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After this recent national election, I, like many, was unfriended. But not on Facebook. In RL — real life. I had a real friend, not just a FB-friend or an e-friend, who suddenly decided I was not friendly. Who I voted for didn’t directly cause unfriending, but it did indirectly. My former friend (f-friend) and I were talking about the vote. We then segued into conspiracy “theories.” My f-friend held that the September 11 attacks were due to then President Bush and his minions planting bombs in the Twin Towers. I held that said attacks were due to some really angry Muslim extremists flying planes. We found the same sort of disagreement when we discussed Kennedy’s assassination: I held that a lone gunman did it (Oswald) and my f-friend held that a large conspiracy did the deed, though the shape and identity of that conspiracy went unspecified.
I then brought up some important psychology. Here is where things went sideways and my friend became an f-friend. The important facts are these:
According to prominent social psychologists and political scientists, conspiracy “theories” are a species of magical thinking. (The shudder quotes around the word ‘theories’ is required since conspiracy “theories” are not real theories. Consequently, conspiracists are not “conspiracy theorists”.) Magical thinking consists of seeing intentional agents behind almost everything (Thor the Thunder God owes his existence to magical thinking). Magical thinking allows us to explain what may otherwise be inexplicable. And when we explain, we understand (or believe we do). And when we understand we feel better, in part because understanding reduces uncertainty (see my blog The Truth Shall Set You Free).
Conspiracy “theories” arise when certain people see large socially relevant events, especially disasters, as being due to intentional agents behind the scene causing the event. Conspiracists tend to have a low tolerance for uncertainty or the role of mere bad luck in such disasters. That the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center collapsed due to the extreme heat of the fires is simply unbelievable to many conspiracists. Ergo something must have helped the buildings collapse. What? Bombs. (This is reinforced by the fact that the buildings’ collapse was something that the terrorists could not have reasonably expected, though they might have hoped for it.) That a lone gunman could effect such large change in the U.S. is unbelievable. Ergo he must have had a lot of help.
According to Michael Barkun, conspiracy “theories” have three components: nothing happens by accident (there are no coincidences), nothing is as it seems (surface features are never a guide to a thing’s essence), and everything is connected by being under control of someone or something. Hence, the conspiracists central claim: the universe is governed by intentional design. (See Michael Barkun, 2003, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press.)
From all of this, the connection between magical thinking, conspiracy “theories,” and religion can easily been seen: A god (or gods) is the intentional agent behind the universe, and all that’s in it, both good and bad and neutral. (Interestingly, conspiracists are rather often not religious.) And just like religions, conspiracists and magical thinkers are born, not made. Evolution and DNA are crucially involved. (See the first 3 parts of my book Excellent Beauty: The naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of the world.)
Another crucial thing about conspiracies that makes them like religion is the hidden aspect of the perpetrators. "Seeing” the perpetrators via the claim of seeing a secret conspiracy is somehow engaging with hidden knowledge revealed to only a few. All religions have this sort of knowledge deep inside them. So do most clubs: to join the club is to learn the secret knowledge. (Of course, often a club's secret knowledge is just below the surface. But in other cases, it is hard to get to.)
Bringing up the above made my f-friend angry. And that was the end of that.
So, what really happened?
---The Sex Appeal of Fear
As discussed at length in Excellent Beauty, religion, magical thinking, and conspiracy “theories” exist in humans because of evolution: humans capable of these three modes of thought produced more offspring than those less capable of such thinking. Fear is sexy somehow.
What was the evolutionary filter that did the selecting? Banding together in groups. Religion (etc.) function as group glue. And how does that work? In a variety of ways, but one crucial way is by both stoking and allaying fear. I call this the two-step fear mechanism. Step 1: fear is increased. Step 2: fear is allayed. Step 1 is accomplished by focusing on the treacherousness of the world outside the group. Step 2 is accomplished by focusing on the unity and strength of the group.
---How the Two-Step Mechanism Works
First, fear is stoked by pointing to Dangerous Others. Terrorists and other people with bad intent are obvious Dangerous Others. But we need to know how to pick out Dangerous Others before they do their terrible deeds. So, Dangerous Others are picked out by focusing on people with a different skin hue, different gender, different sexual preference, different cultural norms (e.g., dress, music, food), different knowledge (e.g., biologists vs. creationists), different resources, etc. At this stage, the contents of religions, magical thoughts, and conspiracies function as shibboleths. They define a group, a safe space, to use the modern parlance.
Second, fear is alleviated by pointing to ways to hold the Dangerous Others at bay. The rhetoric here can come to include not just holding the DO’s at bay, but getting rid of them entirely.
Here’s an example. Consider my f-friend again. My f-friend fears living in an uncertain world where luck governs most things. Fear is stoked: The September 11 attacks increased this fear, as did other events like the assassination of John Kennedy. My f-friend doesn’t want to live in a world where 19 barely trained terrorists can almost upend a country like the U. S. So he doesn’t. He moved to a world where an event that diabolical is the work of many very powerful men with dark intent. Fear is thus allayed. How? First of all, the September 11 attacks were not the work of a group of lucky terrorists, but rather the result of meticulous planning executed to perfection by extremely competent and well-funded bad men (and maybe some bad women). Second, knowing that extremely competent and well-funded bad men pulled off September 11 makes the world rational again. Yes, there was great destruction and death. But it all makes sense. It is far worse to suffer great destruction and death because of bad luck — which is essentially no reason at all.
But there is a complication. My f-friend’s fears are invisible to me. He sees only his fears, and the fears of others who agree with him (the conspiracists). So, the terms ‘magical thinking’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ are revealed to be 2nd and 3rd person negative categorizations: “You are a conspiracist; I am rational.” (Interestingly, this 2nd and 3rd person property doesn’t apply to the term ‘religious’. ‘Religious’ is not a negative term.)
This works for me, too. I fear global warming. This is a fear only some of us can share because only some of us see it. Most Americans don’t see this fear. A majority of Congress, and perhaps the Supreme Court, along with our president-elect don’t fear global warming at all . . . for the very adequate reason that it doesn’t exist. Again, I fear racism. But, many in the U. S. don’t fear racism, they fear other races. I fear war. Many of fellow citizens fear, rather, losing wars.
So, we are stuck. We all inhabit our own little fearful worlds. We share parts of these worlds with others. This produces a set of locally common truths (a term suggested to me by Tara Hall). But those common truths are at best relative to groups of humans, not to all humans.
We all live in a time of incredible uncertainty exacerbated by incredible power. Fear is rampant. The problem is that we all see different fears.
This makes truly allaying those fears next to impossible.
So, what to do? I’m not sure, but perhaps unfriending is the wrong response.
