Just when one starts to think, there really is nothing more to say about conspiracy theories – or better, conspiracy fantasies as they should be called because these aren’t scientific theories; they are merely fantasies – yet, there is still much more to say about conspiracy fantasies.
For example, typing the words “conspiracy theories” into the AI-algorithm-driven website www.craiyon.com and, to nobody’s surprise, a Donald Trump look-a-like emerges. It appears that artificial intelligence thinks that Trump stands for conspiracy theories. Who would have thought.
While many might belittle conspiracy fantasies as pure nonsense and insane hallucinations conjured up by natters, demagogues, and right-wing ideologues, conspiracy fantasies play a seemingly ever more, important role in democracy.
For instance, we know that conspiracy-minded people are less likely than others to register and vote – this is known as voter suppression. Voter suppression is a favorite strategy of Republicans. They are less likely to volunteer, donate to political campaigns, and even put up electoral yard signs.
This fact alone makes conspiracy fantasies highly important for democracy. It is particularly so for a political party that has consistently failed to win the popular vote and is also set to lose it in the 2024 popular vote – again. One might even speculate that the idea is that Trump or another Republican candidate will fire up the Republican base but deters others – so the Republican hope goes: Democrats – from voting. All this is not unique to the USA.
One can look, for example, to the UK and the 2016 EU membership referendum – known as Brexit. Roughly 52% voted to leave the EU. Many did vote under factually incorrect fabrications. Others were led to believe that the true levels and costs of immigration into the UK were being hidden. However, they were not.
Worse, 36% of voting UK people – supporting the Leave-the-EU position – also thought that they should mark their ballot in ink because if they were to vote in pencil, their ballot would be altered. This too was not true – a pure fantasy. Yet both fantasies worked – the UK left the European Union.
At the same time, all too many voters in Turkey – responding to conspiracy theories about the so-called still rather illusive deep state as well as the equally illusive “Western agitators” – elected Recep Erdogan.
Texas governor Greg Abbott gave in to conspiracy theories about a federal government takeover. Even more dodgy, many locals were led to believe that the military – under the direction of President Barack Obama – was on the verge of invading Texas. It never happened. And best of all, it does not need to happen. What needs to happen instead, is what we now know as The Politics of Fear: fear is a powerful motivator.
Yet, conspiracy fantasies have been made to work on the principal danger faced by the planet – global warming. At one point, as many as 40% of Americans reject anthropogenic climate change. They were made to believe that climate change is a carefully orchestrated hoax perpetrated by communists, globalists, and corrupt government officials to steal our money, our freedom, and our standard of living. This is the infamous HAARP conspiracy theory.
Reaching back into history, American colonists imported practices from Europe and crushed witches for supposedly conspiring with Satan. On a much more devastating scale, German Nazis convinced Germans that there is a Jewish World Conspiracy that, in part, led to engineer the Holocaust.
Back on the issue of global warming, conspiracy fantasies such as HAARP have been shown to diminish people’s willingness to reduce their carbon footprint and to reduce their willingness to engage in sustainable and pro-social behaviors.
Worse, conspiracy theories can even persuade people to put themselves at risk by forgoing modern medical treatments such as vaccines against Covid-19 and cancer treatments.
Meanwhile, right-wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh also believed in conspiracy fantasies. He had convinced himself that the government was conspiring to take away guns and to control people – a rather common conspiracy fantasy. Simultaneously, he had also made himself believe that the army had implanted a monitoring chip into his body to spy on him. While to the sane person this might sound mad, McVeigh killed 168 people.
What all of these conspiracy fantasies have in common is that they tell believers that dark powerful shadowy forces are operating against the innocent. Of course, this includes QAnon’s conspiracy theory that a pedophilic deep state is working against Trump and that he needs to be saved from those evil forces.
One might be tempted to see these conspiracy fantasies – including QAnon, Trump, etc. – as paranoid, crazy, mad, mentally ill, and delusional. Yet, people who are really ill tend not to be driven by conspiracy theories per se. In other words, most people with major mental illness do not believe in conspiracy theories. Conspiracy fantasies aren’t for the mentally ill – conspiracy fantasies are for politics.
Meanwhile, the truly mentally ill tend to engage in delusions that are often self-centric. They believe, for example, in the idea that the mailman is after me. Quite the opposite is the case for conspiracy fantasies. These are often group-centric – not self-centric – conspiracy theorists in which entire groups like, for example, QAnon conjure up conspiracy fantasies for political and ideological ends – Trust the Plan.
Worse, many people believing in conspiracy fantasies do that because they believe their conspiracy theory is actually true and based on evidence – their evidence. Beyond all that, people believing in conspiracy theories tend not to consider it to be a “theory” at all. Instead, they actually believe that their conspiracy theory is a fact. They also think, they have “the evidence”. Yet, their “evidence” may not be convincing to anyone other than the true believers of the conspiracy fantasy.
Rather than being a some sort of insane madness, conspiracy fantasies involve the deliberate intentions and often pre-planned actions. It is for this reason that conspiracy fantasies are, more often than not, inherently political.
Of course, people do find it easier to agree with arguments that coincide with how they already view the world. Yet, truth is not a view, and it is not subjective. But people interpret it differently by using their own subjective worldviews and therefore come to very different conclusions about it. This is imperative for the existence of conspiracy fantasies.
Worse, for many conspiracy theorists, the fact that they do not have sufficient evidence supporting their particular conspiracy fantasy only shows that those “evil conspirators” are very good at covering their tracks.
On the other hand, if there is plenty of evidence showing that their conspiracy fantasy actually does not exist, this, in turn, only shows that those “evil conspirators” are very good at misleading the investigators.
As a consequence, those who try to convince conspiracy fantasy believers to reject their conspiracy fantasy cannot win. Conspiracy fantasies exist inside a self-sealed system. Therefore, conspiracy theories are non-falsifiable – they cannot be disproven. This is the true beauty of conspiracy fantasies – it is a closed self-stabilizing system.
Perhaps conspiracy fantasies should be filed under “shit happens”. Yet, conspiracy theorists still make two types of errors:
- a type 1 error – or false “positive” – occurs when believing that a pattern is real when it is not;
- a type 2 error – or false “negative” – occurs when believing that a pattern isn’t real when it is.
Overwhelmingly however, conspiracy theorists tend to imagine – or simply construct – patterns where none exists. From that, speculations and a rather misleading plausibility is constructed that may not have to be greatly plausible but must at least sound plausible enough to be believed.
Key to the construction of conspiracy fantasies is the tendency to rely on selectively chosen evidence to crypto-prove the validity of their conspiracy fantasies. Simultaneously, the conspiracy theorists must ignore all of the evidence that disproves their contentions.
To shore up the conspiracy fantasies even more, such conspiracy fantasies are often associated with other non-authoritative accounts, such as New Age esoteric beliefs, the paranormal, supernatural ideas, unfounded assumptions, obscure beliefs, rumors, and circular referencing in which one conspiracy theory supports the next.
This might best be called crippled epistemology – a paralyzed or dysfunctional theory of knowledge. It is hamstrung because conspiracy theorists know very few things and what they know is wrong and all too often comes from online platforms, as well as dodgy news channels. In other words, conspiracy theorists look to the news the way a drunk looks to a lamppost – not for illumination – but for the reinforcement of their pre-conceived ideology.
Beyond all that, people with less a capacity for analytical thinking tend to believe in conspiracy fantasies. As a consequence, it is not surprising to find that higher levels of education are a consistent predictor of resistance to conspiracy theories. This also works the other way around. Hence, Trump claim that he loves the poorly educated.
Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists also work backward: from outcomes to motives to actions. They try to convince the unsuspecting that because something happened, someone must have intentionally caused it to happen. Conspiracy fantasies thrive on their conviction that nothing happens by accident. This “nothing is accidental, and everything happens according to a plan” assumption remains one of the key ingredients of virtually all conspiracy fantasies.
Finally, conspiracy fantasies make people believe that there are – always – evil groups (the bad) working against the innocent public (the good). Almost all conspiracy fantasies include a good-vs.-evil dichotomy and, at times, conspiracy fantasies even has “the ugly” – Queen Elizabeth II was a reptile.
Thomas Klikauer is the author of German Conspiracy Fantasies – out now on Amazon!
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