The common
explanation for how otherwise reasonable people end up believing in
conspiracy theories is straight-forward and easy to empathize with,
only having the fault of being completely wrong. According to common
wisdom, some people, when faced with a shocking or upsetting act of
violence (e.g. the Kennedy assassination, 9/11, any mass shooting),
are unable to accept the chaotic violence of the world and buy into a
conspiracy theory as a coping mechanism. After all, isn’t it more
comforting to pin all the blame on some shadowy organization that we
can fight? This is comforting for us non-conspiracy theorists, with
the added bonus of being subtly patronizing towards CTs (i.e. conspiracy
theorists. I don't feel like typing it a hundred times). This
explanation means that, deep down, they realize the same chaos we do,
but they’re just really bad at coping, the poor dears. That it
doesn’t make sense has been no obstacle to it becoming commonly
accepted. The argument that CTs find this conspiracy-haunted world
comforting is identical to the claim they make about those of us who
don't buy in to their grand conspiracies, that it must be nice to
live in a world where individuals are responsible for the bad things
they do, and we can trust our institutions, etc. Further, our
explanation absolutely fails to address things like, say, 9/11
truthers. 9/11 wasn't a lone wolf assassinating a president or some
freak accident. What emotional need is satisfied by shifting the
blame from Al-Qaeda to the Illuminati/New World Order/etc.? It's
much easier to fight Al-Qaeda than a shadowy secret organization that
nobody believes to exist.
The answer to how
people come to believe in conspiracy theories is pretty simple: The
same way as they come to believe in anything else. Let's take the
Kurt Cobain murder conspiracies as an example. When a person is
faced with new information, that information must be assimilated. If
that information fits in with the things you already know, it's a
smooth process. (N.B. I'm using the words "know" and
"knowledge" to mean statements that one holds to be true,
regardless of their factual accuracy.) This is why there aren't as
many conspiracy theories about the deaths of Jimi Hendrix or Amy
Winehouse. Even their fans know that they both did drugs and that
drugs can have tragic consequences. In regards to Cobain, one of the
frequent claims made by those who believe he was murdered is that he
wasn't suicidal. They know how suicidal people act, and they know
that Cobain wasn't acting that way before his death. When this
knowledge is contrasted with the knowledge that Cobain died in the
way he did, some piece of knowledge must change so the new
information can be assimilated. Maybe suicidal people act
differently than I thought they did? Alternatively, the new
information must be denied. Cobain didn't
commit suicide. A more recent theory is
that Cobain faked his death, though the prominent theory is the
Courtney Love had him killed. But how do we get from "Kurt
didn't seem suicidal" to "Courtney Love had Kurt killed?"
The steps are pretty easy to trace. If Kurt didn't commit suicide,
then he must have been murdered. One of the earliest theorists was
a public access host who got footage from a window outside the crime
scene and noticed much less blood than he would expect from a shotgun
blast to the head. The host, and those who agreed with him, knew
how much blood to expect. Also, if one accepts that Cobain was
murdered, someone else must have written the suicide note. After
all, the note doesn't look right. Which is to say, it doesn't look
the way you'd expect it to. And everyone knew Courtney Love was only
in it for the money and didn't really care about Kurt.
My
point here is that conspiracy theories and theorists don't start with
a full-fledged master plan. To give one more example, consider the
various Shakespeare authorship theories. Typically, people just
write them off as snobbery, but the reason is a bit more complex. It
also shows that the
types
of things we "know"
aren't
always as concrete as in the Cobain conspiracy. The lack of
contemporary documentation about Shakespeare isn't unusual, as even
many Oxfordians, Baconians, and Marlovians will acknowledge. The
real problem is that what we do have shows Shakespeare to be, well,
boring and occasionally unpleasant. As James Shapiro shows in
Contested Will, it was
not Shakespeare's class that dismayed early CTs, but the fact that
the few things we know about him show his stinginess (e.g. suing a
neighbor over a small debt),
and that he retired to his
estate in Stratford rather than continue writing
in the last six years of his life was unacceptable. Everyone knows
that the greatest literature
in the English language must have been written by an equally great
spirit. Even we who accept Shakespeare of Stratford as the author of
his plays feel this disappointment, yet it is a disappointment based
on our assumptions about the way the world works. Most of the
supporting evidence for these conspiracies are based on accepting
certain unproven premises (e.g. the sonnets are autobiographical)
which can be construed to prove nearly anything, or by
misapprehensions (e.g., there are no records that Shakespeare went to
grammar school, therefore he did not. However, there are no grammar
school records of any of Shakespeare's peers, some of whom went on to
attend Oxford). But the
reason there are conspiracies about Shakespeare at all is the belief
we have about the personal qualities of a great artist.
We
can see in the given examples how conspiracy theories arise
logically. Logically, if not reasonably. They are logical in the
sense that they take a set of given conditions (this is how suicidal
people act, this is what a great artist behaves like), and then apply
logic. If he didn't kill himself, who wrote the suicide note? If
vaccines cause autism, why are doctors saying they don't? If
these people standing outside a mass shooting aren't behaving how
survivors behave, then who are they? To
bring it back to my initial point, what's comforting about believing
that your favorite musician's killer is still at large, or that the
government is dispersing toxic chemicals from airplane jets?
Conspiracy
theories, by their nature, have a tendency to broaden their scope.
Let's say
you start with the knowledge that the US intelligence agencies are
close to omniscient and that middle eastern extremist groups are
unsophisticated, and then
came to the conclusion that 9/11 was an inside job. On the one
hand, this would need to implicate a lot of people not directly
associated. If you 'know' how a building would appear when it
collapses, and countless structural engineers say differently, then
they must be lying. On the other hand, this would tie into other
conspiracy theories already held. If you believe that there is a
Jewish plot to control the world, you'd find a way to tie 9/11 to
that.
Understanding
why people believe in conspiracy theories, and how those beliefs
develop is important. I hope it's already understood that most
conspiracy theorists are not violent or bigots. But as online
communities continue to supplant physical ones, we have to take a few
things into consideration. First, groups like Stormfront (the white
supremacist forum) have a history of trying to recruit from places
like reddit's conspiracy page, not because the groups targeted for recruitment are necessarily racist,
but because if (as the neo-nazis believe) there are shadowy Jewish
groups controlling everything, why not try to make your case to
people who already believe there is a shadowy group pulling the
strings? Second, many of the views espoused by conspiracy theorists
are socially unacceptable. (In the cases where they accuse innocent
people, entire ethnic groups, or survivors of tragedies of
unspeakable crimes, I'd say this unpopularity is justified.) Online
communities are still communities, and fulfill that need.
Communities form identities and protect themselves from perceived
threats, even if that means protecting bad behavior within a
community. Third, there is
still a general feeling that online is not real, not just in terms of
community but in terms of actions. As
such, harassment of people accused of complicity in a conspiracy has
become a serious problem,
since there are so rarely any actual consequences
for the harassers, even when
their activities are clearly illegal.
There
have always been and will always be conspiracy theories. What needs
to be discussed is not how to stop them overall, but how prevent harm
to innocent people caught up in them, whether we're talking about the
anti-semitic results of "The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the careers destroyed by
McCarthyism, or the harassment of bereaved parents after a school
shooting. On the part of conspiracy communities, the answer is
better self-policing, primarily in regards to preventing co-opting by
hate groups and, as a community, establishing a clear sense of
opprobium for harrassment.
On the part of broader society, we need to take online actions
seriously. Criminal harrassment and death threats must not be
consequence free simply because they are carried out online.