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Bad Idea #46 "Conspiracy Theories" with Calum Matheson · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

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The kind of language that we use to debunk conspiracy theories
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and explain it is also precisely the language that they use to
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say that we are missing the point, that we're ignoring the
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evidence, etcetera. Part of the difficulty is that
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we have to find ways of articulating how evidence should
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be evaluated that are sort of acceptable even to people who
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attach themselves to conspiracy theories.
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Because the issue is that they're not ignoring evidence.
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The issue is that they are misinterpreting evidence,
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essentially that their protocols for understanding it are
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incorrect. Not that they themselves think
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that evidence doesn't matter, it's just that they believe that
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they have evidence for things that they don't actually have
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evidence for. And it is.
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And it is anti democratic as well, as you say.
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I think that the impulse when you say we can't trust anyone is
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to look for someone who is coded to them as being authentic, as
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someone who's outside the conspiracy.
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The world is probabilistic like we aren't.
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Speaking in absolutes, most of the time we are saying that
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something is extremely likely to be true and retaining some
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element of doubt. That's how the scientific
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process works. And this has been exploited
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deliberately by industry forces that mentioned before, as the
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whole strategy of the tobacco industry was to say, look, the
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scientists admit they aren't 100% sure that this thing is
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true. Therefore, there is some doubt,
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and that doubt is the wedge by which we can crack the consensus
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and mind the narrative. And they have an immense
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advantage in doing that because all they have to do is tell
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people that the thing that they already want to do is OK.
1:36
Welcome to saving the world from bad ideas.
1:39
I'm Mark Linus and I've had a few bad ideas in my time.
1:42
I used to go out in the night time to destroy GMO crops, and I
1:45
also opposed nuclear power. But then when I looked at the
1:48
science, I found I got it wrong. Oops.
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I've learned the hard way that none of us are right all the
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time. So now I'm here to challenge the
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assumptions that we all too often take for granted because
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the future depends on us getting it right.
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Hello. My guest today is Callum
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Matheson, who's associate professor and chair of the
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Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh and
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also on the faculty of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic
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Centre, which sounds like a fun place to study.
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And I'd love to hear more about what that is.
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Doctor Matheson. But welcome to saving the world
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from bad ideas. Thank you.
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Thanks for having me. Now you're I'd like to kick off
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actually by talking about your first book and then we'll get
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maybe to the bad idea as well. But your first book, which I'm
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particularly interested in having a look at.
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I haven't read it yet, I have to admit.
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But we share an interest in nuclear weapons and your books
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called Desiring the Bomb, Communications, Psychoanalysis
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and the Atomic Age. Tell us a bit about it.
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Before I became a communication professor and before I went to
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Graduate School to get my PhD, I, I got a master's degree in
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military history. And I spent, I studied both
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military and environmental history, and my focus was
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nuclear weapons. And it had been a long, long
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preoccupation with me for many years.
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And policy debate, just activity here where people debate about,
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you know, governmental changes, defense policy and things like
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that. I'd become fixated on nuclear
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weapons when I was young. So I wrote a book about why
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people become fixated on the end of the world, and particularly
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how they imagine nuclear weapons both and kind of how a nuclear
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war would happen and what it would be like, but also their
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relationship to them from a primarily psychoanalytic
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standpoint. So I'm interested in what it is
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that makes people who say this is the worst thing that could
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ever happen. It's sheer unadulterated horror.
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Still become fixated with imagining that horror again and
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again and simulating it in war games and video games and media
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and so on. And ultimately survivalism,
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which is a major. Sort of movement that.
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Still exists, of course, and survivalism led me into the kind
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of work that I do now, studying conspiracy theory communities
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and extremists and things like that.
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Yeah. I mean, my thesis in the nuclear
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weapons book I did, which is about nuclear winter.
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It's actually that people don't think and talk about it enough.
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Yes. And the whole world's
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essentially. I'm not a psychoanalytic person.
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I don't have any expertise in this, but I would say it's a
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kind of form of mass denial from world leaders on down to
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populations. And obviously during the Cold
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War, people were mobilized and they were going on marches and
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they were calling for, you know, to ban the bomb and producing
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films and documentaries and stuff about it that that seems
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to have just more or less disappeared.
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And so while the nuclear weapons are still there, the people's
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perceptions and fears of nuclear arrest seem to have evaporated.
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Is that? Is that your?
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Is that how you see it? I think that's exactly right.
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I'm actually I have read your book.
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I think that. There's something of a paradox
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to it because while we don't talk about the reality of the
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weapons enough, very few Americans I think especially
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have a good understanding of, you know, nuclear deterrence or
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what the difference is between mutually assured destruction and
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nuclear utilization theory and so on and so forth.
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The details of the weapons and how a war would happen,
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etcetera, what what's actually happening, what what we're
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spending on the infrastructure to maintain them, But we should
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be what arms control is like. People have, I think, very
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little concept of that and yet repetitively simulate what they
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sort of fantasize about a nuclear war, about nuclear
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weapons. There's plenty of post
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apocalyptic literature, people who talk about it all the time,
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but they're talking about a fantasy rather than engaging.
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And I think that that's partly because the reality of it is
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very grim and can be overwhelming.
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And it's very difficult to for a lot of people to process that,
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especially if they don't feel personally motivated to do that.
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And that's why they sort of stitched together these
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fantasies that, although they are horrific, are in a certain
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way more pleasing than the reality.
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I suppose, and we'll get on to this.
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That's the same for conspiracy theorists, isn't it?
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Is that they give some sense of agency to the believer and that
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they seek to explain the world and, and ascribe motivations and
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and patterns of behaviour and things in in a world which is
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actually rather chaotic and random.
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And I guess the same goes for for nuclear war.
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My experience is that people jump straight to the prepper
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type thing where they say, well, I'll, you know, I'll, I'll build
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a bunker and I'll survive and I'll stock it with tins of beans
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and, you know, get, you know, some guns and ammunition that,
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you know, people, people get into a very individualistic,
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some survivalist mindset. When they do, when you do force
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them to think about about nuclear war, they don't sort of
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engage in it politically and think, well, I need to get
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active and you know, actually try to try to, you know, push
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world leaders into into restarting arm control
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negotiations. Yeah, I think that that's right.
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There's a certain lure to imagining the post apocalypse
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too, that although everybody would be dead, obviously, and
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that's the downside. The upside is that you get to
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rebuild civilization any way that you want.
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There's a scene in Alas Babylon, this old post apocalyptic novel
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from the 50s or 60s. Or one of the characters asks
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the other whether today is tax day, and they both have a good
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laugh about it. After a nuclear war, there's
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this, you know, again, this kind of decoupled from reality, this
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fantasy idea that you could. Wipe the slate clean and rebuild
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society any way that you want to.
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And there's a lot of post apocalyptic literature about
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that. And I think that that's one
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reason why people sort of fall into the survivalist mind.
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If you look at what most survivalists are actually doing,
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their preparations are incredibly impractical.
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But they enjoy, I think, the repetition of going through this
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sort of the wrote, the ritual almost of getting ready for this
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future that they imagine and that they say that they don't
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want, but they spend a great deal of time preparing for in
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ways that aren't really, you know, aren't what one would do
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if one was really genuinely concerned about the end of the
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world. Yeah.
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So let's dig into that a bit. Like what?
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What are these movements like? And I presume they are social
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movements of sort, that these aren't simply individuals who
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become convinced and they get into a survivalist mindset
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entirely by themselves. I mean, there's some kind of
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social contagion going on there, presumably in terms of how this
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manifests in different cultures and in different places at
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different times. Talk to me a bit about how
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survivalism works as a movement and the kind of different forms
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that it takes. I think you're right that
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there's a social contagion element to it.
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It's not necessarily organized. There aren't survivalist groups
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that sort of span. There are people, you know,
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small communities and so on who plan to do this, but it's not a
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worldwide coherent ideology or set of individuals with any
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structure or whatever. But they.
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Share texts, they share a kind of attitude towards the world.
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They share a set of dispositions maybe.
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And so there is some of that and you know, the the reality of the
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Internet and social media makes it very easy to find.
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People and sort of reaffirm one's views or kind of pick up
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on the social cues of survivalism even if one isn't
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even if it's not a coherent movement in the same way that,
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you know, the arms control movement used to be, for
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example. So some of that is happening,
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but conspiracy theorists have a major role in maintaining this
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as well. People like Alex Jones and
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Infowars, you know, Alex Jones has a had a brilliant business
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model in a certain way and that. The site constantly prophecy at
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the end of the world and also sold iodine pills precisely what
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you would need to, you know, survive the radiation without
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getting thyroid cancer after a nuclear war Very convenient.
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So you could buy 20 years of prepackaged food on the same
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site that said. And there's biblical prophecy
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that the world is about to end and that, you know, the Russians
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will start a nuclear conflict and so on and so forth.
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So there's a a kind of self reinforcing cycle of these kind
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of like grifters perhaps, or at least opportunists on one side,
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and then likely true believers who really sort of get pulled
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into the fantasy on the other side.
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And if that's what you're looking for, you'll find
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constant reaffirmation of it on the Internet.
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The same the same loop that produces committed conspiracy
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theorists produces committed survivalists as well.
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That all signs seem to point to the end of the world because
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those are the only signs you're actually seeing.
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Because the Internet has that kind of self selecting effect on
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information that one consumes. And how, how does this map onto
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political ideologies, at least the survivalism thing?
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And we'll, we'll get on to the different forms of conspiracy
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theorizing in a bit. But do you get, I know you, I
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can sort of see it as a, you know, creature of the right, the
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far right in particular, you know, with the kind of dressing
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up in uniforms. And I mean, this is how I
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imagine it. You could tell me whether this
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is real or not. But is it, is it also there on
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the far left, you know, with kind of end of the world climate
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apocalyptic narratives and stuff?
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I mean, do people also, do you know, I'm thinking of a
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Unabomber or something? I mean, do people still get get
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into survivalist mindsets from different political persuasions?
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Yes, that certainly still happens.
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It's more common on the right. I think that your initial
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impulse is correct. There's a lot.
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It's at least much more visible on the right.
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And the sort of business of survivalism that I was
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describing earlier seems to be primarily a right wing thing.
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There are leftist communities, both far leftist communities and
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ones that maybe are not immediately politically
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identifiable as being far left communities.
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But there are communities that are not right wing communities
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at least that also do this. And they tend to have a little
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bit more of a collective spirit to them, like a group of people
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planning to survive. You know, this is where we'll
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protect our organic farm and this is where it will, you know,
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weather, climate change and so on.
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There's some of that as well. Even though there might not be
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as much of the kind of camouflage truck gun in the
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woods element to the left. There is a similar element of
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fantasy sometimes where people almost enjoy the idea that the
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world will end because they can rebuild something.
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And it's wake nuclear post apocalyptic stuff was, you know,
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by far the most popular vein of that fiction for 50 years.
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And now it's all climate apocalypse stuff.
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It's. The tenor of it has changed, but
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people are still consuming the same media because there is an
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element to that fantasy that is reassuring.
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The world is very complex. It's full of people that we
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don't agree with and imagining that they could all be swept
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away, with the added benefit in this case that it might be their
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fault and that we could build something better in the ruins is
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something that I think still appeals to people.
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And there's something sort of deeply human about all of this.
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I don't know whether these are kind of, you know,
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Judeo-christian narratives of, you know, like, like, like the
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the flood, you know, and then or even Revelations and there being
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some sort of, you know, heaven on earth.
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And this kind of narrative does seem to repeat, doesn't it, of
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there being this sort of cataclysmic end of the world,
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which has has this sort of cleansing effect and you can
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then rebuild something better from the ruins, at least in the
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imaginations of, of believers. I mean, is, is this common
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across all cultures or is it something which we see really
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centered around in in the West? It's hard to say all cultures,
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because I'm sure that there are exceptions out there somewhere,
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but it's extremely common in history and around the world.
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These sort of creation myths and prophecies about the end of the
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world or something that define, you know, major religions from
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Mesoamerica to Europe to East Asia, that they're kind of a
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seem to be a perennial human obsession with thinking about
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the way that the world will end. And it tends to be cyclical as
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well. Very few of them, none to my
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knowledge, have a kind of definitive endpoint, and that's
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it. There's no more.
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After that, there's usually one. Imagine some kind of
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transformation and something else happens.
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You know, like they're the after Ragnarok, there's still a chance
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that, you know, history continues in a different way and
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that, you know, humans are still there even if they're in an
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afterlife and so on. And as you say in Revelation,
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there's the, you know, the end of the world in a certain way,
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but also it's continuation in a new and better form afterwards.
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That seems to be there. Cycles and Mayan and Aztec
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mythology, all of that stuff seems to be part of it.
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So it's both the end and the idea of a new renewal that
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seemed to be pretty close to universal.
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And what kind of psychological needs is this?
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Is this fulfilling if it keeps popping up?
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And there's clearly something quite deep seated here.
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It's hard to say that definitively.
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My my sort of wild speculation is that we have trouble
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acclimating ourselves to chaos and disorder and understanding
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randomness and probability is the kind of key forces in the
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universe, and that we try to impose structures to understand
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those things. That it's more comforting in
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some ways to think that there's a grand design that might
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eventually end the world than it is to think that there's no
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design at all. I'm fascinated by this sort of
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the existential character to, to all of this.
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And I guess it's this kind of the personal, you know,
14:37
existential thing about, you know what, what goes on after my
14:40
death. And there's also this kind of
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collective idea of what goes on after, after all of us, you
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know, all of us die and pass on. And it seems, it seemed, as I
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say, it keeps, it keeps recurring and it seems to
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manifest in all these different ways.
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And I've worried for a long time, as somebody who writes
14:57
about climate change, that the kind of apocalyptic, sort of
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dystopian Duma mindset has attached itself to that over
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many years in a way which is fundamentally unscientific and,
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you know, and, and defies falsification.
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And that when these prophecies don't come true.
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And this is a case for religious prophecies with a definite date
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when the world is supposed to end.
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There seems to be some other way that it's explained away and
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then then the next thing comes up as well.
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So people seem absolutely determined to to hold to these.
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And I've found if I challenge Dumorism in a in a climate
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audience, people get really, really angry and really upset
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more than any for any other reason, probably.
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I think that's right. I think it's very difficult for
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people to tolerate, for some people at least to tolerate
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ambiguity and that it's easier to think, well, that's it,
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everything will be wiped out or everything will be fine and the
15:45
future will be better. But the kind of messy in between
15:48
is very difficult. And it's one of the dangers I
15:50
think of portraying climate change and nuclear weapons and
15:54
apocalyptic terms is that the reality of what actually
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happens, if it's anything short of that, if it's catastrophic
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but short of total, people will still say, well, it wasn't as
16:04
bad as we thought it was. So I I think that that's, that
16:08
is part of it. It's this desire for certainty
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and a kind of reassuring rigidity in the world.
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Even if those things seem terrible, you know, they're
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ultimately fantasies. People don't really don't.
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Really, really understand in a way that's kind of immediate and
16:23
bodily what's the aftermath of a nuclear war will be like.
16:26
It's all text, it's all in paper, it's in film, etcetera.
16:30
For now. And similar with climate change,
16:32
you can see the real effects of it happening right now, but the
16:36
the biggest of the doomsday predictions would wipe out the
16:39
people who would document them. So there's no way to see that
16:42
fantasy fulfilled. It's a kind of endless, almost
16:45
messianic thing. Yeah, when I thought about
16:50
conspiracists and preppers and things in the past, I, you know,
16:53
and you mentioned Alex Jones. I mean, these people seem very
16:56
marginal figures. They're just cranks.
16:58
And now we seem to have jumped forward into this, bizarrely,
17:01
where where they're essentially running the US government and,
17:05
you know, other governments increasingly as well.
17:07
I mean, if you look at the Department of Health, Robert F
17:10
Kennedy Junior is essentially A conspiracy theorist about
17:13
vaccines, as far as I can tell, and many other health and food
17:16
issues besides. And he's running the he's
17:18
running that bit of the government and, and conspiracism
17:21
seems to underlie a lot of MAGA thinking, it seems to me from an
17:25
external perspective. I'm sure you've studied this a
17:27
lot. So so tell tell me what what
17:29
your thoughts are? I think that's exactly right.
17:31
When I started working on conspiracy theory, I wrote the
17:33
first article I published about conspiracy theories over 10
17:37
years ago now, and I thought it would be a kind of interesting
17:40
diversion. Like, look at these cranks.
17:43
They don't have any real influence, but it's such a
17:45
fascinating sort of closed world of how they understand reality
17:49
and how they communicate with one another about it.
17:52
That was 2015 and very quickly I realized I probably have to do
17:55
this for the indefinite future. And I've been working on it
17:59
steadily since then. And I've studied a a wide range
18:02
of conspiracy groups and different beliefs.
18:05
And I think that it is becoming conspiratorial thought is
18:09
becoming far more central that it's always been there.
18:12
Conspiracy theories are ancient, particular conspiracy theories
18:16
that exist now. I've been in circulation for
18:19
2000 years, essentially unchanged.
18:21
You can look at. Q Anon And the belief that
18:24
elites are eating babies, for example, is not too different
18:27
than the blood libel. That was leveraged against Jews
18:31
starting in England in the 12th century, and which is not too
18:34
different than accusations that Pagan Romans made against
18:37
Christians nearly 1000 years before that, that they were also
18:40
eating babies in their religious rituals and so on.
18:42
There's a continuity to a lot of the stuff, both in its contents
18:47
and its structure. But the rise of social media and
18:51
the Internet has, I think, fundamentally changed.
18:54
It has made, although this is maybe not new, it's are
18:58
repetition in a new way that the the social power of these
19:03
conspiracy theories is is different at least than it ever
19:06
has been. And you're right that it's taken
19:07
over elements of government. And it's hard to tell.
19:11
I mean, a classic kind of perennial problem with studying
19:13
conspiracy theorists is that it's difficult to separate the
19:16
true believers from those who think that they can manipulate
19:20
an audience of dupes who believe in the conspiracy theories.
19:24
And I would have said that much of the contemporary far right
19:29
fit better into the kind of charlatan category.
19:33
But some of them, RFK Junior in particular, really do seem to be
19:37
true believers. It's akin to this concept of
19:40
irony poisoning, which is something that US rhetoric and
19:42
rhetoricians talk about sometimes.
19:45
Irony poisoning. Yes, irony poisoning that one.
19:48
What's that? That one can do an ironic
19:51
performance for so long that the boundaries begin to blur and
19:55
one's not sure anymore if it is still ironic and eventually it
19:58
becomes real. That's something people identify
20:01
in Internet trolls, for example, that these communities like 4
20:04
Chan and so on looks like they were parodying and, you know,
20:07
satirizing social ills like racism and so on.
20:12
Then after a time they just became flat out racist.
20:15
It's a kind of similar thing, I think for some conspiracy
20:18
theorists, that it's funny in the beginning, or it's something
20:21
to play with or maybe a tool to manipulate others, and then
20:24
gradually they seem to really kind of get high on their own
20:27
supply. If, as it were.
20:28
Yeah, I remember the Remember Birds Aren't Real, which was an
20:32
effort by who, who was behind it, but basically to kind of
20:35
satirize conspiracy theories as a phenomenon.
20:38
And then people started to believe it, the birds weren't
20:39
real. And then it became a conspiracy
20:41
theory of itself. And, you know, they seem, these
20:45
things sort of almost seem to generate their own momentum,
20:47
which is way out of the control of, of anyone.
20:50
And I don't, I still don't completely understand why
20:53
there's this need for conspiracy theories in a, in a world where
20:57
we have, I mean, I'm so naive about this, but you know, I
21:00
believe in the Enlightenment and I believe in scientific
21:02
objectivity and empiricism and so on.
21:05
Or at least I'd, I'd like to see those things being more sort of
21:09
influential in the world. I guess that's, you know, the
21:11
core of my kind of political beliefs really is that we should
21:14
have evidence based policy making and so on.
21:16
And obviously there's power and there's all sorts of dynamics
21:18
for why that's not nearly as simple as I'm putting it.
21:20
But the conspiracist mindset is something totally different.
21:24
It's literally, it's a belief which is unanchored in any kind
21:27
of reality. And yet that seems to be the
21:30
most popular, you know, populist part of, of the modern at
21:34
political age. I mean, it reminds me of you
21:36
mentioned the Romans. It's almost like, you know,
21:38
Julius Caesar was a populist and that's how he destroyed the
21:41
Republic and, and brought in later the Roman Empire and, you
21:46
know, destroyed, well, destroyed the elements of democracy that
21:49
were there. And I worry the same process is
21:52
sort of unfolding in real time all around us.
21:54
I think that that's a real concern.
21:55
I mean, there's a lot to unpack there.
21:58
I think that the reason, one of the reasons that people keep
22:02
going back to conspiracy thinking.
22:04
Is that it is reassuring in a certain sense.
22:06
There's the chaos and threat and complexity of the world and the
22:09
fact that so much more information is available to us
22:13
now than ever before. And I think, you know, there's
22:16
this utopian idea in the 90s that this kind of thinking would
22:19
fade away eventually, that the future would look like Star Trek
22:22
the Next Generation. People would be rational and
22:24
they would have access to all this information.
22:26
And it would be very difficult for bad ideas to prosper.
22:30
But it's nearly exactly the reverse, that the glut of
22:34
information can be so overwhelming that people look
22:37
for filters to cut that down, to make their world interpretable
22:40
again. And they choose essentially what
22:43
information they want to expose themselves to.
22:46
And conspiracy theories are very, very tempting because
22:48
they're closed systems. If you know the conspiracy, it
22:52
reassures you that you are actually exceptional because you
22:56
know more than most of the people around you do.
22:58
You see the truth and they're just sheep or whatever.
23:01
Choose your herd metaphor. It also means that the world is
23:04
very simple. If you know the structure of the
23:06
conspiracy theory, you don't actually need to know anything
23:10
else. Any bad thing that happens from
23:12
a tornado in a trailer park in Oklahoma to a wildfire in
23:16
Greece, you can just blame the group that you've chosen to
23:19
blame. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories I think are the most
23:22
obvious of these, but they exist in lots of different variants.
23:25
But part of the trouble I think, and this is something that
23:28
researchers like myself who deal with conspiracy theories think
23:32
of yet to grapple with as much as we should.
23:34
One of the reasons that these theories persist is because
23:36
there are actual conspiracies. There might not be reptile
23:40
aliens, you know, who've replaced the royal family or
23:42
whatever, but, you know, the Epstein files show an actual
23:48
conspiracy Every time there's a bank robbery.
23:49
There are conspirators who choose to do this and so on.
23:52
Their conspiracies both large and small.
23:55
And the fact that, you know, Q Anon, for example, predicted
23:58
this child trafficking ring and so on when Epstein was caught,
24:01
it seems to them to validate everything that they had.
24:05
Well. Except.
24:05
Except that that man Trump, was at the heart of it.
24:07
I. Mean that's right, and what
24:09
happened in the Epstein files is not the same as what Q Anon
24:13
predicted. But the difficulty is that
24:15
there's just enough evidence that conspiracies happen that
24:18
it's possible for people to fit that evidence into a pre
24:21
imagined mold about how the world works.
24:24
So it's not just about processing information in the
24:26
way that stops conspiracy theories from arising.
24:29
It's also teaching people to be sensitive enough to and nuanced
24:33
enough in their thinking to, you know, receive new information
24:37
and realize that things that they want to believe because it
24:41
confirms the theory that they've already stuck onto cognitive
24:44
dissonance or however you want to describe it to be more
24:46
critical about that kind of thing as well.
24:48
So it's it's, I think it's a more complex problem than it
24:50
initially seems. It looks like just bad thought.
24:54
We can explain why that bad thought is appealing, but part
24:56
of the difficulty is that our efforts to debunk it also have
25:00
to work against the real world, the existence of evidence that
25:04
can be interpreted, even if falsely, as supporting the
25:07
theory. Right.
25:08
And you mentioned the Epstein Epstein files.
25:12
And that's become just a huge, huge story.
25:15
Probably, I think because it seems to speak to some elements
25:19
of this psychology that the elites are up to something
25:22
behind closed doors, which is truly nefarious and involves the
25:25
sexual exploitation of minors. You know, obviously eating
25:29
babies is is even more even more of an extreme.
25:32
And so how some of these original actual conspiracy
25:34
theories have played out. But there's something about
25:38
that, isn't there? Which I mean, I know all my
25:41
liberal lefty type friends and, and relatives are just, you
25:45
know, really keen to hear more about how all of these elite
25:50
people from Elon Musk to Trump to, you know, Bill Gates.
25:53
But all these billionaires have somehow collaborated and
25:57
conspired to, to, to, to, to do this awful thing.
26:01
And that somehow satisfies, I think a need to explain or, you
26:06
know, the inequality in, in, in the world.
26:08
So there's something going on there about elites as well,
26:10
which is given the Epstein file saying this enormous, enormous
26:14
traction. I think that's right, and
26:15
there's a little kernel of truth to every conspiracy theory.
26:18
There's something that makes it stick, or else they wouldn't
26:21
persist the way that they do. If you read Q Anon as a metaphor
26:25
or an allegory instead of a a true belief, that's actually
26:29
quite brilliant. You know, it describes the way
26:31
that the elites prey on the less fortunate and that they're
26:35
callous and they pretend to be working in our interests, but
26:38
actually all they're interested in is extracting the materials
26:42
that will extend their own lives and improve their outcomes at
26:45
the expense of everybody else. That itself is not wrong.
26:50
What's wrong is all the blood drinking, etcetera and all the
26:52
very the specifics of it. I think that, you know, in a way
26:56
what makes these theories so compelling is that they provide
27:00
a kind of allegorical understanding for things that
27:03
are actually in a certain sense happening usually not the same
27:05
group. So anti-Semitic conspiracy
27:07
theories say similar things about banking and billionaires
27:11
and so on. And they have an anti capitalist
27:14
thread and a capitalist thread that says socialism is actually
27:18
a Jewish conspiracy and so on. So they're adaptable to nearly
27:21
any political belief and outcome.
27:24
The point is that because they are typically non falsifiable,
27:28
it's very difficult to stop them from being imported from one
27:32
place to another. If you believe one and you
27:35
believe the basic structure, then you might as well believe
27:37
all of them because it's the rule of evidence that makes them
27:41
work. That kind of makes the first one
27:43
catch on and then suddenly they all start to make sense.
27:45
So one of the reasons that I worry about the way that people
27:48
approach the Epstein files is that for the left, it does seem
27:52
to be gratifying in a certain way.
27:54
Look, the billionaires really are out to get us, but we
27:57
already know that, that we don't need the Epstein files in a
28:00
formal conspiracy to describe it.
28:02
The more we do that, the more we miss the nuances of the way that
28:06
the world actually works, and also the more monolithic our,
28:11
you know, enemies appear. If you think that one of the
28:15
kind of problems with conspiracy theories is if you really do
28:17
believe that there's a cabal that's so powerful it controls
28:19
all history and what are you going to do about it?
28:21
It's disempowering in the same way that, you know, the threat
28:24
of a nuclear annihilation is disempowering in a certain way.
28:28
The way that survivalists deal with nuclear war is to plan how
28:31
they'll survive in their basements or whatever, go out
28:33
into the woods with their friends.
28:35
And I think that the the grander our conspiracy imaginings
28:39
become, the more disempowered we are, too.
28:40
It leaves very few options other than extreme ones, which is, you
28:45
know, the kind of thing that we saw on January 6th and the
28:48
United States. And perhaps more, not not just
28:53
extreme, but more anti democratic and more prone to
28:55
authoritarian impulse. I mean, that's what we saw on
28:58
January the 6th. Of course, was it was.
29:00
I don't, I'm not convinced it was a coup attempt because I
29:02
don't think it was planned in quite that way.
29:04
But it was certainly an attempt to overturn a free and fair
29:06
election. There's no doubt for that.
29:08
And that, and Trump was was trying to mobilize the crowd for
29:12
precisely that end and made no bones about it.
29:15
But how does that overlap with this sort of sort of whole
29:18
conspiracist narrative that seems to be so widespread and at
29:22
least in the populist right? I mean, is it, is it because if
29:26
you believe in, in conspiracies and evidence and truth and and
29:29
so on just kind of evaporate away into this kind of amorphous
29:32
BLOB where you can basically believe what you like and you
29:35
might as well therefore put your trust in a, in a dear leader
29:37
like Trump or, or whoever? Well, it's interesting.
29:40
They, they criticize us for the same reasons that we criticize
29:46
them. So I wrote an, an article for
29:48
the Conversation a while ago about chemtrails and I got an
29:53
immense amount of hate mail for that article.
29:56
I got a couple of death threats. They're like, you know, goofy
29:58
ones, Nothing, nothing serious. And then I got a lot of messages
30:03
that said something along the lines of, you know, it's it's a
30:06
tragedy that you won't evaluate the evidence fairly and that you
30:10
have this cognitive bias that you want to believe that the
30:14
chemtrails conspiracy theory is wrong.
30:16
And so therefore you are dismissing all the evidence that
30:19
suggests it is the exact same language that we use.
30:23
By we, I mean academics who study conspiracy theories
30:26
primarily. But I think the sort of those of
30:29
us who are concerned about conspiracy more broadly outside
30:32
of academia as well, the kind of language that we use to debunk
30:36
conspiracy theories and explain it, is also precisely the
30:39
language that they use to say that we are missing the point,
30:43
that it's all the same, that we're ignoring the evidence,
30:45
etcetera. I think part of the difficulty
30:47
is that we have to find ways of articulating how evidence should
30:51
be evaluated that are sort of acceptable even to people who
30:56
attach themselves to conspiracy theories.
30:58
Because the issue is that they're not ignoring evidence.
31:01
The issue is that they are misinterpreting evidence,
31:04
essentially that their protocols for understanding it are
31:07
incorrect. Not that they themselves think
31:09
that evidence doesn't matter, it's just that they believe that
31:12
they have evidence for things that they don't actually have
31:15
evidence for. And it is and it is anti
31:18
democratic as well, as you say. I think that the impulse when
31:21
you say we can't trust anyone is to look for someone who is coded
31:25
to them as being authentic, as someone who's outside the
31:27
conspiracy. It's why Q Anon was so
31:29
appealing. It has a clearly negative and
31:32
frightening and, you know, horrific affect the OR the OR
31:35
element where the elites are eating children and so on and so
31:39
forth. There's sex trafficking rings
31:40
and so on. But it's also in a certain way
31:42
very hopeful. But here's Donald Trump and
31:44
he'll save us all because he's fighting the bad forces within
31:47
the government as well. That kind of salvific element to
31:51
it, I think, is ultimately anti democratic.
31:54
It invests too much faith in this person to solve all these
31:59
problems. And it's kind of pitched against
32:01
the democratic process as the enemy.
32:04
But there is an appeal to that too, not just to the negative
32:06
imaginings which we have to think about if we want to try to
32:10
articulate rules of evidence and ways of thinking that make us,
32:13
you know, less likely to be prone to this kind of thing.
32:16
Yeah, and Donald Trump seems to be perfect because he doesn't
32:19
seem to actually believe in anything other than his own
32:23
power. And, you know, he's he's
32:26
essentially a con man. I mean, he he's conned an entire
32:29
country into believing that he can somehow save it by
32:34
exaggerating all the worst aspects of its, of its politics.
32:37
And I, I wonder also whether the loss of trust in institutions,
32:42
and it might be political institutions like in the US,
32:44
it's Congress, parliaments around the world, but also
32:47
scientific institutions. I mean, it used, you used to
32:49
have to believe what the scientific consensus was on
32:51
climate or on something else. Now it really just feels like it
32:54
doesn't matter in the least. No one reads scientific Academy
32:57
statements. No one seems to care anymore.
32:59
And in fact, the more institutional something is, the
33:02
less people are likely to believe it.
33:04
Things need to be, you know, seem to, you know, you're more
33:07
likely to have to, to, to be effective as a, you know,
33:10
YouTube or Instagram influencer than you are as a bona fide
33:15
scientist without impeccable academic credentials.
33:17
So what? What's happened to to 'cause
33:19
that I? Think it's difficult to identify
33:21
just one factor. I think it's a lot of things.
33:24
Some of it is industry. There's been a deliberate
33:27
effort. Tobacco companies were kind of
33:29
at the forefront of this to discredit the scientific
33:32
mainstream. That's not a conspiracy theory,
33:33
that's real, right? No, that's absolutely real.
33:36
And we know that it's real because there's substantial
33:38
evidence for it. The conspirators have been
33:40
identified. They've been tried, they've
33:42
admitted to what they're doing. We have millions and millions of
33:45
pages of documents that you can read yourself.
33:47
And the University of California, I think, I can't
33:50
remember where Berkeley maybe has a huge archive of these
33:53
tobacco documents. That's an actual conspiracy.
33:57
And the difference, of course, like conspiracy theories are not
34:00
automatically wrong because they're conspiracy theories.
34:02
They're wrong because the evidence for them almost never
34:05
validates the claim. That doesn't mean that there
34:08
aren't real conspiracies. And this is an example of a real
34:10
conspiracy with a very, you know, with a very high bar.
34:14
Of evidence also the well actually the absence of evidence
34:16
is validating because that just shows how effective the
34:18
conspiracy is that we don't have any evidence to see what they're
34:21
doing. So has this kind of weird self
34:24
self referential internal logic I guess.
34:26
Yeah, that's exactly what makes them non falsifiable.
34:28
That's what it means to be non falsifiable, that if there is no
34:31
evidence, it's evidence of the cover up.
34:33
If there is evidence, it's evidence of the conspiracy
34:35
theory. Rob Brotherton, who's a
34:37
psychologist, describes this as heads I win, tails you lose is
34:40
the logic of conspiracy theories.
34:42
But the tobacco thing is different.
34:43
I mean, the amount of evidence that's available to it for it is
34:48
overwhelming. You don't have to ever rely on
34:50
saying, well, I can explain this gap by the fact that there was a
34:53
conspiracy. There are no gaps that need
34:56
explaining. And one interesting way to think
34:58
about this, I, I think, is the old saying that, you know,
35:01
extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
35:04
There is extraordinary evidence for the tobacco theory.
35:06
There's not extraordinary evidence for the idea that, you
35:09
know, the Pope is really a lizard or whatever the, you
35:11
know, those are particularly. Far fetched ones.
35:14
How about the the fossil fuel industry?
35:17
And in fact Naomi Oreskes and and others have have have
35:20
written books about this. Merchants of Doubt I think was
35:22
the book's title and it was basically saying that the
35:25
tobacco lobbyist tactics were then used by the fossil fuel
35:27
industry to undermine action on climate change.
35:31
Is that a conspiracy theory or an actual conspiracy?
35:34
That's an actual conspiracy, and again, there's solid evidence
35:37
for it. In fact, you can trace the same
35:38
people between the tobacco industry and fossil fuels.
35:42
Fred Seitz for example, who was at one point a very famous
35:46
scientist he was worked in the Manhattan Project and so on was
35:49
recruited by the tobacco companies to say that smoking
35:54
doesn't cause cancer or at least to introduce scientific doubt
35:57
about that doubt is really the the thing they're not trying to
36:00
conclusively. Yeah, doubt is our product right
36:03
sites also then worked for fossil fuel companies and so on.
36:06
It's people who also challenged the nuclear winter, the
36:09
scientific consensus about nuclear winter, etcetera.
36:11
It's the same people like not just the same tactics over time.
36:15
And there's, you know, excellent documentary evidence for a lot
36:17
of those same things. Soft drinks and sugar is another
36:20
one of those things that's if conspiracy, if, you know, people
36:24
challenge the critics of conspiracy theories by saying,
36:29
well, look, there really are conspiracies in the world and
36:32
that's correct. But to see what it takes to
36:35
prove that there is a real conspiracy in the world, one
36:38
should look at cases like the tobacco industry and the fossil
36:42
fuel industries and see the kind of evidence that's available for
36:45
those conspiracies. And then contrast that to the
36:48
kind of evidence that's available if, you know, David
36:52
Icke or whatever. I don't know how to pronounce
36:53
his name. That the, you know, David Icke's
36:56
lizard people theory, for example, just doesn't have the
36:59
same kind of evidence. You can see very clearly what
37:01
the difference is between those two.
37:03
And that's that's what's between.
37:05
That is where we need to articulate a bar for evidence
37:08
that allows us both to recognize when people really are plotting
37:10
to do bad things, but also not to fall for, you know, every
37:14
grifter who wants to sell books and be on The History Channel.
37:18
Well, you mentioned people plotting to be bad things.
37:20
Producer Rob's a big fan of solar geoengineering, so-called
37:24
SRM. He's he's he's he's shaking his
37:26
head in the in the camera, but he is and you know, and that's
37:30
what the chemtrails conspiracies believe that we're already doing
37:33
that we're certain we I don't know who the we is, but that
37:35
there is already material being spread into the atmosphere,
37:38
which is has is intended to have some kind of deleterious effect.
37:42
But actually the solar Geo engineering proposal is, is to
37:45
put material into the upper atmosphere to reflect some
37:47
sunlight and so, you know, to kind of tackle global warming.
37:51
So this is weird overlap where the chemtrails people think
37:54
something is already happening, which is proposed to happen by a
37:56
small slice of the kind of climate concerned community.
38:00
So yeah, as you say, there's a, there's often a kernel of truth,
38:02
but it's just in a kind of weird, twisted way.
38:05
Yeah, it's interesting. One of the I remember one of the
38:07
emails I got after I read about chemtrails was someone who was
38:10
very upset that I had called it the chemtrails theory.
38:12
And they said, you know, you're using the wrong name for it.
38:15
You're making it sound stupid, but it's really about
38:18
geoengineering. And, you know, the government is
38:20
trying to control our minds by dumping chemicals out of planes
38:23
and so on. It was like just the same
38:24
theory, but they're upset about the titles.
38:26
Yeah, they caught on to this, that there's an older version of
38:29
the chemtrails theory that's more about mind control.
38:32
And there's a more recent one that's partly based on a 1990s
38:36
study about weather modification.
38:38
And that one is more about controlling the weather.
38:40
And the two overlap to some degree, but it's an example, I
38:43
think precisely is what you said, that people do find these
38:45
kind of kernels of truth. HAARP, the high altitude Aurora
38:49
research project in Alaska, has been a kind of focus for
38:53
conspiracy theories for a very long time.
38:56
Or people allege that it's being used again, mind controls a
38:58
really common thing. I think that there are some
39:00
psychological reasons for that, but also to control the weather.
39:03
And you know, HAARP is a weather research facility.
39:06
It just doesn't 'cause earthquakes as weapons for the
39:10
United States government. So what are some of the most
39:12
prevalent conspiracy theories at the moment that you're tracking?
39:15
Because obviously these things, they kind of, I remember, you
39:18
can talk about this, they kind of have a cycle, don't they?
39:20
Like obviously after 911, there was all of the conspiracies,
39:24
conspiracies about this being an inside, inside job in some way.
39:28
Obviously JFK's, the murder of JFK's has been a, you know,
39:33
perennial conspiracy theory which has really echoed down the
39:35
generations. What, what are the big, big ones
39:39
that you're that you're tracking now in real time?
39:41
I think a lot of them really are ultimately about health.
39:44
Health and and gender are the two big ones, I think.
39:46
And they're actually related. There are a ton about, you know,
39:50
chemicals and food or control of big pharma and things like that.
39:55
The kind of things that JFK has been talking about a lot, which
39:58
again do have a certain kernel of.
39:59
Truth RFKR. FK sorry, that's not JFK, which
40:04
again do have a certain kernel of truth, you know, like the
40:06
lawsuit against the Sacklers and so on in Purdue Pharma
40:09
demonstrates that, you know, really drug companies are
40:11
actually doing bad things sometimes.
40:13
It's why we have laws and regulations, etcetera.
40:16
That, I think is probably the biggest one and one of the
40:18
reasons that I think that that's a big area and there's lots of
40:20
little subsets of. Like, you know, varietals.
40:23
Sorry, just and the actual evidence of conspiracy with
40:26
Purdue and Oxycontin, all of that then feeds into the kind of
40:29
anti vax narratives. Well, it's the same big pharma
40:32
industry which is doing this thing to our, you know, doing
40:34
this thing to our bodies, right? Yeah, that's right.
40:36
Again, it's it's easier to believe in a single evil entity
40:39
and you know, when someone actually does something wrong,
40:41
it seems to validate the the same way that Epstein did for Q
40:43
Anon. You know, the Sacklers do for
40:45
this kind of, or I should say Purdue Pharma did for this kind
40:49
of health and Wellness based group of conspiracy theories.
40:53
But those also persists and some ironically, I think because of
40:56
corporate interest, you know, people who sell supplements and
41:00
sell natural quote UN quote, natural foods and lifestyles and
41:03
so on, capitalize on all this conspiracy belief.
41:06
And I think it's one of the reasons that they're so
41:08
prevalent is because there is a major economic interest in
41:12
maintaining them. And I don't think that that's a
41:13
conspiracy. I think that that's a bunch of
41:15
individual agents learning that they can profit from this social
41:19
narrative and doing it without coordinating among themselves.
41:23
So they're not conspirators, they're just benefiting from
41:27
conspiracy belief. There's another big set of
41:29
conspiracy theories about gender, I think, that are partly
41:33
Q Anon derived transvestigation is one that I wrote about in my
41:36
most recent book. There's no.
41:38
I've not heard of that, what's that?
41:40
Unfortunately, you will very soon transvestigate.
41:44
Transvestigators are communities of people who believe that all
41:48
celebrities, sometimes literally all, or at least most and all
41:52
politicians both now and sometimes throughout history,
41:55
are secretly transgender. So they do these things with a
41:59
post photographs of celebrities, and then they superimpose lines
42:04
over them that are supposed to represent the typical angles of
42:06
masculine or feminine bodies and say, look, obviously this person
42:10
is trans. You can tell just by looking at
42:12
them and the kind of people that they took.
42:14
So for example, the Rock is a really common choice.
42:17
They'll post a picture of the Rock with no shirt and say,
42:21
look, obviously this guy is trans.
42:23
You can tell. Just they're looking at him.
42:24
Wayne Johnson is. Dwayne Johnson, The Rock.
42:26
Yeah, they pick hypermasculine figures and hyper feminine
42:31
figures, Taylor Swift and Marilyn Monroe and so on.
42:35
Donald Trump, which I think is a little hilarious.
42:37
But they they'll pick nearly anyone and say, look, there's a
42:40
secret cabal of trans people. It's related to transhumanism as
42:44
an ideology, and it's related back to gender reassignment in
42:47
the Pharmaceutical industry. So it does have overlaps that
42:51
that is I think a larger trend in conspiracy theories now too,
42:54
that they tend to be super conspiracies.
42:57
There are a whole lot of individual conspiracy theories
42:59
all seem to reaffirm each other. Q Anon is the template for this.
43:04
But I think you know the transvestigation conspiracy
43:06
theory is another good example and is partly Q Anon derived
43:09
because that some of them say Satanism and so on is part of it
43:13
and it has a lot of little variance.
43:14
Wow, so kind of meta level conspiracism, which includes all
43:18
of them. I mean, even though they're
43:20
internally inconsistent, a lot of them aren't they?
43:21
Because, you know, this can't possibly happening.
43:24
If that's also happening at the same time, it doesn't seem to
43:25
matter. Like Princess Diana could be
43:27
both alive and be murdered, you know, at the same time.
43:30
And the same people can believe this, both of those at once.
43:33
Yeah, that's right. You know, there's very little
43:35
consistency among a lot of them. And, you know, the, the base
43:38
problem with nearly every conspiracy theory is that if
43:40
this was really happening the way that you thought it was and
43:43
you were right about it and you were right that they're
43:45
murdering critics of the regime and so on, Like, why are you,
43:49
David Icke, allowed to continue publishing books about it,
43:52
etcetera? There's lots of, you know,
43:54
obvious logical difficulties with most conspiracy theories,
43:57
but they persist, I think, because they're so
43:59
psychologically rewarding in a way.
44:01
And the bigger the conspiracy theory is, the more rewarding it
44:04
is as well, the more it seems to explain about the world.
44:07
So the more reassurance it gives us that, you know, yes,
44:11
everything is is evil, but we know what it is and that's the
44:14
important thing. I mean, I remember the time when
44:17
conspiracy theorists used to get banned on Twitter, as it used to
44:19
be, and Facebook and so on, and there was at least some attempt
44:23
to police the reasonableness of online discourse.
44:28
Then a conspiracy theorist bought Twitter, renamed it X,
44:31
and the rest is history, as they say.
44:33
I mean, it seems that though the, we've, I feel like we were
44:37
very naive, those of us who believed that you could, you
44:40
could police this because actually the backlash has been
44:41
worse, worse than anything that was happening at the time.
44:45
And I think, you know, that's LED that's driven the
44:47
conspiracist narrative, hasn't it, That the the sort of forces
44:51
of, you know, powerful forces are censoring your what you say
44:55
online and and has then actually given a lot more power and
44:58
credibility to the original conspiracist beliefs.
45:02
Yeah, once they're deplatformed, they say, look, we were rights
45:05
and people are sympathetic to them.
45:07
I don't think that social media companies did nearly enough to
45:09
maintain content on their sites. I think that there were serious
45:14
gaps that they didn't do. You know, there's a lot of
45:16
published research about this, which I don't have to recount,
45:19
but I don't think that they did a lot.
45:22
And in some ways, YouTube especially became a hotbed for
45:26
conspiracy theories because it seemed to really drive
45:28
engagement, like conspiracy theories.
45:30
Dr. business to social media. It's against their economic
45:34
interest, arguably, to regulate conspiracy theories, but it's
45:39
also the case that the regulation was never
45:40
particularly effective. So transvestigators primarily
45:43
exist on Facebook right now. They're a bunch on TikTok as
45:46
well. I don't know how where Facebook
45:48
is a bit, but you know, these communities have existed there
45:51
for a long time. The only thing deplatforming
45:54
seems to have done, and it does make them less visible in some
45:57
places, maybe, but at the expense of making the believers
46:01
much more committed. And I don't really think that
46:03
that's ultimately worth it. I will say, as a researcher, the
46:06
fact that they've been deplatformed makes it much more
46:08
difficult to keep tabs on them as well.
46:10
I have to, like, really dig into some of these more marginal
46:14
places to find where the conspiracy communities have been
46:17
pushed. Reddit used to be by far the
46:20
easiest place to research them. And now it takes a little bit of
46:23
work to find the like, really, you know, truly hardcore
46:27
believers. So is, is there a way to
46:29
quantify the prevalence of different conspiracist
46:32
narratives and in fact of conspiracism generally as a as a
46:36
phenomenon? Because obviously my hunch and
46:39
my feeling is that it's become more prevalent, but can you
46:42
actually assign numbers to that and show whether it's true or
46:45
false? I'm not sure how you would go
46:46
about doing that in a very conclusive way.
46:50
I mean, I imagine you could try to track conspiracy mentions in
46:54
the media or something like that, but I'm not really sure
46:55
that those are good indicators. A lot of conspiracy theories
46:58
were originally sort of folk beliefs that spread by word of
47:02
mouth. Even as late as the 1990s that
47:05
was really common, I think. I'm actually not convinced that
47:08
conspiracy thinking is more common than it used to be.
47:12
I think it's more visible partly because of social media and the
47:16
Internet, and I also think it's more openly influential in
47:19
government. But you know, anti immigrant
47:21
conspiracy theories, anti Catholicism, things like that.
47:24
Those are. They're very old, and they had
47:27
significant power in the American and British
47:29
governments, for example, at different periods of time.
47:32
I don't think what we're seeing is really truly an expansion in
47:35
the incidence of conspiracy belief.
47:38
I just think that the dynamics of its relationship to democracy
47:42
and government are different than they used to be.
47:44
So what? What does this give me?
47:45
Some future predictions? Why does Why does this go next?
47:48
Where does it end? And I hate to say this, but I
47:50
think we're being just absolutely overwhelmed by the
47:51
conspiracy theorists. I don't think that there's any
47:55
chance that this lets up in the near future.
47:57
I think the content of conspiracy theories will change,
48:01
but some ultimate elements of them always persist.
48:04
It's always a group that's evil. Plotting in secret against
48:09
society as a whole are always people who can see that truth.
48:13
Well, there's can't. That group is always both hyper
48:17
competent in that it has this extreme power to manipulate the
48:20
world, but also totally incompetent and that, you know,
48:23
some weirdo on Reddit can figure out what's really happening and
48:26
tell everybody about it. That kind of structure of
48:29
conspiracy theory I think that there's very little we can do
48:31
about. My guess for the future is that
48:34
although those things will persist, how influential they
48:39
are in democratic government really matters a lot more than
48:43
whether they exist. And not all conspiracy theories
48:46
are the same. So, you know, like half of my
48:49
family is British. I have a a relative who.
48:51
I think pretty firmly believes that the royal family murdered
48:54
Princess Di. That just isn't as damaging at
48:57
the end of the day as someone who thinks that, you know, the
49:00
Jews control the government and welfare is a scam to, you know,
49:03
harvest blood from innocence or something like that.
49:06
It's much more extreme. So some of the things I think we
49:09
have to think about are whether it's possible not to disrupt the
49:13
whole structure of conspiracy theory belief, which I think is
49:17
very, very difficult. It's rooted in fundamental
49:19
psychological needs for a lot of folks, but whether it's possible
49:22
to soften it around the edges in ways that make it less corrosive
49:25
to democracy. And my guess is that research
49:30
and reactions to conspiracy theories will proceed along both
49:34
of those lines. There will be sort of technical,
49:35
primarily technical means, I think, to respond to them, which
49:38
I don't think will be very effective.
49:39
And there will be social means of responding to them, which I
49:42
think will increasingly focus on deemphasizing their political
49:46
damage rather than truly uprooting them.
49:48
Although it's a dire importance that we also teach people how to
49:53
process arguments and information more effectively,
49:56
there's just no substitute for that in the longer term.
49:58
Yeah, it's a, it's a corrosion of democracy, which I think
50:01
worries me more than anything. And most of you think actually
50:03
do conspiracy theories, you know, do they mobilize in the
50:08
same way in, in fully autocratic regimes like in Putin's Putin's
50:12
Russia or in China? Do you still get the same kind
50:14
of phenomenon where where, you know, social interaction is so
50:18
strictly policed and EV, you know, things are very rapidly
50:20
deleted from, from uh, online community communities and so.
50:24
On they certainly exist and they do spread by word of mouth and
50:27
so on. I think some of them continue to
50:29
persist, especially in China, even though the Internet is
50:32
regulated. They're very common in Russia
50:34
and they have been in that sort of Russophone world for a long
50:38
time. Part of the purges under Yazhav,
50:43
especially as head of the NKVD, just look like conspiracy
50:45
thinking. They blamed the kulaks, this
50:48
group of peasants in Russia, rich peasants which arguably
50:52
didn't really exist as a class until the Soviets identified
50:55
them as such. They said, look, the reason our
50:57
economic reforms are not working is because of these Breakers and
51:00
saboteurs within our society and so on, totalitarian governments.
51:04
Rely on conspiracy thinking to work.
51:06
They rely on paranoia. They rely on external enemies.
51:09
The North Korean regime, if you look at North Korean propaganda,
51:12
it's full of references to the United States and American
51:15
attempts to undermine North Korea and so on.
51:18
And there is again an element of truth to all those things. the
51:20
US has been hostile to Russia and North Korea and China, but
51:24
that kind of hostility becomes a full blown conspiracy theory
51:28
when every social I'll is blamed on some external force.
51:31
So I think that, you know, conspiracy theories that are
51:33
sort of folk beliefs that are anti government can be
51:36
suppressed in those societies to some degree.
51:39
But more importantly, conspiracy theories can be kind of
51:41
weaponized as a major part of regime propaganda.
51:44
And what's happening now is not in the United States, it's not
51:48
all that different in a certain way.
51:51
It's a different scale and kind of different consequences, but
51:54
RFK is kind of saying this. RFK Junior is saying, look,
51:59
there's this group of people who are out to get you and the
52:01
reason why you're unhealthy is because, you know, people have
52:04
suppressed the truth of natural medicines and so on and so
52:07
forth. Rather than saying, for example,
52:09
you know, a free market system of healthcare, this isn't a good
52:12
idea. Wow.
52:13
I mean, that's kind of depressing because there's no
52:16
way to fight back or with any degree of confidence that
52:20
there's going to that you can move the needle on this kind of
52:23
thing, is there? I mean, it depends on
52:24
algorithms. It depends on, you know,
52:27
political populism, which seems to be a phenomenon literally
52:29
everywhere. You know, you talk about
52:31
education. And then we had Sander van de
52:33
Lewen who talked about misinformation and the sort of
52:35
inoculation theory on the show a few episodes back.
52:39
But these seem pretty small beer really compared to these vast
52:43
sort of geopolitical forces which are kind of remaking the
52:46
world and this bizarre and really, truly terrifying
52:49
conspiracies way. Yeah, I think that that's right.
52:52
I mean, it can look really grim. The forces of conspiracy do seem
52:56
to be winning right now. I don't think that that means
53:00
that we should give up on trying, though.
53:02
I mean, this is to get back to the very earliest part of our
53:05
conversation. In a certain way, this is like
53:06
looking at this moment and nuclear policy and saying, well,
53:10
there's nothing that we can do. I think the solution is to try
53:14
to build a small scale efforts to do this commonly across a a
53:20
wide swath of society and also to think about what it means to
53:24
be successful in this case. We'll never eradicate conspiracy
53:27
thinking. We won't even eradicate
53:29
conspiracy thinking from ourselves.
53:30
I mean, most people, if they really dig down into it, believe
53:33
something that could be qualified as a conspiracy theory
53:36
one way or another, even if they don't recognize it as such.
53:39
And often that's because it's, you know, low stakes to them.
53:41
They haven't thought about it or whatever.
53:43
We're dealing with people for which it's a like a major,
53:45
you're kind of organizing force, which is a different thing.
53:48
Our goal is probably not no one will believe in conspiracy
53:51
theories anymore. Our goal is probably respond
53:54
individually and in detail to the ones that are particularly
53:58
dangerous, the specificity of them right now, and also try to
54:02
build a kind of sensibility that makes it more difficult for
54:06
conspiracy theories to erode democracy.
54:09
Those things I think are are mitigation tactics rather than
54:13
efforts to completely eradicate conspiracy thinking, which I
54:15
think is impossible. So it does seem like, you know,
54:18
a daunting task, and it is. I don't at all want to suggest
54:22
that it won't take an incredible amount of work and organization,
54:26
diligence and careful thought. But, you know, the goal
54:30
ultimately is to create something that is better than
54:33
the status quo, not an ideal world.
54:35
And I think that that's achievable, although difficult.
54:38
Wow. Well, obviously we need to have
54:41
a bad idea here, or I mean, conspiracy theories are all bad
54:44
ideas by definition. And you know, you're, you're
54:47
doing sterling work to combat them as a phenomenon and an
54:52
individual level as well. Like what, how we're saving the
54:56
world from bad ideas. What's what's the singular bad
54:58
idea? We can we can front this with.
55:02
I don't know. What do you think?
55:04
I mean, we've talked about a lot of bad ideas, I think.
55:07
I mean believing in shit that isn't true, but I mean, as you
55:10
say, we all do that, don't we? I'm trying.
55:12
I do occasionally think, oh there God, there's conspiracies
55:15
that I also believe in, but I try, I absolutely try not to
55:19
because that's a conscious, but that's a conscious effort.
55:21
And I think most people, most of the time, you know, just, yeah,
55:25
people are very, very susceptible to it because it's a
55:28
quick and easy and explanation for something which is
55:31
complicated, nuanced and ultimately unknowable.
55:34
So there's, there's your problem.
55:37
But yeah, I, I don't know, in terms of, in terms of, in terms
55:41
of bad ideas, obviously believing and shit that isn't
55:45
true. I think.
55:45
So. I don't know if you put that on
55:47
a on an Instagram post, Rob. OK, so the bad idea maybe is we
55:52
can demolish conspiracy theories with fact.
55:54
Yeah, I think that that's a good one.
55:56
The the idea that, you know, the truth will set us free.
56:00
The truth will dismantle conspiracy theories.
56:02
Truth is an antidote to conspiracy theories, I think is
56:05
a good way to put this. I forgot to mention this,
56:08
actually. It slipped my mind.
56:09
But there's one chapter of my latest book which is about Sandy
56:13
Hook deniers, people who say it's Sandy Hook school shooting
56:17
never took place. And some of the prominent
56:20
believers of that theory are professors who have pH DS and
56:23
are actually experts in media and epistemology.
56:28
And if those. What, what, what?
56:29
What? Really.
56:30
Yeah, there's a media studies professor who is a very named
56:33
James Tracy, who is a very prominent Sandy Hook conspiracy
56:37
theorist, and another James Fetzinger who I did, who's a
56:41
professor emeritus of philosophy who studies epistemology.
56:45
And those people are, you know, full on public figures in the
56:49
conspiracy movement. And I think education alone,
56:53
Yeah, they sound like. That's enough.
56:54
Exactly. Credibility too.
56:56
I mean, they sound like experts to me from the titles you've
56:58
just given them. Yeah, If I saw them pop up on,
57:01
on a, you know, on the TV, I'd be like, I'd probably trust what
57:04
that guy's about to say. Absolutely.
57:05
And our usual answer to conspiracy theorists is to say,
57:07
well, you should trust people who are actually experts.
57:09
Like that advice would lead you to the conspiracy theory in this
57:12
case, even though they're quite clearly wrong.
57:14
Maybe trust the experts isn't even even more of a bad idea, I
57:19
feel. I feel.
57:20
Conflicted about that one though, as a nominal expert.
57:25
It's true though. But then, you know, I've had
57:27
this, this concern all the way through, you know, the work I've
57:30
been doing for, for 10 or 20 years.
57:32
It's like if I've been trying to sort of, you know, promote the
57:37
notion of, of expertise being valuable in some way, but then
57:40
that often just leads to cherry picking, you know, and you can
57:43
see this in climate and multiple other ways that you, oh, here's,
57:46
here's 5 peer reviewed studies that show XY and Z and you know,
57:50
the way to combat that. And I've tried to do this on, on
57:52
climate change where I did this big quantitative study on, on,
57:55
you know, climate, well, not climate denial, but literally on
57:58
the, on the consensus of the human causes of climate change.
58:02
And it was like 99.6% or something of studies did not
58:07
dispute the human cause of climate change.
58:09
So you can do a kind of big quantitative study like that,
58:12
but of course it doesn't actually commits anyone.
58:14
I got lots of hate mail from that too.
58:15
So what can we do to rescue the notion of expertise and give
58:20
people some sense of who you can who you can trust?
58:23
I think maybe we have to qualify it in some ways and say, you
58:26
know, expertise is important. But I mean, the, the root of
58:31
nearly all of this thinking that I think is dangerous is, is
58:34
basically a neglect of probability.
58:37
Like if I could teach everyone in the world one thing, it would
58:39
probably be Bayesian statistics that people want the world to be
58:43
yes or no, and that they have a lot of trouble with
58:45
probabilistic calculations about how things are and accepting the
58:50
uncertainty that we might sometimes be wrong.
58:53
So I think climate is a great example of this.
58:55
If you remember the climate gate scandal 20 ish years ago, a set
59:00
of people latched onto that and said look these experts are
59:03
wrong and bad and therefore the whole thing is made-up.
59:07
Like that conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence that
59:11
was uncovered. And you know, you also just have
59:14
to accept sometimes predictions will be wrong and sometimes
59:17
experts will be wrong and so on. But overall, they are more
59:20
likely to be correct about the things in their field of
59:22
expertise than untrained people are.
59:25
So I think some of it is about making a better, a different and
59:27
better case for expertise that is not so much as trust the
59:31
experts as learn how to evaluate how expertise fits into an
59:35
argument. But that's, you know, much more
59:37
difficult to convey, obviously. Well, you said everyone needs a
59:40
short lesson in Bayesian statistics.
59:42
So how about you give it a go now?
59:44
Take, take, take, take 30 seconds to a minute.
59:47
Give us a short lesson in Bayesian statistics.
59:49
I I think our audience wants, wants and needs to hear this.
59:52
The world is probabilistic, like we aren't speaking in absolutes
59:57
most of the time, we are saying that something is extremely
1:00:00
likely to be true. And retaining some element of
1:00:04
doubt, that's how the scientific process works.
1:00:07
A scientific discovery is not a discovery that we have uncovered
1:00:12
A fundamental truth of the universe with absolute
1:00:14
certainty. It is that we've developed a
1:00:16
hypothesis about it which the evidence seems to confirm is
1:00:19
very likely to be true. That might be extremely likely
1:00:21
to be true. It might just be kind of likely
1:00:23
to be true. There are differences in how and
1:00:26
you know how certain we can be about things, but absolutes are
1:00:29
just not really the language of that we that are appropriate for
1:00:33
belief. And this has been exploited
1:00:36
deliberately by industry forces that I've mentioned before.
1:00:40
So the whole strategy of the tobacco industry was to say,
1:00:43
look, the scientists admit they aren't 100% sure that this thing
1:00:47
is true. Therefore there is some doubt.
1:00:49
And that doubt is the wedge by which we can crack the consensus
1:00:53
and undermine the narrative. And they have an immense
1:00:57
advantage in doing that because most all they have to do is tell
1:01:00
people that the thing that they already want to do is OK,
1:01:04
whereas we have to say the thing that you already want to do, you
1:01:07
have to stop, stop smoking, consume fewer fossil fuels,
1:01:11
etcetera. We're in a natural disadvantage
1:01:13
against that. And the inability to understand
1:01:16
probability, I think is one of the reasons why that is the
1:01:19
case. The same thing is true for
1:01:20
conspiracy thought. The world really is random,
1:01:24
seemingly random in some ways. There are things that we can't
1:01:27
explain about the world. Which doesn't mean that they are
1:01:31
inexplicable. It means that we have not yet
1:01:33
explained to them. And it doesn't mean that, you
1:01:37
know, I think the reaction to that sometimes also is to say,
1:01:40
well, we're unsure about some things, like who knows really
1:01:43
why tornadoes happen when they do and where they do and so on.
1:01:46
And therefore it must be some evil force behind it that is
1:01:50
ultimately a rejection of uncertainty, ambiguity, and
1:01:54
probability. It's an insistence that nothing
1:01:57
can be random. Everything, actually.
1:01:58
Has to be controlled and we have to know who is doing it.
1:02:01
And I think an ability to kind of tolerate and live in those
1:02:05
spaces of uncertainty and accept that our understandings of the
1:02:08
world are probabilistic, but that a very high probability is
1:02:11
something that we should take seriously would go a long way to
1:02:15
remedying this. I am by training a rhetorician.
1:02:17
I studied rhetoric, which is, you know, the ancient art of
1:02:20
persuasion and identifying how persuasion is functioning and
1:02:23
all the elements of language that go beyond just
1:02:25
communicating information that make it, you know, decorative
1:02:28
and forceful and emotional and so on.
1:02:30
The the core concept of rhetoric is about contingency, that there
1:02:35
are times when we need to convince someone of something
1:02:38
when we don't have absolute, irrefutable evidence of that.
1:02:41
It's a way of living in the world, not just an art.
1:02:44
It's a way of saying accepting the limits to our knowledge and
1:02:48
accepting that sometimes the best evidence is the best that
1:02:52
we can do and learning to present that case, rather than
1:02:57
the kind of absolutes of yes, no, true, false.
1:03:01
I just want to say Amen to that. And I think that's a that's a
1:03:04
good, good ending point. And I just want to say thanks,
1:03:08
Callum, for, for joining us and thanks for sharing your
1:03:10
expertise and your rhetoric with us today.
1:03:13
I'm, I feel quite persuaded by what you've said.
1:03:15
So we hope to have you back on the show soon.
1:03:18
And good luck with the rest of your work.
1:03:20
And if you have a book coming out again soon, do get back in
1:03:23
touch and let us know. Thank you very much.
1:03:25
It's been wonderful. Thanks so much for listening to
1:03:31
Saving the World from Bad Ideas, a We Planet podcast we plan.
1:03:34
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1:03:37
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1:03:39
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mailing list and we'll let you know when a new episode drops.
1:03:53
Just go to Saving the World from badideas.org or weplanet.org
1:03:57
podcast right now. See you next time.