Wrestling with the logic of conspiracies
Politically speaking, you should never let a national tragedy go to waste. A bridge collapsed in Baltimore when a disabled freighter crashed into one of its supports. It's been on the news for days, so everybody knows about it. But there are people convinced it wasn’t just an accident. Nothing is “just” an accident.
It's a political strategy explained by Nazi Joseph Goebbels and modernized by Newt Gingrich. Assume you have a political enemy already. You know, Jews… liberals… homosexuals… Every time anything goes wrong, you find a way to blame it on them. Remember the Sandy Hook school massacre? We have it on no less authority than Alex Jones that this was simply a massive liberal fraud designed to take your gun rights away. No children were killed. All the grieving adults you saw on television were really crisis actors. The networks were all in on it. They really had you going, didn't they?
I've got cancer, for example. What a relief if I could be persuaded it was a conspiracy. Years ago, my father suggested over the breakfast table that cancer research was just a racket. They already had a cure; they just wanted more money, even if thousands died. And this was my own father.
OK, hold your nose; we're going in. “So,” Conspiracy is going to ask me, “when and how did I first learn I had cancer? Was I in any kind of pain?” I get an eye-roll. It's suggested to me that there is some kind of script. First suspicion. Then alarm. Then a scary and impressive description of strategies and treatments… which will cost a lot of money, no matter who pays for it. Conspiracy smiles at me because this all makes a seamless narrative which, even if it isn't true, sure feels like it's true if you want it to be. “Truthiness,” Stephen Colbert used to call it.
And who are “THEY?” Conspiracy leans forward in his chair as if we've gotten to his favorite part. “They” are fungible. This is what's so cool about it: “they” can be Jews or liberals or Muslims or illegal immigrants. They’re whatever you need them to be.
All these so-called experts, and we’re just supposed to believe them? Conspiracy condemns the elites for looking down on the rest of us, always telling us what to do and making money off it. Then Conspiracy relaxes with a wide grin and offers to make us smarter than the so-called experts” and elites because we — those of us in the know - know what's really going on. We’re really the smart ones. How delicious is that?
It's almost a kind of knowing in the religious sense. It's what happened in the 18th century when people thought they had to decide between Genesis and fossils. Will they have a faith strong enough to reject the scientific evidence in favor of a conviction they know in their hearts? Triumphalists of all kinds believe they are in possession of a truth before which all empirical evidence is expected to bend the knee.
I know Conspiracy is dangerous to listen to, but I don't know what to do about it. We seem to have passed beyond a contest of facts or even ideas. We are being assailed with narratives, stories which satisfy by flattering us into believing that we know what's really going on… and none of our problems are our own fault. We know that because we've heard it every day, that when bridges collapse, it's the damn Jews, or the liberals again, or gay people or tolerant people, or people who teach tolerance. It's their fault. It's always their fault.
The more wicked we can imagine our opponents, the more righteous we get to feel in opposing them. So emotionally, narcissistically, we can never let our opponents be honorable people with whom we simply disagree. Because then we're not heroic anymore. After all, isn’t politics supposed to be emotionally gratifying?
Of course, Lawrence Brown didn't really write this. They just want you to think he did. I mean, how can you know anything for sure? Do you really know who wrote this?
Why? Why would the paper try to fool you? Give me a few minutes and I'll think of something.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@ gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Struggling through a world clouded by conspiracies
