Zen and the Art of Talking to Conspiracy Theorists
mcgill.ca
mcgill.ca
They didn't strike me as being normal people taken in by misinformation - instead I figured they had some sort of mental issue like schizophrenia or whatever.
I think that most people massively overstate the amount of genuine crackpottery that exists and instead just resort to calling people they disagree with or are uncomfortable with conspiracy theorists.
As an example, the article lumps in "masks are a control mechanism" with "5g towers cause coronavirus".
The UK government explicitly states that their nudge unit believes in the use of masking as a way to remind people that coronavirus is about. It is being used as a control mechanism, that's incontrovertible fact - it's probably also useful for reducing the spread of coronavirus (but perhaps not for total happiness).
It's not even a conspiracy because it's out in the open.
By contrast the 5g stuff is obviously mental and makes no sense at all.
The people that I know about will not express such a strong opinion. But they are not sure about what to believe, and people in their circle may share many conspiracies. So, they are not strong believers but may decide to not vaccinate as they "hear things about the vaccine".
> It is being used as a control mechanism
I think that you are missing the degree. One thing is to create a reminder that we are in a pandemic, another it's to think that a government in the shadow is using control mechanisms to brainwash the population so they can take over the country.
Both are "control mechanisms" if you want that interpretation. But, only the second one is referred in the news because it's a conspiracy theory. So, it fits with the 5G desease thinking.
Then its an idiotic, bullying and frankly authoritarian "reminder" that should be thoroughly rejected as a piece of government policy. Forcing people to do something you the controller largely believe useless just to emotionally "remind them" that they should submit to a series of control measures is not something worth applauding.
It's akin to a parent randomly punishing a child in minor ways for no good reason just to remind them who's in charge. That would be considered abusive. From government it's okay?
Think of the tobacco industry denying or downplaying the risks of smoking, knowing full well about the harm it causes. Or the pharma industry pushing opioids on physicians and patients, claiming with a straight face they were not addictive. I'm too lazy right now to go looking, but I'm certain there are plenty more cases like this. Suspecting large corporations or even entire industries of putting profits above the health or lives of lots and lots of people is not really crazy.
Suspecting that Covid vaccines are a vector of implanting microchips in people so they can be mind-controlled via 5g is crazy, IMHO. But the line between these is somewhat blurry. And neither corporations nor governments seem to be doing a very good job of dealing with this other than paint people who are hovering in that blurry area in the crazy corner. One may feel morally righteous in doing so, but it is very counterproductive. If we want people to come back to the "sane side", we need to convince them, not pressure or insult them.
"I don't trust vaccines because pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive for me to take them/my government is forcing me/etc" are reasonable viewpoints to hold. The reasoning is based on correct information and true premises, it's sensible to be skeptical of something that suddenly comes out of nowhere and is being pushed from all angles.
You can even hold that viewpoint and take the vaccine anyway because you figure, sure, they want to push them, but that doesn't mean they're not also actually useful and beneficial for the recipients.
I'm struggling to explain here, but basically, the right side of the equation "X is happening" is correct, but the left side "therefore Y" is problematic.
"I don't trust vaccines because they have 5g microchips in" is wrong on both sides. They don't have 5g microchips in, we can show that. Even if they had an incentive to do so, they can't.
That's the line in my view, whether something is even possible.
The best metaphor I can come up with is the event horizon of a black hole. To an outside observer, it's a very sharp line indeed. But to somebody falling into a black hole, Wikipedia tells me, it is impossible to tell when they cross the event horizon. If you only observe specific points, there is a clear line between sane and crazy; but if you move between these points, you probably don't perceive that line as you approach and cross it.
And human beings have a strong tendency, once they accept some kind of belief, to interpret all evidence/observations so as to support that belief, even if it seems to prove the exact opposite to someone who doesn't share that belief.
Based on personal experience I've had times when I've felt like I've veered towards cuckoo land and it's usually been from trauma.
Like, at some point last year I started to lose the plot.
All of the stuff I wanted to do with my life just disappeared - universities gone, work gone, study groups gone, travel very restricted or gone. And the supermarkets started putting up barriers and everyone put stuff on their face, the pubs were closed, people started walking in weird directions around shops and talking about "social distancing" and making stuff illegal and blah blah blah.
And it just fucked with me, it made me feel schizophrenic, because I just don't get this as a response to coronavirus. It felt like, well, you have a 1% chance of dying, maybe 10% if you're in an at-risk group, so just kill yourself now (remove everything that makes life worth living) to avoid the risk. And all I could do is just think about all of the downstream long term permanent effects.
It made me think - is there something underlying this? Like, are the government pushing this because they know something worse is coming down the line (is this a trial run to protect against sars-cov-3 that wipes out 20% of us?). But why are other people just going along with it?
And all the time what seemed like _everyone_ was wandering around acting as if this thing was super bad, and here's me just like, trying to get on with it. I remember walking around empty streets, closed up stores, and just thinking like, what? why? am I in a dream? And it went on for months and months, a year.
Then I'd just be wandering around in a haze, and the cause and effect was disconnected, and meh. It's hard to even word it. I just had some sort of episode.
I've snapped out of it now, but I mean really I've only managed to do that because I'm quite disconnected (I don't work a 9-5, my country has quite lax restrictions, etc).
If I were one of the truckers or whatever and someone was telling me "do this or I'll turn your life upside down" I'd probably be into batshit theories too. If I were in Australia or NZ I don't even think I'd be alive, lol.
I mean, we're still doing some of this shit.
I now know that my countrymen would lock me in a box for months on end to add 1% to their life expectancy. It seems totally horrific when I write that down, but yet people still openly discuss this as if it's some totally normal thing like buying a big mac or whatever. Just odd.
Sorry for the monologue.
Beyond those who died from it, Covid incurred a mental health debt our societies will pay off for years, probably decades, to come. Maybe decades. Suicide attempts among teenagers have doubled over the last 18-or-so months. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I've had to deal with my fair share of mental health issues, but I'm kind of a loner, so the Covid restrictions were not as hard on me as on others. But as a species, we're very social beings, and being disconnected from others is a recipe for a mental health disaster that - say, 10 to 20 years from now - might look even worse than the damage the virus itself did.
FWIW, my godmother holds a yearly Easter-brunch that she has cancelled two years in a row now and will probably cancel again, come Easter. I'm not a religious person, but that brunch has been a fixture in my year for as long as I can remember. I miss it dearly. Likewise, a close friend of my mother's holds a Christmas party every year, again, for as long as I can remember. Cancelled, two years in a row, and who knows if it will be cancelled this year.
It is important, I think, to acknowledge the pain this virus has caused on all of us, even if we got away.
And we - I mean human beings in general - need to make sense of things, at a very fundamental level. If we run out of sensible explanations for what's happening around us, we turn to the irrational.
On a more abstract level, I think living in a modern industrialized capitalist economy incurs a mental health cost we rarely acknowledge. And Covid has turned up the volume to the max. Unfortunately, when we, as a society, acknowledge this mental health cost, our response is to throw pills at it instead of dealing with the underlying pathology.
It feels like if we don't do anything about it, we'll run into a World-War-II-Holocaust-level disaster far sooner than anyone alive right now should be comfortable with. If I look back at history, though, this has happened before, repeatedly, and we failed to learn the lessons offered to us on a silver platter.
I wish I had something more hopeful to say. So let me say this: Nietzsche once said that we have art so we don't die from the truth. The more I think about this, the more I find this to be true. That's what art is for. Life can be a neverending horror show, but through art, we can transform that horror into beauty. Last but not least, it is a means for us to connect to our fellow human beings, even when the lockdown otherwise disconnects us from them.
Social bubbles, man. Go to any place where "new age" people hang out. You'll find them by the dozen. They also - collectively - believe in a veritable smorgasborg of quasi-religious beliefs a la crystal healing. It's important to understand that "belief" doesn't mean the same thing for them as it does for you and I, for their in-group is determined by a staunch refusal to police any notion of objective truth. Maybe they don't all believe 5g causes covid, maybe only 5% of them do, but if someone pipes up with that at a gathering not a single person will challenge them. Instead what will happen is that someone will chime in with their own different, related conspiracy theory / piece of nonsense. Everyone gets to pick and choose which myths resonate best with themselves, and yet collectively they reinforce each other.
There are literally millions of these people. In my opinion they're also one charismatic leader away from being a fascist voting bloc.
I wish universities would use statistics as the "weed them out" class instead of calculus. As one example, make the nursing students take statistics instead of calculus; I'm not sure they need either, but statistics will be more useful in their lives and career.
Their reluctance to criticize sounds like a recipe for getting along at large seasonal family gatherings, Thanksgiving, etc. So many dinners are wrecked these days because, "Hey, I just gotta correct Uncle Billy's naive political beliefs." Maybe it's better to let Uncle Billy remember that he loves his seldom seen nephew than to engage him in what may morph into an irritating, demeaning argument in front of the whole clan. People are more influenced by those they love or like, than by those who mercilessly point out the weaknesses of their belief in front of others.
I can assure you, the person being attacked doesn't think its very harmonious. And having even one person stand up and say "That's unacceptable" can help the mental state of that victim tremendously.
I will let most things pass until some gets targeted. Then I'm not so quiet anymore.
In addition, silence gives consent. If nobody challenges a belief, then it "becomes apparent" that everybody agrees. That may not be true, but unless a single person steps up, everybody else may stay quiet.
You only need a few vocal, motivated people willing to cow everybody into submission if nobody ever voices opposition.
What the new-age hippie leftist types and the far-right evangelicals have in common, apart from a fairly casual relationship with objective truth and a deep distrust of the state, is that they favor a simplistic, absolutist Lord-of-the-rings-esque good-vs-evil style framing of the world. Fascism and vaguely occult symbolism have a long history of symbiosis. This renders New Age types with their laissez-faire attitude to new memes easy prey for propaganda merchants.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/22/leftwi...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-55957298
https://www.mironline.ca/beyond-the-qanon-shaman-the-disturb...
https://www.kunskapskonsult.com/eng/_fascism.html
https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far...
It's a little worrying that you got so defensive because I used the word "fascism".
For example that vaccines are subversive for an entirely different purposes. Microchips, financial greed, mass genocide, virus distribution, etc.
Umm...
I suppose I'm building a tautology in a sense.
In other words, are religious fanatics "mental"? Is this a useful categorization, when they're everywhere?
The effect seems to be the same though, that you shouldn't use their opinions to inform policy because they're not using causal reasoning. Basically, to listen to them would be populist. It might be a vote winner in the short term but it's a bad thing in the medium to long term.
Or, on a more individual level - I don't hang out with these people because well, it's pointless. We can't get on, we can't learn anything from each other, they're broken humans.
My experience has been that many people who are not in favour of masks think that they are being enforced for reasons other than public safety.
No, it's not particularly rational. But when there are distrustful, angry, or hostile groups of humans involved, "rational" describes very little of how things usually go.
My hypothesis about what's going on in people's subconscious, based in part on my own thoughts: your face is a key part of your identity, and pressure or mandate to cover your face is in no small part a demand to cover your identity in the name of conformity. Some people react to this very strongly, if they're inclined to believe "the authorities" want to enforce conformity that way. Add the plain physical discomfort and some flip flopping from the CDC, and you've got a mess.
Masks are a burden wherever people. speak.
Put on a damn mask and stop crying about it.
It's a step along the spectrum of why this textual interaction is not the same as a real world interaction.
Another example would be the plexiglass screens in shops. Theoretically it's just a clear thing that blocks spit. In practice it means there's a psychological barrier which "others" you from each other.
They're also physically uncomfortable.
Describing this as "trivial" is needlessly provocative. You might not care about it, that's not the same as it being irrelevant.
And often enough said laws and regulations are ignored if people perceive them to be overly restrictive, overly cautious, or just pointless. Sometimes people find out the hard way there was a very good reason for those (i.e. get seriously injured or killed), sometimes people get punished for ignoring them (ranging from fines to prison), but a lot of the time there are no real consequences unless something bad happens as a result. Drive a car without wearing a seat belt? Unless you run into a police officer or an accident, there are no negative consequences[0].
I suspect that part of the reason is the backlash people who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated face from the rest of society. If you ride the bus or train without a mask, those who do may perceive you as putting them at risk and call you out on it. In fact, over here, you are required to wear a mask to use public transportation - if you don't, the bus driver will refuse to go, ask you to leave, and call the police unless you comply one way or the other. Same goes for pretty much any business.
Someone who refuses to wear a mask may think it's just another one of those pointless rules, except that this time, everyone else is totally up in arms about enforcing it to the letter. I am certain there's a lot more to it, but I have a hunch this plays into it.
It is very strange, though. I don't like wearing a mask, either, but even if I was seriously opposed to it, at some point I would just comply so I don't have to deal with people nagging me or bus drivers throwing me off the bus.
[0] Of course, no one ever entered a car and thought, "Today feels like an accident-prone day, I'd better wear my seat belt just this once."
There's also the social signalling effect, right. Imagine that you think that the (made up) Yellow Party are arseholes. They pass a law that makes it a legal requirement to wear the little yellow pin badge. Their reasoning is that advertising their presence is a good thing, because they stand for good in the world, and so by wearing their pin society improves as more people learn and are reminded they exist.
Is it a huge imposition? No, it's trivial. You won't _physically_ notice it.
But if you think the Yellows are wrong, then wearing a little badge is really going to piss you off. At best you might try to make parody of it - maybe you'll write "I hate Yellows" with the little yellow badge and wear that.
Masks are like that. If you don't want to wear one for whatever reason, you're going to resent being forced.
I make an active point of not wearing a mask because I think everyone is going to get coronavirus and that "slowing the spread" is no longer a meaningful concept. It's already spread, it's everywhere, almost everyone I know has had it and if that's too anecdotal you can look at the UK stats.
In Germany, people had to postpone surgery, including for things like cancer, because too many anesthesiologists are busy taking care of Covid patients in ICUs.
Maybe that just means "flattening the curve" has already failed beyond recovery. But if somebody you know has operable cancer and has to postpone surgery until it might no longer be operable, it's not easy to remain nonchalant about it.
Plus, I need to ride the bus, shop for groceries, and so forth, so I'll continue wearing a mask for the foreseeable future.
It's a bit different if you have the opposite opinion, I was just trying to explain that.
I mean, that was literally the definition of a conspiracy. It isn't a theory. It was more of a "conspiracy fact".
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-infowars-idUSKCN1LO...
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/6/17655658/alex-jones-facebook-yo...
My neighbours. AMA.
My take away out of all of this, is that 'social media' is far worse for us than most of us think. It amplifies the worst of the worst disproportionately.
"When we talk about grand conspiracy theories, we mean the claim that there exists a secret plot between a large number of powerful people or organizations, usually an entire industry or many large governments, to consistently deceive us in order to reach an often evil goal."
In specific the article references QAnon and the ideas disiminated by the group.
This is all to say that people refuse to believe things that they cannot personally verify. For the record, I believe the earth is an oblong spheroid.
If you're referring to Columbus with the 600 years ago statement, he actually did some dodgy math to say the Earth was much smaller around than others thought which is why he thought he had a shortcut to India. He would have perished had he not had the good luck to run into a whole other continent that just happened to be in the way. To me the craziest aspect of all of that is that somehow we still refer to Native Americans (somewhat pejoratively) as Indians based on a half millennia old mistake.
Indeed I was but not necessarily him specifically, but the average Javascript engineer at the time.
I was just now reading about Eratosthenes[0], to check my priors because I had been taught some people had speculated it way earlier. The article claims:
> By around 500 B.C., most ancient Greeks believed that Earth was round, not flat
That surprised me. But, here I'm stuck thinking how difficult is me to verify that claim. I'd probably need a few years of Classics and then access artifacts that are one thousand years old. I can totally understand how earnest skepticism unravels into madness.
[0](https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200606/history.cfm)
On land, you could attribute any observed curvature to geology. On water, there does not seem to be any other way to explain curvature. I see parents point about how personally verifying is both essential to some (many?) of these critics, and quite hard to do rigorously.
I vaguely recall that historically the round shadow of the earth during lunar eclipses was one good piece of evidence.
Rural US, people believe everything out here. The more sparse the population, the stranger it gets. I don't think this is a new phenomenon; cultists were quite the thing in the early 1990s, essentially before modern web browsers. Although dial-up BBS and Usenet had provided a forum for odd bits for a couple of decades, I'm not aware of a universal search engine that could easily lead people into the Revealed Truth.
The 1990s focused the crazy, as gonzo eschatology was not post-Y2K-compliant.
If you can tolerate evangelical tent meetings, that's also a vast ecosystem for remarkable creeds.
The following list is by no means exhaustive but offers a few examples of serious, not serious / parody works.
The outright hoaxes meant to spread misinformation seem to be relatively common, easily spread by word of mouth or cheap pamphlets and endemic.
Recent-ish but pre-internet dissemination of wild theories that occasionally sucked people in: The Stranglers made an album about men in black[0], "The Illuminatus! Trilogy"[1] covers a few different conspiracies that were apparently influenced by letters to Playboy.
The Fortean Times[2] started in the 1970s although it seems not all the writing was meant to be taken seriously. Some people did though.
More seriously and much older, The Miscegenation Hoax[3] was an actual conspiracy to discredit Lincoln.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_the_Me... (1981) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Illuminatus!_Trilogy (1975) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortean_Times (1973) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation_hoax (1864) [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station (1914-)