Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. special forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive.”18
Conspiracy thinking is strongly self-reinforcing. Polls show that those who accepted the JFK assassination conspiracy were twice as likely to believe that a UFO crashed at Roswell (32% believed, versus 16% for those who don’t accept any other conspiracy theories).19 The people who believed in Roswell UFO stories, in turn, were far more likely to believe that the CIA had distributed crack cocaine, that the government “knowingly allowed” the 9/11 attacks, and that the government added fluoride to our water for sinister reasons.
Psychological studies have shown that conspiracy thinking is all about the need for control and certainty in a random, frightening world where everything seems out of control. Conspiracies are nice simple explanations for scary phenomena that we don’t want to believe are simply due to random events. Conspiracy believers tend to be people who have high anxiety about their lives, their jobs, and their futures and who need someone to blame for their troubles and failures. Various psychological surveys have shown that believers have a very low level of trust in their fellow human beings or human institutions, tend to have a high degree of political cynicism, and believe the worst about other humans. In broader terms, they are people who focus on intention and agency rather than randomness and complexity.
At one time, conspiracy believers were isolated, and conspiracy thinking was treated as a form of paranoia and mental illness. They had little way of reaching each other, getting feedback from like-minded individuals, or finding lots of new conspiracies to read about and believe in. But now that the internet brings any conspiracy theory to you in the touch of a few keys and mouse clicks, they are proliferating at a rate that has never been seen before, because now they can feed on and reinforce each other. For example, a 2007 poll showed that more than 30 percent of Americans thought that “certain elements in the US government knew the [9/11] attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives” or that these government elements “actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks.”20 Thanks to relentless conspiracy mongering by the media, polls show that 51 percent of Americans think that a conspiracy was behind Kennedy’s assassination; only 25 percent agree with the demonstrated reality that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
One of the worst things about conspiracy theories is the fact they are nearly always airtight; they act like a religion or ideology that refuses to submit to testing and falsification. Every debunking piece of evidence against the conspiracy will be viewed as an attempt to “misinform the public,” and the lack of evidence for it is viewed as a government cover-up. In this sense, conspiracy theorists are very antiscientific, because they have the same closed view of the world that will not accept outside information that doesn’t fit their core beliefs as religions and cults do. Much about conspiracy groups resembles religious cults, including suspicion of the outside world, self-reinforcement with like-minded individuals, refusal to look at anything that does not fit their worldview, and an almost messianic devotion to the idea that they have the only truth and that everyone else is foolish or deceived or part of the conspiracy.
People have a much easier time believing that a huge operation of sinister forces is at work to do something they don’t like rather than accepting the idea that stuff happens. To a conspiracy theorist, the idea that evil forces are ruling the world is much more plausible than the reality that bad things just happen and we don’t really have much control over them. Conspiracy thinking is particularly prevalent among people with a deep hatred or distrust of the government, so it tends to be concentrated on the conservative fringe (as evidenced by Donald Trump and his embrace of a wide range of conspiracies and crazy ideas). There is also a strain in conspiracy thinking among leftists who view Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, and so on as more powerful than they really are. We now know that Big Tobacco conspired to suppress antismoking research and that ExxonMobil and some other oil companies conspired to fund climate change deniers and suppress research, but they were not able to hide their conspiracy forever, and the truth came out eventually. As conspiracy thinking also declines slightly with more education, people who know more about how the world actually works tend not to believe in them as much.
So how do we know that the conspiracy believers are wrong and paranoid and that there is nothing really happening? The key flaw with conspiracy thinking is that it assumes a level of competence and secret keeping that has never happened in the history of humanity. People often get the idea from TV and the movies (from shows like The X-Files and hundreds of conspiracy-plotted movies, especially spy flicks) that secret government organizations are really powerful and very good at keeping secrets. But the opposite has been demonstrated over and over again. Watergate was a grand conspiracy, but eventually it was exposed. For fifty years, tobacco companies conspired to keep research about the death toll of tobacco under wraps. But whistle-blowers in the companies leaked their top-secret memos, and eventually they were indicted and brought to court and in front of Congress. Leaked documents have shown that ExxonMobil covered up its own climate change research and funded a wide range of front groups and climate-denier groups, using innocent-sounding names to hide their connection to energy companies. Lance Armstrong and just a handful of his closest friends among cyclists knew about his doping activities, but eventually even this tiny circle of silence was broken. And despite the fear of death for breaking the code of silence, or omertà, in the Mafia, sooner or later there is a weak link and the crime bosses go down.
Large secret government operations, like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, never work as well as they are planned and eventually screw up and are exposed. The Iran-Contra affair was top secret, but eventually a bunch of people made mistakes and it was revealed and investigated. As Michael Shermer quips whenever a 9/11 Truther speaks, “You know how I know it’s not a big government conspiracy that’s been successfully kept secret for many years? Because it happened during the Bush Administration.” Conspiracy believers claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was going to operate concentration camps to keep opponents of the Obama administration under control—which is laughable, because FEMA did not have that capability, as shown by its botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Also, FEMA employees are not sworn to secrecy. Nearly everything FEMA does is completely open.
Conspiracy theorists claim that these top-secret organizations are capable of hiding everything, but as the Wikileaks and Edward Snowden examples show, sooner or later there is one weak link or leaker who talks or blows the whistle, and government secrets are secret no longer. Donald Trump tried to get away with extorting Ukraine for dirt on his opponent, but a whistleblower exposed that conspiracy and Trump was impeached for it. The Freedom of Information Act has given reporters the power to delve into almost any secret organization, especially governmental organizations, and no secret stays hidden long. The more people and more organizations are required to keep the entire thing hush-hush, the less likely it could actually happen.
On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, comedian John Oliver does a hilarious send-up of the entire conspiracy theory mind-set, especially crazy conspiracy YouTube videos. As he puts it, “Conspiracy theories: they’re just fairy tales adults tell each other on YouTube.” In three minutes, he parodies all the excesses of this way of thinking and “proves” the absurd idea that Cadbury Creme Eggs are a conspiracy by the Illuminati. I highly recommend you watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNS41ecOaAc, or use your browser to search for it.
The Flat Earth
The “Wisdom” of Celebrities
In 2016 and 2017, the media were abuzz with reports of yet another celebrity suggesting that the earth is flat. Most of the coverage was incredulous and slightly sarcastic, but by giving these ridiculous ideas so much coverage, the media ended up spreading the ideas more widely and even, to some extent, legitimizing them. As tabloid journalism has practiced for years, “if it bleeds, it ledes,” and this is even more true now. In today’s media world, the whole point of reporting something sensational or crazy, no matter