Episode 12 - Conspiracy Theories (feat. Brian Keeley)

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Ellie: 0:21

David, recently, we recorded an episode on conspiracy theories that features our first ever interviewee, and we were planning to release this episode at the end of January, but we've decided to push up the release date to now because it seems like an especially timely moment to talk about conspiracy theories, given the storming of the Capitol building, because the whole storming of the Capitol revolves around the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged.

David: 0:48

One of the images that has become iconic of this moment is the photograph of that guy with the horns who is a well-known Qanon supporter.

Ellie: 1:01

Yes, he's wearing what I saw one commentator call a Chewbacca bikini. And this is like, to me, partly hilarious. Of course, it's not hilarious. It's absolutely terrifying, but there is some element of just like ridiculous cosplay that's going on in these people's militia outfits. I just, the optics of this are straight out of duck dynasty, which makes it even scarier. That's an actual attack on the Capitol building that was successful.

David: 1:29

It reminds me of a concept that Michel Foucault uses, which is the concept of the Ubu-esque, which is a term that he takes from a play, Ubu Roi in French, and it essentially captures a figure, King Ubu, who is both a buffoon figure, who is ridiculous and comical, but at the same time, murderous.

Ellie: 1:51

Oh, for sure. I mean, it reminds me of Marx's claim that history appears first as tragedy and then as farce and that's not to undercut the fact that these people actually weren't acting out a farce, like they really got into the Capitol building, but there's something about this moment where it's a weird blurring of the lines between the real and the artificial, right. It almost looks like something out of a video game or a TV show, that I think would be farcical if it weren't so apparent that it's actual violence, right. And it's these white terrorists in the Capitol building, thinking that they own the place.

David: 2:28

Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of people who have written, for example, about QAnon, and about some of the online platforms where it has really festered and grown, have pointed out that in a lot of corners of the white supremacist movement, there is precisely this combination of the ridiculous, as funny or as farcical, and the absolutely brutal. And the reason for this is that it allows people who defend conspiracy theories, and who are fighting for a white ethno-nationalist state, to essentially claim that they do it all for the LOLs, right? It's all for a laugh.

Ellie: 3:04

They're just shit-posting.

David: 3:06

And so the appeal to humor is an essential component of it, which is why it looks ridiculous.

Ellie: 3:12

Yeah, there's this element of irony, almost. And it can be really hard to tell whether people are believing in QAnon and posting about other conspiracy theories out of a desire to shit-post, they're just trolling, or whether they actually believe. And it may not matter that much in terms of its real effects on the world when we have something like the storming of the Capitol building. So David, I imagine many of us know at least a little bit about QAnon, but break it down for us briefly. What's going on with QAnon?

David: 3:40

The first thing note is that QAnon is a little bit of a moving target because it has recently splintered into several subgroups, but it's a conspiracy theory that started as a fringe theory on 4chan, which is an online platform where you will find basically the basis-

Ellie: 3:58

The swamp of the internet.

David: 4:00

And in this website, a poster named Q started making posts about how he was an insider in the White House who had classified information about the fact that Trump is, in fact, a hero, fighting against the cabal, and that's a key term "the cabal."

Ellie: 4:20

Which has somewhat anti-Semitic undertones, undertones of elitism, people behind the scenes working the gears.

David: 4:28

Very much so. According to Qand that's where the name comes from, QAnonthis anonymous guy named Q, Trump is a hero fighting this cabal of high ranking officials who are cannibals and pedophiles trying to harvest this chemical called adrenochrome from the bodies of the babies that they consume, because it's the eternal fountain of youth. So like, leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton, according to this theory, are literally killing and eating babies to never die.

Ellie: 5:02

And it's just wild to me how, like, it goes from 0 to 60. It's not as though Trump is a hero fighting a cabal of high-ranking officials who are trying to push a Democratic Socialist agenda; it's that there are actual cannibals and pedophiles. Like what? I mean, oftentimes in conspiracy theories, the presumed motivations of people are just so bizarre. And this all started out of the Pizza Gate theory. Ultimately, there was this idea that a pizza parlor in DC was secretly operating a child sex trafficking ring. And this guy went and basically shot it up, and discovered that the supposed door to the basement where all the children were being held was actually just an electrical closet. Rather than concluding that the pizza gate theory was wrong, people really doubled down and it spiraled into this huge conspiracy about QAnon.

David: 5:58

And it snowballs into an entire worldview.

Ellie: 6:02

And it's a worldview that actually is able to explain even things that seem opposed to it. That's something that we'll be talking a lot about in this episode. So there was an Atlantic article that came out after the storming of the Capitol, where Anne Applebaum argues that the true nature of Trump's ideology is the way that he is able to construct alternative realities that make him a winner, even in situations where he has lost. And that's a really important feature of conspiracy theories, the way that they're able to spin supposed facts and elements of reality into alternative realities that justify their views.

David: 6:39

Yeah. And so it would seem as if Trumpism is nothing more than a systematic, constant escapism from the failure that is Trump. So Trump became Trump simply by asserting that he didn't fail.

Ellie: 6:56

Trump himself has stoked all kinds of conspiracy theories, and he's even shown support for QAnon supporters. And so it's no wonder that they're showing up at the White House and staking a claim.

David: 7:07

Yeah, and it's because he has helped this conspiracy spread like a virus.

Ellie: 7:11

Why is QAnon so appealing? In today's episode, David and I discuss how America is a particularly ripe soil for conspiracy theories. In order to help us think about these questions, we have with us an expert on conspiracy thinking who will be joining us later in the episode.

David: 7:28

We chat with Brian Keeley about how conspiracy theories thrive under conditions of social skepticism.

Ellie: 7:36

We talk about how believing in conspiracy theories threatens to undermine the social fabric of communities and society at large. I have gotten the sense lately, I don't know about you, that conspiracy theories are just everywhere. And in fact, there was a super interesting podcast I listened to a while back, from NPR's Throughline, that talked about the golden age of conspiracy theories as being the present.

David: 8:00

It's the golden age, because it's not yet the platinum, more conspiracies are coming in the future.

Ellie: 8:07

Oh God. God save us. Oh, wait, God is a conspiracy. Just kidding!

David: 8:14

No but there is something about the US and American culture that makes conspiracy theories really stick here. A few years ago, Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood published a really interesting paper in the American Journal of Political Science about the ways in which conspiratorial thinking has been taken up in the United States. After conducting several national surveys, they found out that about half of Americans believe in at least one disproven, conspiracy theory. A lot of Americans, it seems, have this attraction to Manichaean narratives, where there is a very clearly good and very clearly evil side to the world, especially Manichaean narratives that include explanations based on hidden, but intentional forces, right? Like there's a puppet master that's pulling the

Ellie: 9:07

Mhm. Yeah, absolutely. We just love to think that like, something is in control because it's very much tied up with this idea in- in the US that everything happens for a reason, right. It's also likely tied up with the religiosity of the US, you know, the way that we tend to focus on a God who is controlling everything and in charge, right? This fantasy of omnipotence is very American and conspiracy theories definitely got a bump during the Trump presidency. And of course there is the be-all-end-all, QAnon.

David: 9:41

QAnon, which is just the worst one. Not that any of the other ones are good, but there is something truly perverse about QAnon, but, you know, there are other theories historically that have played similar roles. So I think here about, aliens and area 51 in the 1950s, you know, conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK, and so on. So it seems like every decade has its particular obsessions about who the puppet is and what the strings are.

Ellie: 10:11

There's a study that came out of UPenn that said one in three Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered COVID-19 as a weapon. And one in three Americans also believes, I don't know whether it's the same one in three Americans or not, that the CDC exaggerated COVID-19 in order to undermine Donald Trump.

David: 10:31

Yeah, I for sure believe that, it's the- it's- it's science.

Ellie: 10:37

Oh my God. One in three is a lot.

David: 10:40

Do you have a favorite conspiracy theory?

Ellie: 10:41

I might go with flat earthers. Like this idea that everyone is conspiring to make us believe the world is round when it's actually flat just completely goes beyond all realm of plausibility.

David: 10:56

Those pictures that are the photographic evidence of the edge of the world, where there's like a cascade that just like the water into the void. What- what I really respect about flat earthers though, I have to say, is that they're so committed to their damn conspiracy theory that they are willing to come up with an entire system of physics to explain it. They have their own physics.

Ellie: 11:22

I mean, it's basically like the Creation Museum in Kentucky, right? This idea that like scientists have been diluting us about the nature of evolution and actually Noah's Ark is real, but we'll leave that for another day. Let's talk about what a conspiracy theory is. I think it's a phrase that is super familiar to us, but nonetheless, it is worth defining. Philosopher Jared Milson defines a conspiracy theory as follows. A conspiracy theory is an explanation of some alleged fact or event in terms of the actions undertaken by a small group of individuals working in secret. So let's parse this definition, David, what's going on ? David: The first thing about a conspiracy meaning that it has explanatory power. So it's giving us a causal narrative. So basically a conspiracy theory grabs a bunch of data from a bunch of different places and finds some overarching thing that makes sense of it. And that overarching thing that makes sense of it is the idea that a small group of individuals are working in secret to do something.

David: 12:26

Yes, and with nefarious intent, right? Because most conspiracy theories, at least most of the ones that I'm familiar with, are about people who are either trying to control the world or trying to destroy the world or trying to monopolize the world's resources. Y'know, I've never heard of a conspiracy theory about how there are these people working in secret, in order to make the lives of the world's most destitute better, you know, like that doesn't fit into our understanding of conspiracy theories.

Ellie: 12:55

Yeah, for sure. And I think too, when we think about conspiracy theories, there is this idea that, you know, comes from a rational place, which is that there are powerful people and many of them actually do have nefarious intent, or at least they have greed, self-interest, et cetera at heart rather than altruistic motives. But what happens with conspiracy theories is that things that actually do exist in our world, conspiracies, bad intent, people in power, et cetera, get co-opted and suddenly we find ourselves in a place where there's a ridiculous explanation for an event that actually seems pretty well accounted for, by an official account. Conspiracy theories are always seeking to offer an alternative to an official account, and that's another feature of them.

David: 13:44

Yeah, and I think that's key to their psychological appeal, right? People, for example, associated with the QAnon conspiracy, will talk about breadcrumbs, the idea that you have to follow the clues, almost like Hansel and Gretel. Everybody's suddenly Agatha Christie, and so you get the psychological gratification of putting together a very complicated puzzle, to which only you have the answer.

Ellie: 14:07

Absolutely. And I think that's a very American desire because we love individualism and we love detective work, right. We are raised on the hard-boiled detectives that we see in the media and we want to figure things out for ourselves. There's a lot of stuff that we don't know, and that can feel frustrating. And so this longing to have everything made sense of is super appealing.

David: 14:31

It seems like conspiracy theories require a major buy-in, because in order to believe a conspiracy theory, you not only have to believe the things that it tells you, but then you have to commit yourself to constantly disbelieving things that disprove it, which has been major theme in a lot of psychological and philosophical writings on conspiracy theories, which is that they differ from normal theories in the following way: traditional theories, like scientific theories, when they can't explain something, or something contradicts them, they change, right? They adapt, they grow, they get rejected, they get replaced. Conspiracy theories are hyper-resilient to those mechanisms of change and development because they don't want to change. And so they simply negate the validity of the things that might challenge them.

Ellie: 15:23

Yeah. And so conspiracy theories find a way to basically take everything that seems to go against the conspiracy theory as further proof of the conspiracy theory. So when the guy walks into the pizza parlor in DC and finds that what he thought was a basement of trafficked children is actually just an electrical closethe actually did come around, so I'll- you know, that to his credit, um, not that I want to give a lot of credit to a guy who shot up a pizza parlor in DC, but in any um but a lot of the people who believe in pizza gate would actually double down and say, no, the electrical closet that he found was actually just a fakeout entrance, and there is still a secret basement.

David: 16:04

Well you mentioned, Ellie, that there is something very American about conspiracy theories, you know, the appeal of detective work and the radical individualism that seems to be the bread and butter of Americanism. So I'm currently reading a book called The End of the Myth by historian Greg Crandon, and he makes the argument that all the way back to the founding of the nation, there's conspiratorial thinking that motivates the American Revolution, like the war of independence against England, because of all these theories about what King George the Third was, or was not, doing to control English settlers.

Ellie: 16:46

Literally the American Revolution was spurred by conspiracy theories because number of the Founding Fathers believed that the British government wanted to enslave Americans. The irony is there were already tons of people enslaved in the US right? Like we had a major- yes, exactly. And so it was white settlers who were afraid that the British government was going to enslave them, many of whom themselves were slave owners already. And that was in part what led to the American Revolution and those conspiracy theories were passed around through pamphlets.

David: 17:22

And newspapers at the time. And in fact, even in the Federalist papers, when people are trying figure out the moral, economic, and political arguments for establishing distance between us and the Crown.

Ellie: 17:35

Wow. And nowadays we have tons of media that are relatively mainstream that are peddling conspiracy theories, whether it's about COVID or QAnon or the "deep state." And all this is fascinating to both you and me and David, but we're not experts in it. And we feel like we need to bring one on.

David: 17:58

#help.

Ellie: 18:00

Yes. So we have enlisted the #help of philosopher Brian Keeley, who is an expert on conspiracy theories. Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Dr. Brian Keeley teaches philosophy at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and has written numerous articles about conspiracy theories. Dr. Keeley is a specialist in philosophy of mind, philosophy of neuroscience, and philosophy of science. And he is especially well known for his 1999 article "Of Conspiracy Theories," which we talk about with him today. Welcome.

Brian: 18:40

Hey, it's great to be here.

David: 18:41

Hi, Brian. And welcome. It's great to have you here.

Ellie: 18:44

Brian is our first ever interviewee, and this is no coincidence, because Brian is in large part why I have a job, given his advocacy of me when he was my colleague at Pitzer.

Brian: 18:57

You did the hard work Ellie, all I did was, uh, just encourage you.

David: 19:01

We're very excited to talk with you about a subject about which you have written widely, which is conspiracy theories.

Ellie: 19:08

One of the world's top experts!

David: 19:10

I'm wondering, before we jump into the nuts and bolts of your argument, what motivated you as a philosopher to write about conspiracy theories?

Brian: 19:19

Actually it's connected back to Ellie's point about getting a job, because getting a job was one of the main reasons I wrote this paper. My PhD, at, uh, UCSD back in the nineties, was on philosophy and neuroscience. And back in the nineties, it was still kind of a new thing and I was having a problem getting people to pay attention to my job applications. So I was racking my brain for, uh, what can I write that has nothing to do with neuroscience, but is clearly philosophical and might get some interest. And I'd had this idea in graduate school, that the way that a lot of academics approach conspiracy theories seemed to me to be similar to the way that, uh, David Hume told us to think about miracles, that we could know that miracles were literally incredible, because the very thing that made something, a miracle, according to- to Hume, made it beyond belief. It's not a miracle that an NBA basketball star who is in the prime of health should suddenly just fall over and die one day because, you know, it's rare, but people have aneurysms, people have heart conditions that they didn't know about, and even though they might seem perfectly healthy, they might just die, out of the blue, so that isn't a miracle. But the idea of somebody who's been dead for three days, who should suddenly like get up and start playing basketball, that never happens, y'know, that seems to violate the laws of nature itself. And that's what makes it a genuine miracle, is it is this law-breaking sort of thing. And it's by its nature of being a law breaking sort of thing that makes it something that's just not believable, right? There's always going to be a better explanation to explain miracles, according to Hume, right? You know, either somebody is lying to you or somebody is wrong or made a mistake or they were faking it. All those other kinds of explanations are always going to be more probable than that somebody genuinely raised themselves from the dead.

David: 21:09

It seems like on your view, there's an air of the miraculous in conspiracy theories. What would be the miraculous dimension?

Brian: 21:16

This dimension is- it's more, it's more about the structure of the argument, you know, academics don't pay a lot of attention to miracles because as Hume showed us, they're just not the sort of thing you could ever credibly believe in. And the thing that I bumped on is that that's the way that a lot of people treated conspiracy theories, like, I- I don't need to hear your conspiracy theory, I can tell you already that it is incredible. It's just not believable. And so by labeling conspiracy theory, it's like labeling it as a miracle and saying we're never going to be in a position to rationally believe in it. There's always going to be a better or more rational explanation than the explanation being proffered by the conspiracy theorist. And so what I set out to do in this paper was, you know, okay, well, let's- is that right? And is it the case that conspiracy theories can be treated the same way that miracles are treated? And what I ended up doing in my paper is show that will actually that doesn't actually work. There are often good grounds for rejecting conspiracy theories, but they're always going to be empirical grounds, that you have to look and you have to investigate. And the reason is, is because there are a lot of conspiracies that not only happen, but we think are believable. We ought to believe that Watergate happened. We ought to believe that the mafia kills people secretly, and then makes it really hard for us to find the bodies later.

Ellie: 22:33

You basically show that conspiracy theories take good virtues of understanding and do bad things with them, right. And so in the article, you explain that a lot of scientific breakthroughs come about because people look at errant data or these sorts of weird things that don't fit into the system, and then say, maybe there's a bigger story here, right? That's how we discovered helio-centrism as opposed to geo-centrism, by realizing that the system that we had in place for astronomy wasn't able to explain certain things. And so a conspiracy theorist starts with these weird things that don't seem to make sense. But, your ultimate conclusion is that even if conspiracy theorist start from a good place, they end up in a really terrifying place because they end up undermining the grounds for believing in anything at all, because once you latch on to this conspiracy theory, your biggest mission is to make every piece of data fit, rather than being open to revision and seeing like, actually this doesn't fit the data.

Brian: 23:35

Yeah. I- It's not that conspiracy theories are things that we ought to believe in, its that disputing them, separating the wheat from the chaff, right? The good conspiracy theories, the ones that we ought to believe in, the Watergates, uh, the Iran-Contra affairs, separating those from the moon landing hoaxes and the variety of theories about what happened to JFK is not as easy as the Humean miracle argument would make it to be. Conspiracy theories often reveal themselves to be unbelievable, but it often takes a while before that becomes apparent and that we have actual good evidence for drawing that conclusion.

Ellie: 24:09

And in terms of drawing that conclusion, there's a difference to be made between warranted conspiracy theories and unwarranted conspiracy theories. And wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that, how do we distinguish a warranted conspiracy theory, like Iran-Contra from an unwarranted one, like Pizzagate?

Brian: 24:26

One of the things to keep in mind is that conspiracy theories are everywhere. Oh, no, I should say really, conspiracies are everywhere, right? So people like to think that we have a lot of conspiracy theories now in 2021 and, you know, there's actually not a lot of good evidence about the- the occurrence of conspiracy or ending- of whether we're in peak conspiracy theory now, as opposed to some other time.

Ellie: 24:48

Oh, cause we all love to say that.

Brian: 24:50

Oh yeah. Well, I mean, it's the form of presentism, where the present time is always the special time and it's always different from every time that came before, but interestingly, what little evidence there is, uh, there's a political scientist named Joe Uscinski, uh, who with another political scientist, Joe Parent, uh, they actually looked at letters to the New York Times going back to the late 1800s, and then coding them to see what kind of conspiracies come up and how often do they come up. And they actually argued that, you know, we're not in peak conspiracy theory, that peak conspiracy theory was actually the 1950s. It was during the Red Scare, the time of McCarthyism, when there was a communist behind every government program and so forth but even in United States history, I always tell people to just go back and reread the Declaration of Independence. Get beyond the first couple of paragraphs, when you get into this long list of all the stuff that King George is doing behind the scenes and how he's really screwing with us. And, there's a way in which the American political structure is built on conspiracy theories. But even then, conspiracies are a side effect of being a social animal. Conspiracy theories go all the way back to the first time two people decided they wanted to have sex and didn't want anybody else to know about it, right. And so they told a story that allowed them to get away with it. So part of the difficulty and why it's hard to distinguish warranted from unwarranted conspiracy theories is that we're awash in conspiracies and conspiracy theories. And if conspiracy theories of the unwarranted kind are like this group that we're not supposed to believe in, it's always against the background of all the conspiracies that are being carried out, and so trying to distinguish the actual conspiracies from the ones that we ought not believe in, a lot of it comes back to like, how conspiratorial do you take the world to be? I mean, uh, there's a philosopher, Charles Pigden who likes to argue that basically, we're all conspiracy theorists, because we all believe in conspiracies going on all over the place, and we ought to, so trying to figure out the ones that we shouldn't believe in might actually be the minority.

David: 26:50

And it seems that because we live in a world that is filled with cases of true conspiracies, that nobody benefits from that more than the unwarranted conspiracy theory defenders, right. Because one of the things that conspiracy theories can do is that they can always make an argument from induction where they say something like, "Look, I know you think that I am out of this world, that I am miraculous, that there are no grounds for believing in me, but look at all these conspiracies that people did not believe in that in retrospect happened to be true," and so it's almost as if conspiracy theories hide precisely in that in-between space of that ambiguity of not knowing. And they make a wager, where if you don't know, the safer thing might be to believe, because in the past, people who haven't done that have turned out to be wrong.

Brian: 27:43

Yeah. And I think what part of what you're pointing to is a lot of the believability or not of various conspiracy theories is a function of the world in which you find yourself, in particularly the epistemic world in which you find yourself. One of the kind of interesting responses that I got to my paper when I first published it was that somebody pointed out several people pointed out to me that's like, the argument of this paper works fine in the industrialized and Western world, particularly of North America. But, that's in a world where you actually have robust democratic systems. You have investigative journalism being a robust part of society, so that's going to be a particular framework, and also being a privileged white male, in that society as well. One of the people that talked to me after I wrote this paper was somebody who grew up in 1970s Argentina, and is like, you know, living in a world in which, the powers that be routinely took dissidents, put them on helicopters, flew them out over the Atlantic ocean, threw them out. No body. No note. You and this was a routine thing and against that backdrop, conspiracy theories about that government are going to be on a very different situation than say, you know, somebody who wants to make the same sort of claim or, you know, as we're hearing these days of, the US government people in the United States doing dastardly things. Well, depends on what the dastardly thing is, and who it is it's being done to, and then also, who's the audience.

Ellie: 29:04

Yeah, there's been so much made recently about the skepticism in the Black community to a COVID vaccine. And I think that very much speaks to what you're talking about, Brian, this idea that because Black Americans in the US have been routinely used as unwitting test subjects without consent, all kinds of biological warfare has been perpetrated against them, um, including the violent history of enslavement, you can see why there would be skepticism around something like the COVID vaccine. And yet at the same time, the COVID vaccine skepticism seems to be an example of an unwarranted conspiracy theory, right. And so it's challenging, I think, in, in this climate, especially.

David: 29:44

Yeah. And I mean, in connection to this, another example with the Black community in the US is the skepticism that so many white Americans expressed about Black people saying that crack cocaine was deliberately introduced into the Black community, in order to destabilize that community, and by now we actually have an official apology from the CIA saying, "Yes, we actually did do that. We introduced crack cocaine," but for a long time, any Black American who said that was dismissed as hysteric.

Brian: 30:17

Yeah. And that's a really, that's a really deep case. It was part of Iran-Contra, actually, it was the, uh, the drug selling by the CIA was connected to the Iran-Contra drug selling that was going on.

David: 30:29

Well and this raises a question that you tackle explicitly in your paper. One of the most important points that you make on my view is that as a class, conspiracy theories typically thrive under a condition of skepticism, when people lose faith in other people or faith in public institutions, for example medicine, or the CIA, or the media. And I want to hear you talk a little bit more about this. Why do people lose faith in social institutions? And how does that all translate into conspiratorial thinking?

Brian: 31:00

Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's actually something that I'm currently working on. I mean, I wrote this paper 20 years ago, the original first paper, and I keep coming back to it every now and then, grappling with new points about it.

Ellie: 31:12

Uh, yeah, because it's had a huge impact and everybody always wants to talk about it.

Brian: 31:17

Yeah, yeah, no, it's like, no nobody ever asked me about the neuroscience stuff anymore, but oh, what else?

David: 31:21

We can ask you about the neuroscience. We also like that.

Ellie: 31:24

Just not today.

Brian: 31:25

Uh, but yeah, one of the things that I'm interested in right now is this thing that's been given a name, the public trust argument, this argument about the relationship between conspiracy theories and our trust in public institutions. And to me, it's interesting because the way in which my paper was read was that you shouldn't give too much credence to conspiracy theories, because by doing that, you're going to erode the public trust, right? You're going to cause people to be cynical if you pay too much attention to, uh, uh, conspiracy theories and people who obviously bring up this argument are like, this is a bad argument. The fact that it undermines people's trust, maybe their trust ought to be undermined. And I found it very puzzling because I thought I was making the opposite argument, which is that in order to, to take conspiracy theory, seriously, you have to have a preexisting lack of trust in your public institutions, cause otherwise you just can't even get the argument going, right? Cause it's so many people have to be lying to you, for no apparent reason, in order to kind of get the conspiracy theory off the ground in the sense of being something to be taken seriously. And part of what I want to try to figure out in the paper I'm working on now is trying to kind of think through that connection between these two. And exactly as David was pointing to, one of the reasons I originally thought this was really interesting is that the idea that you have to presuppose skepticism, kind of ends up being self undermining. There's this piece from, uh, Robert Anton Wilson. He's kind of a counter-cultural thinker from the seventies and eighties. He said, you know, look, in order to believe that the Holocaust was faked, the amount of things that you would have to throw into doubt, you're also going to undermine the very things that make you believe that World War II even happened, right? I mean, why do you think World War II happened, right? It's like, well, on basis of what kind of evidence? Well, it turns out to be the same sort of evidence that is what people bring forward as the basis for something like believing in the Holocaust. The, the price of taking Holocaust denialism seriously, if you're going to be consistent, is a really extreme form of skepticism. You shouldn't pretty much believe much of anything. One of the critiques of certain kinds of conspiracy theories, and particularly over time is looking at the sources and going well, okay, you say, we shouldn't believe the newspaper when it says this we shouldn't believe the FBI when they tell us that, and we shouldn't believe the government when they tell us this other thing, but then you're more than willing to believe them when they say things that you agree with, right? It looks like a form sometimes of motivated belief, right? That, that you're presupposing what kind of an answer you want, and then you're judging the validity of the sources based on whether they match up with that, as opposed to the other way around. One of the ways of identifying unwarranted conspiracy theories is when they're cherry picking what it is that they want to believe. Like they'll believe what a particular news channel tells them, but they won't believe what another news channel tells them, even though they might both be investigative journalists doing their job. It's like, wait a minute, on what grounds are you picking and choosing between these things?

David: 34:15

It's like Republicans who are challenging the results of the top of the tickets, but not the bottom of the ticket. So if they lost a particular election on the same ticket, then it was rigged, but you-

Ellie: 34:28

Yeah.

David: 34:28

elections that they actually won on the same piece of paper.

Brian: 34:31

Yeah, we need to rerun the election, but not my election. No, no, no. I won.

Ellie: 34:34

I know, right.

Brian: 34:36

No rerun.

Ellie: 34:38

Well, it's interesting, Brian, that you say that there's not empirical evidence for the fact that we are currently in what has been called a golden age of conspiracy theories, but it does strike me that conspiracy theories have perhaps entered the mainstream in a new way because we have conspiracy theories peddled by mainstream news outlets now, such as Fox News, and so what do you think about that? Do you think that the internet is proliferating conspiracy theories to a new degree? Or do you think there is something different about the availability of conspiracy theories on things like the mainstream media and among public figures today, like a member of QAnon being elected to Congress? Or a believer in QAnon, not a member of QAnon.

David: 35:24

He's actually Q. It's Q in the flesh.

Ellie: 35:27

It's a she. But in any case, sorry Brian, go ahead.

Brian: 35:30

So I think, yeah, going back to that earlier point about whether there are more conspiracy theories now than other times, the evidence suggests that there aren't- there aren't more conspiracy theories now than before, but I think you are putting your finger on what might be different, which is that they are a phenomenon now in the way that they weren't perhaps before, the media is paying a lot more attention to them, perhaps. And you know, even just the label, right? Conspiracy theory, there's kind of some interesting work on the use of that term, right. You know, now that we label it as conspiracy theories. I mean, one of the things, when I was doing the work in the late 1990s, that was really big in the culture were urban legends. Hardly, anybody seems to talk about urban legend. In fact, a lot of the things that we now talk about as conspiracy theories used to be referred to as an urban legend, as well as other kinds of fanciful stories that people would get into about somebody who ate too many pop rocks and then drank a soda afterwards and their stomach exploded. And there were books about urban legends and this was like like in the eighties. Now it seems like that interest is now shifted. Like I said, you don't hear about urban legends so much. You don't hear so much about necessarily gossip. And it seems like that role in our culture has now been filled by this idea of conspiracy theories. So part of this fits into a cultural studies narrative about our worry about our own culture. Sometimes there are worries on the left. Sometimes there are worries on the right. Conspiracy theory seem to be the sort of worry on the left. That this is a danger that is recognized by people on the left, as opposed to worrying about pedophile sex rings, which is, it seems to be a worry largely on the right, but they all have in common this idea of worrying, that there's something that's undermining our culture and we need to do something about it. It's a problem. And part of the narrative that we have now is that conspiracy theories have become pathologized. They're a thing that needs to be cured. They're a problem that needs to be addressed.

Ellie: 37:08

Cause they're potentially eroding democracy.

David: 37:10

Um, and in your article, you don't pathologize conspiracy theories, which I do think is a very common move that you find, uh, and you even find a lot of ableist language in the pathologization of these theories, that people are crazy, that people are delusional and hysteric, et cetera. But you do talk about the psychological appeal of conspiracy theories in general. And I really like this part of your argument, which is that one of the things that unites a lot of very different conspiracy theories, maybe a defining feature, is that they all traffic in this notion of an ordered universe, where everything has to make sense according to a master narrative that we can understand. And so, you mentioned QAnon with this ring of pedophiles who are running Hollywood and the Democratic party. And the idea here is that we can explain a lot of things with a very neat, simple unified account. And you make the argument that effectively, this desire for unity and for simplicity is a vestige of 19th century thinking. That's a very 19th century way of thinking about the world, right, trying to reduce the world to a systematic explanation. And so what conspiracy theorists are not able to deal with, because of that need or that desire for unity, is the randomness and the absurdity of the world as it actually exists. The fact that, as you put it in the epigraph to your paper, shit happens and it doesn't always fit into a coherent narrative. I want to hear more about this.

Brian: 38:52

Yeah. They often think that there's a plan but the plan isn't always simple. If anything, often the plan is extremely complicated and complex and ties together all sorts of different things. But you're right. The point is that there is a plan. It might be a really, really complicated plan, but there is a plan. And yeah, you're basically asking, why do you think conspiracy theorists flee from the absurd? And my first reaction to that is because absurdity is scary. I mean, there's a reason why, you know, the existentialists in the early part of the 20th century, who came out with their ideas, it wasn't like everybody jumped on board and go, "Wow, this is a happy, lovely way of looking at the world. Let's all do this. This sounds great."

It always reminds me of that old joke: 39:30

the optimist is somebody who says, "This is the best of all possible worlds." And the pessimist is somebody who says "Yeah, know." It's like, one of the things that I think is central to thinking about conspiracy theorists, I mean, we, we think of them as these kinds of nihilistic, skeptical people who have this dark worldview, where there's a pedophile behind every tree and every politician is in on the take. But the upside of it is that the conspiracy theorist worldview is one full of hope, because if the world is absurd, there's nothing we can do about it. The conspiracy theorist, they're like hoping that if there was a conspiracy, that means we can reveal the conspiracy, we can stop it. We can make the world a better place, if only we stop bill Gates from doing what he's doing and there's a solution. It may be a wrong headed solution, but at least it's a solution.

Ellie: 40:22

Yeah. I was listening to a podcast on conspiracy theorists a while back and hearing about QAnon. I was like, this is actually really appealing, the idea that we can make sense ofI'm not actually a QAnon conspiracy theoristbut this idea that we can make sense of it, all of this errant data that Brian talks about. Cause I think one thing I find really interesting is your claim that the explanatory power of conspiracy theories is so compelling because conspiracy theories can not only explain the official account, but they can also explain all of the things that don't fit into the official account. And you also described that as being an illusion because most human explanations can't explain all of the data but there is something deeply appealing. And I'm also thinking about the fact that, when I think of a conspiracy theorist, I tend to think about some troll living in his parents' basement, probably. Not that it's bad to live in your parents' basement, but just like, I think that's like the image is kind of a South Park-ian, you know, dude living in the basement, but- yeah, it is bad to be a troll for sure, for sure. Parents' basement, fine. Troll, bad. And one of the interesting things in thinking about conspiracy theories is actually some of the people who are most taken in by QAnon are mothers. The charges of pedophilia involved in believing in QAnon trigger this desire to protect. And so #SaveTheChildren has been taken over by QAnon, and I think there's a very different figure of the conspiracy theorist, and one that suggests precisely what you're saying, which is this association of conspiracy theories strangely with hope.

Brian: 42:00

Yeah. Cause if absurdity is true, then we're out of control, and there is something about control that is satisfying, right. And I think this is part of the psychological appeal of conspiracy theories, and also, I think it gives an element of control to those who are entertaining it, right?

David: 42:18

But then it depends a lot on the conspiracy theory, right? Because if a conspiracy theory requires you to believe that there is such a vast network of secret agents working in tandem to rape and eat the children, then that very easily can turn hope into despair and resignation. And I remember reading a news story a few months ago about two women in the Bible Belt, who were diehard QAnon believers. Both of them were mothers, so they fit the stereotype-- or the anti-stereotype, really, that Ellie is talking about, the QAnon mother-- and both of them were interviewed and they told the journalist that if Trump lost the election, it would mean that the only hope for destroying the pedophile cabal would end and their plan was to take their children into the garage and end it all, because- because they were afraid that their kids would inevitably be raped and eaten by Hollywood types and liberal elites.

Ellie: 43:22

Whoa.

David: 43:23

And I mean- and I have a friend whose family members are diehard believers in QAnon. And they constantly post things on Facebook about how they know that there is this restaurant in LA that is, you know, the hottest new place to be, and-

Ellie: 43:40

Which one is it?

David: 43:41

They sell baby steak and they make shakes out of baby blood. And his- and his family members genuinely believe this. They believe that there is a place where a lot of left-leaning Democrats, with a lot of money, go to enjoy the latest cultural innovation, which is baby flesh.

Ellie: 44:00

Oh my God. Well, this is a very weird segue to our final question for Brian and also I really want to know what that restaurant is now, gonna Google. But I mean, it actually makes sense, given that you were just talking about your friend and their family members. So Brian, you've said that we are all disposed to believe in conspiracy theories, but obviously some of them are less warranted than others. How would you recommend talking to those who might believe in conspiracy theories? What are some effective ways of communicating with somebody when you don't share the same view of reality or don't agree on basic facts?

Brian: 44:37

That's the big question, and I don't know if I have a good answer to it. In the last couple of years, I've been getting more and more emails from the friends and relatives of people in the, kind of the same way that David was just saying that, you know, "My husband has gone down this rabbit hole. My daughter is, full on QAnon, what do I do?" And even though before, I was careful about not pathologizing conspiracy theories as a kind of a social phenomenon, I think sometimes there is a pathology, in certain cases, uh, you know, where people have difficulties with dealing with the world as it is and it's sort of like the same as question of what do you do with a relative who is in the middle of a psychotic break? There's not easy and straightforward answers to that. I mean, you can, be empathetic, you can talk them. That'd be one thing I can point people towards is-- do you guys do show notes?

I can give you a link: 45:27

uh, Stephen Lewandowsky and John Cook have written a Conspiracy Theory Handbook, which is like a four page PDF addressing exactly this kind of question, like what- what do you do with a friend or relative in the grips of a particular conspiracy theory that you worry is problematic for their relationships, for their life, and so forth. And a lot of what they talk about is the kind of standard things you always do with people you don't agree with. And even the way that you phrase your question in terms of how do you talk to people who don't share the same world as you in terms of their facts and so forth in our diverse society, we're often in that position, right? The coastal elites, uh, the way they see the world is very different than people in the deep South where I am right now. And there's all sorts of misconstruals of one another, this is part of that same situation. Like how do you talk across ideological boundaries? How does the born-again Christian talk to the atheist and vice versa. Part of the answer is just to talk, but also making sure you don't do things like belittle people. You're not going to convince anybody to your side by making fun of them. The Socratic method also is kind of nice. Ask questions. Really? You think that, what about this? And, well, if you think this well, what about that?" Socrates was pretty good at getting people to recognize the absurdities of their views, and as philosophers, maybe we have some skills there.

Ellie: 46:45

I sure hope so.

David: 46:47

Well, for my part, I'm just waiting for a miracle when it comes to these conspiracy theories.

Ellie: 46:53

Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us today. It has just been such a treat to have you speak with us and share your expertise

David: 47:00

Yeah, we appreciate it.

Brian: 47:02

Well, thank you. I'm- I am very much- I'm honored to be your first non-Ellie, non-David voice on the show.

Ellie: 47:10

David, I learned so much from Brian. That was such a fun discussion.

David: 47:14

Yeah, me too. Absolutely amazing.

Ellie: 47:17

One of the last things I want to talk about briefly with you is the way that QAnon relates to communities. It's community building online, which is perhaps especially appealing during the pandemic when people are not able to see as many in person, although who knows, like a lot of Cunanan supporters are probably flouting social-distancing flagrantly, and seeing people in person. But anyway, QAnon supporters often get together over Zoom and they'll have these big events aimed at taking down the cabal, the apotheosis of which we saw on January 6th, with the storming of the Capitol. What do you think about this? Why is it so appealing for people to have a community?

David: 47:52

Community. That's the motto of QAnon, right. They have this motto that says, "Where we go one, we go all." And so you will see a lot of QAnon supporters wearing that as an acronym on t-shirts, and the idea is that even if they're not together, physically, uh, wherever there is one of them there, the whole community is already manifested. It's almost as if the universal becomes flesh in every single particular.

Ellie: 48:21

Wow. And I can see how coming together around a unified theory of what's happening would be especially attractive to people when society is pretty fragmented.

David: 48:34

Yeah, but on my view, it's not really a community. It's an epistemically, politically, largely racially homogeneous group that doesn't accept difference. And so even to be allowed into this community, you have to buy into an entire worldview. And for me, that means that it's not really a community. It itself is the cabal that they constantly are complaining about. And we cannot lose sight of the fact that it is destroying families all over the world. So I, you know, I want to talk about the family trauma of QAnon because Mack Lamoureux, who is a Canadian journalist, published a piece in Vice Canada in which he talks about how QAnon is tearing families apart. And he tells the story of three people. There is, for example, Joan, whose husband divorced her because she refused to see the Great Awakening according to him. So he would follow her around the house, constantly forcing her to watch these YouTube videos about QAnon and the deep state, and when she didn't buy into it, he just turned around and divorced her after many years of marriage. So imagine living with somebody who then just dumps you because you don't believe that Hillary Clinton is drinking the blood of babies.

Ellie: 49:52

My God. I mean, it makes me wonder how happy their marriage was prior, but in any case.

David: 49:56

No, you know, I- but I think that would be a very easy solution to say, "Oh, well it was an unhappy marriage," but I actually think the opposite might be true, that perfectly normal, functional, loving relationships are being turned inside out by QAnon. And so, for example, he also talks about this other woman, Deb, whose mother fell into this rabbit hole of QAnon, and just couldn't talk about anything with her daughter other than QAnon and about how Democrats are raping babies, and they're enslaving babies, and they're eating babies, and now she cannot have a relationship with her mother at all. She reflects on the trauma of being unmothered by Q.

Ellie: 50:40

Yeah. And it's interesting because when we asked Brian about how we might find effective ways of talking to people who have been taken in by these conspiracy theories, I felt a little bit pessimistic about the options because it was mostly like talk to people and try and reason with them. But we know that that often doesn't work and it's often impossible to find a common ground. And so it makes me feel a little bit despairing about the possibilities for healing, whether it's among families or among the community at large.

David: 51:08

Yeah. I think there is a real wounding of people that happens, because if you think about it for a moment, the mother thinks her daughter is supporting baby rape. So she cannot get past that.

Ellie: 51:24

It's like if you think that obviously you would condemn your daughter and not want a relationship with her.

David: 51:27

Of course, and so, by its very form, QAnon takes out the possibility of any kind of dialogue that results in growth. And the third woman that Mack Lamoureux interviews, I think, highlights this point very well. Her name is Jane and she talks about how her husband became convinced that Democrats were going to impose martial law any second, and they were going to send out Democratic men to rape all women who are not Democrats.

Ellie: 51:55

Oh, my God. As if they're like, "What political party are you?"

David: 51:59

Yes. And so her husband suddenly starts walking around the home every day with a loaded shotgun and preventing her from leaving the house by telling her that she would be raped if she walked outside. And she says there was no dialogue. There couldn't possibly be dialogue. And she talks about hiding in the bathroom with 911 on speed dial wondering what she should do because this loving man that she knew had transformed-

Ellie: 52:32

Not going to call that-

David: 52:33

No-

Ellie: 52:33

loving, okay.

David: 52:34

this man who used to be.

Ellie: 52:35

Come on, that guy was never a good husband.

David: 52:37

Maybe, but again, I think that there is a real transformation that conspiracy theories can bring about that can be unexpected and it can be deeply, deeply traumatic.

Ellie: 52:47

Well, what a cheery note to end on with this episode. Given the 50% of Americans believe in a disproven conspiracy theory, I mean, statistically speaking, David, one of us probably does, right? Doing an extremely flat-footed statistical analysis, taking no context factors. Simply the fact that we are two Americans. Actually, I guess you're exempt. You're not technically American.

David: 53:11

Yeah, so I'm not an American citizen.

Ellie: 53:13

You're living that green card life.

David: 53:15

And that means that I am exempt from the conspiracy thinking that dominates in the US. No, that's not true. Uh,

Ellie: 53:21

That means I'm probably the one who-

David: 53:22

Yeah, you actually have- you believe in so many conspiracy theories.

Ellie: 53:25

What? The moon landing hoax is the only conspiracy theory I-

David: 53:28

Yeah, the other ones are truths, right? They're just facts and logic to own the libs.

Ellie: 53:34

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 53:41

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 53:49

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 54:03

Thanks so much for joining us today!