As someone who has always been fascinated by conspiracism, this is certainly an interesting time to be living in.
Recently I’ve listened to a couple of podcasts on the topic; The Coming Storm, and Death by Conspiracy?. The former deals with the growth of the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory which led to the attack on the Capitol in January last year, and the latter looks at covid denier groups in the UK.
I’d recommend both podcasts, by the way. Both address conspiracism from very different angles. The Coming Storm covers a worldwide mega-conspiracy which led to a shooting in a pizza restaurant and managed to breach the seat of power in the USA, whereas Death by Conspiracy? is a far more parochial story about small town radicalisation driven by online theories about covid. Both have something valuable to say about the nature of conspiracism.
As the Russian tanks have rolled into Ukraine, it has been interesting to watch people who took a conspiratorial line on coronavirus shift into a sort of holding pattern on the invasion. Neil Oliver, who left a pro-unionist advisory board after leaning into covid conspiracism, told GB News that he knows nothing about the conflict and doesn’t understand it, but then for some reason continued talking anyway, to say that he knew the West should share the blame.
This is interesting to me as it is conspiracism without an actual conspiracy. How can Oliver know the West should share the blame if he doesn’t know what’s going on? It highlights that conspiracism is not a fixed set of beliefs but instead a feeling, a gut response, not connected to the facts as we know them. There is no alternative to “The Narrative”, but it must be mistrusted anyway.
QAnon has proved the same point. It doesn’t really matter that many of Q’s predictions have not come to pass - wasn’t Hillary Clinton supposed to be arrested years ago - the conspiracy continues on unabated.
And it was listening to Death by Conspiracy? that a penny dropped.
It is a fairly standard observation that in more secular societies, people tend to find other belief systems, to create their own pseudo-religions. It is clearly a human need to have something to believe in; a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Corbynism functioned like this a lot of the time. Social justice activism can certainly operate in this way. And it struck me that conspiracism is filling the same gap in people’s lives.
In an episode of Death by Conspiracy?, the presenter travels to one of the anti-lockdown rallies in London, and we can hear Charlie Parker, the organiser of the “Shropshire Corona Resilience Network”, befriending various other attendees, being invited to a protest in Milton Keynes, having a great day, being in his element.
This was not just a protest; it was a community get-together. The demonstration served to make links amongst various conspiracy groups around the country, to strengthen the movement. It was a protest, but also it was a pilgrimage. For sure, conspiracism gives people an ego boost; they are the clever few who can see through the mainstream lies. But it also gives them a congregation, and a purpose.
Hannah Arendt argued that loneliness and alienation lead to political extremism. Maybe after two years in which we’ve all been intermittently confined to our homes, cut off from our friends and neighbours, it’s hardly surprising that this social dislocation has come hand in hand with a growth in conspiracism.
But then, if Arendt is correct, and considering how QAnon carries on regardless of its predictions regularly proving incorrect, it suggests that attempts to combat fake news with things like “fact check” websites aren’t really going to help.
They might provide ammunition in debates, but it seems likely that such arguments will fall on deaf ears, because conspiracists have bound up their identities with their causes. As we see with QAnon, poking a hole in a conspiracy isn’t going to shake someone’s belief in it. The conspiracy will simply move on, change shape, evolve.
Maybe the solution is simpler. If society is becoming more atomised, if more people are lonely, one way to combat extremism might be to think about how to reverse that trend. To foster a sense of local community, so that people may not be so driven to seek out communities of their own in strange social media backwaters. And, as some of us have been saying for a while, the inclination to sort friendship groups by political ideology is deeply unhelpful to wider society.
Maybe the answer to fighting political extremism is to just get everyone down the pub.