An Underrated Tool for Fighting Conspiracy Theories
To most of us, the spread of conspiracy theories only makes a dark, chaotic world feel that much more so. Living through a pandemic is already a mind-bendingly bizarre and terrible experience; living through a pandemic knowing that some people believe it was planned by Bill Gates, or that the virus spreads through cell towers, or that Democrats secretly and purposely infected Donald Trump with Covid, is bizarre and terrible on a whole new level.
But as Colin Dickey writes in Gen, to the people who believe in them, conspiracies have the opposite effect. They’re a way of coping with that same darkness and chaos:
There’s something perversely soothing about a conspiracy theory, even one utterly malignant and diabolical, because it presupposes a world without chaos or randomness. Conspiracists believe in these theories because they think they’re true, in part, but also because they find them, on some level, reassuring. And this is perhaps more essential to understand than the actual mechanisms of the conspiracy theory itself because once an idea is providing important moral pleasure, it rarely matters how ludicrous the suppositions are.
