The Un-Conspiracist

Having a measure of good faith, vulnerability, and humility can actually make us harder to deceive.

Feb 21, 2023

We live in the Age of the Garden Path. Misinformation opportunists abound. I’m not sure if the American public has ever been more divided in its perceptions of “reality” when it comes to national and global events, except immediately prior to the civil war.

One key to bypassing the horrible amount of misinformation besetting us today is realizing that each tribe on each side of each division is still comprised of human beings who are rather alike. The better we understand (and make peace with) ourselves, the better we can understand (and can make peace with) the “other” because our differences are much smaller than many would have us think. Strategic empathy, which doesn’t require philosophical agreement—merely imagination with a dash of humanity—is the food of discernment.

If we can strategically picture ourselves in our fellow Americans’ shoes, whether we agree with their opinions or not, we can innoculate ourselves substantially against the influence of the oversimplifying forces that would have us either credit or dismiss them far too hastily. Greater nuance could enrich our world views.

Strategic empathy…is the food of discernment.

I’ve been saying for years that there are two kinds of suckers in this world:
Those who believe too much and those who believe too little. Balance is the key. Ironically, since the qualities of hypervigilance and cynicism about another tribe make people easier to manipulate, and are highly encouraged in this polarized age, we all need to keep ourselves somewhat open-minded and vulnerable in order to avoid being taken for a ride. Dehumanizing the “other” to the nth degree is an overpriced ticket into a tight-knit but everlastingly blind herd of fellows far too susceptible to flattery and other types of manipulation.

Take this sad story by Robert Draper of The Atlantic as an example:

“In March of 2020, I sat in a federal courtroom in Utah and watched a man stand before the judge and murmur through sobs, ‘This wasn’t me. This wasn’t me.’
“The defendant, a 55-year-old health-insurance salesman named Scott Brian Haven, wasn’t protesting his innocence. He openly acknowledged that over the two-year period before his arrest…he had placed 3,950 calls to the Washington offices of various Democratic members of Congress, spewing profanities and threatening violence against them.
“But as the prosecutor listed a sampling of Haven’s vile threats in the courtroom, the defendant…seemed unable to recognize those sentiments as his own. One of the objects of his harassment had been Jerrold Nadler, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. ‘I’m at his office,’ Haven had said in one call to Nadler’s office. ‘I’m right behind him now. I’m going to shoot him in the head. I’m going to do it now. Are you ready?’
“After his arrest, while languishing in a federal jail cell, Haven learned that the Democratic representative was a father and grandfather, just like he was. When he shared this revelation with the judge during his sentencing, he marveled, ‘There’s so much more to know about people than we hear about in the news.’”

Haven’s problem wasn’t a lack of compassionate moral values—the article reports that he volunteered to serve meals to the homeless. His real problem was a lack of empathy for the political “other,” whom he had somehow, in his mind, separated from the rest of the human race. Why did it need to be explained to him that Democrats were people too?

I’ve been saying for years that there are two kinds of suckers in this world:
Those who believe too much and those who believe too little.

Former national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster describes strategic narcissism (the opposite of strategic empathy) as something communicating “our tendency to view the world only in relation to us, and then to assume that what [we do], is decisive to achieving a favorable outcome.” He continues,

“And this is a problem, it’s a problem, not only because it’s self-referential, but also because it doesn’t consider the agency, the influence, the authorship over the future that the other has. And so, this narcissistic view often results in folly, based on cognitive traps that we fall into: We mirror image the other, we engage in wishful thinking and are subjected to confirmation bias.”

That kind of dehumanization and extreme political violence/disorder go hand-in-hand.

Roland Imhoff, Lea Dieterle, and Pia Lamberty wrote in Social Psychology and Personality Science (emphasis added by me):

“Two preregistered experiments…show that the hypothetical adoption of a worldview that sees the world as governed by secret plots [reduces] reported intentions to participate in normative, legal forms of political participation [and] increases reported intentions to employ nonnormative, illegal means of political articulation. These results provide first evidence for the notion that political extremism and violence might seem an almost logical conclusion when seeing the world as governed by conspiracies.”

Quiet, reflective time is invaluable. Our own emotions and cognitive patterns can be difficult to study in the heat of political discussions, which many people find instantly triggering.

Fortunately, there are also external red flags about conspiratorial thinking we can watch for in others that don’t depend as much on immediate cognitive self-awareness—not that we shouldn’t cultivate the latter.

Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol and Assoc. Prof. John Cook of George Mason University are authors of “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook,” which neatly identifies some key principles regarding conspiratorial thinking:

“Conspiracy theories…tend to persist for a long time even when there is no decisive evidence for them...
“Actual conspiracies…are rarely discovered through the methods of conspiracy theorists.”

Lewandowsky and Cook identify seven traits of conspiratorial thinking, which can be remembered using the acronym CONSPIR:

C: Contradictory - “Conspiracy theorists can simultaneously believe in ideas that are mutually contradictory…because [their] commitment to disbelieving
the ‘official’ account is so absolute, it doesn’t matter if their belief system is incoherent.”
O: Overriding suspicion - “Conspiratorial thinking involves a nihilistic degree of skepticism towards the official account. This extreme degree of suspicion prevents belief in anything that doesn’t fit into the conspiracy theory.”
N: Nefarious intent - “The motivations behind any presumed conspiracy are invariably assumed to be nefarious. Conspiracy theories never propose that the presumed conspirators have benign motivations.”
S: Something must be wrong - “Although conspiracy theorists may occasionally abandon specific ideas when they become untenable, those revisions don’t change their overall conclusion that ‘something must be wrong’ and the official account is based on deception.”
P: Persecuted victim - “Conspiracy theorists perceive and present themselves as the victim of organized persecution. At the same time, they see themselves as brave antagonists taking on the villainous conspirators.”
I: Immune to evidence - “Conspiracy theories are inherently self-sealing—evidence that counters a theory is re-interpreted as originating from the conspiracy. This reflects the belief that the stronger the evidence against a conspiracy…the more the conspirators must want people to believe their version of events…”
R: Re-interpreting randomness - “The overriding suspicion found in conspiratorial thinking frequently results in the belief that nothing occurs by accident. Small random events…are re-interpreted as being caused by the conspiracy…and are woven into a broader, interconnected pattern.”

I’m no psychology expert, but if I may modestly propose an “E” to cap onto the end of Lewandowsky and Cook’s acronym, it would be (for reasons discussed above), “Eschewing empathy.” In my experience, conspiracy theorists are far more adept at dehumanizing the “other” than applying Occam’s razor, the reasoning principle that says the simplest explanation for an event is usually the best one.

Lewandowsky and Cook’s handbook also discusses the harm that conspiracy theories can cause and methods for debunking and even “pre-bunking” conspiracy theories. There’s even a section on how to talk to a conspiracy theorist, reducing the odds of offending them.

A couple of other important red flags about false conspiracy theories can include:

The timing and manner in which the explanations are “revealed”: With conspiratorial thinking, if some significant event happens—particularly during a period of group crisis—convenient “explanations” for the event might follow in its wake. Real conspiracies, on the other hand, are discovered slowly, one small verifiable piece at a time, until a larger picture of what the big event was begins to form.
Oversimplification of motives: Lewandowsky and Cook touch upon the idea of nefarious intent, where every participant is a nefarious, robotic cardboard cutout motivated by the same predictable factor(s). Only in comic books are human beings so simplistic. With real conspiracies, different participants can have entirely different motives for acting as they do, plus different levels of awareness that what they’re doing might be wrong.

Why are some people so attracted to conspiracy theories? And are they addictive?

Imhoff and Lamberty wrote the following in an essay, “Conspiracies as psycho-political reactions to perceived power”:

“The notion that powerlessness increases conspiracy beliefs is in line with the compensatory hypothesis: It has been described that power is an important source of a person’s feeling of being in control and lacking control is one important predictor of why people believe in conspiracy theories...
“On the other hand, belief in conspiracy theories could also reinforce feelings of powerlessness (reinforcement hypothesis).”

So, yes, there is a vicious cycle. Feelings of powerlessness increase attraction to conspiratorial thinking, which increases feelings of powerlessness, which increase attraction to conspiratorial thinking… and so on.

It would follow, then, that learning about the boring aspects of the institutions we rely on, and how they work to our benefit—i.e., how they empower us—might go a long way toward neutralizing ill will. (Civics education, anyone?) It’s also good to innoculate against false scandals—someone labeling normal behavior as something nefarious or unexpected.

Political trauma, which—like all trauma—the body physically stores and which stings of powerlessness, plays a huge role today. In a Salon article last December, Rich Logis describes a “Political Traumatization Mythologies Meter” which he has developed for Republicans—FYI, he’s mentioned developing a similar scale for Democrats. In the GOP article, he observes:

“No Republican can win 270 electoral votes without moderate (levels 3-6), to heavy (7 and above) traumatizing; and the number of states a Republican running for statewide office can win is likely shrinking with each passing election cycle — hence the GOP’s worsening hostility to democracy. ”

As a former Republican himself, Logis later remarks:

“Though I will not excuse ignorance, politically traumatized Republicans have themselves been failed by the liars, grifters, carnival barkers, faux-constitutionalists and insurrectionary apologists they’ve supported — all because they were convinced that any Republican is always preferable to any Democrat…I once led such a life, enraptured by make-believe bogeymen, and can attest to its dehumanizing misery…
“I do not believe anyone who voted for Trump should be judged for doing so; and in a free society I do not believe voters need to defend their votes. But any Trump supporter who has not yet exited via one of the myriad available off-ramps will never do so; my guess is that 90 percent of those who voted for him in 2020 would do so again tomorrow. Such voters are stuck at the bargaining stage, quite a soulful distance away from accepting that ‘make America great again’ is a reverie in permanent abeyance of reality. Slowly and surely, more and more Republican voters will graduate through the five stages of grief.”

Let us hope that graduation happens quickly.

Let us also hope that meanwhile, a new principled conservative party is able to emerge as a credible counterweight to the left.

One last element of protection we can grant ourselves is exercising intellectual humility or the healthy recognition that we can be wrong at times. Evolving opinions can be a sign of a healthy, learning mind.

In his debut column for The New York Times, conservative commentator David A. French wrote,

How do we fight past our partisanship to become truly curious about the truth? For me, the answer started with the first principle of my conservatism: Human beings possess incalculable worth. If that is true, and my neighbors and fellow citizens are crying out about injustice, I should hear their voices and carefully consider their claims.
My initial inability to see the truth is related to the second principle, that human beings are deeply flawed…
The lesson I’ve taken has been clear: Any time my tribe or my allies are under fire, before I yield to the temptation of a reflexive defense, I should apply my principles and carefully consider the most uncomfortable of thoughts: My opponents might be right, my allies might be wrong and justice may require that I change my mind. And it may, in all likelihood, require that I do this again and again.

At the risk of sounding trite by quoting Lincoln’s first inaugural address, I’d like to point out the applicability of his words to our day, not only as a call for peace and unity, but also as a call for greater savvy:

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Subscribe. Stay tuned. Spread the word.

Together, we are #FearlessMods.

Get involved

The Fearless Moderate

Discussion about this post