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.

So how do you talk to someone in your life who’s fallen deep down a shadowy rabbit hole? As Lydia Smith explains in Forge, the most effective way to lead a conspiracist back to reality is to let empathy light the way. “Recognize the pain and confusion people are experiencing,” she writes. Show them respect. Show them patience. Show them evidence, and try to guide them toward conclusions without forcing those conclusions on them outright. Press them to question their sources.

Or try one of Dickey’s strategies: “I find myself saying to believers, ‘I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, but if you were right, I would expect the following to happen,’ referring to any number of established conspiracies whose unmasking all followed a similar pattern,” he writes. “My goal is usually to press the believer’s own recognition of internal contradictions so that the belief itself gets harder to sustain.” To leave a conspiracy theory behind, a person has to do it on their own terms.