Conspiracy theories are flourishing because governments engaged in COVID disinformation
Consider four unusual takes on how the world supposedly works. One, vaccines do more harm than good and are promoted because health agencies are in the pocket of Big Pharma. Two, the war in Ukraine was started by NATO. Three, the world is being directed by a cabal of powerful figures who meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Four, cash is being phased out so that governments can control us through digital currencies.
These claims might seem unrelated, but anyone who believes at least two of them is likely to believe all four. You rarely come across people who nurse only one conspiracy theory. Paranoia is more a state of mind than a product of analysis and deduction.
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All four theories are gaining adherents, with websites, radio stations, and newspapers promoting them, often as a bundle. Two friends of mine, both clever and impressive public figures (one a columnist and one a politician) have succumbed, and they are not unusual. I keep hearing these hypotheses from respectable professionals stated as fact. Are conspiracy theories going mainstream?
If so, it would not be the first time. Nearly 60 years have passed since Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He argued that conspiracy theories in politics were nothing new and traced the history of various moral panics involving Freemasons, Catholics, and communists.
Hofstadter noted that conspiracymongers based their illusions on what looked like pedantic accumulations of fact. Then, in a passage that might have been aimed at today’s Stolen Election fantasists, he wrote of what he then saw as a contemporary trend:
“The modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals.”
This was 1964, when the McCarthyite madness had petered out and the new conspiracy theories had to do with the Kennedy assassination. From which I can only deduce that a measure of political paranoia is always present.
Nonetheless, there are times when it rushes in from the fringes. Anti-Masons formed a political party. Anti-Catholics and anti-communists got policies changed and officials fired. We are living through such a surge today, with mainstream politicians, whether from electoral calculation or genuine conviction, repeating wild claims about the Great Reset and vaccine deaths.
Are we seeing the effects of social media and news silos? To some extent. But I think a bigger factor is that, during the pandemic, governments really did engage in misinformation, first flip-flopping over the efficacy of face masks and then, much more seriously, claiming that vaccines were essential, not simply as a way of keeping people out of hospital, but as a way to prevent transmission.
This second claim was false — yet the entire architecture of travel restrictions, passports, and certificates rested upon it. I fear that governments around the democratic world damaged their own credibility, and so pushed a chunk of their populations into disbelieving everything they said, whether about Ukraine or about e-money.
Conspiracy theories are rarely spun out of thin air. Rather, they weave flimsy falsehoods around nuggets of fact. Freemasons really did meet in secret. There genuinely were communist spies in the State Department. Upon these undisputed facts, Paranoid Stylists managed to construct an entire worldview in which shadowy elites were plotting against ordinary people.
In much the same way, today’s conspiracy theorists begin by asking, quite properly, why governments forced young people to be inoculated against a disease that posed no danger to them and end up speculating that the WEF boss, Klaus Schwab, who unfortunately does look very like a Bond villain, is engaged in some plot to inject us all with microchips.
I am not sure that there are any easy answers. You can try to jolt individual sufferers out of some fallacies — I am forever urging anti-Ukrainians to apply the same skepticism to Kremlin propaganda that they do to the West’s arguments — but, in the end, a paranoid frame of mind is not susceptible to logic.
The one thing we can do is to stop our governments and public bodies engaging in what they see as noble lies. When, for example, people see a thousand public health professionals arguing that public demonstrations are dangerous unless they were for Black Lives Matter, in which case they were fine, they stop believing the authorities. It will take a long time to undo the damage.
This article has been archived for your research. The original version from Washington Examiner can be found here.
