An Ancient Mind Plague

In addition to Cormac McCarthy, Milan Kundera died this summer after a remarkable run of 94 years. I first read The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the early 90s and loved the strange detachment of the narrator and small moments like the critique of muzak in restaurant settings (I am now much more critical of restaurants that poorly manage sound reflections; how am I to enjoy my company in a cacophony?) But I had little use for his central philosophical pretense concerning eternal return or the use of metaphors as placeholders for people, though I have known people who strain to operate that way. Structuring a narrative around flimsy Continental ideas from Nietzsche, in turn influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Pythagoras, was too conspicuously self-absorbed with an intellectual airiness. It’s easy to achieve pretension but quite another thing to convey lofty thoughts effortlessly. I might have accepted a narrator musing on the topic among many others, playing with it while laughing at his own ridiculousness, and concluding that such concepts were mythological at best.

But there is a certain circularity in that otherwise educated people continue to latch onto narratives and metaphors that are appealing and unexpectedly strange, from little dioramas about the motives of people in our lives to grand conspiracies and mythologies filled with resurrections, demons, and eschatologies. The conspiracy narratives are a special contemporary problem accelerated by modern communications technologies, but there is nothing particularly new about them in thrust, focus, or pervasiveness.

Aluminum cans cause Alzheimer’s disease? Procter and Gamble’s logo was satanic? When I was in the Peace Corps in Fiji, the Hindu kids thought that certain toothpastes from Australia were adulterated with cow fat or something to undermine Hinduism. And a large number of Fijian Indians were convinced that America was behind the coups in Fiji in the 1980s because our deep water ports in the Philippines would be lost with the end of the Subic Bay lease (itself partially a product of yellow journalism). America needed another port and if we could control Fiji, problem solved.

We can imagine the motives for some of these conspiracies, like steel interests hoping to slow the shift to aluminum in packaging, but there are others that seem more grass roots or spun out of pure imagination.

What do we do when confronted with a complex and diverse collection of information? We try to integrate it into a coherent narrative that reflects our biases about the material itself. If I have doubt about vaccines and think science is corrupted by funding, I choose narrative components that support this bias. Narrative appeal is the strongest correlate for belief. Mythology and religion are both derived from this same storytelling integration effort but also reinforced by tradition.

Studies bear this out. For instance, absurd and extreme elements in conspiracy narratives do not appear to reduce the plausibility of narrative structures in at least one study. Indeed, the authors suggest:

On basis of the findings of our empirical study, we have good reason to believe that the presence of rather extreme statements shifts peoples’ cognitive bounds when they construct their opinion about complex political events: they will tend to construct a more radical view when such information is offered.

Still, if we agree that there are dangerous societal consequences to the mobility of conspiracies that are not grounded in reality like vaccine opposition, we need a toolkit for opposing their impact. There are some good studies on this that show that fact checking is useful, but that other strategies can add value. “Inoculation” is one approach that involves providing clues to subjects about how disinformation works, thus reducing their susceptibility to future conspiracies. Note that these clues are not debunked per se in inoculation, but the goal is that the contradictory and self-defeating nature of the clues is sufficient for building a resistance to other conspiracies.

A stronger form of this is “disenchantment” where the subject is taught how conspiracy theories work, what the motives typically are, and how they are used to groom people in suspicions about out-groups and threats to in-group purity. One always has to ask at moments like this whether this strongly applies to organized religion. Of course, though the pervasiveness and often presumed pragmatic value of religion means that often it gets excluded from adjacent and related concepts like magical thinking. The more recent alignment of conspiracies like QAnon with evangelicalism might motivate a change towards a more proactive disenchantment over time, especially if we can’t sufficiently inoculate against this most modern plague, or at least tame it back to post-modern novels and their narrative conceits.