Conspiracy theories seem to be everywhere these days. Or maybe they have always been there, and I just haven't noticed. Or maybe things like social media have helped them spread a lot more. Either way, it just seems like they are all over the place right now. I keep coming back to a question about why they are so prevalent in the first place.
One thing I've been considering is just how susceptible we are to narrative. We're all story tellers to some extent, and we pretty much universally like a good story. That might be a book, a good movie, or video game. Whatever the medium, we appreciate a good story, and we find ourselves able to inhabit the world of that story for the amount of time that we are engaging with it.
According to Tolkien, this is actually the point of works of fantasy. He writes in "On Fairy-Stories":
[T]he story maker... makes a secondary world which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.
I think Tolkien is right about fantasy stories, but I think this idea applies broadly to all kinds of stories. While we are reading them, we are part of them. Where this connects to conspiracy is that the conspiracy theorist has so blurred the line between what is real and what is part of a secondary (or imagined) world that it becomes impossible to step out of the secondary world. In other words, they live in the narrative that they have created.
Lest that all sound like postmodern literary theorist crap, here's the argument: a conspiracy theory has all the parts of a regular narrative. It has a plot structure. It has protagonists and antagonists. It even has a potential resolution that is coming/will come in the future.
Let's take something like the anti-vax folks as an example. The antagonists are big pharma and the government. Nobody really trusts large corporations or the government around here, so it's an antagonist that makes sense. The protagonists are the regular, humble men and women of America. Or "We, the people" in other terms.
The plot of the story goes something like this: the antagonists are trying to force something harmful on the protagonists. The reason is either for financial gain or for political control of the people. The resolution will come when everyone stops using harmful vaccines and starts to "wake up" to what the antagonist is doing to them. In other words, vaccines are promoted not because they are effective in combating disease (when was the last time you met someone who had polio?), but because of an organized cabal of powerful people who are trying to force their will on others. Meanwhile, those who oppose the cabal are noble heroes fighting for the freedom of other despite the constant mockery of those who have already been duped by the cabal.
That's a story I would read. Wouldn't you? But that's just it: it's a good story and nothing else. The real world is never quite that tidy. That being said, we're affected by good stories. We like them, and we especially enjoy inhabiting the secondary worlds they create for us. In other words, the conspiracy theories exist because of the imaginative capacities of the human mind. They take what is essentially a good and productive thing and turn it on it's head.
So what is the answer here? What can we do to not be so susceptible to creative stories? Unlike a lot of people who think and talk about this stuff, I actually don't think the answer is increased scientific literacy. Don't get me wrong, I think scientific literacy can help, but I don't think it's the answer. Perhaps this is coincidence, but a lot of this conspiracy thinking stuff has come about at a time where STEM education is increasingly becoming the education that people get.
I think that a real response to conspiracy thinking could actually come from a better understanding of literature. Or from literacy in the traditional sense of reading well and reading widely. One of the things that a language arts education actually does for you is it teaches you to find good stories and follow plot lines and character development. Maybe if we all spent a lot more time reading literature, we'd be more equipped to notice when we are inhabiting the secondary world of a piece of fiction, and when we are engaging with reality.
Just a thought.
This model has frustratingly little lore. You can't just call something "The Soul Reaper" and not give it some kind of an epic...
