Despite Biden’s inauguration and the vaccine rollout, conspiracy theories about the US Election and COVID-19 will be with us for a while
The Trump presidency is now over, and many are eagerly awaiting their chance to get one of several COVID vaccines now being administered in some parts of the world. Yet I find myself unconvinced that the world will just move on, or that we should go “back to normal”. One element that certainly will not disappear now that Trump has vacated the White House or after the pandemic subsides will be the extensive misinformation and disinformation that have accompanied both pandemic and election.
Since my recent book on disinformation came out, one chapter on a specific type of misinformation has prompted more discussion and questions than any other: that on conspiracy theories. Many of the conversations I have had about them have been enlivening, but beneath the evident fascination we seem to have with conspiracism, there is also something of a tendency to make any observation of conspiracy theories into a point-and-laugh exercise. This is a luxury we cannot afford.
When we are not laughing at them, we tend to regard conspiracy theories as pathological and extreme, and focus on the harms that they help to enable: hate crimes and the election of politicians with extreme views. To acknowledge the harms they produce is by no means wrong. Historically, conspiracy theories have been one of the many indicators of fascist ideology, as well as frequently being one of the preconditions for genocide and ethnic violence, from the Balkans to East Africa to Sri Lanka.
But this focus is only half the picture. While facts and fact-checking are important to diminish the spread of these effects, the problem is not just one of content, but of trust. In our current historical moment, those who respond to misinformation and disinformation by simply reciting “the facts” have not properly understood the informational problems we currently face.
Conspiracy theories are not just a cause of harm and further misinformation; they are also the effect of a number of important societal factors. To start with, we could blame right-wing media such as Fox or Breitbart (or their historical equivalents) for stoking some of them. Likewise, a share of blame can be apportioned to internet giants such as Facebook for amplifying them in order to garner as much of our attention as possible. But ultimately even these entities are cynically exploiting a political and economic reality that is not of their making. Buried beneath the foundations of these networks of transmission and intensification, we need to talk about what kinds of conditions make the conspiracist way of thinking seem appealing to begin with.
There is an argument to be made, and has been made by numerous thinkers, that Euro-Atlantic democracy since the Cold War has come to be hollowed-out and confected; that many of the societies labelled “democracy” are not particularly democratic at all. To varying degrees, they are oriented around a firm alliance of increasingly unaccountable government and corporate power and are unfair, corrupt, deceitful and riven with inconsistencies. However much we may be celebrating Joe Biden and multinational pharmaceutical conglomerates at the moment, both are very much part of this world.
Indeed, any system that fails to provide the economic security and democratic frameworks that people need, whilst masquerading as cool, socially progressive, and democratic; any economy that pressures people to work hard in order to be successful whilst allowing upward mobility to evaporate; any system of representation in which self-interested millionaires are heavily over-represented, even amongst the representatives themselves, is open to the charge that it invites the very abundance of suspicion that we experience as a proliferation of conspiracy theories. As long as we fail to address this, the political origins of conspiracism will not go away.
This inaction not only deepens that suspicion. It unfortunately makes us vulnerable to even more deceit. Chiefly, it leaves the door wide open for divisive figures of the same type as Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage, of whom there will be many more, but also arch-conspiracists like Alex Jones and David Icke (most of whom are those same self-interested millionaires) to masquerade as “one of the people” and promise us “the real story”. This of course is an even more intensified form of deceit, sugared with the sense that those believing it have finally got “the truth”. There is nothing more alluring than a simplistic lie that feels like the truth you’ve been deprived of, and that is exactly what conspiracy theories are.
Does attempting to understand the pervasiveness and even the appeal of conspiracy theories and other misinformation and disinformation mean we should all become conspiracy theorists? No. Does it justify the ridiculous and hateful things conspiracy theorists sometimes believe? Of course not. But it does mean that we should see misinformation and disinformation, and particularly the conspiracist they often take, as the inevitable political by-products of the very societies we have normalised. Until we are ready to call for radically more equitable and accountable forms of political and economic power, we should not be surprised that people continue to be suspicious, even in ways that are totally misinformed, distorted and hateful.
