Conspiracy theories can be persuasive, even when you know they’re impossible

hen I was recovering from the eating disorder that had plagued me for almost two decades, I had to undergo intensive therapy. It was a huge amount of work, untangling and unpicking the dysfunctional beliefs I had developed around food, my body, my weight. I had internalised harmful cultural messaging that needed to be held up to the light for healing, as well as processing childhood experiences that had left their own scars.

Often, when I was talking about something that had happened when I was a teenager, I would try to contextualise it. I would excuse their behaviour by saying if that person was here with us, they might remember it very differently than I did. It didn’t seem fair to criticise them when they weren’t able to defend themselves.

My therapist would hold a hand up and say something like, ‘that’s all well and good but right now, what matters is your truth’.

Now, I had an excellent therapist, and I was aware that she didn’t mean my truth was the only truth.

In the therapy room, our work was not to forensically piece together my past like two detectives solving a mystery; rather, it was to examine what ‘my truth’ meant to me, how it had shaped the person I had become in good and bad ways, and what I needed to do in order to recover.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people today who don’t seem to understand this.

They don’t understand that their truth cannot supersede reality.

You only have to look at the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, for proof of this, as he is still shouting about how the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from him. This isn’t the first time Trump has been guilty of manipulating the truth to suit his own narrative.

The Washington Post calculated that Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office, an average of 5.9 a day. In 2021, they updated this, saying that over four years, he had made 30,573 false or misleading claims. (The irony of Trump then creating Truth Social, a social media site where posts are called ‘Truths’, beggars belief.) And it’s not just him. In recent years it feels as if a parallel reality has emerged, this other sphere where the moon landings were faked, and John F Kennedy Jr is still alive and a QAnon supporter. Where credence is given to the idea that the world is flat, and 9/11 was an ‘inside job’.

Whether it’s about something as relatively innocuous as ‘Larry Stylinson’, the theory that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson of One Direction fame are in love (their subsequent girlfriends and, eh, babies are dismissed as fake), the Pizzagate conspiracy which holds that Hillary Clinton is operating a paedophilia ring out of a pizza parlour in Washington, or the idea that the Covid19 pandemic was all just a ploy by Bill Gates to microchip us, proponents have amassed a lot of ‘evidence’ to support their theories and refuse to listen to any arguments to the contrary. As someone who has fallen down a Larry Stylinson hole on YouTube, let me tell you that these theories can be persuasive, even when you know they’re highly improbable, if not impossible.

It’s easy to dismiss such people as fanatics, unhinged conspiracy theorists who need to take off the tinfoil hats and move out of their mothers’ basements. But we have all certain truths about our own lives – stories we tell, memories we cling to – that form the basis of our identity.

If someone was to tell us that was incorrect, that the way in which we perceive ourselves was based on a lie, it could completely destabilise our sense of self. That would feel so psychologically dangerous, many of us would do anything to maintain that our truth is the only truth.

This is at the heart of my new book, Idol. Samantha Miller is a beautiful, powerful wellness guru who writes an essay about one of the most important moments of her life, a sexual awakening she experienced as a teenager with her former best friend, Lisa. But when the essay goes viral, Lisa gets back in touch to say that’s not how she remembers that night. Lisa’s memory is much, much darker.

It was inspired by the countless women who told me about the worst night of their lives, and how many of them believed that the other person likely saw what happened as consensual.

Isn’t it bizarre, how two people can be in a room together and when they leave, only one of them remembers it as a trauma?

In that case, who gets to tell the story? Who do we choose to believe? And what does it do to a person when someone they loved rejects their ‘truth’ as a lie?

I don’t have the answers to this. I’m not sure there are any easy answers to such complicated questions. But if we are living in a post-truth world, maybe it’s time we try and figure it out.

Idol by Louise O’Neill is published by Transworld and available now

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