The tribal appeal of conspiracy theories
Dear Reader (Including the creepy dude in the raincoat who keeps asking people to inspect his suspicious package),
Last year I went through an IRS audit. I got through it okay. But it was exactly as much fun as you’d expect. Then last week, I came home from a grueling trek on the road to discover I was being audited again, this time for two different years’ tax returns — one of them for the year I had just been audited for! In case the IRS is reading this, let me say I am overjoyed to once again work with the fine and upstanding patriots of the Internal Revenue Service to ensure that I am paying my fair share.
It’s also a wonderful opportunity. At the risk of being charged with over-sharing with you, my dear readers, I am also in need of a colonoscopy. I am going to try to schedule it around the same time so that I can test the accuracy of a commonly used metaphor regarding these fiscal inspections.
Anyway, I bring this up because I keep getting asked, usually half-jokingly, “Do you think it’s because you criticized Trump?” My short answer: “No.”
Causation and correlation
It’s a very human reaction. Superstition and reason are often pitted against one another as opposite forces, but they are both born from an evolutionary adaptation that allows us to connect dots. In our natural environment, our understanding of cause and effect often boiled down to the fallacy of correlation equaling causation. Countless dietary and hygiene rules were based on the fact that certain benefits accrued to those who followed them. Kosherism is more than a guide to healthy eating — but one can see how staying Kosher thousands of years before pasteurization, refrigeration, etc. might correlate highly with better outcomes.
But one of the key points at which superstition and reason part company is the fact that superstition is non-falsifiable. If the king sacrifices an ox to Baal in the hope he will end the draught, and it rains, Baal will get the credit for the rain. If it doesn’t rain, Baal doesn’t get the blame. Instead, it must be that Baal wanted two oxen — or maybe a virgin maiden or the head of Alfredo Garcia, whatever. If you keep offering sacrifices, it will eventually rain, and when it does, “Praise Baal!”
The seduction of conspiracy
Superstition takes many forms in modern societies — not just carrying around rabbit feet and playing lucky numbers at the casino. Conspiracy theories are a form of superstition. They work on the assumption that bad things must be willed by human actors. What makes conspiracy theories so compelling is that they are like a complex molecule in which Reason and Superstition stick to each other in just such a way that they can get passed the bloodbrain barrier and, like a virus, wreak havoc in our minds. They make us think that we are reasoning our way toward some deeper truth: All those Post-It notes and red strings connecting 8×10 glossy photos can’t be wrong!
The central fallacy here is the idea that conspiracy theories are reasoning toward anything at all. It is in fact a form of pseudo-reasoning: thinking backward from the proposition that a bad event must have been caused by dark forces, which (allegedly) benefit from it. Like the drunk who only looks for his car keys where the light is good, the truth-seeker only looks for evidence to support the proposition. The levees in New Orleans did not hold, Spike Lee observed, so it must be because George W. Bush had them bombed.
Of course, everything becomes so much more complicated by the fact that sometimes there are conspiracies. But they are rare, they are almost never vast, they usually fail, and when they succeed it is most often more from luck than will. Whenever you hear someone insist that “there are no coincidences,” they are revealing that they live in a world of magical realism where powerful unseen forces are treating us all like pawns. It’s a form of secular demonology.