Séamas O'Reilly: How do we tackle the challenges posed by conspiracy theories?
Pic: iStock
"What's the one thing your optometrist doesn’t want you to know about?” began a striking TikTok video last week, shared by anti-misinformation activist @mallorysthoughts.
The line was delivered by Samantha Lotus, a pleasant-looking bespectacled woman, whose long blonde hair and perfect teeth gave her the look of someone who juices her meals and could do a handstand at a moment’s notice.
“The fact that you do not need glasses,” she answered, while removing her own pair in triumph, “there are mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual reasons why you may not be seeing and I’m here to tell you that that can be healed.”
The post went viral, mostly because it was such a ludicrous claim, but also because it was such a predictable endpoint to where such alternative theorising has been taking us for the past decade; the self-satisfied affect, the cosy branding, and the dice-roll inanity of saying anything.
Within days, she faced a challenge about the claims made in her $11 webinar, and the many references within it to a brand of essential oils for which she is a rep.
She denied ‘grifting’ for those oils, and has made changes to the presentation. Perhaps most worrying of all, my main takeaway was how odd it was that no one else had come up with her method before.
I grew up inhaling all the madcap pseudo-science I could get my hands on. I was a sceptical sort, so becoming convinced was not the point so much as marvelling at all these intricate sandcastles of circular logic and strange reasoning.
None were more revered than Gene Ray’s “Time Cube”, a theory, and website, so hard to navigate it approached the realm of modernist literature.
Composed of long, run-on sentences that tumbled down the screen in centred text, it stated that what we perceive as one 24-hour day is, for some reason, actually four days of six hours’ length.
What Ray’s writings lacked in clarity, they made up for in bilious invective and judicious use of underlined capitals.
To whit: “Until you can tear and burn the bible to escape the EVIL ONE, it will be impossible for your educated stupid brain to know that 4 different corner harmonic 24-hour days rotate simultaneously within a single 4 quadrant rotation of a squared equator and cubed Earth”.
This, for dozens of pages, accompanied by diagrams he’d drawn himself.
Time Cube was a synecdoche for the wider ramblings to be found anywhere one looked — and I looked everywhere. I devoured flat earthers, hollow earthers, chemtrails, UFOs, Ripperologists, and believers in every cryptid from Nessie and Bigfoot to Mothman and the Chupacabra.
My interest in moon truthers — those who believe the Moon Landings were hoaxed — led me to encounter the even more intriguing sub-categories of same, namely those who believe the moon is either hollow, or does not exist at all.
The hours I lost in the deepest recesses of message boards filled with enthusiastic cranks taught me that there was no theory, no matter how far-fetched or ill-supported, that wouldn’t have at least some proponents somewhere — all of which worked against the power of any of them to convince me of anything.
They were little more than oddities to be enjoyed, a sort of fan fiction for reality itself.
At the time, even as I considered such things harmless waffle, it struck me that governments and pharmaceutical companies were likely delighted to be accused of faking space missions or spreading chemicals via aeroplanes, instead of the myriad real evils they do perpetrate every day.
Thirty years later, such theories no longer hold the same harmless charm they once did.
It seems clear that the internet has been boiling brains at a rate of knots, and the isolation caused by covid has only exacerbated this effect, sending people into the arms of grifters with more deleterious aims.
Certainly, there appears to be substantial crossover between previously discrete cohorts of the gullible, with wellness and alternative medicine quacks now swelling the ranks of altogether more disturbing factions.
I will say that the only people I ever see sharing wild racist conspiracy theories on Facebook, are people who used to only ever talk to me about yoga and star charts.
Conspiracies, however disparate, share a common goal; providing false explanations for complex phenomena and, more often than not, ascribing blame to a convenient outgroup rather than to their actual causes.
If other countries are a metric to go by, such theories are on the rise.
In June, King’s College reported that 32% of British adults surveyed thought the “Great Replacement” theory — that shadowy elites are systematically replacing white populations with non-white peoples — was either probably, or definitely, true.
In 2021, 17% of Americans surveyed claimed some belief in QAnon, the theory that states, among other things, that Hillary Clinton is a Satanic paedophile who sacrifices and eats human children.
It should go without saying that both theories commonly invoke antisemitic language and directly accuse Jewish elites of being the puppet masters, and tenets of both can be heard with increasing frequency at the sad and sadly growing, far-right protests against migrants and LGBT people in Ireland.
Samantha Lotus is small-scale when compared to such horrors, but the methodology, mechanism and targets are the same.
We can’t tackle misinformation until we reckon with the scores of con artists confidently giving answers to people bereft of answers, desperate to feel that thrum of secret knowledge.
If Lotus tells us nothing else, it’s that gesturing to reality will not be enough to repel these people. Echoing the Marx Brothers, she’s singing the age-old song of the conspiracist: “Who are you gonna believe — me or your lying eyes?”
