While flipping through a book of aphorisms by the American philosopher Eric Hoffer, I came across this little ditty:
Rabid suspicion has nothing in it of skepticism. The suspicious mind believes more than it doubts. It believes in a formidable and ineradicable evil lurking in every person.
The statement speaks for itself, and it is the middle sentence that interests me here. Countless people in our society believe in all sorts of unproven things – horoscopes, psychic powers, ghosts, fortune telling, and the like. Countless people who dismiss such things, who consider themselves skeptical and thus superior to those they perceive as gullible, nevertheless believe in all sorts of government conspiracies, both in history and in present society. 9/11 as an inside job, various ideas about who killed Kennedy, fake moon landings, Area 51 aliens, our government invented crack and the AIDS virus, chemtrails, and so forth. Then there are some more “reasonable” conspiracies – like the notion that Obama wasn’t born in the USA and that the liberal press is covering for him.
There are conspiracy theories, of course, that turn out to be true. Sometimes, people do get together to do things in secret. I don’t dispute that in the least, and it’s with unfortunate frequency that we find out that our government does things that benefit the few at the expense of many. The issue I take with conspiracy theorists is contained in the second sentence of the aphorism. There is an intellectual superiority they claim over those of us who are Missourian “show me” at heart. We’re treated as gullible for accepting the official version of events (even if we don’t), rather than putting stock in the ramblings of people like Alex Jones and Jesse Ventura. Yet it is they who are more likely to believe the unproven, to accept and repeat ideas that are far less vetted than the commonly accepted explanations for things, to put stock in outlandish alternate scenarios rather than accept the simple and sometimes unpleasant versions of events.
Psychologists have identified a human tendency to consistency over accuracy, and to engaging in behavior known as “confirmation bias.” It can be a blow to one’s ego to admit error or to admit that one was fooled by another, so we often defend ideas we’ve expounded even after being shown how wrong we were. Yet skepticism, including towards our own beliefs and conclusions, and holding intellectual rigor in primacy over unwarranted tenacity are far healthier mind sets than giving preference or weight to unfounded or weakly constructed alternate explanations for events and circumstances. Or, for that matter, simply saying “I’m not buying the official explanation” without having the guts to offer up a logically constructed and empirically supported alternate explanation for critique and challenge. There’s no skepticism therein, there’s no respect for the truth, logic or science, it’s just a form of self-aggrandizement. In claiming “I’m the one who doesn’t believe what he’s told, you’re the fool who thinks that the sky really is blue” without backing it up, one is simply trying to elevate one’s stature in comparison to those around him, to show up his peers, friends or acquaintances, or to simply inflate his own ego.
I recently posted an essay Stater vs Statement, where I discussed the tendency we all have to judge a book by its cover, to pre-determine the quality of a statement, an essay or a book with our past experience with and knowledge of the author. This tendency aligns with what I discuss in this piece, a tendency that is rooted in a preference for the veneer of intellectual superiority over respect for the truth and openness to ideas. Therein lies the real reason that people buy into conspiracy theories, and it is a phenomenon that we find in so many other places. Ever get angry when one of your favorite and under-appreciated bands makes it big, when it finds commercial success? Ever decide that a cool restaurant isn’t so cool any more because the hoi polloi have found it? We want to be insiders, we want to be somehow better than the masses, and conspiracies offer us an easy and low-effort pathway to that insider status, at least in self-perception. But if that pathway leads to indefensible or unlikely conclusions, if the embrace of conspiracies comes at the expense of critical thinking and involves unsupported and illogical beliefs, it’s a stray path, and taking it is more likely to show us as fools than to validate our intellect.
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