Conspiracism
For the last month or so I've been rather fascinated by how so many people—including smart people and many people I otherwise respect—have been completely swept away by this conspiracy-fueled moral panic about Jeffrey Epstein and the "paedophilic cabal of global elites" or something. Of course, one component of this is the usual mob madness that has persisted throughout history, most recently during the "Woke 1" era during which we witnessed professors who really should know better write opinion pieces about racist mathematics because everyone needed to show that everything is racist so that everyone could be a good anti-racist. But this is something much deeper, I think. This is something that has led to royals stripped of their titles and professor suspensions and multiple congressional testimonies, and for that reason I've been very confused by so much of it, at least until very recently.
I think I now understand it as a yearning, almost a desperation, felt towards a central sacrosanct "thing" that must be defended at all costs no matter how powerful or scary its attackers are. And I think (though this is far from an original thought) that this yearning is more or less at the core of every conspiracy theory out there, including the Epstein "files."
This understanding was mostly guided by some of the syntheses Natalie Wynn makes in her phenomenal "CONSPIRACY" video essay. It is such a rich text for this incredibly strong relationship between conspiracies and a desire to understand and even poke at power; the mixture of feelings that this desire elicits is so strong that even bringing up objective and inarguable facts about the matter is perceived as a defense of purportedly heinous crimes.
Understanding this better has been useful because I now realise that I had a foolish model of what leads people to become conspiracy theorists. I had believed that only stupid people, people who, for instance, are unable to distinguish between the prescriptive "ought" and the descriptive "is" even after you explain it to them, could fall for conspiracies; that's completely false. For people to fall for conspiracy theories, the "thing" that must be protected from the "powers that be" must be so strong in its moral persuasion that a myth about what "needs to be done" must be constructed around it. This myth then becomes the actionable mantra that then informs how people righteously "stand up" to the powerful Satans that walk around us.
All of this really helps me empathise with the January 6th Insurrectionists, with the Vaccine Deniers, with the people who believe that Q has come to deliver the Word of God via a father-son pair of carpenters... Each of these weird "theories" (calling these cases "theories" seems far too respectful, but I'll persist) shares a number of themes: there are massively powerful people who use their power to impact everyone's lives from behind a metaphorical curtain, there is a very morally pungent thing (at least from the perspective of the conspiracists), and from these a myth about how those powerful people are doing the thing is created; the moral lesson is that they must be put down at any cost.
It would be reasonable if one feels sorry for these people who are so confused by the enormity of power that exists out there and the complexities of modern reality that they become persuaded to construct fictional tales about how the world works, but I don't feel sorry at all. If anything, I view it as yet another fundamental flaw in the natural design of the human psyche.
Ekene