High status conspiracy theories

I recently wrote about high status conspiracy theories for Quillette, featuring James O'Brien, George Monbiot, Carole Cadwalladr, Philip Hammond, Aseem Malhotra, Peter Jukes, Andrew Adonis, Tom Watson, Jeremy Corbyn and Naomi Klein. 

Who can forget Lord Andrew Adonis, once considered the blandest of centrists, demanding answers from the BBC about what he called “the fake vicar scandal”? Perhaps you have forgotten, so let me remind you. It was a minor conspiracy theory of Adonis’s own invention that stemmed from his mind erupting at seeing a female vicar on a Newsnight panel praising Theresa May’s Brexit deal. With a little digging, Adonis discovered that she had appeared as an extra in a number of films, including a villager in Macbeth and a funfair attendant in Pudsey the Dog: The Movie. Rather than accept that she was a vicar who did a bit of acting, Adonis concluded that she was an actor hired by the BBC to pretend to be a Leave voter.

Replying to one of Adonis’s many tweets about “Vicargate,” Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis wrote: “To have got to a place where you could chose to believe that enough to write it—is deeply worrying.” There are, as Donald Trump would say, many such cases. If COVID-19 instigated a wave of conspiracy theories on the Right, Boris Johnson’s election victory had the same effect on the Left and Brexit caused many centrists to have a meltdown. Everybody’s had something to break their brains in recent years and some people may never recover.

Many of the classic conspiracy theories arise from a sense of disbelief. A simple car crash seemed to be an inadequate ending to the Princess Diana soap opera. JFK was too important to have been killed by someone as insignificant as Lee Harvey Oswald. 9/11 was too enormous to have been mere terrorism. The logistics of putting a man on the Moon were too mind-blowing to have been achieved in 1969.

COVID-19 and lockdown delivered a psychic shock on a greater scale than any of these events. That fallible politicians were grappling with the extraordinary problem of dealing with a deadly new virus seemed an inadequate explanation when one could instead believe that it was a false flag to sell vaccines and install a world government (or, from the opposite perspective, that the government had a policy of culling the elderly).

The election of Donald Trump and the vote to leave the EU were similarly shocking to those who had previously regarded those developments as unthinkable. As we retreat into our echo chambers, there is a growing inability to even acknowledge the existence of opposing views, let alone consider them valid. When everyone you know agrees with you, it comes as a shock when the votes are counted and you realise that your side is outnumbered by a basket of deplorables. When something seems unbelievable, the temptation is to simply disbelieve it and reach for alternative explanations.

 

Have a read.