‘Sanity is not statistical!’ is the cry of Winston Smith in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, rejecting the Party’s notion that the ‘truth’ is whatever a majority of people believe it to be. With the wealth of information available to us in the 21st century, we’re more equipped than ever to deviate from the commonly accepted narratives of broader society. But is it bringing us closer to Winston’s definite assurance of the truth? Or is the internet unavoidably Orwellian?
Currently the statistics of sanity are rather worrying. Research by Hope Not Hate found this year that 1 in 4 Britons believe “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”, with even more believing that there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together” regardless of who is in government. This often antisemitic idea has become popularised recently via Facebook groups like QAnon.
But how, in our ‘post truth’ age, are we to say that such claims are unfounded? After all, they are compelling enough for large amounts of the population to believe in, share, and even lose friends over. Perhaps labelling people ‘conspiracy theorists’ shows an arrogance that our facts are objective and superior.
If you ever talk to a QAnon supporter, they’ll tell you to ‘open your eyes’ and stop ‘blindly believing what the mainstream media tells you’, likening you to a sheep. If you then probe them further on their views, they’ll proceed to enlighten you with information about a secret cult they’ve derived from one unverifiable ‘insider’ who never discusses anything in greater detail than can be contained in a tweet. If you ask how they know that this one source on YouTube or Facebook is trustworthy, they’ll give a wry smile and tut at your brainwashing by the monolithic mainstream media.
And that is the core irony of conspiracy theories, and the line that sets them apart from what we might consider ‘truth’. Followers of conspiracies like QAnon appear to be under the impression that simply deviating from what the rest of us believe qualifies as critical thinking. Once they’ve accepted this new belief that some shady kabal is directing world politics, their faculties for critical thinking no longer feel the need to engage. You can tell something’s a conspiracy theory if it persistently reassures you that you’re ‘opening your mind’ by unquestioningly consuming its argument.
Both sides of the political spectrum have politicised the term: left-wing journalists are hitting out more than ever against ‘right-wing conspiracies’, and right-wing politicians like Donald Trump are decrying the ‘fake news’ (a synonymous term, which is, if anything, more catchy) coming from left-wing media sources.
Many theories which were once deemed ‘conspiracies’ have actually turned out to be true. The Dalai Lama truly had been working for the CIA for a while, the CIA truly had been working on mind control for a while, and smoking really is deadly. That last one was an example of a conspiracy from major corporations to block scientific research, something which continues to this day across the world.
So, what do we take from this? That conspiracy theories are true, but to believe in them is to be closed-minded and uncritical?
Quite the opposite: on the whole, conspiracy theories earn their name. They’re mostly founded on partial truths, or no truth at all, and made up by partisan bodies to destabilise the discourse on a certain subject (i.e. smoking). But we shouldn’t dismiss that sense of curiosity these theorists claim to hold about our modern world. Deeply questioning the stories that we all tell ourselves as a society can reveal notions and prejudices that we never would have exposed otherwise, and that urge to find out what’s ‘really going on’ in the lives of those in power can lead to some important investigative journalism.
But what we’ve got to cling to, when we’re asking these questions, is verifiable proof, and the knowledge that information will always be biased, no matter where it's coming from.
Here’s a quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four, that summarises the mindset of us all, both conspiracy theorists and science believers:
'There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.'
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