Conspiracy Chimera Essay Lecture #1

Essay Comparison Choice #6: The Chimera of Conspiracies:

People lose contact with reality as they go down rabbit holes of conspiracies. We will examine the forces of “the epistemic crisis,” the breakdown of faith in institutions, the death of expertise, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and we will narrow our focus on conspiracies to anti-vaxxing and QAnon. 

Sample Outline for Choice #6

For paragraph 1, your introduction, define the idea of a conspiracy as a very tempting chimera to certain types of people.

For paragraph 2, your thesis, develop a claim that explains the causes of a conspiracy chimera. You might want to focus on a specific conspiracy like the one that supports the belief of anti-vaxxers or QAnon. Otherwise, you may find your essay is so broad that you can’t chisel a 1,200-word essay. 

Paragraphs 3-7 would explain the above thesis.

Your conclusion is a powerful restatement of your thesis. 

Notice there is no Counterargument-Rebuttal Section because this is not so much an argument essay as it is cause-and-effect. 

Works Cited page with the sources you used would be your last page. 

Since the subject is so broad, we will focus on ant-vaxxers.

For sources, we will look at the following: 

• Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Appealing to So Many People?
• The Appeal of Conspiracy Theories
• “Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing” (Dunning-Kruger Effect)
• “Why America Loves Fake News” 
• “Anti-Vaxxers: What Went Wrong?”
• “Anti-Vaxxers: How the Media Created a Monster” 
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: 
• “Vaccines” (June 25, 2017)
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: “Covid Vaccines” (May 2, 2021). 

• “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” by Jonathan Haidt

Types of Conspiracies

 

Proxy Conspiracism: The conspiracy belief is a substitute or a proxy for some deep psychological need like control, power, and revenge against others.  (From Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy).

 

Tribal Conspiracism: The conspiracy is linked to a chain of other like-minded conspiracies that as a whole define the religious, political, or tribal beliefs of the individual (From Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy). 

 

Constructive Conspiracism: The conspiracy that is believed “just in case” it’s true because it’s better to be safe. There have been so many true conspiracies, we might just as well be skeptical of everything (From Michael Shermer’s Conspiracy). 

 

Profit Conspiracism: You don’t believe in the conspiracy, but you cynically fabricate one to make money. Alex Jones is a top-level Profit Conspiracist. 

 

Radicalized Conspiracism: You live in a fever swamp of social media, cable news, cherry-picked evidence, and confirmation bias. Worse, many succumb to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which states that there are many people who think they’re smart when in fact they are the opposite and they lack the self-awareness to see how others perceive them.  

 

Outrage Conspiracism: According to social scientist Jonathan Haidt, around 2012, social media algorithms exploited our reptile brains by feeding our appetite for anger and outrage. These emotions are strengthened by extreme misinformation, which makes money for social media companies, destroys our brains, and destroys democracy. “Going viral” is “proof” that the conspiracy is true. 

 

The Epistemic Crisis in Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Knowledge

 

From the ancient Greeks, we had a tradition of mentor and student in which the mentor was the authority on knowledge and both engaged in a humble quest for higher knowledge, battle-testing their ideas by putting them against their opponents’ objections.

 

Such rigor is in little evidence today. As a result, we live in an epistemic crisis: We can’t even agree on what reality is anymore. 

 

Already, for example, the attack on Nancy Pelosi, Paul Pelosi, has been politicized. 

 

A group of people who say the 2020 election was stolen blame Nancy Pelosi so she was targeted and her husband was attacked instead. This is the most logical and clear explanation.

 

But conspiracy trolls have already weaponized misinformation to call the event a “media conspiracy” to hide the truth: The real event is that Paul Pelosi was having an illicit affair with the attacker and the violence was the result of a relationship gone bad.

 

Just as getting vaccines and wearing masks is politicized, so is the way society interprets the murder attempt of Paul Pelosi.

 

***

Are We Losing American Democracy to Conspiracies?

“Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” by Jonathan Haidt

 

David Pakman Video Interview with Jonathan Haidt

We are trapped in a Groundhog Day of Fragmented Realities

 

We are trapped in a Groundhog Day, a term for being trapped in a crucible. According to John Haidt, author of the essay “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” the trap is the fragmentation of human experience into “different realities” that don’t mesh with the other. Depending on which information silo you live in, your reality differs from other people’s, and these differences represent your cognitive biases, preferences, and moral development. 

 

Haidt observes that this fragmentation leads to anxiety, alienation, and hostility toward one another. As he writes: “We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

 

We are therefore trapped in a state of disharmony, alienation, and hostility among each other. We live in chaos. This is our crucible.

 

We are not in a Cooperation Mode of History

 

In more sunny periods of history, Haidt observes, we live in cooperation with one another, but to do so we have to address conflicts from a shared reality. Thanks to social media, the shared reality has been shattered and we don’t live in cooperation. Rather, we live in animosity toward each other, largely in a cultural and political war, but even within the same tribes, a spirit of irrationality causes them to splinter so that Red and Blue tribes have insane subsets that erode and metastasize the entire party.

The glue that holds society together has come undone from social media

 

Haidt writes that society is held together by three things:

 

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009. 

 

From Friendship to Marketing and Looking for the Viral Effect

 

Over time, people on Facebook and other platforms moved away from deepening friendships and instead looked to promote themselves and their brands. 

 

As Haidt writes: “Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.”

 

2012 is when things started to go crazy:

 

Haidt writes that viral sharing started to motivate social media users to become obsessed with going viral and this is when the craziness began. As he writes:

 

Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline––a never-ending stream of content generated by their friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom. This was often overwhelming in its volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting. That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly “like” posts with the click of a button. That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful: the “Retweet” button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers. Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own “Share” button, which became available to smartphone users in 2012. “Like” and “Share” buttons quickly became standard features of most other platforms.

 

What tended to go viral? Anger and outrage and making social media “a nasty place”

 

Going viral was best achieved through anger and outrage. Social media algorithms want our attention because that is their business model, so their algorithms targeted anger. As a result, anger on social media began to snowball. 

 

By 2013, your posts could either leave you loved or hated, so you started to behave performatively to be loved, even if being loved meant venting hatred toward others. 

 

As Haidt writes:

 

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.

 

The Race to the Bottom

 

Social media posts were now based on dishonesty, oversimplification, and catering to the mob mentality, or in other words, The Race to the Bottom.

 

As Haidt writes:

 

This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

 

A whole country drunk and addicted to outrage and its collective judgment debased is the unraveling of a free democracy

 

Haidt observes that for a sustainable free democracy, we need a voting populace that is reasonably sane, educated, and not living in a Fever Swamp of heated passions. As he writes: 

 

The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.

 

 

Social media and its rampant conspiracy theories erode trust in institutions

 

Conspiracy theories go viral on social media so they are rewarded by the algorithms. 

 

A society beholden to frivolous distractions and two-bit conspiracy theories is not a serious society capable of upholding a free democracy. 

 

Cooperation dies and in its place is “owning” your enemies 

 

We care less about democracy than we do about “owning” our enemies and destroying them. As Haidt writes: “But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side.” 

 

Social media has put different political tribes into different information silos and have “broken the mortar of trust.”

 

Haidt observes that the exponential growth of social media has fragmented us and resulted in a tribalistic society incapable of democracy. This breaking down of American society into hostile factions occurred between 2011 and 2015. During this time there was “The Great Awokening” on the Left and MAGA on the Right and the two groups have been ratcheting up their mutual hatred since. As he observes:

 

Mark Zuckerberg may not have wished for any of that. But by rewiring everything in a headlong rush for growth—with a naive conception of human psychology, little understanding of the intricacy of institutions, and no concern for external costs imposed on society—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a few other large platforms unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

 

Twitter kills newspapers

 

In the present age, Twitter can spread ideas faster than any newspaper however big. 

 

So an ignoramus with a big platform can spread lies on Twitter and if he spreads his lies with outrage and caters to the cognitive biases of his core audience, he will enjoy far more influence than any credible peer-reviewed report in the world’s biggest newspapers.

 

As a result, dishonest outrage trumps honest reporting.

 

Social media and its billions of injurious darts have brought injustice and political dysfunction in three ways.

 

First, trolls get all the attention, not average, responsible citizens with reasonable voices. The more grotesque the more attention. This ruthless aggression scales. 

 

Secondly, political extremism enjoys more voice than moderation even if moderation is 80% of the country. The most white, rich groups on the Right and Left dominate their Extremes. 

 

Thirdly, social media judges and cancels people before they’re given a fair defense. In the words of Haidt: “Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process.”

 

Information Silos lead to Structural Stupidity

 

In social media, we are isolated in our information silos that cater to our cognitive biases so never addressing a counterargument, we become more and more stupid and ignorant. 

 

Not even agreeing on what constitutes reality or a health crisis to be specific, we live in what Jonathan Rauch calls an “epistemic crisis.”

A divided country cannot maintain democracy

 

Haidt reminds us that we are not more stupid; the problem is structural: the “enhanced virality of social media.” In other words, social media is a weapon and this weapon makes for stupid conversation, aggressive political discourse, and a country that is getting more and more divided to the point that it cannot uphold democracy. 

 

Disinformation is the tool of autocrats

 

Disinformation, a tool of autocrats, is going to get worse, not better. We currently do not have any countermeasures in place to repel weaponized disinformation and bad political actors are seizing upon the opportunity to win their political battles by using the same type of disinformation used by Russia’s Putin and Germany’s Nazis. In the words of Haidt:

 

In a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).

 

Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

When you confuse a public and tire them with constant lies and disinformation, you break them into despair, they shrug their shoulders with apathy, and say, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” You’ve defeated them. 

Misinformation, extremism, fear of being Twitter-shamed: all these things combined have made us scared, apathetic, conformist, and oblivious to more reasonable voices that might save our democracy. 

Haidt proposes 3 reforms to save our democracy

Haidt proposes that we “harden democratic institutions,” reform social media, and “prepare the next generation.” 

***

 

Review of Jonathan Haidt

• Since 2009 when social media scaled, we started living in separate information and news bubbles, causing us to mistrust each other. Many of these information bubbles are conspiracy-soaked. 
• Social fragmentation is antithetical to cooperation and weakens democracies.
• We’ve had a breakdown of trust in our major institutions. This has cleared the way for crazy beliefs in conspiracies. 
• We’ve developed a misguided trust in unreliable sources and ourselves as “experts” who can push the real experts away and embrace conspiracy theories.
• The Viral Effect gives false credence to conspiracies so that the popularity of an idea becomes its power, not its truth. This results in the growth of conspiracies.
• Misinformation spreads on social media faster than legacy media can slow it down with vetted facts so that conspiracies flood the mass consciousness. 
• Misinformation creates chaos, but the very same misinformation provides conspiracy theories, which give their believers a false sense of understanding and control. 
• History teaches us that conspiracies are the tool of the autocrat.
• A public confused and fatigued by a flood of misinformation gives up on the notion of truth, credibility, accountability, and critical thinking. They shrug their shoulders in despair and say, “I don’t know what to believe anymore. All I know is the cost of gas.” 

***

Sample Thesis Statements

Sample #1

What kind of person gets their brain hijacked by a conspiracy theory? I’m afraid the answer is not a pretty one. Typically, a person who has failed to love and connect with others in a mature, meaningful way and who has deeply-rooted prejudices becomes the perfect personality for the True Conspiracy Believer. Not wanting to confront her personal failings, he scapegoats some Enemy Entity--Anthony Fauci, the WHO, the libs, the Woke, the Jews, the terrorists, the liberal media, the Immigrant Caravan, or some other Enemy Combatant. Secondly, this person is overwhelmed by life’s uncertainty and has a childish desire for a simple narrative to make sense out of the chaos. Third, this person is so deep into the social media rabbit hole that he is disconnected from real people, real news, and reality itself. This is a dangerous cocktail that turns this person into a radicalized conspiracy believer. 

Sample #2

Why are people on both the Left and the Right anti-vaxxers? It seems there are plenty of conspiracies out there for people of any political persuasion. For the Right, anti-vaxxing sentiments are rooted in hostility for “big government,” the liberal plot to join China to create a world order, and a weaponizing of Covid to allow the Democrats to destroy the Republicans. On the Left, anti-vaxxing sentiments are rooted in hostility toward Big Pharma, a preference for alternative medicine to mainstream science, and the belief that “personal choice” is superior to being a “sheeple,” and anecdotal evidence of children getting vaxxed and immediately becoming autistic. 

Sample #3

Anti-vaxxer beliefs are built on a wobbly foundation of logical fallacies. 

Sample #4

Eric Hoffer's perennial classic The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, published in 1951, is a cogent explanation of conspiracy believers today. The conspiracy believer is marked by a sense of personal failure, a cowardice that prevents honest self-inspection to account for the personal failure, a lust for power and easy opportunities for self-advancement, fear of future change, and faith in an "infallible leader" who possesses some theory to make sense of their world.