Cults and Conspiracy Theories
Here is a welcome to a new president, and a new America. It will be refreshing get this particular ugly phase behind us. The polarized environment is almost always posed as two factions, but I see it as many more than that. There are hundreds of factions, and some of them align.
Let me use the term “cult” but please ignore the religious connotation. We know what cults are. There is generally a charismatic leader at the center. Generally the leader says: “Out there the powers that be are trying to hurt you. You’re safe here. Only I can fix this.” The key thing about a cult is that it operates to isolate members from any outside influence, so that it can continue with an exclusive brainwashing of the individuals involved.
When I was young. cults had to be geographically isolated. Jim Jones took his cult to Guyana before they drank the koolaid. David Koresh had his cult in Waco. The difference now is that social media is able to create cults out of members that are all over the place. We call it a “Cult Factory“. Members self identify, and then self isolate to hear only the information they want to hear. The extreme amount of media channels today allow a person to live completely isolated, and still feel like they are hooked into the world.
Many cults focus around a conspiracy theory.
- There is a flat earth cult which believes that NASA and the government is lying to the public about the shape of the earth. They also believe that the moon landings were faked.
- There is an anti-vax cult that believes that vaccines cause autism.
- There is a climate denial cult that believes that the NSF is secretly funneling research funding to people who agree to write false papers and get them published.
- Q-Anon is a cult around the idea that there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. They believe that key Democrats (and particularly Hillary Clinton) traffic children in order to “drink their essence” and stay young.
- There are the Proud Boys who believe in a white genocide conspiracy theory blamed on Jews to dilute the purity of the white race, a theory that Donald Trump tweeted about in August of 2018.
- Of course, there is the KKK, but they don’t seem to be able to keep up with the newer cults.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that hundreds or thousands of people have to know a secret, and have to keep it, even when telling about it might net them a fortune. How do they keep the secret so well? First of all, large conspiracies simply do not exist. Second, the bigger and more unbelievable the conspiracy, the more convinced that the conspiracy theorist believes that it is evil. The more that evidence is missing actually convinces them that there must be more to this conspiracy, not less. But large groups of people simply can not keep a secret. 3 people, maybe 4 can keep a secret about some wrong doing. But 100 people to hide illegal activity for months, to accept the liability of participating in a crime, but without huge financial rewards — no possible way it has ever happened for more than a few days.
To know whether you are in the thrall of a conspiracy theory, ask the question: how many people would have to keep the secret? The 911-Truthers believe that 9/11 was an controlled demolition of the buildings orchestrated by Jews to avoid having to pay for a legitimate demolition. Laying the charges would take dozens of people months to put in and wire in a control system to make it all happen. And all the guards would have to be involved. And they all would have to care nothing for all regular New York people who would be hurt or killed. All in service of a building demolition? Unfortunately, questions like these do no persuade the conspiracy theorist: there is far too many bias confirming fake news articles.
Trump has been peddling a conspiracy theory that thousands of Democrats have been secretly working in polling places to change the vote. Trump brought 60 separate suits alleging voter fraud. 59 of them lost, most being thrown out as baseless. If there was widespread fraud, you would think their batting average would be better. But to the conspiracy theorist: no problem! All the judges are in on the deal. And not just the judges, but everyone in the court who had access and could tell that the judge lied. For a judge to falsify a case, it would be the end of their career. Becoming a judge is difficult, and nobody is going to throw it away because they hate Trump. It is just not believable at any level. But the indoctrinated still believe it.
Cult leaders typically take advantage of their followers, and the followers are often badly hurt. Jim Jones got 918 people to commit suicide (304 of them children). Trump got his followers to walk down Pennsylvania avenue to “show strength” and “fight to take your country back” and do “trial by combat.” He said “we” will walk down there, while he actually walked the other way. I feel sorry for those people, because many of them actually did believe there was widespread voter fraud simply because their cult leader had told them so. They were stupid. But it is all so easy to fall prey.
Any one of us could be susceptible to a cult. It happens all the time. Social media has this power to draw people in. Once you feel like you belong, you start actively filtering out news you don’t want to see. And since there is so much media that is saying what you want to hear, you really get the impression that you know what is going on. Edgar Maddison Welch was so convinced by Q-Anon that the pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong, had a Democrat-run child trafficking operation in the basement, that he showed up with an AR-15 and fired a few shots until they staff showed him that there was no basement.
We need to take some special precautions to make sure that what we read and hear is real. When someone has shown themselves to be unreliable at telling the truth, we need to stop listening to them. We need to question everything. And most of all, we need to ask the question: how many people would have to be silent for this to actually be the truth. How many people could just run to the newspapers and sell the story for a pile of money. If the number is dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, you can bet that one day some one of them will be in a dire situation, willing to sell out.
The good news is that getting a cult leader out of the white house is going to help, but it will not solve the problem. Q-Anon is not going away. The Proud Boys are not going away. Boogaloo is not going away. Plandemic, a conspiracy theory that the government is trying to turn everyone autistic from forced vaccination, is not going away. Most importantly, the Trump cult is not going away. Like the KKK, it will be around the rest of our lives, as long as there are people who believe the utterly baseless claim that the election was stolen. No amount of evidence will ever change their opinions. There will continue to be hundreds of cults and the political polarization will continue to get worse.
Senator McCarthy did a lot of damage to the country with his witch hunt. Many people got hurt. But we moved on. We learned that this kind of fear mongering and baseless accusations can be a big problem. In a way, McCarthy inoculated us against McCarthyism. Trump has done that as well. We now see that he just wanted to the steal the election. No wonder he always thought the other side was doing it, because it was exactly what he was thinking about doing. He called a mob to a rally, got them all worked up, told them peacefully walk to the capital and “be strong”. Most of those people will go to jail for their stupidity. And this kind of Trumpism — an actual mob storming the capitol egged on by false rumors of voter fraud — won’t happen again. We will know how a sitting president can try to disrupt the vote and be ready for it.
America will be stronger for it.