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“An extremely credible source called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” –Donald Trump on Twitter August 6, 2012
Thus, the conspiracy theory of Barack Obama’s non-American citizenship was given oxygen for the next four years.
Conspiracy theories are as old as human civilization. In the book of Matthew, the chief priests were worried about the Christians spreading a theory that Jesus would be resurrected (they apparently took the words of Jesus more seriously than did the disciples). In chapter 27 we read:
“ 62 The next day, the one after Preparation Day, the chief priests and the Pharisees went to Pilate. 63 “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he [Jesus] was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ 64 So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”
65 “Take a guard,” Pilate answered. “Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.” 66 So they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard”.
The harm that conspiracy theories create is obvious. While The Protocols of the Elders of Zion did not create anti-Semitism, they spread it and gave it legitimacy. The violence in Charlottesville in 2017 and the El Paso mass shooting in August of this year had their origins in The Great Replacement theory promulgated by French white nationalist Renaud Camus. The anti-vaccination campaign has led to measles outbreaks that endangered children’s health.
Pacific Press via AP Photo/Albin Lohr-Jones
Van Prooijen and Douglas argue that the following conclusions can be drawn about conspiracy theories:
- “First, conspiracy theories are not unique to our current time or culture. People of all eras and cultures are likely to believe in conspiracy theories, provided that they are confronted with societal crisis situations.
- Second, this relationship between societal crisis situations and belief in conspiracy theories is attributable to feelings of fear, uncertainty, and being out of control. These feelings instigate sense-making processes that increase the likelihood that people perceive conspiracies in their social environment.
- Third, after being formed, conspiracy theories can become part of lay representations of history and are transmitted to new generations as coherent narratives even though people do not experience uncertainty about past crisis situations anymore.”
In addition, Karen Douglas et. al. surveyed the literature and reached the following conclusions about conspiracy theories:
- They are not more prevalent today than any time in the previous century.
- Belief in conspiracy theories has higher prevalence at the extremes of the political spectrum and are especially strong on the extreme right.
- In general, less educated people are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than more educated people; males more than females; unmarried more than married; those with weaker social networks more than those with stronger networks.
I want to emphasize two related factors that have fueled the growth of conspiracy theories: 1) the decline in trust and 2) the fact that some conspiracy theories have a grain of truth.
Declining trust. It seems obvious that the less people trust what they are hearing from authorities, the more they will turn to unauthorized versions of the truth, some of which are conspiracy theories. The following graph look at trust in government and show sharp declines in trust in government since the Vietnam War. Between 1964 and 2018, trust in government fell from 80% to 20%. This is remarkable. So it should not be surprising that, according to a May 2006 Zogby poll, 42 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. government and the 9/11 commission “concealed or refused to investigate critical evidence that contradicts their official explanation of the September 11th attacks,” and that “there has been a cover-up.”
Pew Foundation
Grains of Truth. Another factor that leads to belief in conspiracy theories is the fact that some of them contain a grain of truth, no matter how tiny. Two examples will serve to illustrate this point.
The U.S. Government created the HIV/AIDS virus: One conspiracy theory that has found some purchase among African Americans is the idea that HIV/AIDS was created by the U.S. Government to control the black population. About one out of seven African-Americans believe this to be true. While this conspiracy theory is false it is true that the US Government acted shamefully in another public health arena, syphilis, The story of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment is one of the U.S. Government using poor black sharecroppers as experimental subjects in a particularly unethical way.
“The Public Health Service started working on this study in 1932 in collaboration with Tuskegee University, a historically black college in Alabama. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama. Of these men, 399 had latent syphilis and 201 did not have the disease. The men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance for participating in the study. The men were told that the study was only going to last six months, but it actually lasted 40 years. After funding for treatment was lost, the study was continued without informing the men that they would never be treated. None of the men were told that they had the disease, and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic was proven to successfully treat syphilis. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told that they were being treated for “bad blood”, a colloquialism that described various conditions such as syphilis, anemia, and fatigue. “Bad blood”—specifically the collection of illnesses the term included—was a leading cause of death within the southern African-American community.”
Grains of Truth: There’s a great world-wide conspiracy of elites to control the world. This conspiracy story has many variants: Zionists, the Illuminati, the Masons, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc. However one 19th century groups aiming for world domination was not the creature of some novelist or some paranoid delusion but was a real conspiracy of important 19th century Englishmen.
The reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States (1776). The Latin phrase “novus ordo seclorum“, appearing on the reverse side of the Great Seal since 1782 and on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill since 1935, translates to “New Order of the Ages” and alludes to the beginning of an era where the United States of America is an independent nation-state; conspiracy theorists claim this is an allusion to the “New World Order”
During the second half of Britain’s “imperial century,” between 1815 and 1914, English-born South African businessman, mining magnate and politician Cecil Rhodes advocated for the British Empire re-annexing the United States of America and reforming itself into an “Imperial Federation” to bring about a hyper-power and lasting world peace. In his first will, written in 1877 at the age of 23, he expressed his wish to fund a secret society (known as the Society of the Elect) that would advance this goal:
“To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible, and promote the best interests of humanity.”
According to an April 9, 1902 article in The New York Times “In 1890, thirteen years after “his now famous will,” Rhodes elaborated on the same idea: establishment of “England everywhere,” which would “ultimately lead to the cessation of all wars, and one language throughout the world.” “The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world [“and human minds of the higher order”] to be devoted to such an object.”
Even Rhodes’ famous philanthropic project, the Rhodes Scholarship, was aimed at helping to implement this vision. Established in 1902, the original goal of the trust fund was to foster peace among the great powers by creating a sense of fraternity and a shared world view among future British, American, and German leaders by having enabled them to study for free at the University of Oxford.
Rhodes hopeful aspirations for his Anglo-Saxon kindred carried further than mere personal beliefs. While in his twenties, Rhodes sought to solidify formation of a secret group, following a meeting that transpired with General Gordon of Khartoum. What resulted was Rhodes aptly-named group, The Secret Society, which was designed with one express intent and purpose: the institution of a New World Order, under British Imperial rule.
Weirdly, Rhodes’ roundtable gave birth to the Council on Foreign relationships which, in turn, gave birth to the Trilateral Commission, both cited by conspiracy theorists as groups seeking global control.
Conclusions
Not all conspiracy theories are grounded in myth. The belief that Russia is conspiring to weaken our democracy has been proven by the evidence. Conspiracy theories, true, partly true, or false are always going to be believed by some people. Specific false theories can lead to great harm, but perhaps the worst danger is the feedback loop between conspiracy and distrust. Democracy depends not on law enforcement or police power, but on voluntary compliance with laws based on the belief in their general beneficence. When our trust weakens, we are in existential danger.