“Those who believe unproven stories about hidden cabals and secret machinations tend to show no interest in well-documented stories of hidden cabals and secret machinations,” summarizes British columnist and author George Monbiot.
It begins with a confession: “I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe that groups of people are secretly conspiring against our interests based on their pocketbooks, or covering their backs for political purposes. » And he has examples to this effect: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it was revealed that a secret micro-targeting campaign—targeting audiences with surgical precision, using data obtained from Facebook without their knowledge of users—could have influenced the vote on the British exit from the European Union (“Brexit”). Or the “Panama Papers” and “Pandora Papers” scandals, when the media revealed strategies used by rich and influential people to hide their money in tax havens. In the first case, it was a scandal that opened the door to the need to reform the laws on the protection of our personal data online. In the second case, on the need to tighten the rules on tax havens.
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Except that, Monbiot continues, rather than devoting energy to fighting these real conspiracies, which have real ramifications in our daily lives, lots of people prefer stories of chemtrailssecret conspiracies on vaccines, rigged elections against Donald Trump, or a mythical “great replacement” of “white” populations by immigrants.
Why is this so? The ills that have plagued our societies in recent decades are certainly to blame: economic inequalities, degradation of public services and infrastructure, environmental problems, etc. These problems create legitimate frustrations. But the problem is that, rather than working on possible solutions, people prefer to redirect their frustrations and anger towards imaginary plots: these, writes Monbiot, “distract us” from the real reasons for these dysfunctions.
He is not the first to point out that these beliefs have the ability to distract. Psychologists and political scientists wrote about this years before the pandemic. But the latter was a revelation when large sections of the population, rather than rebelling against the risks caused by poor preparation by their governments (no ventilation in schools, insufficient masks, lack of local production of vaccines, etc.) preferred to spend energy fighting imaginary enemies.
These observations lead Monbiot to a possible solution, also mentioned by other authors in recent years: dialogue. Since these frustrations have a basis of legitimacy, since the injustices that these conspiracists denounce are real, it is because there is a common core of frustrations and social criticisms from which it would be possible to dialogue. His experience with an artist who had been the subject of an interview on the BBC and defended theories mixed with anti-Semitism, however, cooled his ardor: although this person was very friendly when Monbiot and she was talking about very real social or political problems, she turned away as soon as the columnist pointed out falsehoods in his argument.
What if it turns out that these conspiracy theories serve the interests of groups that have an interest in not seeing political or social change? For example, the millions of people around the world who spend time and money trying to demonstrate imaginary spraying by airplanes—the famous chemtrails— do not devote this time and money to fighting for a reduction in pollutants, even though they are very real, contained in aircraft fuels.
We also cannot help but notice that several of the conspiracy theories of recent years are anchored in a very conservative ideology, and therefore indeed serve political interests: the denial of climate change and the severity of COVID , opposition to immigration, etc.
Canadian author Naomi Klein also discusses this idea in her latest book, Doppelganger: we know that we live in an unjust world, we know that the rich and powerful can often act with impunity. Confronted with this, conspiracy theorists can be factually wrong, “but often get the feelings right.”
“If a story is plausible or proven,” adds Monbiot, it seems that conspiracy theorists “don’t want to know.” » The story they prefer to hear offers them something comforting: rather than admitting that they are enmeshed in an economic system that they should work to reform, they prefer to believe that all the world’s problems are the fault of the “Other”, and that it would be enough to get rid of the “Other” for everything to be fine.
