How To Stop Believing In Conspiracy Theories
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From 3 Quarks Daily, by Rachel Robison-Greene. Reprinted with permission.
Earlier this month, “No Kings” protests set records for being among the most well attended political protests in recorded American history. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful. On the same day, a politically motivated killer shot two Democratic politicians and their spouses in Minnesota, killing two and critically wounding the others.
Despite the facts being presented regarding all of these events, conspiracy theories quickly spread. Reports circulated that cities in which protests were held were on fire. Politicians took to Twitter to spread conspiracy theories about the shootings. Before all the details were known, Utah’s senior senator Mike Lee took to Twitter to blame the violence on “Marxists.”
The tendency to believe what one hopes is true rather than what is supported by the evidence is far from a new trend in American politics. One might even think it has become its most distinguishing feature. In recent years, conspiracy theories have emerged about the pandemic, vaccines, climate change, and the security of the 2020 election, to name just a few. All of this flies in the face of our ordinary, idealistic attitudes about how people form beliefs. The idea that humans form beliefs and come to know truths through reviewing evidence and applying reliable reasoning practices is an enduring post-Enlightenment concept. Recent events demonstrate that it’s not that helpful for understanding how human beings actually think. Our everyday reasoning may be more grounded in social connectedness and personal insecurity than we ordinarily like to believe.
In book VII of Plato’s Republic, he provides one of his most famous allegories. Socrates, Plato’s teacher and central participant in the dialogue, tells the story that has come to be known as “The Allegory of the Cave.” He first describes a group of prisoners chained up in a cave. They are positioned in such a way that they cannot move their heads, and they can see only what is right in front of them. Their discussions with one another concern only what they are able to apprehend from this limited vantage point. They see shadows cast on the wall in front of them and come to believe that all of reality is contained in what they can observe.
Socrates then asks those with whom he is conversing to imagine that one of the prisoners is released from his chains and allowed to ascend to a higher position in the cave. This would be disconcerting to the released prisoner at first. Socrates says, “he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him.” Nevertheless, once he becomes accustomed to the brighter part of the cave, he will be unable to see things in the way he once did. He will no longer see shadows; he will now see the source of those shadows—the puppets that were casting the shadows on the walls.
There is still more to reality than the puppets casting the shadows. Socrates portrays the liberated man as at least somewhat unwilling to move to the next stage. He says, “he is reluctantly dragged to a steep and rugged ascent and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself. Is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled and he will not be able to see anything at all of what he now calls realities.” From this new perspective, the man sees not shadows, or puppets, but the truth of reality itself.
At this point, Socrates emphasizes the intrinsic value of knowledge. Though the prisoner was reluctant at first, once he sees things in the light of the sun, he would never want to return to the state he was in before. He would never trade true beliefs for falsehoods, even pleasant falsehoods. He would rather live a solitary life knowing all that he knows than have honors conferred on him by his former fellows for assenting to the truth of all they took themselves to know before.
In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes describes a similar solitary journey. He finds himself in a period of life in which he has the leisure to reflect on all of his beliefs. He sets out on his own on an intellectual journey (in his own parlour) to set his beliefs about the world on a similar foundation to those on which mathematics rests. He uses skeptical hypotheses to call each of his beliefs into doubt—perhaps he can’t trust his senses, maybe he is actually dreaming, or there may even be an evil demon tricking him into believing everything that he presently believes. If any of his beliefs can withstand this level of skeptical doubt, those beliefs would be strong candidates to serve as the foundation for the rest of his knowledge.
Both of these examples from the history of philosophy suggest that the pursuit of knowledge is a solitary activity. The liberated prisoner in Plato’s Cave has guides, but they seem to serve only to move him from one stage to the next without much active participation in the process. The pursuit of knowledge is certainly valuable, but it may be that knowledge gained in this way is at best fantasy and at worst a potentially dangerous endeavor.
In the allegory, Socrates endorses a set of views that is commonly held in the history of philosophy: that knowledge is good for its own sake and that people would prefer to have knowledge than to be ignorant. John Stuart Mill expresses the idea in Utilitarianism,
It is better to be a human being satisfied than a pig dissatisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Casting characters in solitude advances the projects of both Socrates and Descartes. In contrast, it might be useful to imagine the characters in the cave as socially embedded, as they would be. Suppose that instead of faceless, nameless prisoners, the people chained up in the cave are friends. Their captivity is all they’ve ever known, and they have to try to make sense out of it. Their lives are senseless and repetitive, and they must imbue them with meaning to endure them. They tell each other stories about the shadows on the wall. Some of the shapes become monsters and others become Gods. The vicissitudes of fate become intentional and divinely directed. Most importantly, the shadow Gods care about the poor silly prisoners in chains. Through these stories, the prisoners relate to one another and form strong social bonds.
What, then, would happen to the “liberated” prisoner when he is free from his physical chains? When he ascends and sees the marionettes, would he really be so willing to embrace the idea that they are neither Gods nor monsters but merely, as Plato describes them puppets, “made of wood and stone and various materials”? Instead, the person might well find more value in social connectedness and a sense of meaning to his own existence than he does in truth or authenticity.
It would take quite a bit of courage for the newly free prisoner to be willing to accept what is right before his eyes. Rather than take what he sees at face value, he might be inclined to craft a narrative to make what he all too recently believed about Gods on the wall cohere with shadows cast by wood and stone. The strong desire to avoid being socially ostracized would likely contribute to this tendency. Mill insists that a person would rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied, but would this really be true if everyone in that persons’ in-group were fools?
Social connectedness is a source of the problem, but it can also be part of the solution. A person striving to be an epistemic hero might shut himself in his study next to the fire and craft for himself an internally consistent narrative about the world. It may be a conspiracy theory or a whole philosophical system. The person might delight in basking in the sun of what he takes to be the final epistemic ascension. He might even derive all of his self-esteem from it, being otherwise ineffectual. It is only through discussion with others that the person can come to see that, though the beliefs he has crafted are consistent with one another, they are totally unmoored from reality.
The dominance and political ascendance of beliefs that aren’t supported by compelling evidence should encourage us to pause and reflect on how people form beliefs and what it would take to change someone’s mind. It takes understanding, empathy, and safe spaces to agree to a set of best practices. Epistemic heroes are more likely to be friends and neighbors than solitary crusaders.
