The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

by Jesselyn Cook

Adam was right to worry that a sustained and strictly partisan media diet could have an effect similar to brainwashing, or could radically alter the way that people like his mom thought. A pair of political scientists would later attempt to reverse-engineer this effect by paying hundreds of Fox News watchers to switch to CNN for a month. By the end, the participants’ opinions on hot-button issues, from racial justice to voting by mail, had shifted significantly.

Believers weren’t drawn to QAnon through lurid tales of cannibalism, infanticide, or satanic sex abuse rituals. They started out consuming lighter, more digestible conspiracy theory hors d’oeuvres with kernels of truth baked in, like rumors about corrupt elites, then gradually developed an appetite for wilder and wilder claims.

Social isolation and loneliness, as well, were known to fuel hypervigilance toward perceived threats, in addition to cognitive decline.

The allure of conspiracy theories transcended race and other demographic boxes: At a basic level, they appealed to people with a sense of powerlessness—perceived or valid.

What had felt to Matt like an epiphany, however, was in fact an apophany: a Rorschachian conclusion drawn from dots that have no business being connected. Apophenia is a natural phenomenon; the human brain is hardwired to scan for patterns, even where they don’t exist. It’s also a bedrock of conspiracy theory thinking, wherein illusory patterns perceived in random noise are held up as evidence of nefarious activity.

Standing with the tribe was more important than standing for the truth when one’s ideology became their identity.

And when people’s firmly held beliefs are challenged—particularly those tied to their sense of self—the brain reacts the same way it would to a physical threat, ready to defend those beliefs as if they were part of the body. Adrenaline courses through the bloodstream, the heart races, and the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s logic center, is functionally compromised. It can make people impulsive and irrational. Cruel, even.

Research suggests that harboring grievances—whether they stem from real or perceived offenses—actually makes people feel good. Brain-imaging studies have revealed that feeling aggrieved, and in turn, desiring retribution, stimulates the same neural reward-processing circuitry as narcotics.

Religious belief was significantly positively correlated with conspiracy theory belief, attributed by experts to the service of common psychological needs (certainty, purpose, community) and shared underlying elements (grand narratives, a righteous mission, conviction in the unseen).

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste,” he wrote. “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

That was the thing about rock bottom: It was a profoundly liberating place to be.