Bokelskere.no

With all conspiracism, classic and new, the counterstrategy of speaking truth runs up against the wall of closed minds. With classic conspiracism—the kind that collects evidence, that tries to connect all the dots, that offers theories and explanations—speaking truth to conspiracy is often ineffective. The conspiracist’s sealed mind-set is resistant to intervention. Conspiracists categorize contrary evidence as part of the conspiracy itself, and competing evidence is especially suspect when it comes from the very sources said to be part of the plan: political officials or government commissions or the mainstream press. These qualities of mind—epistemic closure, or a self-sealing resistance to all challenging facts—also make the new conspiracism difficult to correct and contest. It is all the more difficult in the case of the new conspiracism because so often the “evidence” consists only of bare assertion, “a lot of people are saying.” In addition, there’s the tribal element of the new conspiracism: identification with a group for which conspiracist stories are a regular way of viewing the political world. The tribal element imposes a real cost on changing one’s mind. Call it the reputational obstacle to acknowledging false belief.

...the new conspiracism is a special kind of assault, and it poses a distinctive challenge beyond its specific targets. It is disturbing and dangerous because it is a direct, explicit, and wholesale attack on shared modes of understanding and explaining things in the political world. It unsettles the ground on which we argue, negotiate, compromise, and even disagree. It makes democracy unworkable—and ultimately it makes democracy seem unworthy.

The new conspiracists do not necessarily believe what they say. But they do not disbelieve it either. As we have argued, classic conspiracy theory is about making sense of the world. But to assent in the way the new conspiracists do is something different. Their assent is forceful and has the stamp of certainty—the election was “rigged!” But when probed, the language of certainty often gives way to the language of “true enough.” And “true enough” is good enough politically. Because the weak ground of assent does not cause hesitation or humility. It is not a barrier to publicly asserting emphatic claims about reality. It does not inhibit conspiracists from claiming to own reality. And for conspiracists in power, it is not an impediment to imposing their reality on the nation.

What validates the new conspiracism is not evidence but repetition. When Trump tweeted the accusation that President Barack Obama had ordered the FBI to tap his phones in October before the 2016 election, no evidence of the charge was forthcoming. What mattered was not evidence but the number of retweets the president’s post would enjoy: the more retweets, the more credible the charge. Forwarding, reposting, retweeting, and “liking”: these are how doubts are instilled and accusations are validated in the new media. The new conspiracism—all accusation, no evidence—substitutes social validation for scientific validation: if a lot of people are saying it, to use Trump’s signature phrase, then it is true enough.

Warranted or not, classic conspiracism is conspiracy with a theory. The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.