Breaking Free of Conspiratorial Thinking

How I extracted myself from the absurd feedback loop of trutherism

Edit: BEFORE YOU COMMENT, READ THIS!

I am, at times, flabberghasted by the responses I get to this article, usually suggesting that the response was made before the article was read, or perhaps only the first few paragraphs. If you read nothing else of it, then read this, the definition of Conspiratorial Thinking:

Conspiracy theory, an attempt to explain harmful or tragic events as the result of the actions of a small powerful group.

Or, in greater detail, from the paper quoted later on:

Broadly, conspiracy theories refer to causal explanations of events that ascribe blame to a group of powerful individuals (the conspirators) who operate in secret to form hidden plans that benefit themselves and harm the common good.

“YES BUT CONSPIRACY IS A THING THAT HAPPENS YOU KNOW?!”

Yes, I know, but just because conspiracies sometimes do happen does not mean that all events are caused by conspiracy. I would have thought this to be obvious, but obviously not.

The world is chaotic, and humans are more independent and less individually powerful than they might seem. To prove a conspiracy, you need concrete evidence. For example, even if you were to somehow prove it physically impossible for the twin towers to collapse the way they did when hit by passenger jets, that by itself is not evidence of a conspiracy by the government to bring them down with dynamite.

At the same time, simply being unable to prove that something was not the result of conspiracy is not proof of a conspiracy having occurred, or even that one is likely to have occurred.

Conspiratorial thinking, therefore, is the tendency to jump to the conclusion that conspiracy is behind any given world event, with or without concrete evidence of a conspiracy, and regardless of whether it’s actually true.

Ok? We done? Good, now you can comment.

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We all know holiday season means having to suffer through the mad rantings of that one particular relative. You know the one. The one that thinks the Sandy Hook shootings were staged, that the Covid-19 vaccine is full of mind-control nanobots, that Trans people are systematically violating the sanctity of public toilets, that there is this evil cabal of paedophiles lead by Hillary Clinton who run a Pizza place as cover for their satanic child sacrifices.

You usually rock up to the family gathering hoping that they won’t turn up.

But they do.

They always do.

Today, I want to try and give you some idea of what’s going on inside the mind of these individuals. Knowing how some of them think might help you get through the ordeal, and maybe - just maybe - be a bit of fun.

Lets see where we end up.

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I have a confession to make.

I was once a 9/11 truther.

I was also once a “moon landing skeptic.”

I was bought in to Alex Jones and his documentaries, had seen "Loose Change” like 20 times, and believed the End of Days were upon us. I “knew” all about the Bilderberg group and the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and Skull & Bones. I believed US Presidents were picked by a tiny shadow group of elites, bankers and oligarchs.

I even believed that the giant flag pole which sits atop Parliament House was some kind of secret antenna, and that western governments were in contact with extra terrestrials.

I’m not saying it was aliens… actually yes that’s exactly what I’m saying.

Speaking of Parliament House, I have some fun stories of my teenage years evading Australian Federal Police on a skateboard at 2am, but that’s for another day.

Of course, like just about everyone else, I believed there was something to the Grassy Knoll theory of JFK’s assassination.

I even briefly denied the reality of Climate Change.

I used to spout these beliefs and theories to just about anyone and everyone, with total confidence. The sky was blue, water was wet, 9/11 was an Inside Job. I was a True Believer™.

I’ll admit, I had a bit of help. When I was young, I was exposed to a fair bit of religion. Religion takes the idea of centralised and invisible control and makes it your entire world-view, so steps 1 through 5 on the road to plausibility are already pre-filled:

1. we live in an intelligently-designed universe

2. there is no such thing as coincidences

3. there is a universal, pre-determined moral code (set by God)

4. there exists only “Good” and “Evil”

5. my tribe is “Good”, and anyone outside of my tribe is “Evil” by default

So that was easy.

How did I make my way out of this mindset, though?

To be honest, it’s difficult to say for sure. It was a process that took many years, but I do remember quite clearly when that process began.

Let’s take a trip back to early-2007.

As we in the rest of the world watched the 2008 US Election season with bemusement, I had been getting caught up on predictions from folks like Alex Jones and other tin-foil hatters.

The prediction was given with complete conviction and certainty: Hillary Clinton had been chosen by the shadowy Illuminati group as the next US President. The Democratic Party primaries were still months away, but there were no doubts about it. It was all pre-determined. Simple as that.

I don’t remember exactly who it was that made the prediction, whether Jones himself or some other related personality. If anyone can find more about it, let me know.

I repeated this prediction to a friend who was sceptical. He didn’t buy in to my conviction. I couldn’t understand why, but I actually made a bet with him and said “you’ll see, it will be Clinton.”

News flash: It was not Clinton. I lost the bet.

After the results of the Primary, it was Obama who became the Democratic candidate. I once again tuned in to my conspiracy shows and blogs to help me make sense of what just happened. I felt humiliated at having repeated what they told me, only to be spectacularly proven wrong.

If I recall correctly, their excuse was this: apparently, the “elites” just… changed their minds.

That was when something snapped in my brain.

I didn’t sense it at the time, but that was the moment when I really began to scrutinise what I was being told. There are not a lot of things in this world I actually hate, but “being wrong” is very high up on that short list.

Early on in Barack Obama’s Presidency, Alex Jones came out with a new documentary: “The Obama Deception”, with the following blurb:

Watch the Obama Deception and learn how:

• Obama is continuing the process of transforming America into something that resembles Nazi Germany, with forced National Service, domestic civilian spies, warrantless wiretaps, the destruction of the Second Amendment, FEMA camps and Martial Law.

• Obama’s handlers are openly announcing the creation of a new Bank of the World that will dominate every nation on earth through carbon taxes and military force.

• International bankers purposefully engineered the worldwide financial meltdown to bankrupt the nations of the planet and bring in World Government.

• Obama plans to loot the middle class, destroy pensions and federalize the states so that the population is completely dependent on the Central Government.

• The Elite are using Obama to pacify the public so they can usher in the North American Union by stealth, launch a new Cold War and continue the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

An Article in Newsweek about the Tea Party movement of the time also described its dark prophecies:

This world view's modern-day prophets include Texas radio host Alex Jones, whose documentary, The Obama Deception, claims Obama's candidacy was a plot by the leaders of the New World Order to "con the Amercican people into accepting global slavery"

[…]

According to this dark vision, America's 21st-century traumas signal the coming of a great political cataclysm, in which a false prophet such as Barack Obama will upend American sovereignty and render the country into a godless, one-world socialist dictatorship run by the United Nations from its offices in Manhattan.

By this point, I was beginning to pay close attention to the many predictions of doom and gloom being fed to me by conspiracy theory “alternative media” which I had long been following. If they were so wrong about Clinton, what else are they getting wrong?

I realised there was one sure fire way to know: observe what happens, and see if the predictions are borne out.

So, Obama had 2 terms in office for a total of 8 years. Did the United States at any point resemble Jones’ apocalyptic vision?

Nope.

Only one of those predictions - all of which were somewhat vague, and open-ended enough they could have been stretched to suit a bunch of scenarios - even came close: Iraq and Afghanistan were indeed occupied for most of Obama’s presidency.

Everything else was about as accurate as a drunk throwing knives.

That fact ended up dragging me out of my strange conspiracy stupor as the years went by. I had been wrong about so much for so long, and I was tired of it. I was tired of the flaws in my arguments being so obvious to everyone else but me. It wasn’t enough anymore just telling people to watch this documentary on YouTube or read that blog article or whatever.

I couldn’t answer the obvious challenges brought up by people I spoke to. I realised I didn’t even understand the material that I was parroting.

If I can’t even defend the viewpoint, why do I believe it? Why do I repeat it?

I felt intellectually bankrupt.

The Turn-Around

I hate being wrong. However, this required the ability to realise that I was wrong. It required insight. Many folks in Conspiracy Theory land simply don’t have that ability. Many simply accepted the rationalisation that the “elites” had simply “changed their minds” about Clinton and decided at the last second to go with Obama as their “Manchurian Candidate”. They kept declaring with righteous indignation the “beginning of dictatorship” and the “setting up of FEMA camps”, over and over, as if they were trying to will it into existence.

I’d been debated by all manner of very intelligent people on my beliefs, and despite being unable to answer many of the challenges raised, I nonetheless stuck stubbornly to my guns. Simply presenting me with the evidence and analysis wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until I put my entire identity as someone who “knew things they didn’t want you to know” on the line with that bet that a breakthrough finally occurred. It was a very subtle breakthrough at first, but over time, that crack grew and grew, eventually shearing off not only my conspiracy theories but my religion and magical thinking as well.

If Clinton had indeed won, I might still be a conspiracy theorist.

I watched on with mounting distrust as the prophets of apocalypse twisted themselves into fantastical distortions and mental gymnastics in a blatant attempt at reconciling their original prediction with the actual outcome.

My trust in their word unravelled as they continued down this road: making yet more failed predictions. Obama was supposed to be the literal Antichrist. He was supposed to implement martial law, establish a dictatorship, herd people into concentration camps. It was absurd in the extreme, and none of it came true. Then, there was the “Birther” thing, one of the most pathetic and blatantly racist political attacks I have ever seen.

I slowly disconnected myself from those sources and communities, and began floating around in a kind of fugue state, ready to be imprinted anew.

I realised I needed to stop pretending that I knew anything, and accept that I honestly knew nothing. I had to begin again on a journey of self-education and discovery, and challenge any world-view put to me by anyone, no matter how much I might believe them, or want to believe them.

More than just “doing my own research”, I had to figure out who to trust, and why, and accept that I could not personally verify the entire universe of human knowledge. That meant finding the people who were making more reliable predictions, and seeing what they were about.

Validate your assumptions, as we say in Software Engineering.

Lastly, I had to treat the admission of being wrong as a virtue in itself. No more making bets on things I didn’t understand thoroughly. Once you start making bets, you make your own bed, and will have to lay in it. Now you are stuck with your choice, and anything other than that outcome is a loss, whether materially or reputationally. To accept defeat is to lose something valuable. I had to curb my habit of speaking in absolutes.

Not everyone is so ready to accept being proven wrong. Sometimes, the failure of a prediction to pan out just makes individuals dig-in even further, for whatever reason, either for the integrity of their identity, their connection to that community, or greed.

That’s what drove Tobacco companies to play down the risk of cancer. That’s what drove Standard Oil, Thomas Midgeley, Charles Kettering and GM to ignore and deny their own internal research and 2000 years worth of other research on Lead toxicity. That’s what drives the American NRA’s insistence that guns don’t kill people.

“From my cold dead hands.”

What does the science say?

In 2023, an incredibly comprehensive multi-layer meta study was done, traversing the tidal wave of more focussed research into the topic of conspiratorial thinking and its neural and psychological correlates. It found some amazingly detailed results.

From Bowes, Costello, and Tasimi, The Conspiratorial Mind:

Complexity

…conspiratorial ideation appears to be related to inflexible cognitive styles, including reliance on intuition, identifying patterns and agency in their absence, and maintaining one’s views while being closeminded to alternative views. Still, individuals prone to conspiratorial ideation may also lack the cognitive abilities to evaluate information accurately and critically.

It’s this reliance on intuition which seems to be one of the core and consistent pieces to this puzzle. It’s all about gut-feel. Anything which affirms their gut-feel is amplified. Everything else is ignored or denounced as biased.

The reason for this reliance on intuition may be due to an aversion to mentally-effortful thinking and analysis. That is to say, they defer to their mental short-cuts to avoid having to think.

The paper has a lot to say about a relationship between conspiratorial thinking and the avoidance of complexity, and the inability to cognitively comprehend complexity when required to do so.

Also not terribly surprising if we’re honest.

The ability to comprehend a technical subject and to really analyse it for what it is requires something called effortful thinking, which, as should be obvious, is a more energy-demanding type of thinking. Brain fog is the feeling of being unusually incapable of energy-demanding thought processes. I wonder how often people with extreme conspiratorial thinking habits experience brain fog (or are aware of it).

Social Motives

At the same time, we might assume conspiratorial ideation would be related to the need for closure and definite explanations of the world and its phenomena, however this was not found to be a strong factor. Instead, it may be driven by a need to feel unique, or “special”, especially among their peers. They want to stand out, and to feel like only they perceive what’s really going on while others remain blind to it.

These results point to the possibility that people who endorse conspiracy theories are motivated to stand out among their peers and feel entitled to special recognition. That is, those who endorse conspiracy theories may feel they possess secret knowledge about “the truth” that others fail to see or are not knowledgeable enough to possess

Simultaneously, they exhibit a consistent mistrust of others, “from peers to politicians to institutions”

These data converge on an image of conspiratorial ideation being linked to needs to valorize the self, as conspiracy theorists may perceive that they are in possession of special talents and knowledge while simultaneously feeling skeptical of others.

It’s not just the individual, though. We’re all social animals, and have our “in-groups”. One of the strong correlations with conspiratorial ideation is the perception that one’s in-group is special or exceptional, while also seeing the “out-group” as an overt threat with active malicious intent aimed at the in-group specifically.

In short: us-vs-them is a big one. Whoever the “us” is defines the polarity of the conspiratorial thinking, and it’s not exclusively a “right-wing” thing, either.

I have to be constantly vigilant against my own left-wing biases. One recent example was an article that declared RFK Jr was going to send people on ADHD medications to “labour camps”. The article was almost a complete re-invention of a quote taken from one of RFK’s appearances on some random podcast, where he had mentioned the idea of opening voluntary “wellness farms” as one option for helping people suffering from addictions.

As everyone knows, I find RFK Jr to be a dangerous nutcase and conman, but he doesn’t need to be taken out of context to find examples. He spouts so many absurd ideas and theories that can just be quoted verbatim. This kind of article was clearly designed to appeal to my leftist “in-group” types, and it did spread around in those circles, even among folks who are not normally inclined toward conspiratorial thinking.

However, the study found a weak-to-moderate correlation between a Right-Wing Authoritarian political bent and conspiratorial thinking. So, despite being a phenomenon across the political divide, it is certainly more heavily-weighted toward the Authoritarian Right.

Paranoia and Schizotypy

Here it is, the bit I know you were all dying to know: to what extent does conspiratorial thinking rely on paranoia and schizotypal personality disorders?

This is where the study found perhaps the strongest of all correlations:

Indeed, a recent meta-analysis on the relations between conspiratorial ideation and paranoia indicated that conspiratorial ideation was strongly positively related to paranoia (k = 11, N = 2,006, r = .36, 95% CI [.30, .46])

It seems almost necessary for a conspriacy theorist to be quite paranoid (high levels of distrust and assuming malice in others), and in a lot of cases, they are.

When thinking of Paranoia, one might also think of Paranoid Schizophrenia, a kind of penultimate example of the genre. However, one can exhibit several of the symptoms of Schizophrenia - such as paranoid thinking - without being fully Schizophrenic: this is usually called a Schizotypal Personality Disorder (STPD), or Schizotypy.

Schizotypal traits contribute to holding anomalous beliefs (e.g., paranormal beliefs) and exhibiting decision-making biases (e.g., jumping-to-conclusions) germane to conspiratorial ideation.

STPD is mainly differentiated from Schizophrenia by the absence of actual hallucinations, and is typically accompanied by a mood disorder (which is rare for actual Schizophrenia). This makes for a difference in overall classification: Schizophrenia is defined as a psychotic disorder, while STPD is a Personality disorder.

Unsurprisingly, but still interestingly, the study found:

conspiratorial ideation manifests medium-to-large positive correlations with total scores on schizotypy measures as well as scores on lower order schizotypal facets, such as odd and bizarre thinking styles.

There is still a question as to exactly how common the schizotypal facets they mention are in the general population, and therefore how “normal” they are, but there is little doubt of a connection here.

Conclusions?

Conspiracy theorists tend to see everything at this weird “other level”, a quantum level, where you look super closely at a single leaf on a single tree, down to its atomic structure, and proceed to make immediate conclusions about the entire forest, despite never even looking at it.

Something like this seemed to be going on quite literally here on Substack, where some people went out and bought themselves microscopes and looked at various blood samples and other things which are supposed to have quantities of Covid-19 vaccine in them; one of these publications shared some videos they’d taken of lipid spheres and microbubbles in a sample, and said “if you look closely at this video, you can see the nanobots moving around in the sample.”

Indeed the video does show the tiny bubbles jiggling around in the sample. However, they’ve assumed that the movement must be controlled, and therefore, the bubbles must be nanobots. They cannot conceive it to be natural in any way, shape or form. In reality, they’re simply observing the phenomenon of Brownian Motion, which can be observed in anything microscopic that is suspended in a liquid, like pollen grains.

So, while there are no great answers for how to help someone escape from these modes of paranoid and conspiratorial thought (it might not be possible for many of them), at the very least we can try to understand where it may be coming from; there are consistent themes and correlations, from the need to feel recognised and special, to schizotypal personality traits, and the avoidance of complex and effortful thinking.

Regardless, it is sometimes possible to escape, as evidenced by my experience and many others.

We will end this post with a quote about what happens when people stare too closely at anything: they’re likely to find all sorts of weird happenings.

If you put any [historical] event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on.

It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.

- Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas

This is the last episode of A Chemical Mind for 2024. Thank you all so very much for being on this journey with me.

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Merry Christmas everyone. See you in January!