Among the Truthers (38 page)

The same is true of conspiracy
movements
themselves—which never entirely go away, even as the passage of years fails to vindicate their underlying theories. Even when conspiracists move on to fresh subjects, they tend to cite the truth of their old claims as validations for their new ones. Since the military-industrial complex killed JFK, why wouldn't it have destroyed the World Trade Center? Since the Bilderbergers had Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in their pocket, why not Barack Obama as well? In this way, conspiracy theories have built up like layers of rubble that smother what once were the intellectual foundations of rationalism.

An Ounce of Prevention

“Nothing you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this: That if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

—Harold Macmillan, prime minister of Britain 1957–1963, quoting his classics tutor at Oxford

Conspiracism is a stubborn creed because humans are pattern-seeking animals. Show us a sky full of stars, and we'll arrange them into animals and giant spoons. Show us a world full of random misery, and we'll use the same trick to connect the dots into secret conspiracies. For most of us, our desire to impose an artificial pattern on world events is held in check by our rational sense, which tells us that life often is cruel and unpredictable. Or we find compartmentalized, socially accepted outlets to give expression to our pattern-seeking—such as astrology or mainstream religion. Conspiracism takes root when, for the reasons discussed in this book, our pattern-seeking appetite overwhelms these containment mechanisms.

Yet this same pattern-seeking penchant is also the key to
fighting
conspiracism: By teaching ourselves to recognize conspiracism's unchanging basic structure—from its archetype in the
Protocols
to its modern incarnation in the 9/11 Truth movement—we can protect our brains from conspiracy theories before they have a chance to infect our thinking.

Conspiracism is deeply rooted in American thinking. Then again, the same once was true of racism. Exactly 150 years ago, the United States went to war with itself over the principle that a man could be chained up like an animal because of the color of his skin. It wasn't till 1954 that black and white schoolchildren were granted the constitutional right to attend the same schools. Even as recently as the 1970s, well within the living memory of middle-aged Americans, the idea that blacks and whites should be able to marry one another, or use the same swimming pools, was still controversial. And then, in the space of just a few decades, everything changed—capped by an extraordinary moment in early 2009 when it could be said that America's most powerful politician, beloved entertainment figure, and revered athlete all were black (Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Tiger Woods).

Women, meanwhile, went from ornamental second-class citizens in the typing pool and kitchen to full-fledged business-world equals. Perhaps most stunning of all was the transformation of our perception of gays. In 1973, homosexuality still was classified as a mental disorder by the American Psychiatric Association. Just 25 years later, NBC was airing a hit sitcom starring two gay men as part of its “must see” Thursday night lineup. Never in human history have social attitudes toward what we now (increasingly anachronistically) call “disadvantaged groups” been transformed so quickly. Never has human bigotry been winnowed at anywhere near this pace.

What developments in the Western intellectual condition permitted such a massive, wholesale shift in thinking? Whole libraries of books have been written about the struggle against racism, sexism, and homophobia, and I will not try to summarize them here. Instead, I will highlight just one essential factor, whose roots are in the Enlightenment, but which reached full bloom only in the twentieth century: civilizational self-awareness.

By this, I mean the habit of mind that permits us to stand back and objectively observe the flaws, hypocrisies, and double-standards embedded in our society. This ability is taken for granted in the modern Western world, so much so that we don't even recognize it as a special frame of mind. But it is: Throughout human history, and in most of the non-Western world today, the superiority of one's own tribe over others, of the faithful over the infidels, of the we over the they, has been entirely taken for granted—all corollaries of the reflexive tribalism that evolution has programmed into the hard-wiring of the human brain. Even the basic idea that a civilization should be “improved” can exist only in a society that is aware of its relationship to history and the outside world: It has little resonance in caste-ridden communities where the pace of technological change is slow, sons inherit their fathers' jobs, social mobility is nonexistent, and the established pecking order—with all its attendant forms of discrimination—is uncritically accepted as God-given and timeless.

Conspiracism cannot be eradicated any more than we can eradicate nationalism, midlife ennui, psychosis, or any of the other causes cataloged in Chapter 5. But among otherwise mentally healthy and open-minded individuals, it can be minimized by applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades. As noted in Chapter 2 conspiracist mythologies tend to follow the same predictable pattern: There is no reason why people can't learn to recognize it.

This is an educational project that, to my knowledge, has never been attempted: For all the damage conspiracy theories have wrought, they traditionally have been regarded as mere intellectual curios, and so conspiracism never has been included in the canon of toxic
isms
targeted by educators. Instead, the approach has been to attack conspiracism's symptoms—often implementing a new brand of conspiracism as a cure for the old. Just as the fight against racism begat political correctness, the fight against communism begat McCarthyism, and the John Birch Society; and now, in our own era, the backlash against militant Islam and One World environmentalism has led to the Birthers.

What young minds need are the intellectual tools that not only permit them to identify established conspiracist creeds, but also allow them to identify the common features that bind all conspiratorial ideologies. The ideal time for students to receive these skills is when they are old enough to understand complex, abstract ideas, but before they have been exposed to conspiracism in a systematic way on campus or via the Internet: the freshman year of college. As the example of Luke Rudkowski shows, this also happens to be the time in life when many young people are looking to define their identity through the sort of radical, overarching secular faith conspiracism provides (which is one of the reasons so many college students fall hard for Karl Marx or Ayn Rand).

Of course, there already are numerous American intellectuals and organizations dedicated to the cause of fighting political radicalism, including the debunking of conspiracy theories. These include the James Randi Educational Foundation, an atheistic organization that specializes in refuting claims of paranormal and supernatural phenomena (and which recently has formed an education advisory panel); the Montgomery, Alabama–based Southern Poverty Law Center and Somerville, Massachusetts–based PublicEye.org, both of which take on right-wing conspiracists as part of their mandate to promote civil rights and fight bigotry; and the Skeptics Society, an Altadena, California–based group that describes itself as a “scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas, and the promotion of science.” (Thanks to his popular articles, books and speaking tours, Michael Shermer, the Skeptics Society's executive director, and the editor-in-chief of
Skeptic
magazine, likely ranks as the most effective debunker of junk science and conspiracy theories in America.) Also worthy of note is Snopes.com, an amateurish-looking but surprisingly authoritative resource for debunking urban legends; and, for vetting claims made by political candidates, Factcheck.org which is run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

But the limitation associated with all of these resources is that they preach mostly to the converted—i.e., mainstream educators, journalists, and activists who already take a deeply skeptical attitude toward conspiracist movements. As explained in Chapter 7, conspiracy theorists themselves tend to cut themselves off from all but the most radical information sources; and regard even independent, well-respected NGOs as complicit in the same power structure that envelops Washington and Wall Street. (This fact helps explain why there are so many more conspiracist books sold on the Internet than debunking books. “Debunking books don't sell,” one New York City editor warned me when I told him that my original draft of
Among the Truthers
contained several long chapters explaining the logical fallacies within 9/11 Truth theories. “Conspiracy theorists won't believe you. And normal people don't need to be told what you're telling them. So you have no audience.”)

Moreover, given the low level of trust that Americans have in their political leaders, it is out of the question that Washington, or even state governments, should be directly involved in the sort of educational project I am describing. Consider that in September 2009, when Barack Obama delivered a bland speech to the nation's students, urging them to work hard at their studies, many conservative Americans attacked the innocuous gesture as a form of statist propaganda—and some even kept their children home. One can only imagine the reaction if government officials instead were lecturing Americans about what sort of political ideas they should and shouldn't believe.

W
hat would an anticonspiracist curriculum look like? The approach I've taken in this book, I like to believe, helps answer that question.

One of the reasons I chose to focus on
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
in the second chapter is that its status as a hoax is now entirely uncontroversial among educated people in Western societies. While there exist tenured North American university professors who embrace conspiracy theories about 9/11—I have profiled a number of them—there is not a single faculty member on any first-tier university campus whose career would survive if he or she said they believed the
Protocols
was a legitimate historical document that described a real plot by Jews to enslave human civilization. The same is broadly true of any faculty member who denied the Holocaust (though I am aware of at least one tenured university professor who is on record with Holocaust-denial—Lincoln University's Kaukab Siddique, a Pakistan-born professor of English and Mass Communications who also believes that American Jews control “the entire economy,” and who calls openly for Israel's destruction).

The Protocols
and the Holocaust-denial movement thus would serve as generally uncontroversial objects of study in a university course that teaches students to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought. More specifically, it would provide an opportunity to educate students about the basic themes contained in almost all systemic conspiracy theories—singularity, evil, incumbency, greed, and hypercompetence. These would be presented as warning signs in regard to the radical doctrines that students eventually will confront.

Teaching about Truthers, Birthers, anti-Bilderbergers, New World Order types, and all the rest also would be informative. But that would bring the curriculum I'm describing into the realm of current events—and thereby render it vulnerable to the charge of indoctrination or propaganda; which would in turn create friction between parents and school board trustees or university administrators, not to mention provide raw meat to the conspiracist blogosphere. Far better to have the next generation of students themselves connect the dots between the five conspiracist building blocks contained in the
Protocols
to more modern conspiracist movements.

Another advantage of a
Protocols-
centered curriculum is that it would reinforce traditional scholastic messaging promoting tolerance, especially if it also included modules on the KKK, anti-Mason agitation, Nazi propaganda, anti-Catholic hatred, and other historical examples that demonstrated the link between bigotry and conspiracism. This would help the project draw in the existing network of NGOs, education think tanks, and activists that are committed to the cause of antidiscrimination. Yet it would also be distinct from these existing campaigns: The fight against racism and its ilk typically is presented as a battle to eradicate hatred from people's hearts; but as I've described here, the fight against conspiracism is an intellectual project centered on pattern-recognition.

Finally, an anticonspiracist curriculum would aim to provide students with a grounding in Internet literacy. Students would be taught the difference between news and opinion; and between websites that are run by professional journalists, and those that are not. They would be taught the limitations associated with searching for information using Google and other search engines. And they would be instructed in the manner by which multimedia effects can be used to promote misinformation.

A
study of conspiracism can have benefits that extend beyond merely inoculating young minds against conspiracy theories. On this score, I'll present myself as an example: The experience of writing this book has fundamentally altered my view of politics, faith, and the human capacity for rational thought.

That's not something I expected when I set out in early 2008. I then approached conspiracy theorists as if they were lab specimens to be poked and prodded from the other side of a tape recorder. On the Venn diagrams of human sociology, the “conspiracy theorist” was something I imagined to be a distinct and identifiable class of pathological thinker—a breed apart from humanity's “normal” rank and file that could be circled off in black ink.