Jun 25 JDN 2460121
Every man has the right to an opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
~Bernard Baruch
We shouldn’t expect political conversation to be easy. Politics inherently involves confllict. There are various competing interests and different ethical views involved in any political decision. Budgets are inherently limited, and spending must be prioritized. Raising taxes supports public goods but hurts taxpayers. A policy that reduces inflation may increase unemployment. A policy that promotes growth may also increase inequality. Freedom must sometimes be weighed against security. Compromises must be made that won’t make everyone happy—often they aren’t anyone’s first choice.
But in order to have useful political conversations, we need to have common ground. It’s one thing to disagree about what should be done—it’s quite another to ‘disagree’ about the basic facts of the world. Reasonable people can disagree about what constitutes the best policy choice. But when you start insisting upon factual claims that are empirically false, you become inherently unreasonable.
What terrifies me about our current state of political discourse is that we do not seem to have this common ground. We can’t even agree about basic facts of the world. Unless we can fix this, political conversation will be impossible.
I am tempted to say “anymore”—it at least feels to me like politics used to be different. But maybe it’s always been this way, and the Internet simply made the unreasonable voices louder. Overall rates of belief in most conspiracy theories haven’t changed substantially over time. Many other times have declared themselves ‘the golden age of conspiracy theory’. Maybe this has always been a problem. Maybe the greatest reason humanity has never been able to achieve peace is that large swaths of humanity can’t even agree on the basic facts.
Donald Trump exemplified this fact-less approach to politics, and QAnon remains a disturbingly significant force in our politics today. It’s impossible to have a sensible conversation with people who are convinced that you’re supporting a secret cabal of Satanic child molesters—and all the more impossible because they were willing to become convinced of that on literally zero evidence. But Trump was not the first conspiracist candidate, and will not be the last.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now seems to be challenging Trump for the title of ‘most unreasonable Presidential candidate’, as he has now advocated for an astonishing variety of bizarre unfounded claims: that vaccines are deadly, that antidepressants are responsible for mass shootings, that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon. He even claims things that can be quickly refuted simply by looking up the figures: He says that Switzerland’s gun ownership rate is comparable to the US, when in fact it’s only about one-fourth as high. No other country even comes close to the extraordinarily high rate of gun ownership in the US; we are the only country in the world with more privately-owned guns than private citizens to own them—more guns than people. (We also have by far the most military weapons as well, but that’s a somewhat different issue.)
What should we be doing about this? I think at this point it’s clear that simply sitting back and hoping it goes away on its own is not working. There is a widespread fear that engaging with bizarre theories simply grants them attention, but I think we have no serious alternative. They aren’t going to disappear if we simply ignore them.
That still leaves the question of how to engage. Simply arguing with their claims directly and presenting mainstream scientific evidence appears to be remarkably ineffective. They will simply dismiss the credibility of the scientific evidence, often by exaggerating genuine flaws in scientific institutions. The journal system is broken? Big Pharma has far too much influence? Established ideas take too long to become unseated? All true. But that doesn’t mean that magic beans cure cancer.
A more effective—not easy, and certainly not infallible, but more effective—strategy seems to be to look deeper into why people say the things they do. I emphasize the word ‘say’ here, because it often seems to be the case that people don’t really believe in conspiracy theories the way they believe in ordinary facts. It’s more the mythology mindset.
Rather than address the claims directly, you need to address the person making the claims. Before getting into any substantive content, you must first build rapport and show empathy—a process some call pre-suasion. Then, rather than seeking out the evidence that support their claims—as there will be virtually none—try to find out what emotional need the conspiracy theory satisfies for them: How does it help them make sense of the terrifying chaos of the world? How does professing belief in something that initially seems absurd and horrific actually make the world seem more orderly and secure in their mind?
For instance, consider the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. At face value, this is horrifying: The US government is so evil it was prepared to launch an attack on our own soil, against our own citizens, in order to justify starting a war in another country? Against such a government, I think violent insurrection is the only viable response. But if you consider it from another perspective, it makes the world less terrifying: At least, there is someone in control. An attack like 9/11 means that the world is governed by chaos: Even we in the seemingly-impregnable fortress of American national security are in fact vulnerable to random attacks by small groups of dedicated fanatics. In the conspiracist vision of the world, the US government becomes a terrible villain; but at least the world is governed by powerful, orderly forces—not random chaos.
Or consider one of the most widespread (and, to be fair, one of the least implausible) conspiracy theories: That JFK was assassinated not by a single fanatic, but by an organized agency—the KGB, or the CIA, or the Vice President. In the real world, the President of the United States—the most powerful man on the entire planet—can occasionally be felled by a single individual who is dedicated enough and lucky enough. In the conspiracist world, such a powerful man can only be killed by someone similarly powerful. The world may be governed by an evil elite—but at least it is governed. The rules may be evil, but at least there are rules.
Understanding this can give you some sympathy for people who profess conspiracies: They are struggling to cope with the pain of living in a chaotic, unpredictable, disorderly world. They cannot deny that terrible events happen, but by attributing them to unseen, organized forces, they can at least believe that those terrible events are part of some kind of orderly plan.
At the same time, you must constantly guard against seeming arrogant or condescending. (This is where I usually fail; it’s so hard for me to take these ideas seriously.) You must present yourself as open-minded and interested in speaking in good faith. If they sense that you aren’t taking them seriously, people will simply shut down and refuse to talk any further.
It’s also important to recognize that most people with bizarre beliefs aren’t simply gullible. It isn’t that they believe whatever anyone tells them. On the contrary, they seem to suffer from misplaced skepticism: They doubt the credible sources and believe the unreliable ones. They are hyper-aware of the genuine problems with mainstream sources, and yet somehow totally oblivious to the far more glaring failures of the sources they themselves trust.
Moreover, you should never expect to change someone’s worldview in a single conversation. That simply isn’t how human beings work. The only times I have ever seen anyone completely change their opinion on something in a single sitting involved mathematical proofs—showing a proper proof really can flip someone’s opinion all by itself. Yet even scientists working in their own fields of expertise generally require multiple sources of evidence, combined over some period of time, before they will truly change their minds.
Your goal, then, should not be to convince someone that their bizarre belief is wrong. Rather, convince them that some of the sources they trust are just as unreliable as the ones they doubt. Or point out some gaps in the story they hadn’t considered. Or offer an alternative account of events that explains the outcome without requiring the existence of a secret evil cabal. Don’t try to tear down the entire wall all at once; chip away at it, one little piece at a time—and one day, it will crumble.
Hopefully if we do this enough, we can make useful political conversation possible.