12/19/2017 Reason and Reality in an Era of Conspiracy - Quillette

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Published on December 19, 2017 — comments 3

Reason and Reality in an Era of Conspiracy

written by Stephen T. Asma

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Did Nelson Mandela die in prison or did he die years later? Many people reading this probably lived through such recent
history, and know perfectly well that he died decades a er his release. Many of our students, however, do not know this
because they didn’t live through it, and they haven’t been taught it. That is trivially true, and not particularly worrisome. But
in 2010 a quirky blogger named Fiona Broome noticed that many people she met – people who should know better –
incorrectly believed that Mandela had died in prison. She dubbed this kind of widespread collective false memory the
“Mandela E ect” and began gathering more cases, inspiring others to contribute examples to a growing online database. Ask

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your students if they’ve heard of the Mandela E ect and you will nd that 95 percent are familiar with it. They are fascinated
by it because it is a highly successful topic of countless YouTube videos and memes.

Examples of the Mandela E ect are amusing and easy to nd online. Everyone thinks that Darth Vader said “Luke, I am your
father” but in fact he said, “No, I am your father.” Everyone thinks Forrest Gump said “Life is like a box of chocolates” but he
actually said, “life was like a box of chocolates.” The Queen in Snow White never said “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” but
actually said, “Magic mirror on the wall.” The popular children’s book and show “The Berenstein Bears” is actually “The
“Berenstain Bears.” Many people think evangelist Billy Graham died years ago but – at the time of this writing, at least – he
lives on.

There’s nothing particularly surprising or even interesting about such failures of memory.
The Memory Illusion by Dr. Julia Our memories are deeply fallible and highly suggestible. A recent study revealed that
Shaw
psychologists can easily coax subjects to ‘remember’ committing a crime they never actually
committed (see Dr. Julia Shaw’s recent book The Memory Illusion). With the right coaching I
can start to remember the time I assaulted a stranger, even if I never did. Moreover, cultural memes – like famous movie
dialogue lines – naturally glitch, vary, and distort in the replication process, especially in mass media replication. The version
an actor misstates on a late-night talk show, becomes the new urtext and rapidly replicates through the wider culture,
replacing the original. All cultural transmission is a giant “telephone game.”

But here’s where it gets weird. Students – yes, current undergrads – think the explanation for these strange false memories is
that a parallel universe is occasionally spilling into ours. In that parallel universe, apparently, Mandela did die in prison, and
the Snow White mirror phrase is how we remember it. Alternatively, a number of students believe that we humans are
moving between these parallel universes unknowingly, and also time-traveling so that our memories are distorted via the
shi ing time line.

This Berenstain Bears Conspiracy Will Blow Your Mind | Fangirl Mysteries
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When I pressed my students, suggesting they were not really serious, they grew indignant. Like a gnostic elite, they frowned
upon my failure to grasp the genius of their metaphysical conspiracy theory. As an antidote, I introduced Ockham’s Razor – a
principle originally set forth by William of Ockham (c.1287-1347), that simpler explanations are preferable to metaphysically
complex explanations of phenomena. When explaining an event, Ockham suggested that entities should not be multiplied
unnecessarily. As he puts it in Summa Totius Logicae, “It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.” (i.
12) When you have two competing theories that make the same predictions, the simpler one is usually better. I don’t need a
world of demonic possession, for example, to explain why the delusional person on my bus this morning was talking to his
hand.

I turned to a student in the front row to illustrate the obviousness of Ockham’s Razor. “Imagine,” I said to him, “a series of
weird bright lights appear over your neighborhood tonight around midnight. Now, which is easier to believe: that an alien

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invasion is happening, or that the military is testing a new technology?” Without

blinking, the young man told me that the military would never be in his
neighborhood, so aliens seemed more reasonable.

“But…but…” I stammered, “you have to assume a whole bunch of stu to make the
alien explanation work – like, aliens exist, aliens are intelligent, aliens have
incredible technology, aliens have travelled across the solar system, aliens have
evaded scienti c corroboration, and also that aliens would come to your
neighborhood while the military would not. Whereas, the list of assumptions for the
military testing explanation is relatively small by comparison.” He just blinked in
response.

Thus reproached, I switched to another example, asking students whether it was

easier to believe a ghost slammed their door shut, or the wind did it. Some conceded
that the wind was a leaner or more parsimonious explanation, but a great many
students already believe strongly in the reality and ubiquity of ghosts, so referring to William of Ockham

spirits did not seem to them like a violation of Ockham’s razor. Many ghost stories
from family and friends, and YouTube videos had already served as a sort of ‘corroboration’ for their theory, so ghosts and
wind had a comparably equal metaphysical status in their world.

I had arrived at the death of reductio ad absurdum arguments – where you demonstrate the absurdity of your opponent’s view,
by showing that it has obviously ridiculous implications which your opponent has not yet appreciated. But one cannot o er
such a refutation if every ridiculous implication seems equally reasonable to your opponent. You never get to an absurdity
that both parties accept, and it’s just ‘beliefs’ all the way down. It is the bottomless pit of the undiscriminating mind. It is
preferable to my students to think that alternate universes are colliding to create alternate Mandela histories and Darth Vader
dialogue, than to think we simply remember stu badly. Adiuva nos Deus.

Intense handwringing has attended the rise of fake news. The worries are justi ed, since the media has never been more
unreliable, biased, and embattled. But the proposed solutions tend to focus on xing the media, and no one dares suggest that

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we should be xing the human mind. The human mind, however, is arguably broken, and educators must implement a
rigorous curriculum of informal logic before our gathering gloom of fallacies, magical thinking, conspiracy theories, and
dogma make the Dark Ages look sunny by comparison. Obviously, it would be nice if our politicians and pundits were
reliable purveyors of truth, but since that isn’t about to happen, we should instead be striving to create citizens who see
through these charlatans. Kids who believe their mistaken memories of movie lines are proof we’re all time-traveling or
jumping between parallel realities are not those needed citizens.

Harvard legal scholars Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule suggest that contemporary Americans are more credulous and
committed to conspiracy theories because they have a “crippled epistemology.” When a person or community comes to
believe that the twin towers fell because of a U. S. government plot, or that the 1969 moon landing never happened, or that
AIDS was a manmade weapon, they reveal a crippled epistemology. And, according to Sunstein and Vermeule, as well as
Cambridge political theorist David Runciman, the “crippling” results from a reduced number of informational sources or
streams.1 When information enters a community through only a few restricted channels, then the group becomes isolated
and their acceptance of ‘weird’ ideas doesn’t seem irrational or weird to those inside the group. We see lots of evidence of
this, like when people get all their news on Facebook but the news is trickling through a single ideological pipeline.

On this view, increasing the number of informational sources reduces conspiracy gullibility. Closed societies, like North
Korea and to a lesser degree China, are more susceptible to fake news, conspiracy, and collective delusion. Belief systems in
these closed environments are extremely resistant to correction, because alternative perspectives are unavailable. Online
information bubbles produce some of the same results as political media censorship.

My own experience in the Creation Museum in Kentucky con rms the idea that informational isolation is highly distorting. I
spent time touring Noah’s Ark, watching animatronic dinosaurs frolic with Adam and Eve, and talking to the director Ken
Ham. The Evangelical isolation became obvious, and was even worn as a badge of honor by Ham and others, as if to say, “We
are uncontaminated by secular information.” The Bible-belt audience for Creation Science gets all its news about the outside
world from Evangelical cable TV shows, Christian radio programs, blogs, podcasts, and of course church. An Evangelical
museum, claiming the earth is 4000 years old, is just icing on the mono- avored informational cake.

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People and dinosaurs co-exist in an exhibit at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Pic by David Berkowitz (2011)

However, this kind of information isolation cannot explain our students’ gullibility. Yes, the average undergrad has a silo of
narrow interests, but they are not de cient in informational streams. In fact, I want to argue they have the opposite problem.
We now have almost unlimited information streams ready to hand on our laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other mass
media. If I Google the 9/11 atrocity, it will be approximately 2 or 3 clicks to a guy in his mother’s basement, explaining in
compelling detail how the Bush administration knew the attack was coming, engineered the collapse of the twin towers, and
that the U. S. government is a puppet for the Illuminati, and so on. If you don’t already have a logical method or even an
intuitive sense for parsing the digital spray of theories, claims, images, videos, and so-called facts coming at you, then you are
quickly adri in what seem like equally reasonable theories.

During the Renaissance, Europe had a similar credulity problem. So much crazy stu was coming back from the New World
– animals, foods, peoples, etc. – that Europeans didn’t quite know what to believe. The most we could do is collect all this
stu into wunderkammern or curiosity cabinets, and hope that systemic knowledge would make sense of it eventually. In a way,

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the current undergraduate mind is like the pre-Modern mind, chasing a er weirdness, shiny objects, and connections that
seem more like hermetic and alchemical systems. According to a recent survey by the National Science Foundation, for
example, over half of young people today (aged between 18 and 24), believe that astrology is a science, providing real
knowledge.2

During the last three years, I have surveyed around 600 students and found some depressing trends. Approximately half of
these students believe they have dreams that predict the future. Half believe in ghosts. A third of them believe aliens already
visit our planet. A third believe that AIDS is a man-made disease created to destroy speci c social groups. A third believe that
the 1969 moon landing never happened. And a third believe that Princess Diana was assassinated by the royal family.
Importantly, it’s not the same third that believes all these things. There is not a consistently gullible group that believes every
wacky thing. Rather, the same student will be utterly dogmatic about one strange theory, but dismissive and disdainful about
another.

There appears to be a two-step breakdown in critical thinking. Unlimited information, without logical training, leads to a
crude form of skepticism in students. Everything is doubtful and everything is possible. Since that state of suspended
commitment is not tenable, it is usually followed by an almost arbitrary dogmatism.

From Socrates through Descartes to Michael Shermer today, doubting is usually thought to be an emancipatory step in
critical thinking. Moderate skepticism keeps your mind open and pushes you to nd the evidence or principles supporting
controversial claims and theories. Philosopher David Hume, however, described a crude form of skepticism that leads to
paranoia and then gullibility. He saw a kind of breakdown in critical thinking that presages our own.

“There is indeed a kind of brutish and ignorant skepticism,” Hume wrote, “which
David Hume (1711-1776) gives the vulgar a general prejudice against what they do not easily understand, and
makes them reject every principle, which requires elaborate reasoning to prove and
establish it.” Paranoid people, Hume explained, give their assent “to the most absurd
tenets, which a traditional superstition has recommended to them. They rmly believe in witches; though they will not
believe nor attend to the most simple proposition of Euclid.”3

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Absent the smug tone, Hume is onto something. Creationists have just enough skepticism to doubt evolution, climate deniers
have just enough skepticism to doubt global warming, and millennial students have just enough to believe in the latest
conspiracy theory, as well as ghosts, fortune telling, astrology, and so on. In the Creationism case, the crippled epistemology
results from too little information but in my Chicago undergrads the gullibility results from a tsunami of competing
informational options. For our students, settling on a conspiracy closes an otherwise open confusion loop, converting
distressing complexity and uncertainty into a reassuring answer – even if that answer is “time travel” or “aliens” or “the
Illuminati.”

Another motive seems lurking in the background too, and it is insidious. The millennial generation does not like being
wrong. They are unaccustomed to it. Their education – a unique blend of No Child Le Behind, helicopter parenting, and
oppression olympics, has made them uncomfortable with Socratic criticism. When my colleague recently corrected the
grammar on a student’s essay, the student scolded him for enacting “microaggressions” against her syntax. So, conspiracies
no doubt seem especially attractive when they help to reinforce a student’s infallibility. Having an alternate dimension of
Mandela E ect realities, for example, means the student is never wrong. I’m always right, it’s just reality that keeps changing.

There are two cures for all this bad thinking. One of them is out of our hands as educators, and involves growing up. While
the demands of adult life are sometimes delayed – as graduates return to live at home and postpone starting families – there
is an inevitable diminution of conspiracy indulgence when one is struggling to pay a mortgage, raise children, and otherwise
succeed in the quotidian challenges of middle class. Interestingly, however, this reduction in wacky thinking is not provided
by the light of reason and educational attainment, but rather by the inevitable suppression or inhibition resulting from the
demands of the workaday world. Our students at 30-something and 40-something are not converts to rationality, but merely
distracted from their old adventures in gullibility.

The other cure for conspiracy thinking, and the problems of too little and too much information, is something we educators
can provide. And it’s relatively cheap. We could require an informal logic course for every undergraduate, preferably in their
freshman or sophomore year. The course should be taught by philosophers or those explicitly trained in logic. I’m not
talking about some vague ‘critical thinking’ course that has been robbed of its logic component. I’m talking about learning to
understand syllogisms, fallacies, criteria for argument evaluation, deduction, induction, burden of proof, cognitive biases,
and so on. The informal logic course (as opposed to formal symbolic logic) uses real life arguments as instances of these

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fundamentals, focusing on reasoning skills in social and political debate, news, editorials, advertising, blogs, podcasts,
institutional communications, and so on. The students are not acquiring these skills by osmosis through other courses. It
needs to be made explicit in the curriculum.

Studying logic gives students a way to weight the information that is coming at them. It gives them the tools to discriminate
between competing claims and theories. In the currently frantic ‘attention economy,’ logic also teaches the patience and grit
needed to follow complex explanations through their legitimate levels of depth. It won’t matter how sensitive to diversity our
students become, or how good their self-esteem is, if a lack of logic renders them profoundly gullible. More than just a
curative to lazy conspiracy thinking, logic is a great bulwark against totalitarianism and manipulation. The best cure for fake
news is smarter citizens.

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, and author of ten books including The Evolution
of Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He writes regularly for the New York Times and Aeon. You can follow him
on Twitter @stephen_asma 

References:

1
Sunstein, C. R. and Vermeule, A. (2009), Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures*. Journal of Political Philosophy, 17: 202–227. And see
Runciman’s work on a 5-year funded research project called “Conspiracy and Democracy” at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org

2 National Science Foundation, https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/chapter-7/c7h.htm

3
See David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hackett, 2nd Ed. 1998), Book I.

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3 Comments

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Uri Harris
December 19, 2017

I think consistently teaching students that critical thinking = challenging power hierarchies plays a role as well. The advance of critical theory
may very well lead to more conspiracy thought. Claire Lehmann mentioned in a recent article a critical theorist who wrote a thesis on the
Australian Government’s vaccination policy being a conspiracy between Big Pharma and the WHO.

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Florina T
December 19, 2017

So, if we follow your reasoning to its logical end, people only need to be correctly educated to ditch religion altogether. Because nothing about it
is logical and stu .
We have many thousands of years behind us already that prove this is not how its done.
There’s absolutely nothing to prevent people to go on just as they do today, irrespective of any kind of training they’ll undergo. They will
continue to be dogmatic in relation to some theories and laugh at others.
To move from propping your intellect with dogmas to making sense of the world and your place in it, to understanding that you are essentially
alone – a natural accident of evolution, if you wish, that there is no higher purpose than the one you draw for yourself and that there won’t be
any prize or retribution whether you succeed or fail – and still feel at peace with yourself it’s not achieved by logic.

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It’s a decision which has nothing to do with logic, in fact I would argue that it is illogical since many people who come to this conclusion live in
anguish and those who are the most dogmatic seem to live more ful lling lives by their own account.

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