In Defence Of Conspiracy Theorists: It’s The Trauma, Stupid

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a US presidential election in the wings this week. But whatever Tuesday’s result, the one group of folks you probably shouldn’t blame for the outcome are the ‘conspiracy theorists’. Kari James looks back on the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump to help explain why ‘believing crazy things’ isn’t always, necessarily, ‘crazy’. And an ironic and sarcastic trigger warning for bleeding heart lefties: you’re potentially going to be distressed to find out why.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Hanlon’s razor implores us to not give our governments and institutions undue credit in deeming them capable of conspiracies. They’re probably just inept.

But there are folks among us who won’t attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice.

An assassination attempt on the former POTUS is a Pavlovian signal for conspiratorial drool. So, the Secret Service couldn’t just be inept. If they are, we’d have to ask hard questions of them, like whether they prioritise DEI quotas above competence.

Instead, they must be either part of a conspiracy to assassinate the former POTUS or part of a conspiracy to cement a Trump comeback, depending on which side of the political aisle you sway.

The mainstream media are having a field day generating clickbait from partisan brainfarts.

The left of the spectrum frustratingly sheds little light beyond denigrating conspiracy theorists as wingnut idiots and losers.

There’s an ironic cachet associated with claiming to be the sensible, logical adults in the room while poking fun at folks who distrust the United States’ ‘sharp as a tack’ leadership in an era of heightened political tension and word salad.

In 2022, Professor Matt Hornsey and his team at the University of Queensland published a comprehensive review of research into conspiracy theories. They confirmed that personality-related factors – like whether someone is a wingnut, an idiot, or a loser – are a bit of a nothingburger when it comes to predicting who’s likely to engage in conspiracy beliefs.

And both sides of the political aisle engage in motivated reasoning for their pet beliefs.

Anecdotally, the first woo-woo whispers I heard were from Left-identifying colleagues, hinting that Trump’s near-miss back in mid-July in Pennsylvania was his version of a Reichstag Fire, engineered to sway the election in his favour. What are the odds the former president choreographed his moves so precisely as to only lose the tip of his ear to a bullet?

Is it less likely that purposefully lax security allowed for the possibility that a lone gunman could slip through the cracks?

 

What if Malice Actually Explains it?

Much of the media frames conspiracy theories as a comfort blanket for pitiable folks desperate for a sense of certainty and control in the face of seemingly random violence. But this framing lacks support from the empirical literature.

While conspiracy beliefs do grow stronger when people feel powerless, exposure to conspiracy theories typically increases a person’s sense of powerlessness by reducing their sense of control.

So maybe it’s not about needing a sense of control in the face of randomness. Maybe folks who won’t attribute to incompetence that which can be explained by malice are simply folks who’ve had a lot of experience on the receiving end of malice.

Perhaps they know it when they see it.

Or perhaps it’s like when you buy a new car and then you see that model everywhere you go. The Baader-Meinhof effect applied to nefarious villains and their stooges.

In symptomatic survivors of both simple and complex trauma, fear and loss of trust generalize beyond the epicentre of a traumatic experience, projected, as it were, onto subsequent neutral experiences.

It seems we have an inbuilt mechanism designed to protect us from a repeat of what hurt us.

 

The Fault Line of Identity Politics

Dutch researchers Jan-Willen van Prooijen and Mark van Vugt propose that conspiracy theories evolved as a means of alerting us to and protecting us from hostile coalitions or outgroups.

Their adaptive conspiracism hypothesis makes sense. By definition, conspiracy theories involve the notion that coalitions of individuals are acting in their own interests and against the interests of others.

Ingroups are typically defined by arbitrary identities associated with nationality, ethnicity, religion, ideology, or political affiliations. Identity therefore demarcates the fault lines along which ingroups and outgroups are divided.

A standout example of this is international differences in subscription to 9/11 conspiracy theories. In the wake of the attacks, 22% of Canadians surveyed believed they were an inside job. Across a range of Muslim nations, 78% of individuals surveyed endorsed the conspiracy theory.

So, in parts of the world well-experienced with the receiving end of US military aggression, folks were more likely to believe the US government would do something nefarious as a pretext for bombing them.

Does this mean people who are historically on the receiving end of aggression are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories?

If so, what does this say about those of us who ridicule them?

Well, the interesting somethingburger in Matt Hornsey’s research was this: we are all prone to believing in conspiracy theories. It just depends on our sociohistorical context as to whether or not we will.

 

The Role of Historical Trauma

Historical trauma is a term that applies to the collective trauma of populations who share arbitrary group characteristics like ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Typical examples of historical trauma include war, occupation, or colonialism, and systemic abuses such as genocide, slavery, and dispossession.

Unsurprisingly, such experiences lead survivors to feel oppressed, victimised and powerless, even generations on from the epicentre of their collective trauma. Many also become paranoid and suspicious, over-generalising from their past experiences.

These people are often the survivors of actual conspiracies in which perpetrators and aggressors succeeded in their objectives by concealing their true intentions and propagandising would-be witnesses into believing in their virtues and/or the inherent deficits in their victims.

Often the victims only come to realize the extent of what has been done to them and members of their group later, having been successfully duped themselves.

Fool me once, as they say.

As it happens, conspiracy theorists are hellbent on not being fooled twice. For obvious and compelling reasons. So, they become hypervigilant to signs of threat.

Of course, false positives abound. Especially when historically traumatised people successfully move to places where they are not oppressed or victimised. Or when formerly conflict-ridden regions enter periods of peace. Or when the formerly enslaved are liberated.

Far from being maladaptive, the development of an extreme defence against persecution is highly adaptive. What we witness is survivor bias, as false negatives can prove fatal; those who are successfully duped don’t live to tell the tale.

 

The Trauma Triad

Historical trauma underpins belief in conspiracy theories in three ways: a sense of powerlessness, victim mindset, and status degradation.

A sense of powerlessness is common among survivors of both historical trauma and present-day institutional or systemic abuses, which is why rebuilding a sense of agency is integral to the treatment of trauma.

The perpetrator outgroup is viewed, in contrast, as powerful and agentic, having gained power by stealing from the victim ingroup.

A victim mindset leads people to behave as though they are under siege, and thus perceive and interpret the behaviour of outgroups as potentially threatening, even when neutral or positive.

When under siege, people are fearful, suspicious, and on guard, ready to respond to any perceived threat.

This siege mentality is not just the domain of tinfoil hatters and MAGA Republicans. It’s also prevalent amongst historically oppressed or marginalised groups including ethnic minorities, colonised populations, and the LGBTIQ community, for whom life under siege is not a distant memory.

The status degradation endured by the historically oppressed positions them as low-status citizens, expected to suck up their circumstances and accept material disadvantage. This deprivation results in prolonged insecurity and uncertainty, which in turn lowers trust in government and other authorities.

So, it’s not surprising that conspiracy theorists tend to cluster around the poverty line. Representation of conspiracy theories is a lot higher in countries where per-capita GDP is low, and where inequality is high.

There is also a discernible increase in conspiracy theorising during – and in the aftermath of – periods of economic instability. As economic vitality is viewed as a metric for a government’s commitments to its population, it serves as an indicator of whether the government can be trusted.

 

The Erosion of Trust

Endorsement of conspiracy theories is also higher in countries rated as more corrupt, where trust in authorities is understandably low.

Indeed, in a paper by French researchers Laurent Cordonier and Florian Cafiero published this year, the authors suggest that public sector corruption is fertile ground for conspiracy theories because it renders them plausible.

Authoritarian states also produce far more conspiracy theorists than democratic ones.

A far cry from the stereotype of a young, pallid, neckbearded misogynist who lives in his mum’s basement, Cordonier and Cafiero’s study of 21 countries suggests the average conspiracy theorist is far more likely to be an elderly Indonesian genocide survivor or a black South African who remembers Apartheid all too well.

It is not, contrary to commonly received wisdom, irrational for people subject to oppressive regimes riddled with corruption to distrust their governments and institutions. Lies and cover-ups warrant skepticism; the gullible in such cases are perhaps those who don’t believe in conspiracy theories.

I say all this with one eye on the possibility that any given conspiracy theory could turn out to be on the money.

If the CIA were responsible for the assassinations of a number of world leaders, then why not also JFK? Wouldn’t that make it seem plausible the CIA could also be behind a plot to assassinate Donald Trump?

Whether it’s true or not (and I don’t have a dog in this fight), it’s hard for anyone with a finger on the pulse of history to argue that it’s completely implausible. What divides those of us who extrapolate from these patterns from those of us who don’t is the trauma triad.

Take that to mean that if you’ve never at least sympathised with a conspiracy theory, it could just be that you’ve led a pretty white picket fence life. You could stand to learn a little about how rough some folks have had it.

And you could just be one shitty experience away from becoming a conspiracy theorist yourself.

 

Canaries in the Conspiracy Coalmine

While this is a treatise in defence of conspiracy theorists, it’s also fair to say that an orientation toward conspiracy beliefs is not without negative consequence.

Historical trauma survivors and their descendants are at greater risk of mental ill health, including anxiety, depression, and PTSD, as well as issues with self-esteem and trust.

The sense of powerlessness, victim mindset, and status degradation are not foregone conclusions of all historical trauma, however. It is possible for survivors to gain a sense of agency and feel empowered, liberated from their victim status. And unfounded beliefs in conspiracies tend to drop off as people become more empowered.

This means it’s essential first to acknowledge and validate experiences of abuse, oppression, or deprivation. It’s only after this truth is spoken that reconciliation can begin and the traumatic rift between ingroup and outgroup can begin to heal.

But you know what? It wouldn’t hurt if governments were more transparent and trustworthy, less corrupt and self-serving. And it wouldn’t hurt if the news consisted of more than just corporate-sponsored partisan punditry.

Perhaps the assassination attempt on the former POTUS is an opportunity to reflect on why there are so many conspiracy theorists in our purportedly free democracies.

Historic oppression. Economic inequality. Corrupt governance. And an election farce-off between a man you wouldn’t buy a used car from and a man who plays a demented president on TV. Or his female deputy.

Tackling those issues would be an election platform for anyone serious about governing in the public interest.

Perhaps the conspiracy circus is just a distraction from that notable omission.