Friday, March 1, 2019

A Conspiracy to Debunk

On last Sunday's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver John Oliver spent most of the show discussing psychics, mediums, clairvoyants, etc. He did, as always, a fantastic job demonstrating why not only are these things simply not true (duh) they are actually harmful to people's healing process and financial situation. It's 21 minutes of fantastic TV and cannot recommend it highly enough.

The piece is, unsurprisingly, not going to convince a lot of people that psychics and mediums are frauds. Oliver is right that facts will not, by themselves, convince people to change their beliefs. If that were true things like the Discovery Institute (promoting the pseudoscience of Intelligent Design) or the many flat Earth conferences wouldn't exist. (There's an excellent YouTube video that does a very thorough job of discussing the recent explosion of flat Earth nonsense.) Heck, all the way back in 1925 Harry Houdini went around the country exposing psychics and seers as the frauds they were/are. Since the YouTube rabbit hole is now open there's a great bit from Drunk History that recreates one of these debunkings with the added benefit that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ropes Houdini into it.

Seances, psychics, remote viewing, etc. are part of a whole world of "powers" or "hidden knowledge" that "they" don't want "us" to know about. While there may not actually be more conspiracy theories than before it certainly seems like they spread faster and effect people's beliefs more than in the world before the internet. Proof of this could be easily be obtained by pointing at the President. Trump certainly loves conspiracy theories (and loves inventing them). The Los Angeles Times editorial board actually named one of it's articles on Trump "Conspiracy Theorist in Chief".

Let's try a little experiment in "Who Said It?":

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.
Sounds like something Trump might say, right? Well, it wasn't him (rather obvious given the fact that the sentence contains more than five words). It was another conspiratorial nut: Joseph McCarthy, U.S. Senator and crackpot. He said this all the way back in 1951. Historian Richard Hofstader uses McCarthy's words to bring up-to-date (in 1964) the conspiratorial tendencies of Americans that have existed since the early republic.

As Hofstader writes

But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
In other words this strain of thought has been apart of all Americans since, at least, the founding of the country. It is also worth pointing out that Hofstader would not have been at all surprised that those with left-wing beliefs would believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq after 9/11 was for the profit of oil companies, that the government purposefully flooded New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, or that GMOs are unsafe to eat.

In his recent book Fantasyland Kurt Andersen also traces the history of America's beliefs in the conspiratorial or pseudo-scientific and suggest that it is American's individuality that engenders this type of thinking. Another recent book, The Money Cult by Chris Lehmann, makes a similar argument in how the believe-anything-individuality of some sects of Protestant dissenters lead to the creation of a whole new form of religion (this one based on capitalism). The two works note that since colonial times Americans have a sort of "believe what you want" approach to religion, science, and the world generally.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia that if his "neighbour" believed that "there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." This isn't entirely true because as Oliver, Andersen, and Lehmann all make abundantly clear belief in these things can often lead to financial exploitation, societal harm, and a disbelief in science.


**All views in this post are the author's own and do NOT represent the views of Mercer County Community College**

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