Not every conspiracy theory is de facto bad. Vast forces really are colluding against us, with varying degrees of intent. It is when these forces are misidentified—when blame is pinned on people equally helpless, or people who are totally made up—that things can spin out of control. The events of January 6th are just one example: five people died that day, and many more might have. But this was, of course, not the first time conspiracy thinking has erupted in violent ways. From this country’s inception, paranoid fever dreams have regularly led to startling acts of terror, subjugation, etc. But which specific conspiracy has caused the most destruction? What is history’s most damaging conspiracy theory? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.
Jennifer Rice
Associate Professor, Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, University of Kentucky, and the author of Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory, Rhetoric and Acts of Evidence
Early on, we inherited a lot of our conspiracies from Europe—we had Freemason conspiracies, which morphed into anti-Catholic conspiracies and then Illuminati conspiracies, and then of course we had many anti-semitic conspiracies.
To me, all these conspiracies constitute the same narrative with different characters repeated over and over again: some kind of shady group is secretly running every aspect of our lives, and we have no control over it. We see this again with QAnon.
What’s so damaging about this particular narrative is the message it sends of powerlessness. In some ways, it leads to an almost apolitical orientation: if there really is a shadowy group of people controlling every aspect of our lives, why bother getting involved in local government, or voting, since it’s all just a ruse anyway?
For someone like me, who really does believe you have a responsibility to go out and vote and be involved in government, to see all these people kind of give up on that, and seek out this alternative reality is dismaying. They’re giving up the power they have to make change.
There’s a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter on this subject, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and even though it was written in 1963, it provides a really good perspective on why Americans are prone to conspiracy theories. America emphasizes a don’t-tread-on-me mentality, an individualism that’s distinctly American, and the ugly side of that is: nobody’s going to take what’s mine. And a lot of the paranoia we see is: someone is taking something from us. When you’re constantly in the position of a little kid trying to protect your stuff from other people, it breeds a particular kind of paranoia.