I heard a fantastic podcast recently on the history of conspiracies in America. Throughout our country’s political life, there have been struggles with truth and facts, and how they are disseminated. That hasn’t changed today. And yet in the Trump era, our national disconnect with reality has been accelerated, particularly with the advent of social media, which has a distinct profit motive toward unfair biasing of entrenched beliefs.
There was a wonderful quote in the podcast that I though summed up the phenomenon nicely:
Believing everything and nothing; everything is possible and nothing is true.
That sums up the heart of conspiracy thinking, and also its danger. Let’s dissect the statement.
If everything is possible, there is a natural dilution of truth. It’s hard to know where to start planting your stakes of belief when every hypothesis is equally plausible. It’s a notion that is antithetical to the scientific method, which demotes those ideas that have less veracity.
The second portion of the statement is perhaps the worst: “Nothing is true.“ This axiom serves to destabilize the whole framework. Conspiracy thinking is a perversion of skepticism, itself a healthy point of view when in check. Back to the scientific method, the sciences’ default position is skepticism that is constructively critical, not for its own sake.
But marrying skepticism with cynicism predetermines that truth cannot be known, because machinations bigger than the observer prevent them from ever knowing the truth. How fatalistic!
I highly recommend the show.
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