Rather than look at reality and agree on one
whole reality we’re becoming a society where
we have these different groups that believe
in different realities.
And that is a big part of political polarization
where people don’t just agree about their
opinions, disagree about the opinions about
a series of facts but they disagree about
whether the facts are actually true.
But we can also see it in conspiracy thinking
where these fringe groups, or at least they
used to be fringe groups on kind of the outskirts
of thinking about what could be real or what
is happening, paranoid thinking for instance.
Thinking about reptoids controlling our government.
There have always been people who believe
these sort of strange things but what social
media and the internet in general has allowed
to happen is for people with these beliefs
to find each other and then when they’re
hearing back those same sorts of facts or
same sorts of theories then their beliefs
strengthen.
One thing that is particularly alarming that’s
happening is what Michael Barkun calls fusion
paranoia where these fringe groups who might
have believed in aliens and these others that
might have believed in reptoids and these
others that may have believed that the JFK
conspiracy are merging and that’s kind of
alarming to me.
Jesse Walker wrote a wonderful book, The United
States of Paranoia in which he classifies
the various types of paranoid thinking that
have occurred in our country right since our
very founding.
He classifies them into four different types.
Enemies outside, enemies within, enemies above
and enemies below.
All of them involve fear.
All of them involve belief in conspiracy style
thinking but they vary in their sources.
So the enemies above are those that have more
power than us and they’re trying to control
our lives.
So pharmaceuticals, creating vaccines just
to make money rather than to help people is
an example of the enemies above.
Enemy below tends to be people who have less
power, who we have oppressed or who don’t
have a lot of power kind of rising up and
overthrowing things.
Outside is immigration, people who are unlike
us that might come and infiltrate us.
Enemies within are people like secret communists
or witches during the Salem witch trial.
People who look like us, seem to be embedded
in our society but actually are plotting against
us.
I think that fear is an incredibly dangerous
emotion.
I think that it causes us to narrow our thinking.
I think it causes us to shutdown options and
there are a lot of threats in the world but
I think what we need to face those threats
are open, creative, playful thinking.
When we think as a hivemind, when we think
collectively and we do so in a fearful sense
then that shuts down a lot of our thinking.
One thing that I think we tend to do is we
think that we’re going to be the person
who is going to crack a big mystery, who’s
going to solve a whole puzzle.
I think that Hollywood has given us this idea
and the famous book and movie, The Da Vinci
Code sold us on this that we were going to
be the hero who would figure everything out,
this big vast conspiracy.
And I think the romanticization of that is
dangerous and I think that we all think that
we’re going to be this hero who’s going
to discover some secret thing.
I think that we need to weigh in, let experts
weigh in.
I think that we need to trust expertise and
I think that we need to look at Snopes.com
rather than YouTube for our information.
I think that we need to regain our trust and
scientists and people who have spent their
life’s work studying a phenomena rather
than thinking we’re going to hunt down the
answer on the internet.
