MICHAEL SHERMER: Whenever there's a high level
of anxiety and uncertainty in an environment,
your personal life or society at large conspiracism
goes up.
That is to say people find comfort in attenuating
the anxiety or uncertainty they're feeling
by concocting some overarching plan.
This is what's going on.
Now I understand it.
Now I don't have to feel so uncertain about
the environment.
So people concoct conspiracy theories for
that main reason.
Now, people differ on, different groups believe
different conspiracy theories and so on but
let's set that aside for the moment and just
think about with the coronavirus this is,
we know pandemics happen historically.
We know about more recent ones like SARS and
the avian flu and so on and what that causes.
This appears to be at least that bad if not
worse.
In a way it's a real event that people should
fear.
We should have a certain amount of paranoia
and anxiety about that and respond accordingly.
So there it's only a small step to making
a paranoid conspiracism claim that well, it
was invented by the Chinese or in the case
of the Chinese they say well, it was invented
by the U.S. military.
And we've all seen enough of the movies about
bioterrorism that that's not completely crazy.
It could happen.
In this case there was just a paper published
in Nature this last week about that it's not.
There's evidence and genetics to show that
it was derived from animal DNA, not manipulated
in a lab with human DNA.
Okay, so we can set aside that conspiracy
theory.
But finally, we know that governments do bad
things on occasion, especially autocratic
governments.
But even our own, the U.S. government.
If you look at the history of the things we've
done to attempt to assassinate foreign leaders
or manipulate elections in South American
countries in the 1970s, for example, a lot
of this has come out in the Pentagon Papers
and the Wikileaks that our government was
doing things that we didn't know they were
doing.
Congress didn't even know.
So we know that happens.
Again, my point is that I don't think this
applies to the coronavirus example.
I think those conspiracy theories are wrong.
But worrying about that is not completely
crazy because sometimes that sort of thing
does happen.
Another factor with conspiracy theories is
politics.
I mean we're very tribal and it's gotten worse
since the 1990s.
The left and right have become more polarized.
The centric middle has shrunk as the two bimodal
curves have gotten a larger on the far left
and the far right.
More people are identifying with extreme positions.
So the moment something like a coronavirus
conspiracy theory erupts the only question
is who's going to accuse which side and it
ends up both sides are accusing each other.
You go to certain sites and Trump gets hammered
all day long for his inadequacy in responding
to coronavirus crisis.
Then you go to another media source and it's
just the opposite.
It's the left that's failed this and Trump
is going to save us.
Then you have the really far out ones about
the deep state and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the
voice of reason here is actually just a pawn
to destroy Trump.
I mean the further out you go in the extreme
nature of a conspiracy theory the less likely
the theory is to be true.
The more people that have to be involved in
the conspiracy theory, the less likely it
is to be true.
The more elements that have to come together
just at the right moment to make the conspiracy
work, the less likely it is to be true.
And the more global it is, world domination,
that sort of thing, the less likely it is
to be true.
Conspiracies usually are very narrowly focused,
like insider trading, or corporate manipulation,
like Volkswagen with the emissions, or some
government attempting to manipulate an election.
It's a very specific thing that the conspiracy
is really about.
