Skip to content

Anyone can believe the truth

Why are conspiracy theories so widespread of late? Are our neighbors stupid, insane, deluded, brainwashed, or what?

In their recent paper, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood,” Danish political scientists Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen and American anthropologist John Tooby examine how accepting patent falsehoods serves a deifferent function from mere motivated reasoning. As an example of the latter, Salon’s Paul Rosenberg cites Paul Simon’s “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”

But spreaders of misinformation and conspiracy theories are doing something more, the group theorizes, acknowledging they require additional empirical evidence to support their theory. Rosenberg asked Petersen what he thinks is the explanation.

Rather than being a misperception of reality or rejection of truth, Petersen believes that for the human social animal, spreading misinformation/disinformation may serve an organizing function that fact alone may not. That may have certain evolutionary advantages:

When you want to mobilize your group, what you need to do is find out that we are facing a problem, and your way of describing that problem needs to be as attention-grabbing as possible before you can get the group to focus on the same thing. In that context, reality is seldom as juicy as fiction. By enhancing the threat — for example, by saying things that are not necessarily true — then you are in a better situation to mobilize and coordinate the attention of your own group.  The key thing is that it may actually be to your group’s advantage that if everyone is in agreement that we don’t like these other guys, then we make sure that everyone is paying attention to this other group. So by exaggerating the actual threat posed by the other group, you can gain more effective mobilization. 

Holding outlandish ideas (such as QAnon) may signal committment to the in-group. The more outlandish the notion, the harder it is to disprove. The better to make it hard to “verify what’s up and what’s down,” says Petersen. The logic, says Peterson, “is that anyone can believe the truth, but only loyal members of the group can believe something that is blatantly false.”

Petersen explains, “[W]hat we are arguing is that a lot of beliefs don’t really exist for navigating the world. They exist for social reasons, because they allow us to accomplish certain socially important phenomena, such as mobilizing our group or signaling that we’re loyal members of the group. This means that because the function of the beliefs is not to represent reality, their veracity or truth value is not really an important feature.” 

Donald Horowitz’s, “The Deadly Ethnic Riot,” examines how rumor-sharing serves as a precondition for ethnic massacres. The purpose of the rumors is not to represent reality either but to stigmatize your enemy and mobilize your group for attack.

Here’s the segment that made my hair stand on end (emphasis mine):

[I]f you look at the content of the rumors, that’s not so much predicted by what the other group has done to you or to your group. It’s really predicted by what you are planning to do to the other group. So the brutality of the content of these rumors is, in a sense, part of the coordination about what we’re going to do to them when we get the action going — which also suggests that the function of these rumors is not to represent reality, but to serve social functions. 

Observers of right-wing projection don’t need that spelled out for them. Republicans justify their election cheating because “Democrats do it.” Donald Trump spent months ahead of and after November 2020 telling his base that. Everybody knows that. Every loyal Trump Republican, anyway. Phony ballots containing bamboo fibers were smuggled in from China. Others from Democratic precincts were counted multiple times. The “massive fraud” went on in counties Trump lost, even if other Republicans won there. Democrats hate babies. Democrats eat babies. Lack of evidence be damned. The rumors justified a violent attempt to overthrow our democracy that might not be the last.

As the House Select Committee investigates the Jan. 6 insurrection and coup plotters, we can expect to hear Trumpist justifications for both based on what mean, nasty, ugly things communist-Marxist-socialist (take your pick) Democrats meant to do to America if Joe Biden won the presidency.

I thought of that last night while watching Ron Howard’s The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years (2016). The father of one British fan with a ticket refused to let him attend a concert. The four Beatles, he said, were a threat to western civilization. When John Lennon remarked in an interview that The Beatles seemed at the time more popular than Jesus, protests erupted in the U.S. Record-burnings took place, primarily across the South. The Ku Klux Klan got involved. Americans are nothing if not reactionary. We have a history.

With the violent Jan. 6 insurrection in mind, Petersen’s “It’s really predicted by what you are planning to do to the other group,” and his theory about conspiracy theories and misinformation are unsettling, to say the least.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about the Rwandan genocide on my car radio. I’ll never forget. Those events have been referenced multiple times in this space, perhaps most recently by Digby after Tucker Carlson asked his audience, “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?” while trying to turn Fox News into Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM).

Published inUncategorized