In 2003, my hometown was threatened by a massive wildfire. It went on for 26 days, led to two separate evacuations and scorched more than 20,000 hectares. The fire was thought to have been started by an off-road vehicle but instead of focusing on that, another narrative emerged. A story grew that the blaze had at first been easily brought under control , but that because the fire crew was made up of many Indigenous firefighters for whom this was their main source of income, they deliberately allowed the fire to fester for a few extra days work. But then the winds picked up and blew it out of control.
Of course, there wasn't any actual evidence that this occurred. I don't know how many people bought this story but it was repeated to me several times. The story 'worked' because it satisfied numerous needs: it gave a specific cause for a calamity, it didn't challenge any preconceived notions (Could off-road vehicles be damaging to the environment? Nah.) and most importantly, it found a scapegoat, a clearly defined 'other', to blame and provide a target for people's anger.
In a nutshell, those are the requisites for any conspiracy fantasy (I will not call them theories, which have facts, evidence, logic, etc). Things like QAnon or the fake moon landing are so ludicrous they aren't worth spending even a nanosecond on. These are the realm of people who either wholly lack intelligence or are suffering from mental health issues. Unfortunately, there are innumerable scammers out there who are happy to take advantage by feeding them this garbage. But while conspiracies are the extreme of this sort of delusional thinking, our brains are wired in a way that makes us all prone to these kinds of fallacies. We constantly look for short cuts, reference points and patterns to help us make sense of the world, and while this can often be helpful and save us time, it leaves us vulnerable to biases, which we all have.
One of the worst cliches in English is "everything happens for a reason." This implies that there is an order and logic to the universe that we can discern and this notion is hopelessly false. In his book, Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb explains that we think the world is far more explainable than it really is because people constantly confuse correlation with causation. For example, statistics clearly show that when ice cream sales are high, so is the murder rate. But that doesn't mean that ice cream causes people to kill. Ice cream sales go up in the summer and that's when criminals are more active but one has nothing to do with the other.
Now, you're probably thinking no one is dumb enough to believe ice cream causes murder. But is my example any more ludicrous than the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism? The 'study' that initially started this anti-vax nonsense used 12 children who all had supposedly developed autism after receiving the shot. It never provided any actual scientific evidence that the shot caused autism and it ignored the small matter of the hundreds of millions of children that got the shot and didn't become autistic. But this fallacious correlation was enough to fool Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey and now we have diseases that were firmly under control breaking out all over again.
Daniel Kahneman's book on bias and cognitive errors, Thinking, Fast and Slow, was so revolutionary that he won the Nobel Prize for economics, even though he is a psychologist who by his own admission doesn't know the first thing about economics. (He won because his book essentially destroyed the notion that free markets consisted of rational beings who always acted in ways that maximized their benefit.) Kahneman showed that we all have biases and that these constantly infect our thinking and decision making. What makes this worse is that we are mostly unaware that it's happening. Kahneman, who has studied this subject his entire adult life, remarkably admits he even finds biases in his own thinking.
A common blind spot is the availability bias, where our brains focus on information that is readily available in our minds and thus ignores other considerations. Here's an example: What is the ratio of gun homicides to gun suicides? Most people will immediately say that homicides are much higher and they will be very sure they are correct. After all, the news is full of stories about shootings and those stories trigger an emotional reaction that creates a strong, readily available memory. But in fact this seemingly clear conclusion is false; gun suicides are almost twice as high as gun homicides. (This data pretty much invalidates the claim that guns are needed for protection.) There are many other biases, too numerous to mention here, that make me wonder how we ever get anything right at all.
So much of our society's institutions are constructed with the notion that people are essentially rational. Economics, politics, the legal system, etc. all presume that participants will think about their choices rationally and make decisions on that basis. But it's frequently not the case. During times of very rapid change and dislocation, which is where we are at right now, people will cling to what they think they know and to ideas and beliefs that make them feel better. It's a somewhat childish behaviour, but it's also understandable; we all need a coping mechanism. While people of lower intelligence are especially susceptible, very smart people also become ensnared in bad ideas and false narratives. It happens to every person at some point.
There is a solution. The collective wisdom of our world is far greater than any individual or even group of individuals can ever possess. We need to use that collective wisdom to help us minimize the effects of our flawed thought patterns. But this requires a lot of effort and most importantly, a large dose of humility. Socrates, after a life spent in brilliant contemplation, said before he died that all he truly learned was that he really knew nothing at all. This is the level of humility we should strive for by constantly reminding ourselves of all the things we've been wrong about. Humility will help us keep an open mind and look at more information and different viewpoints. But in an individualist, social media driven look-at-me world, humility seems to be becoming scarce. We desperately need to reclaim this value, or we will delude ourselves straight off the proverbial cliff.
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