Scott Alexander considers why people are attracted to various conspiracy theories:
QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.
Viral game designer Adrian Hon wrote an article about What Alternate Reality Games Can Teach Us About QAnon.
It argues that people fall for QAnon because it gives them an interesting mystery. It’s a place where new discoveries are always around the corner, where a few hours of research by an amateur like you can fill in one of the missing links between Joe Biden and the Lizard Pope. The thrill of QAnon isn’t just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. It’s the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it.
One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert — a position our culture treats as the height of dignity — is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy.
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This isn’t meant in any way as a criticism of Hon. I’m transparently doing the same thing he is here — claiming to have an interesting insight, then contributing it to a shared community of knowledge-seekers. My point isn’t that Hon is similar to QAnon and therefore bad. My point is we’re all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we’re having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are.
Partly this is all for the greater good. If we don’t know about the Lizard Papacy, we won’t be able to resist them; if we don’t know what secretly drives QAnon, we won’t be able to fight it. But another part of it seems to be — a critic might say “intellectual masturbation” but I would argue “intellectual exercise” is a better term. Exercise is sort of about building strength and skill that you might use later, but it’s also guiltlessly joyful, done for nothing’s sake but its own.
Athletes understand that not everyone can be Babe Ruth. That’s why you have local baseball leagues, or Little League, or the Minor Leagues, so that everybody can satisfy their sports competition drive whether they’re a superstar or not. But what’s the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you’re not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?
My stock position on any given conspiracy theory is that the bigger and more important the alleged conspiracy, the less likely it is to be true: most people can’t keep a secret for more than a day before wanting to blab to someone else to show off.
