On skepticism, questioning authority and conspiracy theories

Last week one of my colleagues at Saint Peter’s University invited me to give a guest lecture in a class aboutmedia literacy, discussing conspiracy theories, how to define them, how they manifest in our culture, how they are both reflected by and shared by popular entertainment, and how they are amplified and spread by social media. I'm pictured about to start the lecture. It was a great opportunity to discuss this with students since I had written a book about the topic and teach a course on it. And it was great hearing that this same professor also uses the critical examination of conspiracy theories as a tool for various exercises in several of his classes, as do I. 

Discussions like this should always start with a precise definition of what we mean by “conspiracy theory,” what the term “conspiracy” means in a strict legal sense, and how it differs from those outlandish, rococo speculations of grand cabals and shadow organizations of blood-drinking cultists and Satanists. As far as the law is concerned, a “conspiracy” is any instance of two or more people colluding to commit a crime. Gangs and organized crime cartels are conspiracies in the legal sense of the word. Films like the “Godfather” trilogy and “Goodfellas,” or TV shows like “The Sopranos” are crime films, not conspiracy theory films. Films like “The DaVinci Code” and its sequels, TV shows like “The X-Files” or the plethora of Roswell crash and UFO cover-up entertainment, however, fall into the “conspiracy” theory category.

 

Conspiracy theories, as a whole, are claims about secret organizations of such immense power and control as to be able to create a false consciousness in an entire global population, organizations of such reach and influence as to be able to start wars at will, manipulate economies, and construct fictions like mass shootings in the mainstream media every day. Conspiracy theories, in short, refer to grand plots to run everything according to some unified grand scheme…and plots that have absolutely zero tangible proof of their existence. For example, we had a little thought exercise pretending to be the New World Order plotting the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and concluded how the major conspiracy theories contradicting the U.S. government’s explanations for the events of that day are as absurd as the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theories or the chemtrail conspiracy theories.

 

But all this is not to say that an outright denialism of conspiracy theories is all desirable either. As so much of history has proven the old adage, absolute power does corrupt and it corrupts absolutely. The opposite side of a knee-jerk non-belief is when we turn “conspiracy theory” into a thought-stopping cliché, the shutting down of all dissent, debate, and discussion. We saw this with the knee-jerk reactions to the claims that the COVID virus might have escaped from a lab in China. Just a few years ago, if you said something to that effect on social media, you could have been deplatformed and branded a hateful, racist conspiracy theorist. I had written about that issue right here in previous blog posts.

 

So what is the solution to the problem, my colleague and I finally asked. The best that we can do in a free society is to educate in logical, critical thinking, and media literacy. To try and turn out students who will be able to cast a skeptical eye at organizations of authority and power, whether those organizations of power are governments, corporations, or collections of charlatans spreading malicious lies about fake mass shootings, Satanic cults hiding under pizza parlors, COVID being spread by chemtrails and activated by 5G towers run by the cabal that assassinated JFK from the grassy knoll and fluoridated the drinking water.

With our focus on such pedagogy, we can only hope that no Saint Peter's student will every walk away from our school listening to Alex Jones, thinking that Oliver Stone's film "JFK" was an accurate dramatization of the assassination, for fall for any the nonsensical fantasies spread on conspiracist webpages and social media.