Conspiracies and plotters: the dark side of information

Author: Prof. Daniele La Barbera

On that warm night of July 21, 1969, there are few elderly people still awake, on their stuffed wooden village chairs, on the sidewalk in front of the louvered French doors of their ground-floor cottage; their children and grandchildren are all in front of the black-and-white television eagerly watching the first steps of Neil Armstrong, and of all mankind, on the Moon. But they, the slyly elderly, are laughing under their breath at the thought of the naiveté with which their young relatives are being bamboozled by such crass fiction. They see the moon directly in the sky, and they are sure that no one has arrived up there at all. This skit, which on that moonlit night was repeated, with a few variations, in many places in Sicily, and who knows how many other places in the world, and which in the following years would be the basis for the fake moon landing theory, embraced by millions, can be considered the mother of all conspiracy theories of contemporary post-modernity. But at the same time, it already provides us with some elements of some interest in outlining a possible “conspiracy psychology.” Beginning immediately with the fact that sometimes the conspiracy theorist latches on, as it were, to a tiny fraction of truth, a tiny “slot” of verisimilitude, which he then tends to generalize and amplify: in this case, as has been reconstructed over time, a small film clip had indeed been filmed that reproduced the moon landing scene in a movie studio, under the direction of Stanley Kubrick and featuring three CIA agents impersonating astronauts; but this “short film,” which had been prepared by the Nixon administration as a plan B in case the Apollo 11 mission failed, was never used and traces of it were lost. But the descent to the moon, broadcast live-both two epochal winds: the first ushering us into the space age, the second into the age of communication – represent a good basis for explaining conspiracy because they contain in themselves something potentially destabilizing for our cognitive set-up; for as much as the fascinating images of the first moonwalk may have thrilled us, they simultaneously represented a kind of quantum leap in information and knowledge, but also a revolution in the way we represent the world and the physical space around us; which has expanded enormously since that July night. Interpretive uncertainty, the tendency to package alternative explanations to the official and institutional ones, the prejudicial inclination to always and in any case ask “what’s up with that,” the default backtracking on all significant and much talked-about facts, all characteristics of the mental functioning of conspiracists, are thus elements that we can partly link, in the current age of digital communication, to informational overload and the progressive proliferation of data and news, many of which require time and patience to be verified and tracked against their respective sources. Let us think, just for a moment, about how different the experience of the world, the reading of reality and the experience related to the happenings of life of a collective nature, is in a peasant of the late Middle Ages and in a subject of post-modern contemporaneity. The former had a number of direct human acquaintances, throughout his life, in the order of dozens; and the radius of his movements, with respect to his usual place of residence, did not exceed about ten kilometers, except for exceptional events or the compelling need to migrate to neighboring territories for reasons of survival. His knowledge was stable and enduring, he hardly had the need to question whether the news or explanations he was given were true or not, and should he have the need or pleasure to do so, there was very little data to reason about. Needless to say, how the inhabitant of digital worlds has to deal with an absolutely incessant and chaotic amount of knowledge, information, experiences, and experiences, with a total loss of control over the sources and origins of much of this data; the progressively exponential complexity of the reality in which he or she lives not only makes it elusive and labyrinthine, but also susceptible to highly changeable and impermanent explanations and representations. Moreover, informational decentralization, the possibility in the advanced web phase (2.0) to be able each one to concur in the dissemination of information of all kinds (through a YouTube channel, a Blog, a Social, one’s own page on the Web thus disproportionately increasing the informational chaos, but also becoming actors and authors of the processes of knowledge dissemination (no matter if true or false, verified or not, scientific or parascientific) determines a strong protagonist inclination, which pushes many to actively concur in the dissemination of unverified theories, but which, on the other hand, are of strong emotional impact and precise ideological positioning. With the advent of the Net, anyone who so desires can become a powerhouse of information dissemination, can also greatly expand his or her radius of influence, and can, using some clever business strategy, even profit significantly on their “fake news.” The concept of post-truth, i.e., the new current cognition of “truth” that seems to be asserting itself today in the experience of many people helps us to better frame the issue: that is, the shift from a truth based on objective, real and verifiable data, facts or explanations to a personal hypothesis, usually shared in relationships of elective affinity, which, however, is accompanied by a strong emotional resonance. And to levels of interpretation and confirmation that are either wholly bizarre and self-referential, or approximate and capable of distorting reality. One example among all, rather topical: to say that vaccines contain cells from aborted human fetuses is not exactly the same thing as stating, with objectivity, that, in the preparation of some vaccines, cell lines (procedures of this kind are extremely widespread in biological research and its most varied applications) derived from fetal tissues from 50 or 60 years earlier are used. Even the Church has had to step into the field to point out and clarify that such a procedure does not invoke any moral issue; nor any biological risk, we would add since many scientists, long ago, extensively refuted claims that vaccines would induce DNA alteration of host tissues. Just as the “devil is in the details,” in the same way conspiracy hypotheses often run rampant and find credence because of details related to the use, not infrequently in bad faith, of a real datum used in a distorted or approximate manner, so as to package a seemingly credible and plausible thesis, but one that does not hold up to more rigorous and systematic investigation. Of course, there is also an exquisitely subjective conspiratorial vocation, which is rooted in a number of psychological determinants, beginning with the narcissistic components of the personality, which, if pronounced, explain egocentrism, obstinacy, the complacency to assume and spread theories contrary to official or institutional theses, the need to proselytize and thus find confirmation and approval in others. Not infrequently, the more fragile and insecure the personality, the more it attempts a fictitious sustenance through the radicalization of alternative views, more or less credible. Finally, a strong urge for a generalized conspiratorial approach to reality, aimed at rereading the entire overall political-economic-social-health situation in a strongly conspiratorial key (e.g., those who, in pandemic times, are inclined to claim, without the slightest shadow of a doubt, that all prophylactic measures and vaccination policies have, in reality, an ultimate purpose of total control over the world population) can be linked to cues of a paranoid type, even outside of a true psychotic disorder. But when the projective tendency, i.e., the attitude of interpreting in a negative key and inflexibly oriented toward a rigid and unchangeable view of facts and situations, becomes very intense, the resulting mental operations and consequential statements turn out to be very close to true delirium. Finally, we must not forget what provides many cues to these subjects: namely, that conspiracies do exist! and that it is left to our intelligence, common sense, balance and degree of culture and knowledge, to discern those that are true and exist, from those that are plausible but not very credible and, again, from those that are clearly false and completely invented.