I remember my first conspiracy theorist as vividly as others might remember their first schoolteacher or lover – though not quite so fondly. In fact, the first conspiracy theorist I came across was a girlfriend, at least briefly. We had been introduced just as I began studying Spanish: Lucia from Argentina, me from West London, it was a match both amorous and educational, like having an early version of Duolingo, but in human form.
My initial enthusiasm was brought up short, however, when I happened to mention an acquaintance who’d taken a job with the World Bank. Rather than ask about his work, Lucia told me matter-of-factly that the World Bank was systematically sterilising people in poorer countries, so their land could be seized.
“I’ve seen photographs of their black helicopters,” she assured me, “conducting secret operations in Africa.”
Mea culpa, gentle reader, I chose to ignore what my belle from Buenos Aires had said, and its implication that we might be seriously mismatched. After all, I told myself, her English was not much better than my Spanish, so maybe something had been lost in translation.
This wilful denial became harder to sustain when Lucia revealed her knowledge of a global financial plot involving staff at banks giving clandestine signals to customers selected as accomplices. For this I could make no excuses, so left.
It was a disconcerting experience, but a brief one; no lasting harm was done. More was at stake, though, when it came to one of my oldest friends. A partner in crime from my teenage years, I’d known Jack for more than three decades when he suddenly began his own journey down the rabbit hole.
It came quite out of the blue, when Jack casually mentioned that the then US President, Barack Obama, had really been born in Africa. He was holding office illegitimately, it seemed, and the “Deep State” had swapped his real birth certificate for a fake.
Bear in mind, we were speaking long before conspiracy theories became such an ubiquitous form of political discourse. This was back when David Icke’s ideas were mere freak-show entertainments, not a harbinger of more widespread beliefs to come. If you’d mentioned QAnon back then, people might have thought you were referring to a new bar in Shoreditch, or a South Korean boy band.
In that prelapsarian era, I was unaware of the resistance to logic and facts that conspiracy theorists tend to present, so I tried reasoning. There was no evidence, I told Jack, that would show Obama to be an imposter. Oh yes there was, Jack insisted. You just needed to know where to look on the internet.
The internet was indeed the place to find the source of Jack’s new-found beliefs, and to understand their proliferation. Conspiracy theories were, after all, nothing new in themselves. The infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and the fake “Zinoviev Letter” had long ago posited plots both Jewish and Gentile. You can see conspiracy theories emerging immediately after Pearl Harbour: there were claims President Roosevelt had known in advance that the naval base would be attacked, but let it happen to push the US into World War II. A few even suggested he’d staged Pearl Harbour himself, a “false flag event”. The similarity to later theories about 9/11 is unmistakable.
What the would-be Pearl Harbour truthers lacked, of course, were websites on which to post their conjectures – whereas Jack had an ocean of cyberspace to surf. Later, the internet would give birth to its bastard offspring, social media, and there would be tweets and WhatsApps to aid dissemination. People now carried devices in their pockets that could be used to check any information in the world. Yet the power of the algorithm meant Jack’s smartphone directed him to sites that served only to confirm his belief in evil, behind-the-scenes machinations.
The internet also offered a sense of community. Jack had become something of a loner in recent years, but now felt part of a movement of swashbuckling rebels who’d seen through the lies we “sheeple” had fallen for. Meet-ups with him featured ever-increasing nuggets about who was really controlling global developments, from the Bilderberg Group to the Illuminati, by way of Mossad. My refusal to see the world through this prism of distrust seemed only to convince Jack of my naiveté.
Of course, some beliefs that sounded crackpot in the past have turned out to be true, leaving conspiracy theorists with a barrel full of I-told-you-so to unload. There is evidence the CIA really did consider killing Castro with cigars, either poisoned or exploding, and it turned out Ronald Reagan did approve selling weapons to Iran. These once seemed as improbable as the ridiculous suggestion a tabloid hack once shared with me, that John Major had an affair with Edwina Currie.
The internet has also spawned an international army of keyboard warriors, like those proverbial monkeys with typewriters. Enough are now bashing away at the keys that, even though none is likely to come up with Hamlet, we may get the odd sonnet or political theory that holds water.
None of these arguments could dent Jack’s beliefs, nor mend the widening chasm between us. Increasingly, we lacked the bare minimum of common ground that enables meaningful conversation. I last saw Jack in the same West London pub where, half a lifetime before, we’d bought our first pints of beer, drawn not by the quality of ales so much as the landlord’s admirably lax approach to underage drinking. Yet even in these nostalgia-tinged surroundings, it was clear our friendship had run out of road.
While Jack was no longer physically present in the years that followed, his mode of thinking became more common. At pubs, parties – even, once, in a department-store lift – I was regaled with tales that would previously have seen their narrators universally ridiculed. 9/11 of course loomed large as a theme, much as the cause and consequences of Covid 19 did years later. Jack and Lucia, I realised, had been ahead of the curve, my very own canaries in the coalmine, providing me with advance warning of noxious gas ahead – or rather, noxious gaslighting.
Because of my job as a reporter for BBC Radio, I found myself personally implicated in these stories of pan-global deception. A henchman of the Mainstream Media, I was obviously helping suppress the truth of what was really going on.
This was most apparent in the lead-up to the Brexit referendum. Politicians and pundits were debating the risk of trade tariffs, and the role of the European Court of Justice. Meanwhile, out in real-voter land, people I interviewed told me they knew from Facebook that David Cameron had done a secret deal with the European Union to let Turkey join. Britain would soon be inundated with 70 million Muslims if we did not vote Leave, they explained, “but you lot at the BBC won’t report that, will you.”
Well, here we are in 2023, and so seriously does the BBC take the problem of conspiracy theories, it now has a “Disinformation Correspondent” to counter them. A survey it commissioned in June found that about a third of British adults believe the cost-of-living crisis was created by government to control the population. A similar proportion believe in a secret scheme to replace white people.
So seriously does the BBC take the problem of conspiracy theories, it now has a “Disinformation Correspondent”
The distinction between conspiracy theories and the mainstream is increasingly blurred. Would-be Republican Party candidates in the US have trouble being selected if they do not state that coronavirus and its vaccines are part of a plan. Here in Britain, the former Conservative MP, Andrew Bridgen, stands accused not so much of going down a rabbit hole as digging an entire warren of myth and fear. He compared covid vaccination to the Holocaust.
The covid outbreak provided a rocket booster for conspiracy theories, by which I do not mean alternative views about the necessity of lockdown or the safety of vaccines. Nor would I include claims that the virus was accidentally released from a Chinese laboratory, as this involves carelessness and contingency, rather than deliberate plotting.
The writer David Aaronovitch suggested that conspiracy theories emerge at times of crisis or instability, because they are strangely reassuring: they imply that someone is in control. It might be preferable to believe coronavirus was created by an evil puppet master than through chance mutation. Random chaos, it seems, is a more disturbing prospect than the whiff of sulphur.
The prospect I find disturbing, though, is a world increasingly dominated by suspicion and anxiety. I continue to pursue fruitless arguments with the purveyors of paranoia. Friends raise eyebrows as I once again join battle with someone insisting Princess Diana was assassinated by secret agents working for Prince Philip. And I’ve been known to go comically ballistic at those who believe the late Duke of Edinburgh was actually a giant, shape-shifting lizard.
It feels at times like living through a modern sequel to Invasion of the Body Snatchers as, one by one, victims succumb to conspiracy theory contagion. The most ordinary people, unexposed to the wilder shores of post-modernism, have begun sounding like Foucault on steroids. Truth? It’s just your version of events. Science? Not to be trusted. Countries have in the past shown remarkable resilience in periods of radically divided opinion; what has not been tested is whether social cohesion can survive if fellow citizens cannot agree on the most basic facts.
Perhaps I’m just haunted by the loss of Jack’s friendship, watching in slow motion as someone I once felt so close to becomes essentially unrecognisable. Perhaps the experience with Lucia makes me fearful for where this is all leading. I chose at first not to acknowledge just how outlandish, even delusional, her ideas were. Now we’re all living amidst a normalisation of the absurd, with people often choosing to ignore the maelstrom of mad ideas coursing through our communities. But in its wake it will continue to carry off our friends, relatives, and maybe lovers too.
Paul Moss is a writer and broadcaster, currently to be found talking about matters European on the BBC
