Born To Be Wheeled - Home on the Range of Disinformation

Susceptibility to disinformation is the illiteracy of the internet age.
We have a tendency to view conspiracy theories as theories, statements about the world that can be either true or false.
Since they are typically false, we treat them as flawed explanations,
premised on logical inconsistencies or faulty evidence.

The expression “conspiracy theory” was coined by a philosopher of science,
Karl Popper, to designate the incapacity to understand social events
as the outcome of a many interdependent processes.
He saw them instead as the expression of a single and omnipotent will.
The “conspiracy theory of society,” Popper wrote,
was something akin to “a primitive kind of superstition.”
This has remained the prevalent view ever since: in an influential article published ten years ago, two Harvard scholars—Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule—called them “crippled epistemologies.”

This is certainly how I've seen them. With increasing occurrences of people whom I would think would know better, one by one, into the mouth of madness they leap.
Probably, like me; you have thought belief in conspiracy theories is a cognitive issue.
Something that has largely arisen clad in the sociological garb of poor educational achievements or a lower class background - people do not think well.
In short, we have come to view conspiracy theories as bad information and those who believe in them as unsophisticated information processors.
Something to be fixed with exposure to light. Point out the fallacy, the disinformation withers like a garden slug who has been salted. Yet that's not how it works. 
There's something else going on. 

This mode of thinking lays responsibility for beliefs in ridiculous things
 at the feet of individuals. QAnon for instance,
is nothing but the hot air generated by an 8Chan server.
Why...or how could anyone with even a few functioning brain cells
possibly believe that obvious bullshit? 
It doesn't matter.
They do. 
And it's not because they are stupid.
It's not the fault of the individual per se.
More and more, I'm forced to understand this phenomenon
as a social problem that most be addressed by society.
Not individual actors or actions. 

We can understand how a sort of existential drama could manifest itself in historical situations of particular suffering and deprivation, such as wars or famines...how that could bring about unsustainable duress.
Some people certainly see this as the defining experience of our time: the climate meltdown and its wake of extinctions, the destruction of continent-wide ecosystems, the uprooting of entire communities fleeing the devastations of infinite wars or the irreversible degradation of their habitat, a global pandemic that ravages the most vulnerable, unprecedented social and economic inequalities that mean that for millions of people the end of the world may be the end of the month.

It is easy to assume that never before, has our existence
as individuals and as a species felt so precarious.
Never has our world seemed so fragile.
Our capacity to project ourselves in the future has shrunk dramatically.
Even uplifting spatial feats
that used to be seen as giant leaps for mankind
now feel like evacuation drills for the first class deck,
as billionaires fizz into orbit in their private escape capsules.
It is minutes to midnight, people are told.
And can we blame someone for believing so?

Yet it is also business as usual.
One looks in vain for the cultural and political resources
that would help us see through the apocalyptic haze
to see the possibility of a new beginning,
a better one.
In this schizophrenic situation,
cognitive dissonance can only become the norm.

The proliferation of conspiracy theories reflects the dismal poverty of a culture that fails millions of individuals confronted with the loss of their world.
Because each in their own perceptions, are desperate and impoverished
Accepting disinformation is an attempt at making sense of the catastrophic dimensions of the present when the available cultural resources fail to do so, conspiracy theories are a direct outgrowth of a political vacuum.

Odd for me to say? Maybe. After all I am pretty clearly one of the "coastal elites" everyone now seems to complain about. I guess it's my turn to be a scapegoat.
Don't worry, you'll be next, if you already have not had a turn.

I firmly believe conspiracy theories are honestly cognitive deficiencies that need to be corrected but we can not do that and remain deaf to the existential anxiety they express.
If we are concerned about the spread of conspiracy theories, we should realize that debunking is a distraction, a Whac-A-Mole game for fact-checkers and information watchdogs. Perhaps first we should address the scarcity of political vision on which conspiracism feeds.
Democracy fails when it looks like the bureaucracy of the last days.
Postponing the end of the world has always been the conservative justification for the maintenance of order and the preservation of the status quo.
In some places classical liberalism looks much the same in those regards.
Instead of tribalism or blind adherence to the solutions of the past,
we need to recover a political capacity to throw bridges across a cataclysmic present.
This can only start with reconstructing the vision of a common world and an inclusive future for all those who are losing theirs. All of us. Every one.

Let me be clear, as counterintuitive as it may sound, we have to solve the problems of the Bedsheet Regalia and those with a sartorial penchant for the Waffen-SS because if we don't, they will grow in numbers. And as has been proven in 2016, those numbers are already large enough to threaten democracy and humanity itself.