Conspirituality: Social and Psychological Perspectives

(c) Richard Bolstad 2022

Not So New? Conspirituality

I am a trainer in the Psychology related field of Neuro Linguistic Programming. In the 21st century, I believe the spread of Conspirituality is the single biggest danger to the credibility of Scientific NLP and similar alternative psychology. The term was first used in the 2011 essay “The Emergence of Conspirituality” by sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas who suggested that “It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to Conspiracy Theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new paradigm’ worldview.” Ward and Voas suggested that this is a unique confluence of traditionally male, right wing, problem focused, paranoid-delusional social theories with traditionally female, left wing, positivity focused, grandiosity-delusional social theories.

Egil Asprem and Asbjørn Dyrendal countered that conspirituality is not really new, and that becomes obvious once we step beyond the categories of “new age” and “conspiracy theory’ and use the much older concept of “cults”. Cults have always thrived based on their claim to possess suppressed “esoteric” truths, or “stigmatized knowledge”. In this article I intend to very briefly discuss conspiracy theories from several different perspectives; the history of blood libel (the libelous claim that a secret Jewish cabal drink the blood of others) and persecution, the psychiatric nature of paranoia, the deliberate political weaponising of conspiracy theory, the raised anxiety of pandemics, and the fear and trauma created by social events such as dispossession and colonization.

Blood Libel and Conspiracy Theories: Our Ultimate Fear?

The most dramatically effective stigmatized knowledge story in the twentieth century was the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (Протоколы сионских мудрецов), brought from France to Russia by Yuliana Glinka, an agent of the Tsarist police (Asprem and Dyrendal, 2015: 376). This text was mostly copied from irrelevant earlier works such as an 1864 polemic by the French writer Maurice Joly attacking Napoleon III: “Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.” (Rothstein, 2006). It claimed that a secret “cabal” of Jewish leaders plotted through history to overthrow Christianity and establish their dominance. They used secret societies such as the Knights Templars and the Bavarian Illuminati, as well as the anti-monarchist enlightenment thinkers and the socialist revolutionaries to achieve this aim. In his book Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler warned of the “Protocols” and explained that “with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims.” Hitler mass produced 23 editions of the “Protocols” as an explanation of his wish to exterminate the Jewish people. The “Protocols” were often linked to the “Blood libel” – the claim that Jews were committing ritual murder of Christian children, whose blood was then used to make Jewish unleavened bread (a claim repeated many times in Hitler’s magazine Der Stürmer (The Stormer). 

The “Protocols” conspiracy theory that inspired 19th century Tsarism, and 20th century Nazism re-emerged in Russia in the 21st century in the Russian Federation. In early January 2005, 20 members of the Russian State Duma publicly made a blood libel accusation against the Jewish people. Alluding to previous antisemitic Russian court decrees that accused the Jews of ritual murder, they wrote that “Many facts of such religious extremism were proven in courts.” The accusation included the claim that “the whole democratic world today is under the financial and political control of international Jewry. And we do not want our Russia to be among such unfree countries”. This demand was published as an open letter to the prosecutor general, in Rus Pravoslavnaya (Русь православная, “Orthodox Russia”), a national-conservative newspaper. This group consisted of members of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democrats, the Communist faction, and the nationalist Motherland party (Родина), with some 500 supporters such as chess player Boris Spassky (Бори́с Спа́сский). The accusing document is known as “The Letter of Five Hundred” (“Письмо пятисот” see Сова 2005).

The theory also emerged at this time in the west, with an unusual twist. David Icke is a former English sports commentator, who claims that he is a “Son of the Godhead” and has secret knowledge about an evil alien race who have secretly conquered the earth. He claims many public figures are actually disguised members of this race, part of a “Babylonian Brotherhood”, of “The Illuminati”, of the Rothschild Zionists”, and they plan to propel humanity towards a global fascist state or New World Order.  These secret world rulers are a “deep state” of child-sacrificing, blood-drinking Satan-worshipping hybrid aliens, capable of changing their shape, whose ranks include George Bush, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Queen Elizabeth of England, the Queen Mother, Bob Hope and Kris Kristofferson, among others. Icke’s book “The Robots’ Rebellion” (1994, pp 175-177) refers repeatedly to the Protocols of Zion, saying they are a real world conspiracy but calling them the “Illuminati protocols”, and defining the Illuminati as the “Brotherhood elite at the top of the pyramid of secret societies world-wide”. He suggests that all the Jewish words in the Protocols are metaphorical and do not refer to Jewish people as such, and yet when he lists the brotherhood, he lists 25 people of whom 20 are Jewish. “At least twenty of the twenty-five are Jewish. Of the remaining five, two have Jewish or German names, and one is described as a “Rothschild Zionist . . . in belief if nothing else”—which clearly implies that one would usually be expected to be a “Rothschild Zionist” in something more than belief. Again, the implication is that the great majority of “Rothschild Zionists” will be Jews.” (Allington and Joshi, 2020, pp 41). The quote comes from a video called “What others dare not say”. Frankly, it makes it quite clear that Icke has something he “dare not say” but has hinted at in every other possible way: his enemy are the Jews.

QAnon is a political conspiracy theory that (like Nazism and Putinism) later evolved into a political movement. It originated in the American far-right political sphere in 2017, with posts on the website 4Chan and 8Chan, although it has clear links to a previous conspiracy theory called Pizzagate. Pizzagate itself began with a leak of Hillary Clinton campaigner John Podesta’s emails, which promoters of the theory believed contained a secret code detailing child sexual abuse. Pizzagate followers said that high-profile Democrats were sexually abusing children at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, which led to an armed attack on the real world pizza restaurant by a gunman who believed the theory. The Conspiracy theory was promoted online most of all by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (RIA), as part of their campaign to get Donald Trump elected president. “We found that at least 14 Russia-linked accounts had tweeted about Pizzagate, including @Pamela_Moore13, whose avatar is, aptly, an anonymous figure wrapped in an American flag; that account has been retweeted by such prominent Trump supporters as Donald Trump Jr., Ann Coulter and Roger Stone, the political operative who recommended Paul Manafort as Trump’s campaign manager.” (Robb, 2017)

QAnon itself centers on claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals known as “Q”. They claim that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children operating a global child sex trafficking ring conspired against former U.S. President Donald Trump during his term in office. Followers of the conspiracy theory say that Trump was planning mass arrests and executions of thousands of cabal members on a day known as “the Storm” or “the Event”. QAnon supporters have named Democratic politicians, Hollywood actors, high-ranking government officials, business tycoons, and medical experts as members of the cabal (Rothschild, 2021).

Allebach (2020) mentions the ultimate 21st century version of blood libel, often incorporated into the QAnon belief system: “Frazzledrip, [based on] a video (that does not exist) of Hillary Clinton mutilating a child in a satanic ritual for “adrenalchrome,” [was] spread by a fake news website in 2018. Adrenalchrome is the made-up concept of adrenalized children’s blood.” The substance (also named Adrenochrome) is mentioned in the 1998 movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“. A real substance called adrenochrome exists, is made synthetically by oxidising adrenaline, and has some rather irrelevant medical uses such as helping blood clotting, by the way. There is something powerful for human beings in the idea of people eating their own children – a kind of primeval aversion that makes these conspiracy theories spread especially well. 1000 years ago people were willing to accept that cannibals could gain magic power from the blood of their victims itself. Now, they need to propose another magical substance that could be present in the blood.

Characteristics of Paranoid Delusions (Conspiracy Theories)

If all this is beginning to sound a little “far fetched”, then good. Conspiracy theories can be viewed psychiatrically, as a kind of persecutory and grandiose delusion. To meet the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) criteria for a delusional disorder, the beliefs need to be “false beliefs based on incorrect inference about external reality that persist despite the evidence to the contrary; these beliefs are not ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture”, and for a doctor to diagnose the disorder, the beliefs must persist for at least a month. The diagnosis is often made primarily by a doctor’s observation of symptoms of distress from the delusion, rather than from the “bizarreness” of the delusion itself; symptoms like “confusion, agitation, perceptual disturbances, physical symptoms, and prominent mood abnormalities” (Bourgeois, 2017).

Real conspiracies do of course exist, where one or more people attempt to subvert social interactions for their own benefit. Some of the most popular conspiracy theories emerged in the late 1960s, at a time when the USA military was engaging in a war in South East Asia and making several claims about that war that were almost immediately shown to be false to fact (that they began serious intervention after an attack on American ships at the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, for example). Those claims were part of a real conspiracy by the US military to justify its intervention in a South East Asian war. Interestingly, some of the earliest of the modern conspiracy theories (such as that the CIA planned the assassination of J.F. Kennedy) were promoted by the “left wing”, at the time of the Vietnam war.

Conspiracy Theories are characterised, like much psychotic ideation, by their universality. With this criterion, we don’t have to check whether shape-changing lizards are involved to define it as conspiracy theory. The notion that all the nurses and doctors in all the ICUs across the world are sending in false information to support a bid for world control is intrinsically illogical. However there are other distinguishing psychological characteristics of conspiracy theories. I have tended to use the following 6 criteria to distinguish Conspiracy theories from knowledge of real political conspiracies and deceptions.

  1. The person believing the theory shows ongoing signs of high anxiety, and physical agitation, such as inability to sleep or make decisions, but denies this anxiety or explains it as a physical effect of the conspiracy attacks.
  2. The person feels a need to convert other people to their beliefs, and cannot distinguish contexts where that might be inappropriate (they are a “conspiracy evangelist”).
  3. The delusions include superheroes who will save us from the conspiracy, often political figures, sometimes ones who are in fact dead, and often ones who simultaneously deny the conspiracy in words and deeds (a denial which is explained as their need to operate secretly for now).
  4. The delusions include beliefs in the magic powers of the deluded person: they are immune to diseases, able to detect chemicals without testing, able to read other people’s minds, able to gather knowledge superior to all scientists, etc. The Sovereign Citizen movement is also an example of this.
  5. The delusions include conspiracies which would require the ongoing cooperation and secrecy of millions of actors, often people with known antagonisms to each other, and often people who have extensive public personas (e.g. all nurses and doctors, all reporters in media companies globally, all heads of states)
  6. The person shows attention/learning difficulties but remains convinced that they have special skills in obtaining information, or special intuitions.

These criteria are useful, because conspiracy theories can be held by “anyone”. We cannot say that only “mentally subnormal” people would believe conspiracy theories, or that no person with tertiary education would believe conspiracy theories. As we shall see, there is some evidence that education protects people from being caught by conspiracy theories, but sometimes even hundreds of medical doctors might voice an opinion that is patently absurd. Even in 2016, 12 million Americans (including many with tertiary degrees) believed that the country was run by shape-changing alien lizards, a theory promoted by former sports presenter David Icke. That 12 million included hundreds of medical doctors (I know two medical practitioners who are practicing in New Zealand, are certified NLP Practitioners, and believe this). No amount of medical training is guaranteed to screen out future psychosis. David Icke, mentioned above, believes that the British Royal Family are key shape changing lizard rulers, that the Nazi holocaust never happened, that the 911 attack was planned by the USA government, that he is the son of God, that climate change is a hoax, and (previously) that the world was set to end in 1997 (Sky News, 2020). This level of conspiracy theory would be considered psychotic by most people, and yet Icke has become central in the Covid-19 conspiracy movement, and his videos are embraced by people with various professional trainings.

That said, educational level is a factor in the adoption of crazy ideas. People who have had practice presenting logical arguments at tertiary level are only a third as likely to be fooled by simplistic conspiracy theories. “In a study that included 9654 US adults, 48% of those who had a high school education or less believed there was some truth to the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was planned, but only 15% among those with some postgraduate training endorsed this idea.” (Schaeffer, K.A.) By encouraging professionally untrained people to quickly get “certification”, alternative health fields could be said to be encouraging the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias whereby people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability (the initial study showing this effect was done by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 2011). 

Weaponising the Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories are not simply a result of personal vulnerabilities though. At specific times in history, they are deliberately promoted by specific political leaders (as in the example of Adolf Hitler promoting the Protocols of Zion). Who promotes conspiracy theories online in the 21st century? The key sources are fairly easy to identify. A Cornell University study that analysed over 38 million news articles about the pandemic and confirmed that, “the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around COVID.”(Evanega et alia, 2020). In 2019, accounts removed by Twitter and suspected of being controlled by Russia’s Internet Research Agency sent a high volume of tweets tagged with #QAnon and the movement slogan #WWG1WGA, short for Where We Go One, We Go All. The conspiracy theory that 5G technology has negative health impacts predates the pandemic. “In January 2019 the Russian government’s English-language channel RT featured a correspondent warning that 5G “might kill you” .” This was picked up by conspiracy sites over the next week and became a significant part of the early covid-19 conspiracy theory movement (Evanega et alia, 2020). In short, conspiracy theories are centrally initiated by political actors, rather than by ‘the person in the street”.

In the pandemic, this was very obvious, especially in the United States. “It is apparent from the data that mentions of President Trump within the context of COVID-19 misinformation comprise by far the largest single component of the infodemic. Trump mentions comprised 37.9% of the overall infodemic, well ahead of “miracle cures”, which comprised 26.4%. However, a substantial proportion— possibly even the majority — of the “miracle cures” topic was also driven by the president’s comments, so a substantial overlap can be expected between these topics. We conclude therefore that the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic”.” (Evanega et alia, 2020).

RT and other Russian media channels also invested a lot of energy in the “911 Truth” movement, a conspiracy theory claiming that the World Trade Centre buildings did not collapse as a result of terrorists flying planes into them, but as a result of “controlled demolition”. “Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth” is the central organisation in this movement. Ironically it has few actual architects or engineers, but what it does have is a lot of people paid to talk on Russian media about how the US government may have killed thousands of its own people. With a weekly US audience of over 8 million, RT also promotes the most offensive conspiracy theories of all – “False Flag” conspiracies that claim that the frequent mass shootings in the USA are actually staged by fake actors, interviewing people like Gordon Duff who even claims that terrorist attacks such as the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack (Paris 2015) were done by Jewish authorities as part of a Zionist plot to divide the west. RT also publishes articles on the “chemtrails” conspiracy theory and on the flat earth theory, demonstrating that its aim is not so much to provide news or even to promote a specific worldview, but rather to deliberately create a continuous sense of distrust of “the official story” (West, 2018, p 233-236).

Ed Pilkington and Gloria Oladipo (2022) looked at the Russian claim that Ukraine had biolabs at which they were developing strains of SARS-CoV-2 in March 2022, creatively proposed just a few weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, 2022. “Moscow went on to claim that it had found documents related to the secret US operation in laboratories in Kharkiv and Poltava. The allegations were quickly amplified by China, which supported the claims during the UN security council debate. The theory took on a life of its own on social media under the hashtag #usbiolabs, and found a welcome home among right-wing outlets in the US including the War Room podcast of Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and the Fox News primetime show hosted by Tucker Carlson.” This conspiracy theory should win a prize for its ability to link together previous conspiracy theorists (everyone from Plandemic to QAnon) and political actors (Right wing, Left wing, Russian, Chinese, Donald Trump, Fascists….)

Cambridge Analytica

The technology by which Political Actors benefit from conspiracy theories is called psychometrics, and was pioneered by a company called Cambridge Analytica, in the 4 years leading up to the pandemic. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s White House Chief Strategist, and chairman of Brietbart News (the American centre for fake news over the time of the Trump presidency), rejects claims that he is a white nationalist, and describes himself instead as a “Christian Zionist” who sees Orthodox Russia and Fundamentalist USA as natural allies in a “war for eternity”.  In 2014, as Vice President of Cambridge Analytica (a “data analysis” company) Bannon paid the social media company Facebook  a million dollars to access their profiles and perform an investigation as to what political messages would target what specific people. Cambridge Analytica offered Facebook users some fun questionnaires which actually assessed their personality profile based on Psychology’s “Big 5” researched personality traits (Roccas et alia, 2002). They then tested various types of political proposal and assessed the response on each of the personality types. Once they had finished collecting this “psychographic data”, they were able to reliably assess what someone’s personality was by their word use on Facebook, and target specific political advertisements to specific Facebook users in specific political constituencies. They knew that tipping an election did not any longer require convincing everyone. It just required targeting small groups of undecided voters in specific geographical areas, and those voters could be reached online by “memes” (pictures with words) and videos (Mayer, 2018).

The next year, this strategy was a key to Cambridge Analytica’s work for Leave EU (Nigel Farage’s Brexit organization which achieved a UK vote to leave the EU in 2016) and for Donald Trump’s Presidential election campaign in the year 2016. The aim of Cambridge Analytica’s work is to make political adverts feel like something the person is already emotionally committed to. For example in Brexit, they had a proposal that easily appealed to right wing racists who wanted to stop all non-white immigration, or to businessmen who were concerned about EU regulations stopping their tax havens. To make the campaign appeal to left wingers, they ran advert campaigns suggesting that the British National Health Service (NHS) was underfunded because so much money was going to the EU, and that the European Union was an unelected bureaucracy that was destroying local democracy. Those people then enthusiastically shared these adverts, because they felt aligned with the ideas already. The Russian Ambassador to the U.K., Alexander Yakovenko, provided a link to Putin in the Russian Federation, and after the successful Brexit vote is reported to have said to a fellow diplomat “We have crushed the British to the ground. They are on their knees, and they will not rise for a very long time.” Conspiracy theory memes published by Russian sources and circulated on facebook claimed there were Muslim”no-go areas” in Britain where the police could not enter, and various other horrors which were a result of being in the EU and not being able to “control the borders”. Other memes suggested that Putin was an anti-Muslim hero who kept his own country safe in a way that Britain (as part of EU) could not. They falsely quoted him as saying “The Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture and primitive ways of Sharia Law and Muslims”. (Reuters staff, 2021)

Russia also assisted in the Cambridge Analytica work to get Donald Trump elected. With precision timing, Russian hackers got a trove of presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s emails and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange released these just before the 2016 US election, along with claims that they revealed damning information about her plans for the US military-industrial domination of the world (Mayer, 2018). As a subtext, they were said to contain secret information about a Democratic party child sex ring, evidence that Clinton had a fatal disease and evidence that she had committed several murders – all false, but the precursor to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Cambridge Analytica recommended all the key moves in Trump’s election campaign. A slogan that appealed even to leftists in the USA was “drain the swamp” – a paradoxical claim that electing a billionaire to the presidency would remove the “swamp-like” influence of the wealthy on politics. Trump said repeatedly that he didn’t really understand it, but was happy to have crowds chant it. Russian memes now showed Trump standing with Jesus, against Satan and Clinton.

The Big 5 Personality traits, by the way, are:

  • openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
  • conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless)
  • extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
  • agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational)
  • neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

Pandemics and Paranoia

Another predisposing factor for conspiracy theories is social crisis. Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen Douglas show that the rise and fall of conspiracy theories through history follows the sense of loss of social control, especially due to rapid changes in power structures and norms of conduct, especially in the 1890s and 1950s, as well as in our own decade. They also show that when workers suspect that their job future is uncertain, they are more likely to suspect that their managers are engaged in a complex conspiracy for evil goals.

Pandemics have always generated paranoia in a section of the population. Human beings, firstly, are primed to intuitively be fearful of and avoid those who are sick (Axelsson et alia, 2018). 2018 research showed “that untrained people can identify sick individuals above chance level by looking at facial photos taken 2 hours after injection with a bacterial stimulus inducing an immune response”. Since we are not usually conscious of this avoidance of ill people, and don’t have a clear understanding of the effects of invisible pathogens like viruses, we tend to explain our response with other fears that focus on visible events.

Polio was a viral disease that ruined the lives of many in the early twentieth century (including the great Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, whose work I teach). In New Zealand it killed many children and paralysed many more from 1910 to 1955. Lockdowns and social distancing were the only solutions at the time. In 1948, New Zealand schools simply closed for a term (a third of the year) and churches, movie theatres and swimming pools were closed, and concerts and other public events were banned. Finally, in 1955, a simple immunization was developed and when I was a child I drank the small pink liquid in a paper cup, protecting me for life against it. New Zealand Anthropologist Dr Heather Battles studied the history of responses to the Polio outbreaks in the early 20th century and identified these three conspiracy theories which emerged at that time.

  1. The Electrical Energy Conspiracy theory. Environmental changes that can be seen visibly (like power lines or 5G towers) are an easy focus for anxiety. In 1910, Dr Charles Sheard, Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health and Chairman of the Provincial Board of Health, suggested that electrical power lines could be predisposing people to ‘nerve ailments’ and causing the cases of ‘infantile paralysis’ (as polio was then known). This was reported in the Toronto Daily Star, August 18, 1910. This idea had particular resonance and significance to Ontarians, and especially the people of Hamilton, aka ‘The Electric City’, where the polio epidemic was centred.”
  2. The Biological Attack Conspiracy theory. Another easily visible object of paranoia is racial groups and national groups. It is easier to believe that some malevolent nation is attacking us, rather than to accept that nature is not entirely benevolent and sometimes very bad things happen to nice people who just happened to be vulnerable (The Germans were the target of blame in the early 20th century, the Chinese or Ukrainians in the 21st century). “Fear of Germans and prevailing ‘hate the Hun’ propaganda during the WW1 led to rumours of German spies spreading ‘polio germs’ around New Zealand during the 1916 epidemic. New Zealand newspapers reported these suspicions, which came from various quarters. These ranged from the Women’s Anti-German League which proposed the epidemic was “caused by the machinations of German scientific persons sent here for the purpose by the Kaiser to prevent the strength of the New Zealand armies of the future from growing formidable” (Otago Witness, 16 February 1916) to John Payne, then MP for Grey Lynn (Auckland), who said “outbreaks of cerebro-spinal meningitis in camp and infantile paralysis all over the country lent colour to the suspicion that Germans intended to liberate disease cultures” (The Colonist, 11 April 1926).”
  3. The Fake Pandemic Conspiracy theory. Paradoxically, one of the most common responses is to say that the Public Health Measures introduced to deal with the pandemic are themselves to blame. In his  book “A Summer Without Children”, Alex Crockett tells the story of the Virginia, USA, 1950 Polio outbreak, and comments on the debunking done by a local newspaper: The Enterprise. Locals who believed that the outbreak was “fake” had been taking down public health warnings, fearing that their businesses would be damaged by social distancing and quarantines. The July 28, 1950 edition of The Enterprise was headlined, “Get The Facts – Please Don’t Spread Rumors,”

The same three anti-scientific responses occurred after the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020. As early as January 2020 the French conspiracy website called Les moutons enragés suggested a correlation between the emergence of the novel coronavirus and the installation of 5G towers in Wuhan, China. The bioweapon theory really emerged on May 4, 2020 with the release of the YouTube video “Plandemic” with filmmaker Mikki Willis conducting an uncritical melodramatic interview with discredited researcher Judy Mikovits. The idea that lockdowns and mask wearing are politically motivated rather than a scientific public health response first emerged strongly when Fox News reported on May 17, 2020 Eric Trump’s comments that the coronavirus will “magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be able to reopen” after the November 3, 2020 presidential election. (see Evanega et alia, 2020 for all these dates). In both cases, of course, the final conspiracy theory focus shifted to the immunization/vaccination process itself. Conspiracy theorists claimed that vaccines had a computer chip or tracking device hidden in them, made people “magnetic”, caused more deaths than the virus and so on. Memes from the Russian Internet Research Agency even claimed that Putin was a kind of anti-vaccine hero (which was odd because he was amongst the first to take the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, once it was developed). As time went on, the Russian memes focused on non-Russian covid-19 vaccines such as Pfizer/BioNTech, AstraZeneca, and Moderna, and amplified negative scientific results (Krutov et alia, 2021).

Suspicion of Science, Pharmaceuticals and Colonization

Not every social group is as susceptible to conspiracy theories. Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky reviewed several studies showing that “Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self.”

In New Zealand, for example, vaccine hesitancy and refusal to cooperate with Covid-19 health measures such as lockdowns and mask wearing were far more common in the indigenous Māori population than in the “colonial” Pakeha population. While most Māori were vaccinated and cooperative with Health Ministry requests, there was a sizeable “refusal”. It was Māori protestors who organised the “Hīkoi [march] of Truth” in October 2021 to protest against lockdowns and vaccination.

On 25 October 2021, Māori kai ‘hakahāere [organizer] of the Hīkoi [march] of Truth, Carlene Hereora, said; “We, the direct descendants of ngā rangatira o ngā hapū o Nu Tīreni [the original Māori chiefs] have come together to uphold the mana and tapu [sacredness] of He Wakaputanga o ngā hapū o Nu Tireni [the Declaration of Independence], as we can no longer rely on our leaders to uphold that which is sacred to us. We are here together to restore order”. In this statement she claims to be speaking on behalf of her ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence of the Māori people in 1935 [He Wakaputanga o ngā hapū o Nu Tireni]. However the elected council of the tribe that organized that declaration (Te Rūnanga-ā-iwi ō Ngāpuhi) told her to stand down. Te Rūnanga-ā-iwi ō Ngāpuhi chair Wane Wharerau said in a statement that the Rūnanga stood with everyone who opposed the hīkoi. “We have not fought this virus for 20 months and tolerated the harsh restrictions around tangihanga [funerals], gather at the marae [community centre] and visit whanāu [extended family] to abandon this plan now. It is disappointing that organisers are using He Whakaputanga, or the Declaration of Independence, as a means of bringing attention to their cause…this hīkoi diverts attention from a genuine commemoration of a covenant in the history of Ngāpuhi.” Police intervened and stopped the planned march, which would have breached the Covid-19 lockdown in Auckland city. … Wane said the anti-vaccination event was “particularly dangerous for whānau” in Tai Tokerau, who faced a growing threat likened to the 1918 Spanish Flu which caused a widespread loss in Northland. “Now, little more than 100 years after that pandemic, Te Tai Tokerau is at the point of a similar threat but this time we have a vaccine at our disposal. “…when this threat has passed, Ngāpuhi will happily welcome you and your whānau north again,” he said.”

Researchers Rebeka Graham and Bridgette Masters-Awatere say “Prior to colonisation, Māori had developed health structures and systems tailored to themselves, their environment and collective concepts of health. Colonisation fundamentally disrupted these systems, with newly imposed health systems (including hospitals) configured primarily to serve Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent). Inequitable Māori healthcare outcomes are consistent with broader Indigenous experiences of colonisation that include theft of land, degradation of language, racist policies, discrimination and social exclusion. Practices associated with colonisation include reduced access to social determinants of health, higher rates of preventable, adverse in-hospital events, and increased likelihood of inappropriate care and follow-up.”

The effect of colonisation is just one of the social factors identified as leading to vaccine hesitancy and suspicion of health services. A New Zealand research study on the origins of vaccine hesitancy in the 2020 pandemic concluded “Public-health professionals aspire to tailor pro-vaccination messaging to the backgrounds of vaccine-hesitant or vaccine-resistant people. But who are these people? This 5-decade longitudinal study revealed that vaccine-hesitancy and resistance are not merely misunderstandings by un-informed adults. Intentions emerge from adverse childhood experiences that leave a legacy of mistrust, chronic mental-health problems, lifelong tendencies to have extreme fear and anger emotions and shut down mentally under stress, fatalism about health, non-conformism, and information-processing deficits that, when combined with extreme emotions, can yield decisions that seem inexplicable to health professionals. Vaccine intentions‘ roots begin before secondary-school age. Education to prepare pupils to make decisions as adults about infection-reducing behaviors, including vaccinations, should be part of the national preparation strategy for future pandemics.” (Moffit et alia 2022).

“The results found that 13 percent of those surveyed in July 2021 were resistant to vaccinations. It found many of those had adverse childhood experiences, and that vaccine hesitancy could reflect a lifetime of mistrust. Dunedin Study associate director Professor Terrie Moffitt explains “What they appear to learn during childhood is if anyone comes to you with authority, they’re just trying to get something, and they don’t care about you, they’ll take advantage,” … She said those now opposed had scored lower on information processing speed, reading level and verbal skills as children, and as 45-year-olds just before the pandemic, had less practical, everyday health knowledge. [This] suggests they may have lacked the knowledge they needed to make health decisions in the stress of the pandemic,”” (Radio New Zealand, 2022).

The same challenge is found in the United States. Dr Lissa Rankin, Integrative Medicine specialist, is part of a task force set up by USA President Biden to study the effect of social trauma on acceptance of public health advice. Their indictment of the traditional health care system is profound (Kohler, 2021). “While the reasons for vaccine fear are diverse, complex and bipartisan, we believe that individual and collective trauma is an underlying issue responsible for attitudes and beliefs in the vaccine fear-laden population. …Given that preventable medical error was the #3 cause of death in the US until COVID-19, people have good reason to be fearful, ambivalent and mistrustful of the medical system. …While the for-profit pharmaceutical industry gives lip service to patient wellbeing, the public is well aware that, by definition as publicly traded companies, the financial bottom line is the #1 priority. Especially when the public perceives that the government protects private pharmaceutical industry interests above the interests of individuals who are harmed by medications or vaccinations, it’s no wonder trust in pharmaceuticals is wounded. … Given that chronically and intentionally marginalized people have historically been unethically and inhumanely oppressed under systemic racism, not to mention scientifically experimented upon during atrocities like Tuskegee there is a significant historical and active breach of trust that breeds ambivalence and fear. … Public trust in government is at an all time low: Less than one-quarter of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (22%). So many policy decisions that impact millions of people’s lives are made by the private interests of a few who can fund lobbyists and political campaigns.”

Down the “Rabbit Hole”

This is the social background in which Conspirituality blossoms. Ironically, since the original aim of the anti-vaccination protests was presented as an issue of “individual freedom”, the protests led many New Zealanders to events at the New Zealand Parliament in early 2022, where they were exposed to further politicisation by extreme right wing (fascist) activists. As we saw with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, international political actors skilfully manipulate conspiracy theorists to support political aims that they would have been very opposed to before getting involved in the movement. In New Zealand, the “Freedom” protests were organised by groups such as “Counterspin Media, which operates on Steve Bannon’s online media platform GTV and is hosted by Kelvyn Alp (the founder of an anti-government militia in the early 2000s). Alp regularly claims that Covid is not real and called upon the military to “take over the government” during the parliament occupation. Or Damien De Ment, a QAnon-influenced conspiracy theorist and Trump supporter, who has regularly threatened politicians, academics, activists and the media with summary trials and execution for their “crimes”. Or John Ansell, former ad-man most known for the controversial “iwi / Kiwi” billboards in 2005, who believes the mandates are part of a broader communist takeover. Ansell has proposed executing politicians by lethal injection and believes that the prime minister staged the Christchurch terrorist attack because she “wanted another Port Arthur”. Or Richard Sivell, a “vociferous” participant in the parliament occupation who was recently arrested for allegedly threatening to kill the prime minister. At the time of his arrest, Sivell was occupying a Crown-owned property under “allodial title”, an archaic common law doctrine popular among sovereign citizens that is “completely foreign to New Zealand land law”.” (Cunningham, 2022)

The sequence of radicalisation is shown in the following diagram. People may start off just wanting to live a healthy lifestyle, and having had bad personal experiences with traditional health care, as well as being interested in alternative choices. Especially if they search online, these interests lead them to proposals that are based in scientific falsehoods, often deliberately promoted by political actors. As they begin to doubt all expertise, they begin to entertain notions that increasingly question all accepted science and social expertise. In conspiracy theory circles this is sometimes called “taking the red pill” or going “down the rabbit hole”. These terms come from the 1999 movie “The Matrix“. In this movie, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus. Morpheus says “You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The choice to “take the red pill” creates both anxiety (consensual reality cannot be trusted) and exhilaration (you are now one of the elite who “know the truth”). Unfortunately, online the political solutions that people who “take the red pill” are then introduced to tend to be classically fascist (plans to overthrow and execute the current governments, and to punish identified enemies such as the “Rothschild Zionists”). Obviously, such solutions are especially appealing to those who know from their own personal and cultural experience that consensual reality creates many severe injustices. By this stage of radicalisation, their own personal health is not the issue: they feel they are part of a global awakening that will lead to a better future for humanity.

The Line of Demarcation

Mick West points out that all conspiracy theorists and all human beings have “a line of demarcation” between what they consider to be scientifically verifiable reality and what they think is nonsense, and indeed nonsense that deliberately obscures or ridicules the whole notion of truth. That is to say that a person who believes that vaccines are more dangerous than the actual diseases they protect against may none-the-less be offended by your lumping them in with people who believe in shape changing reptilian aliens, a theory that they may well suspect is deliberately designed to make fun of, and thus dismiss their valid scientific objections. You also have a line of demarcation. Maybe you believe that President Bush deliberately planned the invasion of Iraq knowing that there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (I think that is likely, for example), but you draw the line at claiming that he also planned the 911 attack as a precursor excuse (many conspiracy theorists believe that is true). West explains “Helping people out of the rabbit hole can equate to simply moving that line gradually down the extremeness spectrum. But to move their line you’ve got to understand exactly where that line of demarcation lies.” (West, 2018, p. 41).

Summary: What Can We Do?

We have looked at conspiracy theories in general and conspirituality in particular from several different perspectives; the history of blood libel and persecution, the psychiatric nature of paranoia, the political weaponising of conspiracy theories by heads of state, the effect of pandemics in raising anxiety, and the effects of trauma created by social events such as dispossession and colonization. We have seen how people can gradually radicalise until they believe the absurd. This doesn’t magically solve our challenge, but it does help us understand what factors can be leveraged to increase the chances that we come out of this sane.

  • We need to learn ourselves, and to teach people, cognitive skills such as the ability to distinguish real conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
  • We need skills for trauma recovery, and to create a sense of safety and resilience in times of health crises and political upheaval.
  • We need social change to empower people to feel that by choosing science, they are choosing their own best future.
  • We need a movement to expose and refuse political manipulation of conspiracy theories for fascist agendas.

In short, we need all the positive intentions that people try to get in distorted ways as a result of scientific, psychological and political illiteracy. And that is my personal program for my work in NLP over the next decade.

To read more about the NLP of Conspiracy Theories see these articles:

References:

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