The Story of my Own Involvement in Conspiracy Theories

Richard Bolstad

As I have been writing a series of articles about conspiracy theories, I think it is important for me to acknowledge that I, as a human being, have all the usual cognitive biases and have been prey to conspiracy theories in my time also. This is also helpful for people to understand because it helps make sense of why I am now involved in debunking conspiracy theories. To explain the context: people often suspect that people critiquing conspiracy theories are doing so because they are paid to do so by the conspirators themselves. My reasons for being involved in “debunking” conspiracy theories are specifically about participating in the creation of a scientifically sound NLP. I am a trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming, a model of psychology which you will see on Wikipedia is even now described as a pseudoscience. On reflection, I can see that I myself have previously been a promoter of the kind of conspiracy theories that have helped earn this label for NLP.

I grew up in an ostensibly “Christian” family. This had the advantage that I was introduced to a lot of nice ideas about love and forgiveness. One disadvantage was that if ever I injured myself, for example tripping over, my mother would say to me, “What have you done? That is God punishing you. You must have done something naughty.” This meant that I grew up with the idea that the ruler of the universe devoted his time 24/7 to monitoring whether I brushed my teeth well enough, whether I touched my genitals inappropriately and whether I said my prayers carefully enough – if I didn’t include every single family member in my nightly prayers, they might die, and it would be my fault. Let’s not get into the idea that he was willing to torture his own son to death because of all my screw-ups, and that he frequently had commanded people to kill their own son or had massacred whole cities because they contained bad people. And sadly, there was a special agent of the bad forces who devoted his entire time 24/7 to trying to get me to do exactly the sort of things that God was worried about – brush my teeth overly quickly, forget to bless my grandad, touch myself in the wrong place. And his agents included even my best friends. This is, frankly, a conspiracy theory. I loved it. I remember explaining it to my father. I said “When Jesus was on the cross, even one of the Romans said “Truly this was the son of God.” See that proves it – even the Romans knew.” My father smiled. “Maybe. But maybe he just said “He wasn’t such a bad guy.” and then as people told that story it got bigger over time.” Yep: my father was in Satan’s possession! But by 1970, I was starting to suspect that my father was right about Matthew 27:54. Let’s face it: a Roman is not likely to have said “Truly this was the son of God.” Which God? Romans had many, one of whom, at this time, was the “deified” Julius Caesar. The phrase doesn’t even make sense in Roman. Someone had misquoted someone.

In 1972, aged 17, I left my home in Christchurch, New Zealand, and moved to another city (Auckland). Away from High School and the restraining influence of my family, I had by now gotten involved in the protest movement and the drug “counterculture”, and I had stopped going to church. I lived first at the old headquarters of the Socialist Action League (a Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist political party), and then at the old headquarters of the Communist Party of New Zealand (a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political party). While I did not myself identify as a Marxist, but instead as an Anarcho-syndicalist (Lev Tolstoy was my hero), I largely shared the Marxist Leninist view of history, explained in economic reductionist terms as Marxist “Political Economy” (Eaton, 1966).  I actually assisted in teaching Marxist Political Economy study groups at one point. I now identify this as a conspiracy theory style view of a secret international capitalist “cabal” who rule the world, control history, and are destined to soon be overthrown by a brave revolutionary movement of everyday people.

At the same time, I also began reading writings by people like Erich von Daniken (Chariots of the Gods, 1969) and John Michell (The View Over Atlantis, 1969) who maintained that in ancient times aliens had begun visiting earth and had set up a system for harnessing a geomagnetic energy in the planet, revealed in the positioning of ancient structures such as the Pyramids and Stonehenge. Basic to this idea was the premise that significant events in human history were being “covered up” by governments and historians who knew about the events but did not want the rest of us to know. The aim of the UFO movement was to expose the coverup and re-establish our rightful contact with galactic civilization. I loved this stuff, and it even explained my earlier Christian ideas, because maybe the stories in the Bible were actually misremembered stories of aliens. Genesis 6:4 said “The Nephilim [giants, fallen ones] were on the earth in those days – and also afterward – when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” Maybe it was referring to alien visitors. Of course, even with the limited attention I had paid to High School Science, it should have been obvious to me that alien beings who had evolved on one planet would be unlikely to be able to breed with humans on earth – after all we can’t even breed humans and their closest surviving genetic relatives. Unfortunately, the same absurd error was beaming onto my TV via Star Trek every week. Vulcans and humans could marry (the Star Trek character Spock is a child of a human mother and a Vulcan father), so why not ancient aliens and humans.

All these conspiracy theories (my version of Christianity, Ancient Aliens and Earth Energy, and Marxist Political Economy) appealed to my childhood fascination with history. In all cases, by 1972 I considered myself to be an expert in “facts” about history that most historians did not even know. It was almost shocking to me to come across an equally fringe book which provided contradictory evidence in each case. Christian archaeologist Clifford Wilson’s book Crash Go The Chariots (1969) showed that von Daniken was inaccurately presenting facts and that it was fairly easy to identify a more plausible explanation for the artifacts he described in most cases. Unfortunately, Wilson himself subscribed to the alternative conspiracy theory that some of the events in von Daniken’s alternate history were the result of intervention by a simultaneously genocidal and yet loving Christian God. However, in the case of Political Economy, William Domhoff’s book Who Rules America? (1967) was both firmly pro-democracy and yet showed that no belief in a secret capitalist class conspiracy was needed to explain the rise of a power elite in USA, and there was little historical evidence of Marx’s grand theory of class war as the driving force of history either past or future. Once I understood conspiracy theories, suddenly it all seemed very familiar: our arrogant discussions at left wing meetings where we thought we were riding the wave of history, our obsessions about the CIA plot to assassinate the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and all the way down to modern leftists claiming that Syria’s emergency medical teams and the inhabitants of Bucha are secretly actors trying to make Russia look bad. We were no different than 2020s Trumpists with their claims of a secret Democrat plot to assassinate Clinton’s enemies, and their claim that the victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre are actors. And no, the fact that leaders of entire countries (Russia and China, in both cases) are encouraging you does not somehow prove that your conspiracy theory is more valid. Domhoff (2022, p 26) points out that such conspiracy theories differ from actual history because a) they imagine that the “secret rulers” have a unique obsession with power that makes them non-human, b) they imagine that the secret rulers are incredibly smart and calculating, whereas research suggests they have rather ordinarily intelligence, but are opportunistic and occasionally lucky, and c) they imagine that large groups of people can keep conspiracies secret for prolonged periods, whereas actual conspiracies are rather prone to multiple leaks. “The “school of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe the conspiracy thinking that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, three great philosophers of this time, all of whom seem to pride themselves with unmasking the obvious realities and exposing a hidden system behind history. (Ricoeur p. 356).

Some of those early conspiracy theories seem so harmless by comparison to QAnon, but the cognitive bias is the same. In 1969-1970, my friends and I listened carefully to all our Beatles records searching for the clues that proved “Paul is Dead” (ironic since today Paul McCartney is actually one of the last surviving members of the band, and still clearly is Paul with all of Paul’s memories). The idea was that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash and was replaced by a “stunt double” called Billy Shears (a name referenced in the original lead-in to the song “With a little help from my friends”). The cover of the Abbey Road LP, where Paul is out of step with the others and barefoot, was a clue, as was the line in the song “Glass Onion”, where John Lennon says “Here’s another clue for you all, the walrus was Paul”. Hours of video of Paul arguing and playing music (public in the movies “Let it Be” and “The Beatles: Get Back”) had not yet been released, and we were sure this was a shocking international plot to deceive us all. Imagine the intricate work that the Beatles, and hundreds of people who knew Paul, would need to go to, to hide his death over all these years, and then to incorporate such bizarre hints about it into the songs. Actually, of course, the whole story was created as a series of accidents (Sheffield, 2019). For us, it was such a thrill to have “secret knowledge” that transcended what the “ordinary people” were getting from the “mass media”. Alienated from the rewards of prestige and money available in mainstream New Zealand, we none-the-less felt we were special in our own way.

One of the most fascinating experiences I had of being caught by conspiracy theory at that early time was common to most of us in the anti-Vietnam war movement. The main USA involvement in the Vietnam war began after two dramatic incidents in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964. The USS Maddox, a Navy destroyer, was reportedly attacked by North Vietnamese boats on August 2 and again on August 4 that year (West, 2018, p. 183). President Johnson’s Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, was told that in the second event, a torpedo attack had been launched on two US navy ships. This would have been an open declaration of war, but within a few hours Captain Herrick on the Maddox radioed “Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager [sonar operators] may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.” Convinced that it was just a matter of time before such an attack did happen, McNamara ignored this “Oops we goofed” message and allowed the military to launch a hugely costly war. To be clear, this was not a full “false flag” operation (a faked attack by the USA on its own craft) but a fortuitous mistake which war-eager bureaucrats utilized. It was a LIHOP incident (conspiracy theory talk for an event where the authorities “Let It Happen On Purpose”) rather than a MIHOP event (“Make It Happen On Purpose). And like most such fake excuses for wars (the claim of there being “Weapons of Mass destruction” in Iraq is a good example) it was debunked almost immediately because lots of people on the Maddox, for example, knew the attack had never happened. Like most real world conspiracies, it was clumsy, did not involve millions of people, and was quickly questioned, even in the mainstream media. But the conspiracy theory version went much further….

For my generation, this incident was just the beginning. Once we had accepted that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a full-on false flag event, our pattern-identifying bias was activated, and we were sure that the assassination of Kennedy was the first step before this – the CIA killing the anti-war president so that Johnson would accept the Gulf of Tonkin claim. In 1978 the US House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” (West, 2018, p 29). The fact that the committee specifically rejected the idea that a government agency had been involved, and that what they meant by a conspiracy was simply that Lee Harvey Oswald had other people working with him, was lost on us of course: we were sure that the entire US government was one giant conspiracy (what would now be called a “deep state”), and convinced that there were numerous clues that a second secret CIA shooter had fired the actual fatal shot. Kennedy had been killed in a coup by his Vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who then became President and deliberately set up the Gulf of Tonkin incident to start the war that the CIA wanted. Of course, if you don’t know much about how a bullet behaves inside a human head (i.e. if you’re not a trauma surgeon), even the rebound movement of Kennedy’s head “back and to the left” can seem like proof of a conspiracy. And by 1991, Oliver Stone had created a gripping movie (“JFK”) out of the conspiracy. For people who already have difficulty with critical thinking, a movie makes the conspiracy seem real.

In 1972, I was a firm believer in both the larger historical conspiracy theories (multi-thousand year suppression of alien visitation stories, and the Marxist conspiracy theory of USA capitalism), but by 1992 they had faded into the background as interesting but unlikely possibilities. By that time I had completed full professional trainings as a Nurse and Teacher, including learning how to meet University standards for presenting a researched coherent argument. I now made the decision to become an NLP Trainer. In my NLP training with Tad James in Hawaii that year, I was unwittingly initiated into several new NLP-related conspiracy theories. In particular, Tad James taught the philosophy of German medical doctor Ryke Geerd Hamer, who held that cancer was caused only by traumatic events (identifiable by specific brain lesions), and that microbes do not cause disease but are used by the body as part of its healing (which happens in stages, once the trauma is revealed, with symptoms getting worse before the disease gets better). Hamer claimed that his method was a “Germanic” alternative to mainstream clinical medicine, which he claimed is part of a Jewish conspiracy to decimate non-Jews. Hamer (2009) believed that Influenza vaccines secretly placed a computer chip in non-Jews, transmitting control of them to Tel Aviv, Israel. After being convicted of allowing his patients to die without adequate medical treatment, Dr Hamer was imprisoned and struck off the medical register. French doctor Claude Sabbah, in Marseille, first combined Hamer’s work with NLP, and thanks to this, NLP Trainers like Tad James promoted Hamer’s new medicine with its conspiracy theory base. When I first taught Time Line Therapy™ in 1992, I unwittingly taught much of Hamer’s model. I admit I was puzzled by the strange medical model, but I accepted Tad James’ claim that Dr Hamer had discovered a specific correlation between brain lesions or “foci” and cancer sites in the body. As is typical of pseudoscience diagnosis (phrenology and iridology being other examples) this is an untestable theory – when someone with cancer is found not to have a “lesion” in the correct place in their x-ray, they can be pronounced to be at a different “stage” of healing, and when a person has a “lesion” but no cancer clinically evident, we can be told that the problem has been caught before it manifested as a life-threatening disease. The brain “foci” that Dr Hamer showed in x-rays are in fact identified by radiographers as “ring artifacts” (errors due to slight miscalibrations in the CT scanning machine). Dr Hamer repeatedly claimed he had verified his method at the University of Trnava in Slovakia, and that University has no medical department and denied knowing him. Dr Hamer maintained that this denial was part of the Jewish plot against him. His two step model of healing suggests that the symptoms have to get worse before they get better, as the emotional conflict underlying illness is exposed. The great thing about this theory for healers is that if their client gets better, then their method is claimed to have worked, but if the client gets worse, then this is also evidence that the method is working.

My previous partner Margot Hamblett died of breast cancer in 2001, and she did a lot of visualizing healing, Time Line Therapy™ and other NLP processes, including under NLP co-developer Dr John Grinder’s direct assistance. This is not to deny the anecdotal truth that sometimes people heal from cancer after doing such processes, and not to say that these processes were of no benefit. Merely to acknowledge that neither NLP Practitioners nor Medical Practitioners have a perfect record with treating cancer, and to suggest that they do is misleading at least. I needed to face the reality that my Nursing Registration had prepared me for: we are mortal, and no therapy, cognitive or biological, has so far effectively removed that limit. At the time, I was to some extent convinced that orthodox medicine was caught in a vast conspiracy by international pharmaceutical companies, who suppress successful treatments like we were teaching. I know that individual pharmaceutical companies do make money by selling less than successful treatments (e.g. antidepressants) which they promote with fake science (e.g. the serotonin theory of depression), and that they ignore research warning of side effects or showing a lack of success: they “cherry pick” the research to make more money. I know that they lobby to get governments to prevent access to alternative treatments such as mega-vitamin therapies and herbal treatments. However I also know that the promoters of those treatments behave in a very similar way often. In the NLP field, for example, it is not uncommon to see people claim, as I once did, that NLP is a “cure” for any cancer, to claim that when their clients die this is purely the result of the orthodox medicine they may have taken, and to maintain that the only reason the alternative isn’t more widely researched is because “Big Pharma” obstructs it. Alternative healers often cherry pick their anecdotes just as much as Pharmaceutical companies cherry pick their research. I have come to understand that the truth is more nuanced, and largely the result of each protagonist behaving with the same human cognitive biases and “selfish” motives.

Conspiracy theories depend on the idea that instead of individual actors behaving at times deceptively and at times incompetently, there is a grand plan or “metanarrative” behind history, which most people cannot see (Johnson, pp 126, 187-196). That is obvious in Hamer’s theory where there is an ongoing Germanic medicine that eternally struggles against Jewish medicine. It is also there in a more benign form in theories such as “Spiral Dynamics” developed by followers of Clare Graves, and also part of what I was taught at my NLP Trainer Training. Graves contended that there was a predictable unfolding of human “values systems” through history, “As man solves the problems of existence at a level, Graves contended, ‘new brain systems may be activated and, when activated, change his perceptions so as to cause him to see new problems of existence.’ Instead of beginning only as passive hardware without content (Locke’s tabula rasa or blank slate view), it turns out the normal human brain comes with potential ‘software’-like systems just waiting to be turned on – latent upgrades!” (Beck and Cowan, 1996, p51). Don Beck and Chris Cowan, before they fell out with each other, referred to themselves as spiral wizards who stood above this grand scheme of history and could help others evolve through it. This pretence that history can be transcended by evolved spiral wizards who know the secret pattern, and that there are secret “upgrades” in the brain not yet discovered by scientists (and placed there by God or by aliens presumably, because evolutionary biology does not allow for a series of future species upgrades pre-installed) … is not in itself a conspiracy theory, but meets many of the prerequisites of one.

In the 1990s in Christchurch, New Zealand, there was a much more obvious conspiracy theory being promoted of course, and I had many friends who were involved in it. This was the Christchurch Civic Creche affair, leading to the conviction of Creche worker Peter Ellis for satanic sexual abuse. Children accusing Ellis, who died in 2019 still claiming his total innocence, said he not only sodomised them, but urinated on them, suspended them in cages, forced children into a steaming hot oven, buried children in coffins, removed a child’s belly-button with pliers (?), and ritually sacrificed a boy called Andrew. No child was actually reported missing by anyone involved in the case, and there was neither physical evidence of abuse nor any event with an adult eyewitness. Despite the child interviewing techniques being considered suggestive in the extreme by later psychotherapeutic investigators (in supervised interviews even the next year, several children retracted all of their previous accusations), Ellis was convicted and served 7 years in prison (Hood, 2001). But this was, the complaining parents said, just the tip of an iceberg of satanic child sexual abuse in Christchurch, in which both male and female creche workers had been central. Some of the accusing parents were friends of mine, and the house where the worst abuse was claimed to have happened (404 Hereford Street, where Peter Ellis was boarding) was a “commune” house I had actually lived in 15 years before. The house had originally been an old mansion staffed by servants with servant entrances unobtrusively placed behind rooms etc, and later the house had been converted into a boarding house with separate locked rooms and an isolated internal communal phone room. The conspiracy theory said the house had secret trapdoors and tunnels, and I guess to a child it seemed a bit like that (on one occasion only, Ellis had taken a group of children to the house to see his collection of animals: dogs, ferrets, cats, budgerigars, rabbits, pigeons, fowls – a kind of mini-wildlife-reserve). Like most people peripherally involved, I kept my distance from the whole conflict, which certainly tore Christchurch apart. In an interview after the trial, the Police Detective Inspector in charge of the investigation explained his determined efforts to get a conviction, saying (Hood, 2001, p. 533) “I actually believe in a God that will not be mocked. I believe that this country is actually now starting to reap the harvest of liberalism and of compromise and of double standards.” Needless to say, this modern Christian “witch-hunt” (as US researcher Elizabeth Loftus called it) had come a long way from the first complaints by feminist parents working in the Rape Crisis movement to stop child sexual abuse (5 of the 7 children who reported incidents with Ellis had a parent working in the sexual abuse recovery field themselves, and as I was working with Men Against Rape and the Mensline phone-in counselling service, I knew, or knew of, these people). The witch-hunt for Satanic abuse was a world-wide trend at the time, and accusations of satanism were part of a 1990s moral panic that has since been effectively debunked, and that, like the QAnon movement of 2020, took energy away from the real work to stop sexual abuse (Nathan and Snedeker, 2001). Sadly, for a short time, the conspiracy theorists in the feminist therapy movement had joined forces with the most extreme Christian opponents of their gender-neutral childrearing and other feminist advocacy.

Most people (most only means more than 50%) do not consider themselves conspiracy theorists, and do not use conspiracy theory terminology like “red pill” and “deep state”. However 61% of Americans believe that JFK was killed by a conspiracy probably organised in the CIA (Enten, 2017). After watching Oliver Stone’s movie JFK in 1991, I certainly did. And in 2003 I was convinced that there was a concerted CIA/Military/Presidential conspiracy to have the USA invade Iraq and steal its oil. Wikipedia provides a relatively good summary of the various statements which were part of the story by which USA ignored UN rules of engagement and invaded a sovereign nation at that time (Wikipedia, 2022). As in most real history, there were numerous competing individuals pushing their own agendas: that is to say there was not one conspiracy, but multiple people conspiring to get their own outcomes. There were oil companies who clearly each wanted control of Iraq’s oil. There were other Middle Eastern nations who were telling President Bush that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction because THEY wanted Iraq to be invaded and taken out of the equation. US military intelligence itself (the people I suspected were organising the war) told the president “Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence. The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.”, and immediately after the invasion it became clear to everyone that there was no evidence for those WMDs. If the USA administration was actually organising the entire “conspiracy” it could at least have faked evidence, but it didn’t. The oil companies won their oil contracts, and (ironically) it is the US government that ended up looking like what conspiracy theorists call a “Patsy”. In January 2004, David Kay, the original director of the Iraq Survey group, said unequivocally that “It turns out that we were all wrong”, and that the intelligence community owed the President an apology. Meanwhile Tyler Drumheller, who headed CIA covert operations in Europe during the run-up to the Iraq war, said in 2006 that intelligence sources in Iraq “told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction programs …. The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested,” Once the White House had decided that they were going to achieve a regime change, they didn’t want to hear opposing opinions. They may have been set up as Patsies by false intelligence and by oil lobbyists, but they played the game willingly in the sense that they chose to listen to some accounts and not others, ignoring most of their own “intelligence”, indeed using them as “scapegoats” (Drumheller, 2006). The conclusion is that this was a brutal invasion initiated under false pretences, and ultimately benefiting specific businesses, but not the kind of global conspiracy that leftists like me preferred to imagine. In the actions of people working for the US government at the time, we see ineptness, deception, plotting to hide or distort facts, blame-passing, and all the hallmarks of normal reality: we do not see a skilful, unitary conspiracy, much as political activists would love to claim that was what they were fighting.

By 2001, after Margot’s death, I was starting to examine even my own former NLP beliefs with somewhat more scepticism. By 2006, when “The Secret” DVD movie was produced by Rhonda Byrne, I was clearer that while NLP processes link into powerful mind-body connections, they are not supernaturally magical. “The Secret” claimed to re-present an ancient idea that what you place your emotional attention on determines (or “attracts”) entirely the results that you get. Byrne suggested that this “secret” idea explains the success of all the greatest achievers of history. The original DVD of “The Secret” was focused on the teachings of former Amway distributors Esther and Jerry Hicks, who from 1986 “channelled” (a word they do not approve of) a group of 100 spiritual teachers collectively called Abraham. Jerry died of cancer in 2011, after extensive chemotherapy, and Esther Hicks carried on with her claims, explaining that Jerry had chosen to depart his body, but all is well. There are of course links between NLP and the teachings of Abraham, just as there are links between NLP and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, but NLP is not CBT and it is not the Law of Attraction. NLP is, for example, based around the idea of modelling the detailed steps – the “how” by which successful people achieve results, rather than just visualising results and “trusting” that they will manifest. By 2007, when I retrained with Tad James, he had altered his own model to incorporate some reality testing, emphasising that the prerequisites of change included not only doing NLP processes but also keeping your focus on what you want (that’s the “Secret” bit), AND acting congruently to achieve what you want in the real world (that’s the non-“Secret” bit). That is to say, NLP does not “work” by itself, any more than piano playing “works”. You can have a teacher install all the useful systems for piano playing, but if you don’t practice, you don’t become a great piano player, no matter how congruently you visualise that result. Interestingly, “The Secret”, while not itself being a fully fledged conspiracy theory, had the same appeal to secret knowledge. “I began tracing The Secret back through history. I couldn’t believe all the people who knew this. They were the greatest people in history: Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, Hugo, Beethoven, Lincoln, Emerson, Edison, Einstein.” (Byrne, 2006, p. ix). As I show in my articles about this, this is simply false. These people did not believe in “The Secret” as explained by Byrne (even though they sometimes used the word “secret”). But the feeling that the key to success has been hidden, and that you now have it, is eternally tempting. Especially if the real secret is that you don’t have to work hard or do anything unpleasant to achieve things. The veneer of “science” was so thin on this “law of attraction” theory that people would actually say that it was a universal “scientific” principle that similar “energies” attract each other. Anyone with even the most elementary grasp of electro-magnetism knows that in science energy is not “stuff” but is a quality that stuff has, and that mostly, negatively polarised “stuff” actually attracts positively polarised “stuff”. Negative attracts positive, and positive attracts negative.

It is not just the young who can get caught in conspiracy theories. My mother was (apart from her belief in a punishing God looking over us) a very “down to earth” individual, and during her early twenties had worked in a pharmacy, with some dreams of eventually training as a pharmacist. When she was in her 60s, a friend convinced her to become a home salesperson for a well known brand of “natural” cosmetics: Nutrimetics. What cosmetics are you currently using, the friend asked, and explained “It’s best to avoid anything that contains Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS), Triclosan or Parabens.” She had evidence that these chemicals are deadly poisons, and that traditional cosmetics are a conspiracy by the chemical companies (the truth is, a. they are poisons, but in very large quantities, and b. same goes for other chemicals used in Nutrimetics too). She explained that my mum could make huge amounts of money selling the safer products, and she would be doing the world a service. She would get 20% off each sale. Actually of course, she had to buy the products, at 20% off the official price, and resell them at the official price, to do that. My mother never really made any money doing this (she told me she always just passed on the 20% discount to her friends if she sold something), but it was a hobby. As with all such multi-level marketing schemes, up to 90% of the money coming into such cosmetic companies is not from sales of products to the public, but from the sale of display/sample kits to the “consultants”. That initial payment is what keeps Nutrimetics going. This is a relatively harmless “multilevel marketing scheme”, but it preys on elderly women and it depends on them buying into the great SLS conspiracy theory at the beginning (Prende, 2020; West, 2018, p. 227).

In 2020, as I saw the response of the NLP community to Covid-19 pandemic, I realized I needed to both get clearer about what conspiracy theories are and what I was doing to deal with them. I began writing criticizing those in the NLP community who claimed that the pandemic was fake, that viruses didn’t cause disease etc. The most shocking statement by an NLP Trainer I read was the claim that “Masks, gloves, etc do little or nothing to help you stay safe. The best way to protect yourself is to work with your unconscious to set a shield that protects your nervous system from getting the virus.” NLP Trainers recommended that people “forget about the pandemic and go on a holiday cruise” (at a time when people were still trapped on such ships dying). Over the first year of the pandemic it became clear that a large section of the NLP community had been caught in what was now called “conspirituality”. In the NLP Leadership Forum, an NLP trainer circulated a document by Eshani King, claiming that “The [SARS-CoV-2] vaccine was developed as a bioweapon between the US and China…. The vast majority of the public is still totally unaware of the hundreds of thousands of vaccine related deaths worldwide and well over a million reported vaccine injuries reported via the Yellow Card system in the UK alone. They are still under the highly misleading impression that the injections are ‘safe and effective’. Possibly the biggest deception perpetrated against humanity in its entire history…. This has been a pandemic, not so much of a virus, but a pandemic of fear, self-caused by the reactions meant to prevent it…. Never in recent history has there been a threat to our freedom that more justifies, more demands, our passive non-compliance, active civil disobedience and collective resistance to the disaster into which we are being led under the cloak of this manufactured crisis.” (King, 2021). As I wrote explaining my concern about this, more and more NLP students sent me conspiracy theory videos and argued evangelically for their theories on my social media pages, so I eventually cut connections with those people. Partially as a result of this split in the NLP community, my NLP trainings dropped to 1/3 their size, and I began to pivot away from any NLP trainings that seemed uncritically “magical”. I argued in the NLP community for keeping our work clear of these theories, which I believe discredited NLP at the very time it was trying to remove the “pseudoscience” label and produce the first officially recognized research results. I looked for others, like American doctor Lissa Rankin (Sacred Medicine, 2022), who were trained in scientific medicine, were exploring complementary spiritual and psychological approaches to maintaining health, and yet who were anti-conspiracy-theory and skeptical.

Our brains, as I have explained in other articles, are designed to look for hidden dangers, and to identify patterns in data. This is why people saw canals on Mars (and later people saw a human face looking out from Mars to the stars). There is nothing broken when we do this: it’s just part of being human. And that is why we need to learn about the natural way our brain distorts reality to help us survive. Because, especially now that we have machines and AI to help us, we will keep misrepresenting the world to ourselves, and sometimes (when there is a pandemic, for example) this can be a life threatening mistake. Identifying these mistakes and changing our mind needs to be a normal part of life.

One time, a few months before my previous partner Margot died, I discovered that all my photography negatives had been lost. I became convinced that, in her carelessness, Margot had thrown them away with a lot of other stuff she had recently tidied up. I was angry about this, and in my polite “communications skills-ey” way, I told her how her carelessness had affected me. She apologised. And then, quite by chance, one day I found all the photography negatives where they had fallen down behind my bedside drawers. I had simply misplaced them. But I can assure you I had felt so absolutely righteous about my indignation before I found them. My brain had found a pattern: I was a tidy organised person, and so she must have done something that caused my stuff to get lost. I felt so sure of my theory. Luckily I found out in time to be able to apologise. The Germans did not find out in time to apologise for the Holocaust, and the Israelis did not find out in time to apologise for Gaza. Any time you start suspecting that you have the real truth and some other group are engaged in a plot to cause harm and hide reality from you, you owe it to yourself to check what other possible explanations there might be. Incompetence is more likely than mass evil, and misunderstanding is even more likely than that. Be gentle. We are only human.

Also read: Influencing people with Conspiracy Theories

Bibliography

• Beck, D.E. and Cowan, C.C. (1996) Spiral Dynamics, Oxford: Blackwell
• Byrne, R. The Secret, Atria Books, New York, 2006
• Domhoff, G.W. 1967, Who Rules America?, Prentice-Hall, Hoboken
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