Constructive Conspiracism: Paranoia, Pessimism, & Conspiracy Origins (2022 PDF)

CHAPTER 4 Constructive Conspiracism...

CHAPTER 4 Constructive Conspiracism Paranoia, Pessimism, and the Evolutionary Origins of Conspiracy Cognition Ever since the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, much has been made over the conspiracy theory that the Russians meddled in American politics, ranging from manipulating social media with fake accounts operated by bots to backroom deals between Russian operatives and members of President Donald Trump’s family or inner All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. circle. At least that’s the conspiracy theory promulgated by Democrats who, when they were confident Hillary Clinton would win in 2016, defended the electoral process against Trump’s fears that it was already rigged against him. After Trump won, Democrats decided that the election was rigged after all, but the results of the Mueller investigation into the matter of Russian collusion did not pan out as they had expected.1 Not that Republicans are off the conspiratorial hook. During the 2016 campaign, they cooked up a number of doozies, including the following:2 Hillary Clinton had epilepsy or heart problems, as evidenced by a video clip of her stumbling as she got into her car after a campaign speech. The Mueller investigation of the 2016 election was rigged (before the results came out in their favor, after which it was a fair and balanced investigation). President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. Hillary and the FBI conspired against Trump’s campaign. The Deep State arranged for Hillary to escape prosecution (despite “lock her up!” chants) for her mishandling of classified emails. Conspirator-in-Chief Trump famously blamed the Chinese for creating a global warming hoax; before that, he spent years accusing his presidential predecessor Barack Hussein Obama—emphasis on the middle name—of being foreign born. Alleged conspirators can even swap sides. Democrats initially accused FBI Director James Comey of conspiring with Russia to prejudice the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton after he announced that he was launching an investigation into her emails, but when Trump fired the FBI director after the election, Democrats exonerated Comey and turned to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the conspirator du jour.3 You can set your watch by these political conspiracy theories. If you think the 2016 and 2020 elections were contentious and divisive, then your long-term memory needs refreshing. Harken back to the 2000 election, when Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by the width of a hanging chad on a Florida ballot. Democratic conspiracists pounced, with opinion polls showing that almost half believed that election was rigged.4 Or recall the 2004 election, when Bush won a second term and Democrats concocted a conspiracy theory that the election was stolen in the pivotal state of Ohio, investigations of which proved false.5 When liberals occupied the White House between 2008 and 2016 under President Obama, Democratic Copyright 2022. Johns Hopkins University Press. conspiracists were quiescent, while Republican conspiracists dialed up their conspiracy meter, believing the following:6 The community activist group Acorn, with which Obama was associated, had engaged in illegal voter registration practices, even though there was no evidence of this. Obamacare was said to contain “death panels” that would determine who would live and die under the Affordable Care Act. Obama was bringing 100 million Muslims to America. Obama was influenced or controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Obama redecorated the Oval Office in Middle Eastern style. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE AN: 3344169 ; Michael Shermer.; Conspiracy Account: s4194587.main.ehost 44  Obama was funded by a Saudi prince. Obama’s birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii was fake, and he was actually born in Kenya. By the end of his second term, Obama himself admitted that if he watched only Fox News, where such conspiracy theories about Democrats are routinely promoted, he wouldn’t vote for himself.7 You’ll notice something common among all these conspiracy theories: they have a negative emotional valence to them. That is, rarely do people believe there’s a conspiracy afoot to make the world a better or safer place. Conspiracy theories nearly always involve nefarious agents conspiring to do bad things. Indeed, it is the very definition of a conspiracy theory that we’ve adapted for this book, and it is what most people think regarding conspiracies. Even the flip side to this negativity gradient—namely, that conspiracy theorists believe that in uncovering and exposing an evil cabal, they are doing the world a positive service—still necessitates a negative threat that must be countered. “Many conspiracy theories actually assume a hidden struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ conspiracies,” conspiracy researcher Jan-Willem van Prooijen noted, citing QAnon as a type specimen.8 “Surely this is about an evil, satanic ‘deep state’ of Democratic elites. But part of the theory also is that the Trump administration is fighting a secret war against this deep state. So here we have a secret, ‘benevolent’ conspiracy trying to make the world a better place by fighting an evil conspiracy as part of the narrative.” In this chapter, I want to consider the deeper psychological reasons for conspiratorial thinking, starting with the observation that conspiracy theories are slanted toward the negative. There are good evolutionary reasons for such pessimism. My friend and colleague Jared Diamond, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author who spends every summer in Papua New Guinea with the indigenous peoples there, identified what he has called “constructive paranoia,” or “the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.9 “One night when out in the rain forest with his native colleagues, Diamond proposed they pitch their tents under a big tree. “To my surprise,” he recalled, “my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.” At first, Diamond thought them overly paranoid. Over the years, however, he formed a different opinion with some back-of-the-envelope calculations: “I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.” If the odds of a tree falling on you any given night are only 1 in 1,000, but you sleep under trees every night, “you’ll be dead within a few years.” Diamond’s “constructive paranoia” is an insight we can apply to conspiracism. Call it constructive conspiracism—the tendency to assume conspiracy theories are true, just in case. Psychologist Steven Pinker also invoked an anthropological example to make the point that there are good evolutionary reasons why constructive conspiracism may be hardwired into our nature.10 “Conspiracy theories, for their part, flourish because people have always been vulnerable to real conspiracies. Foraging people can’t be too careful. The deadliest form of warfare among tribal peoples is not the pitched battle but the stealthy ambush and the predawn raid.” It’s what the Yanomamö of Amazonia call nomohori, which anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon translated as “dastardly trick,” such as when one tribe invites another for a feast and then ambushes them when they’re most vulnerable. Here’s an account of one such nomohori that Chagnon gleaned from a missionary: The headman of the group organized a raiding party to abduct women from a distant group. They went there and told these people that they had machetes and cooking pots from the foreigners, who prayed to a spirit that gave such items in answer to the prayers. They then volunteered to teach these people how to pray. When the men knelt down and bowed their heads, the raiders attacked them with their machetes and killed them. They captured their women and fled.11 In his ethnography on the Yanomamö, Into the Heart, anthropologist Kenneth Good recounted what life was like for these prehistoric people who, in serving as an analog of our Paleolithic ancestors, would have had to develop a constructive conspiracism about other people, both in their own group and especially in other tribes. In an interview for a story I did on the “anthropology wars” of the 1990s over the characteristics of human nature, Good offered this explanation: EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 45  Fidelity in Yanomami land is not considered a standard of any sort, let alone a moral principle. Here it is every man for himself. Stealing, rape, even killing—these acts aren’t measured by some moral standard. They aren’t thought of in terms of proper or improper social behavior. Here everyone does what he can and everyone defends his own rights. A man gets up and screams and berates someone for stealing plantains from his section of the garden, then he’ll go and do exactly the same thing. I protect myself, you protect yourself. You try something and I catch you, I’ll stop you.12 Many antisocial behaviors in Yanomami land, such as theft, are kept at a minimum through such social constraints as shunning, or through personal constraints, such as fear of violence and retaliation. In this context, constructive conspiracism emerges as a rational strategy, which is backed by game-theoretic logic. Here’s how Pinker explained it: The only safeguard against this cloak-and-dagger subterfuge is to outthink them preemptively, which can lead to convoluted trains of conjecture and a refusal to take obvious facts at face value. In signal detection terms, the cost of missing a real conspiracy is higher than that of false-alarming to a suspected one. This calls for setting our bias toward the trigger-happy rather than the gun-shy end of the scale, adapting us to try to get wind of possible conspiracies even on tenuous evidence.13 From his extensive studies on conflict and violence in hunter-gatherer bands, anthropologist Lawrence Keeley showed just how common and dangerous coalitional conspiracies probably were for our ancestors: “The most elementary form of warfare is a raid (or type of raid) in which a small group of men endeavour to enter enemy territory undetected in order to ambush and kill an unsuspecting isolated individual, and to then withdraw rapidly without suffering any casualties.”14 That’s a conspiracy, so the propensity to believe conspiracy theories about behind-the-scenes, backstabbing conspirators has an evolutionary basis. That is also the finding of conspiracy researchers Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Mark van Vugt in their analysis contrasting proximate (immediate) mechanisms underlying conspiracy beliefs, such as pattern recognition, agency detection, threat management, and alliance detection, and ultimate (evolutionary) mechanisms, such as “a functionally integrated mental system to detect conspiracies that in all likelihood has been shaped in an ancestral human environment in which hostile coalitions—that is, conspiracies that truly existed—were a frequent cause of misery, death, and reproductive loss.”15 The problem is that there is often an evolutionary mismatch between traits that were adaptive for survival in our Paleolithic environment but are not necessarily functional in modern settings. Being constructively conspiratorial in an ancient hunter-gatherer milieu may not be especially beneficial today, especially if one acts on one’s conspiratorial beliefs, from barging into a Washington, DC, pizzeria to storming the US Capitol. Such paranoia about bad things that can happen hints at a deeper psychological reason for conspiracy beliefs, called negativity bias, or, in the title of a paper by psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good.”16 There are many examples. For instance, in investing, behavioral economists have identified a phenomenon called loss aversion to explain why investors tend to be risk averse: losses hurt twice as much as gains feel good.17 To get people to gamble on an investment, the potential payoff must be twice what the potential loss might be. Nor does this occur just in finance. Tennis superstar Jimmy Connors once said, “I hate losing more than I love winning.”18 Cycling champion Lance Armstrong echoed this sentiment when explaining to filmmaker Alex Gibney why he was more motivated to not let cancer—and, subsequently, other cyclists—defeat him, than he was by the pull of the positive payoffs of winning: “I like to win, but more than anything, I can’t stand this idea of losing. Because to me, losing means death.”19 Pessimism and negativity bias are ubiquitous in life. Psychologists consistently find that criticism and negative feedback hurt more than praise and positive feedback feel good.20 Losing money and friends has a greater impact on people than gaining these objectives.21 Bad impressions and negative stereotypes form faster and are more resistant to change than positive ones.22 A study of the emotional content of diaries found that bad events negatively influenced both good and bad moods, whereas good events were limited to affecting only good moods.23 Bad everyday occurrences also have a greater impact than good ones. For example, having a good day does not necessarily lead to a good mood the next day, whereas a bad day often does carry its consequences over into the next day.24 Traumatic events leave traces in mood and memory longer than good things that happen. For example, a single childhood traumatic event, like sexual molestation, can erase years of EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 46  positive experiences.25 Morally bad actions weigh far more in the moral evaluation of a person by others than morally good actions.26 In an analysis of over 17,000 psychological research papers, 69 percent of them dealt with negative issues, compared with only 31 percent for positive ones.27 This probably is because bad things have a greater impact on human thought and behavior than good ones do, so research on negative life events is more likely to get funded and be published. In a long review paper covering hundreds of such studies, Baumeister and his colleagues not only consistently found that in all domains of life, bad is stronger than good, but they were also unable to find a single counterinstance in which good outdid bad—and it wasn’t for lack of trying.28 “We had hoped to identify several contrary patterns, which would have permitted us to develop an elaborate, complex, and nuanced theory about when bad is stronger versus when good is stronger,” they stated. Instead, bad always triumphed. “It is found in both cognition and motivation; in both inner, intrapsychic processes and in interpersonal ones; in connection with decisions about the future and to a limited extent with memories of the past; and in animal learning, complex human information processing, and emotional responses.” Psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman were the first to call this effect negativity bias, in which “negative events are more salient, potent, dominant in combinations, and generally efficacious than positive events.”29 In the numerous examples above of how pessimism triumphs over optimism, Rozin and Royzman noted that negative events lead us to seek their causes more readily than positive events do. For example, wars generate endless analyses in books and articles, whereas peace literature is paltry by comparison. Everyone asks, “Why is there war?” Almost no one asks, “Why is there peace?” Moreover, negative stimuli command more attention than positive stimuli. For example, in rats, negative tastes elicit stronger responses than positive ones. In taste-aversion experiments, a single exposure to a noxious food or drink can cause lasting avoidance of that item, but there is no corresponding parallel with good-tasting food or drink.30 Tellingly, we have more words to describe the qualities of physical pain (deep, intense, dull, sharp, aching, burning, cutting, pinching, piercing, tearing, twitching, shooting, stabbing, thrusting, throbbing, penetrating, lingering, radiating, etc.) than we have to describe physical pleasure (intense, delicious, exquisite, breathtaking, sumptuous, sweet, etc.).31 Not only that, but there are more cognitive categories for and descriptive terms of negative emotions than positive ones.32 As Leo Tolstoy famously observed in 1875, and since then became elevated into the Anna Karenina principle: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” 33 In addition, evil contaminates good more than good purifies evil. As an old Russian proverb says, “A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar.” In India, members of the higher castes may be thought to be contaminated by eating food prepared by members of the lower castes, but those in the lower castes do not receive an equivalent rise upward in purity status by eating food prepared by their higher-caste counterparts.34 Related to these effects, an evolutionary component of negativity bias may be seen in the emotion of disgust, which evolved to drive organisms away from noxious stimuli, because noxiousness is an informational cue that such stimuli could kill you through poison (e.g., food substances) or disease (e.g., fecal matter, vomit, and other bodily effluvia). This explains why negative events are more contagious than positive ones. Germs are the basic biological model for a contagion, for which there is no positive parallel.35 There’s a good reason for this cognitive asymmetry between good and bad. Progress is mostly made incrementally and in small steps, whereas regress can easily come about in one colossal calamity. For example, in a complex machine or body, all the parts must consistently work to keep the thing going, but if one part or system fails, it can be catastrophic to all the rest. This can spell the end of the machine or organism. Stability of the overall body must be maintained, requiring the brain, which runs the body, to devote the most attention to threats that could terminate the organism. And in life, there are more ways to fail than there are to succeed. It is difficult to attain success, and the paths to it are few, but there are many ways to fail to achieve success, and the paths away from it are many. Let’s dig even deeper into our evolved psychology to understand the logic behind negativity bias. Steven Pinker argued that in our evolutionary past, there was an asymmetry of payoffs in which the fitness cost of overreacting to a threat was less than the fitness cost of underreacting, so we err on the side of overreaction—in other words, we assume the worst.36 Why? Because the world was more dangerous in our evolutionary past, so it paid to be risk averse and highly sensitive to threats. If things were good, then taking a gamble to improve EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 47  them a little bit more was not perceived to be worth the risk of things becoming worse. Pinker placed the blame for our evolved constructive paranoia squarely on the shoulders of the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. Entropy is a fundamental physical rule that closed systems (those not taking in energy) move from order to disorder, from organization to disorganization, from structured to unstructured, and from warm to cold. Although entropy can be temporarily reversed in an open system with an outside source of energy, such as heating cold food in a microwave, isolated systems decay as entropy increases. Without an outside source (like the sun), energy dissipates; systems run down; warm things turn cold; metal rusts; wood rots; weeds overwhelm gardens; bedrooms get cluttered; and social, political, and economic systems fall apart if not maintained. In our world—particularly the world in which our ancestors evolved the cognition and emotions that we inherited—entropy dictates that there are more ways for things to go bad than to turn out well, so our modern psychology is attuned to a world that was more dangerous in our evolutionary past than it is today. Thus, as I concluded in an essay on the meaning and purpose of life, the second law of thermodynamics is also the first law of life.37 By doing nothing, entropy pushes you toward greater disorder and then death. Life’s basic purpose is to combat entropy by doing something extropic—expending energy to survive and flourish. The ne plus ultra explanation for entropy can be found on the bumper sticker “ SHIT HAPPENS.” As such, so-called misfortunes like accidents, plagues, famine, and disease have no purposeful agency behind them—no gods, demons, witches, or conspiracists intending evil—just entropy taking its course. Because we tend to find meaningful patterns and intentional agents in random events, we attribute many of life’s outcomes to conspiracies. And because of negativity bias, in which bad is stronger than good, a belief in negative conspiracy theories is a feature, not a bug, in our cognition. The two main aspects of our cognition that lead to conspiracy thinking in this regard are what I briefly mentioned earlier: patternicity and agenticity. I would like to return to these and develop them in more detail, to better understand the logic behind constructive conspiracism. Recall that patternicity is the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.38 To explain why we evolved this feature in our thinking, let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine you lived three million years ago on the plains of Africa as a small-brained bipedal primate, highly vulnerable to predators. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind, or is it a dangerous predator? If you assume the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator, but it turns out to be just the wind, you have made a Type I error, or a false positive—believing something is real when it isn’t. You connected A (the rustle in the grass) to B (a dangerous predator), but in this case A is not linked with B. No harm occurs. You move away from the rustling sound and become more alert and cautious. But if you assume the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out to be a dangerous predator, you have made a Type II error in cognition, or a false negative—believing something is not real when it is. You failed to connect A (the rustle in the grass) to B (a dangerous predator), and in this case A is tied to B. Harm is likely, and you could be the predator’s next meal. The problem is that assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic—especially in the split-second, life-and-death decisions in our ancestral environments—so the default position is to assume that all patterns are real—that is, assume all rustles in the grass are made by dangerous predators, not the wind. We are the descendants of those who were most successful at finding such patterns. I call this constructive conspiracism, and my interpretation is supported by what van Prooijen and Van Vugt called “adaptive conspiracism,” where “conspiracy theories uniquely helped ancestral humans to navigate their social world better and anticipate and overcome imminent dangers in their environment.”39 They termed the threat coalitional violence, or “violence committed by actual conspirators occurring both within and between groups,” and they noted that our psychology would have evolved to be attentive to this as an adaptation for survival. Similar to my analysis above of the relative risks of making Type I versus Type II errors and of erring on the side of assuming the worst—in this case, that the conspiracy theory is true—they invoked error-management theory, which came from evolutionary psychology. This theory was first developed by Martie Haselton and David Buss to explain the massive male and female differences in sexual behavior and preferences that lead women to be far more cautious and choosy than men when it comes to sex, because they have so much more to lose (ranging from pregnancy to physical violence).40 Thus, van Prooijen and Van Vugt concluded, “error-management theory would predict that underrecognizing conspiracies becomes more costly EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 48  (and overrecognizing conspiracies less costly) to the extent that the dangers of real conspiracies increase.”41 The evidence that we evolved conspiracy detection cognition comes from having met the requirements for all psychological adaptations—that is, complexity, universality, domain specificity, interactivity, efficiency, and functionality.42 Conspiracy theories contain complex predispositions, such as pattern and agency detection, alliance detection, and threat management; are universal; are specific to domains of human life and thought; interact with other cognitive domains; trigger detection cues quickly and efficiently; and are functional, in that they “lead people to display emotions and behaviors designed either to avoid the suspected conspiracy (e.g., fear and avoidance) or to actively confront it (e.g., anger and aggression).” Van Prooijen and Van Vugt presented substantial evidence that all of these domains are tapped by conspiracism.43 Thus, by implication, constructive conspiracism most likely is an evolved adaptation. Colloquially, we might think of constructive conspiracism as the default position when living in a dangerous world. If it turns out that there is no danger, no harm is done, and not much energy is expended in being a little paranoid. Instead, if it turns out that there is danger, being constructively paranoid pays off. In other words, assume the worst! In this model, constructive conspiracism is a type of pattern, a belief about the world in which our ancestors benefited from focusing more on the negative than the positive. Thus it offers an evolutionary explanation for a worldview in which bad is stronger than good. Finding conspiracies where none exist is a lower-cost error than not finding conspiracies when they are present, especially if someone or something is conspiring to harm you. Therefore, constructive conspiracism has a deep evolutionary foundation in the brain—in the form of patternicity—but there’s more. Conspiracy theories usually involve other people conspiring to do something nefarious, so we need to add the concept of agenticity—the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency—to our explanatory model. Agenticity is directly related to patternicity, inasmuch as we tend to instill the patterns we find with intentional agents. Returning to my thought experiment with the hominid on the plains of Africa who hears a rustle in the grass, and the crucial matter of whether the sound represents a dangerous predator or just the wind—what’s the difference between the wind and a dangerous predator? “Wind” is an inanimate force, whereas “dangerous predator” signals an intentional agent—that is, someone or something out there that plans to make me its next meal. That is, we often impart agency and intention to the patterns we find and believe that these factors control the world, sometimes invisibly, from the top down. Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government and corporate conspiracists, and all manner of invisible agents with power and deliberate intent are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. For example, subjects watching reflective dots move about in a darkened room, especially if the dots take on the shape of two legs and two arms, infer that they represent a person or an intentional agent. 44 Children believe that the sun can think and follows them around. When asked to draw a picture of the sun, they often add a smiley face to give agency to it.45 Subjects in an experiment conducted by Peter Brugger and Christine Mohr at the University of Bristol in England who were given dopamine—a chemical transmitter in the brain involving rewards and reinforcements for learning and finding patterns—are more likely to find significance in coincidences and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none.46 In another study, Brugger and Mohr compared 20 self-professed believers in ghosts, gods, spirits, and conspiracies to 20 self-professed skeptics of such claims.47 They showed all subjects a series of slides consisting of people’s faces, some of which were normal, while others had their parts scrambled, such as swapping out eyes or ears or noses from different faces. In another experiment, real and scrambled words were flashed on a screen. In general, the scientists found that the believers were much more likely than the skeptics to mistakenly assess a scrambled face as real, and to read a scrambled word as normal. Combined with our propensity to find revelatory patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise, patternicity and agenticity form the basis of conspiratorial cognition (why people believe conspiracies), along with the conspiracy effect (why smart people believe blatantly wrong things for apparently rational reasons). Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Deep State, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, or the Illuminati. For example, psychologists Joshua Hart and Molly Graether, in their research on conspiracy personality types (discussed in chapter 2), they found that people who were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories “were also more likely to say that nonhuman objects—triangle shapes moving around on a computer screen—were acting intentionally, as though they were capable of having thoughts and goals they were trying to accomplish. In other words, they inferred meaning and motive where others did not.”48 That’s patternicity and EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 49  agenticity at work. Finally, how paranoid are conspiracy believers? That is the question asked by Roland Imhoff and Pia Lamberty in their “more fine-grained understanding of the connect and disconnect between paranoia and belief in conspiracy theories.” These researchers examined one meta-analysis and two correlational studies to provide an estimate for an association between the two, reaching the following conclusions: Although both assume sinister intentions of others, beliefs in conspiracy theories are more specific in who these others are (powerful groups) than paranoia (everyone). In contrast, paranoia was more restricted in terms of who the target of the negative intentions is (the self) than conspiracy theorizing (society as a whole). In light of this and distinct associations of conspiracy beliefs with political control and trust but not (inter-)personal control and trust (like paranoia), we propose to treat the two as distinct (albeit correlated) constructs with conspiracy beliefs reflecting a political attitude compared to paranoia as a self-relevant belief.49 Paranoia and constructive conspiracism are not exactly the same, or else we could just employ one term. But their influence overlaps in the mind of conspiracists, which is undeniable—and sometime deadly. The consequences of combining constructive conspiracism with Type II errors—that is, false negatives, or failing to recognize a conspiracy—can be as deadly as it is for prey animals who fail to recognize the rustle in the grass as a dangerous predator. Examples from history are abundant: 1. The Yom Kippur War. On October 6, 1973, a coalition of Arab states, led by Egypt and Syria, launched a surprise attack on Israel on the holiest day in Judaism, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), crossing the Suez Canal and advancing virtually unopposed into the Sinai Peninsula. It took days for Israel to scramble a defensive response and repulse the attack, but that failure to recognize a conspiracy on the part of a potential enemy resulted in Israel now being hypervigilant about any potential threats to its existence.50 That is constructive conspiracism. 2. Operation Barbarossa. This is the code name for the surprise Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on Sunday, June 22, 1941. The normally paranoid Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who saw conspiracies afoot everywhere he looked, was not constructively paranoid enough to recognize that Adolf Hitler, his partner in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact guaranteeing peace between Nazi Germany and the USSR, would betray him, despite the fact that the Germans were amassing hundreds of thousands of troops and equipment near the Soviet border, and the British high command had signaled this fact to Stalin.51 Stalin was not constructively conspiratorial enough. 3. Operation Z, or the Hawaii Operation: The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, caught most of the US military off guard. Although it was evident enough from the actions of the Japanese military that war with the United States was imminent, inasmuch as the former was already at war with China and diplomatic relations with the United States had broken down, most American leaders believed that the conflict would take place in the Far East, not thousands of miles closer to America, in Hawaii. With hindsight bias in full operation, many conspiracy theorists can’t believe that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not have realized the attack coming, so they have suggested he was either in on it or let it happen. The deeper problem was simply that he wasn’t constructively paranoid enough.52 Although these examples come from military history, this should not distract from the deeper principle that the world is often a dangerous place, not just for nations, but also for individuals, so constructive conspiracism is often necessary. Applying our definition of a conspiracy (two or more people, or a group, plotting or acting in secret to gain an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally), even a cursory review reveals that conspiracies have dramatically influenced the course of history and may still be found at work in modern societies. A few examples from this arena will suffice to make the point, some of which I’ll cover in more detail in the second half of the book: Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by a conspiracy of Roman senators on the Ides of March in 44 BC. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 saw a group of provincial English Catholics attempting to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament. The plot was discovered and thwarted only a few days beforehand, with the conspiracists caught, tried, convicted, EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 50  hanged, drawn, and quartered. In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were assigned as George Washington’s bodyguards, some of whom were plotting to assassinate the future first president of the United States at the behest of the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City, who were both Loyalists. Their plan was foiled, due to the ineptitude of the plotters in keeping it secret. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy of white Southerners angered by the outcome of the Civil War, which itself was instigated by a Southern cabal to illegally secede from the United States, arguably the biggest conspiracy in US history. World War I exploded after a Serbian separatist secret society called the Black Hand conspired to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, leading to an arms race that erupted in the guns of August and the start of a conflict that resulted in the deaths of millions. In the 1950s, conspiratorially minded Senator Joseph McCarthy, in his now-infamous congressional hearings, launched a witch hunt to ferret out what he was certain was a Communist conspiracy to destroy America. In the 1960s, Operation Northwoods was a document produced under the Kennedy administration, proposing a number of false-flag operations—which themselves are a type of conspiracy—that might be carried out in order to justify military intervention in Cuba. Among the proposals were such ideas as staging a fake attack on the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, employing a fake Russian MIG aircraft to buzz a real US civilian airliner, faking an attack on a US ship to make it look like Cubans did it, and developing “a Communist Cuban terror campaign in Miami.” None of these crazy ideas were implemented, but the fact that members of Kennedy’s administration considered them—even in the context of a meeting with people just spitballing ideas—reveals the lengths to which even high-ranking people in government are willing to conspire against others to get their way. In the 1970s, Watergate stands out as a conspiracy of dunces, and the Pentagon Papers revealed the extent to which the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations conspired to escalate the Vietnam War without congressional knowledge, much less approval. We now know that Kennedy conspired to have Fidel Castro assassinated, Johnson conspired to cover up that fact when he took office, and Nixon secretly recorded conversations in the Oval Office that revealed his distinctive view of presidential power—a view that he later summarized in an interview with David Frost: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”53 In the 1980s, the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal was a conspiracy that embodied what conspiracists since World War I had been concerned about—the usurpation of power by conspirators who were legally elected to their positions, instead of hijacking government agencies through a coup, which was common in centuries past. In the 1990s, government overreach against Randy Weaver and his family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and against David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, led to the rise of the conspiratorially minded militia movement that culminated in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. In the 2000s, the George W. Bush administration concocted a conspiracy theory that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and used it as a justification for invading that country, which proved false when inspectors failed to find any WMDs. Wikileaks revealed the extent to which the National Security Agency and other governmental agencies conspired to spy on Americans and foreign leaders on the heels of 9/11. As George Orwell warned us in a memorable commentary shortly after the Second World War, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.... The point is we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.” 54 Once again, reality bites. EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 51  CHAPTER 5 A Case Study in Conspiracism The Sovereign Citizens Conspiracy Theory On July 3, 2021, Americans awoke to a bizarre story about a group of heavily armed men arrested without incident by Massachusetts police after an overnight roadside standoff.1 Law enforcement had come upon them on the side of the road at 1:30 AM on Interstate 95 north of Boston, the drivers attending to their vehicles on what they said was their journey to a “training” camp in Maine. Whatever it was they were going to train for apparently involved firearms, as state troopers confiscated three AR-15 rifles, two pistols, a bolt-action rifle, a shotgun, a short-barreled rifle, lots of ammunition, high-capacity magazines, and body armor, all unlawfully possessed. Unlawful, that is, if you’re a citizen of the United States, which the members of this particular group—Black separatists called Rise of the Moors—claimed they were not. Of what country, you may ask, were they citizens? None. According to their website,2 the group seeks “equal justice under our own law, and not under the United States government, as we are not citizens of the United States.” As such, “we owe no tax obligations to the government of the United States.” Watching the story unfold, I immediately thought of the Sovereign Citizens conspiracy theory, which I first encountered as a college undergraduate. My roommate and I attended a tax seminar where we were told that paying taxes was unnecessary, because the Sixteenth Amendment, which empowered Congress to levy an income tax, was never legally ratified. After a long and detailed history of the IRS, we were advised not to file a tax return and given instructions on what to do and say when the Feds came a-knockin’. This was a type of conspiracy theory, inasmuch as it involved a government agency illegally profiting from citizens without their knowledge. The slick presentation seemed internally coherent and logically plausible while I was sitting there in the room. It was not until later, after some reflection, that I figured it couldn’t possibly be true, because if it were, then no one would pay income tax. Unfortunately, my roommate went for it and got away tax free for years, until the IRS caught up with him and he got his comeuppance. I was thinking about this incident in August 2013, when I appeared in a Portland, Oregon, court as an expert witness on the psychology of why people fall for such schemes. The case, United States of America v. Miles J. Julison, involved a house flipper who lost big in the 2007 financial meltdown.3 That year he reported $583,151 in “other income” to the IRS on his tax return, claiming that the entire amount was withheld as income taxes. Submitting eight IRS 1099-OID forms, Julison requested a refund of $411,773. According to the IRS, an OID, or Original Issue Discount, “is a form of interest. It is the excess of a debt instrument’s stated redemption price at maturity over its issue price.” A 1099-OID applies to debt instruments, such as bonds and notes, that were discounted at purchase, and the tax is the difference between the instrument’s actual value and the discounted purchase price. A 1099-OID fraud consists of filing Form 1099-OID with false withholding information, in order to reduce taxable income. Amazingly, the IRS sent Julison a check in the amount of $411,773, which he spent on a home loan, credit card bills, a Mercedes-Benz, and a boat. Emboldened by his success, the next year Julison reported $2.3 million in interest income and demanded a refund of $1.5 million. This time, however, instead of a refund check, he got an IRS investigation that landed him in court and, after a guilty verdict, sent him to jail. This particular tax scam is popular among tax resisters with a conspiratorial bent, especially those who call themselves Sovereign Citizens. These individuals hold that the US government is actually a corporation owned by the International Monetary Fund and English banks, and that there is a secret account holding $1 million for every child born in the United States, thereby rendering them slaves to a global financial system.4 Sovereign Citizens think this money should be “refunded” to them, and the 1099-OID is one tool among many that they use. Sovereign Citizens believe that they are exempt from federal jurisdiction, because they are “natural citizens” who are granted their rights from God. The rest of us schlubs are what they call “Fourteenth Amendment citizens,” slaves who were freed by this constitutional amendment but who have fewer rights. As EBSCOhost - printed on 1/23/2025 9:11 AM via BOSTON COLLEGE. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 52