The Right’s Irrational Obsession with Conspiracies

There are many theories as to why those on the far political rights seem to always be ready to believe that some nefarious conspiracy exists against them and/or "real America."  With the Christofascists, we hear constant bleating about conspiracies to "persecute Christians" in America even though it is the Christians who for centuries been the ones persecuting everyone else, starting with genocide against Native Americans.  Simply not being a freely allowed to abuse others equates in their pea brains that they are suffering injustice.  Then we have all the white supremacists be they open racists or not who simply cannot handle the erosion of white privilege.  In their minds, there has to be a conspiracy causing the phenomenon.  A piece in Salon looks at the right's lizard brain mindset that embraces insane conspiracy theories.  Here are excerpts:

[S]ome folks see conspiracies as anything but a reflection of our nature. They see conspiracies almost wholly as “other,” deeply sinister, and maddeningly perfect — or at least nearly so. Such folks are properly known as “conspiracy theorists.”  They’re not wrong to believe there are conspiracies everywhere around them — as many of their critics mistakenly believe — but they are wrong about the nature of the vast majority of what’s really there, as well about how powerful and important conspiracies are, absent other forces working in tandem with them — such as the enormous economic and political clout possessed by tobacco companies.

Conspiracy theories are lay beliefs that attribute the ultimate cause of an event, or the concealment of an event from public knowledge, to a secret, unlawful, and malevolent plot by multiple actors working together.”

Two further points. First, those involved in conspiracy theorizing invariably bring with them a moral overlay — they seek not only to understand some historical event, but to judge it, and those responsible, usually quite hastily. . . . . . Second, in doing so, they themselves frequently violate norms — norms of civilized discourse, most visibly, but also, more subtly, norms of reason itself, which come into sharper relief precisely by studying how conspiracists violate them.

In short, the false image that conspiracy theorists have is a natural consequence of a set of cognitive characteristics that researchers and scholars like Keeley have identified which do not necessarily indicate false beliefs on a one-to-one basis, but that do impair the ability to think critically, consider alternatives, accept contradictory feedback, and otherwise gain a more rounded perspective

The first conspiracist characteristic identified is “nefarious intention”:

First, the presumed intentions behind any conspiracy are invariably nefarious. Conspiracist ideation never involves groups of people whose intent is to do good, as for example when planning a surprise birthday party. Instead, conspiracist ideation relies on the presumed deceptive intentions of the people or institutions responsible for the “official” account that is being questioned.

The second conspiracist characteristic is “persecution-victimization”:

“A corollary of the first criterion is the pervasive self-perception and self-presentation among conspiracy theorists as the victims of organized persecution. The theorist typically considers herself, at least tacitly, to be the brave antagonist of the nefarious intentions of the conspiracy; that is, the victim is also a potential hero.”

The third conspiracist characteristic is “nihilistic skepticism”:

“[D]uring its questioning of an official account, conspiracist ideation is characterized by “…an almost nihilistic degree of skepticism”; and the conspiracy theorist refuses to believe anything that does not fit into the conspiracy theory. Thus, nothing is at it seems, and all evidence points to hidden agendas or some other meaning that only the conspiracy theorist is aware of.”

We can see a small hint of this outcome in the world as seen by “young earth” creationists — those who insist on a literal reading of the Bible (ignoring the contradictions between Genesis 1 and 2), and thus say the world was created 6,000 years ago. Of course this means that they reject evolution, but that’s only a small fraction of the science they nihilistically reject. They also reject tree rings, since, as of 2009, the University of Arizona’s bristlecone pine database established a timeline of 8,836 years — almost 50 percent older than the Young Earth creationists claim the earth to be.  They also reject carbon dating — using elaborate arguments, the most noteworthy of which are debunked here by the National Center for Science Education.

The fourth conspiracist characteristic is “nothing by accident”: “Fourth, to the conspiracy theorist, nothing happens by accident. Thus, small random events are woven into a conspiracy narrative and reinterpreted as indisputable evidence for the theory.”

The fifth conspiracist characteristic is “must be wrong”:
[T]he underlying lack of trust and exaggerated suspicion contribute to a cognitive pattern whereby specific hypotheses may be abandoned when they become unsustainable, but those corrections do not impinge on the overall abstraction that `something must be wrong’ and the `official’ account must be based on deception….

[W]hile conspiracists tend to focus obsessively on specific details, what really drives them is a transcendental belief, which by its very nature cannot be proven or disproven — it is purely a matter of faith, albeit a negative one: a belief that others are serving the Devil, as it were. 

The sixth conspiracist characteristic is “self-sealing”:

Finally, contrary evidence is often interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy. This ideation relies on the notion that, the stronger the evidence against a conspiracy, the more the conspirators must want people to believe their version of events. This self-sealing reasoning necessarily widens the circle of presumed conspirators because the accumulation of contrary evidence merely identifies a growing number of people or institutions that are part of the conspiracy.

[T]he conspiracist viewpoint tends to be inherently reactionary, defending an implicitly simplistic “commonsense” conception of how things should be against what it sees as the pernicious and arbitrary meddling of elites.  And second, that it explicitly turns a blind eye at best to malevolent influences within its own ranks.

There's much more to the piece, but in my view, the take away is that the conspiracy theorists of the far right are psychologically/mentally ill.  Facts and objective reality simply do not matter.  This is especially true of the Christifascists who now largely control the GOP base - hence why the GOP has gone totally insane.