Down The Rabbit Hole … part 5 - Dangerous Minds
What the heck. It’s a free country, yeah? People can believe whatever they want.
No harm done, right?
Well, it’s not that simple. You certainly have the right to deny reality… but don’t be surprised when it comes back and bites you on the ass.
In 1999 Thabo Mbeki became the President of South Africa. This was bad news for many South Africans because Mbeki subscribed to the belief that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not cause acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). He prevented antiretroviral drugs from being used to treat patients, declaring such medicines to be “poison”. He appointed health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang who promoted the use of herbal remedies instead of real medicine, earning herself the name “Dr Beetroot”.
The result? The preventable deaths of between 343,000 and 365,000 people from AIDS.
In 2002 Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa declared a national food disaster, saying around four million people faced severe hunger and famine. He then refused 35,000 tons of food aid from the United States because of the possibility that the food could be genetically modified, stating "Simply because my people are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health." United States aid officials denied that the food is unsafe, pointing out that Americans eat GM maize every day.
In 2009 homeopath Thomas Sam was convicted of the manslaughter of his nine-month-old daughter. She had contracted an infection but her parents refused to take her to hospital, using homeopathic “medicine” instead … which of course had absolutely no effect, being nothing but water.
During the coronavirus pandemic Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro failed to secure adequate supplies of vaccines, believing that herd immunity and potentially dangerous treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin would be more effective. He also refused to implement a national lockdown and promote social distancing or the use of face masks.
The result? The preventable deaths of around 400,000 people.
In Alabama in August 2021 the vaccination rate was 33%, the lowest in the US. Anti-vaccine campaigners in the state had successfully persuaded many people to not take the vaccine. Hospitals were overflowing with coronavirus patients, over 80% of them unvaccinated. Many of them clung to their delusions even as they died of a disease that they insisted did not exist.
The list goes on, and on, and depressingly on…
It is no surprise that false beliefs can lead to tragic loss of life – many mass killings have been committed by people who believe in conspiracy theories, as they are more likely to feel comfortable with the notion of committing violence for political reasons – but when someone refuses to believe in scientific facts, which have been reliably and repeatedly verified – this is much more worrying because the magnitude of denial is greater.
Establishing the veracity of human events (current or historical) can often be hampered by uncertainty regarding the reliability of accounts, but when the matter being contested has already been vigorously established by empirical means, by a large number of independent researchers, one begins to question the mental health of the ‘sceptic’.
The politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan said:
“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
The problem is that many people cannot distinguish between the two...
The Earth is NOT flat. Beetroot and lemon juice do NOT cure AIDS. Food made from genetically modified plants is NOT poison. Water containing less than one molecule of any type of effective chemical does not cure ANYTHING (except maybe dehydration). These are facts. Denying them is denying reality.
The psychological term for this is delusion, a key symptom of psychosis.
Generally speaking, when you disagree with reality, things just don’t end well…
Should these guys be getting straitjackets to match with their tin foil hats?
Although not technically a mental illness, conspiratorial thinking has certainly been linked to certain unpleasant psychological states, mostly anxiety and feelings of powerlessness. Psychologists have suggested that some people deal with perceived threats by interpreting them as being the result of secret plots by mysterious villains. For example: believing that coronavirus was engineered in a lab by evil Chinese communist agents as a biological weapon frames the issue in more straightforward terms than accepting the fact that sometimes nature itself can simply take us by surprise. Blaming disasters on human beings simplifies the problem because it offers the possibility of a simple solution: get rid of the bad guys. This offers the possibility of restoring order, certainty and control.
Another issue is a type of siege mentality (“us vs them”) experienced by people who believe that their social group (political, religious, ethnic, etc.) is under attack in some way. This makes adopting inaccurate ideas more likely, as a form of security. The person wants to protect his ‘tribe’ and also seeks to cement his inclusion within that tribe by conforming to its accepted norms.
This is particularly true for those who feel that their group is already under attack. During the COVID-19 crisis some members of the black community were convinced that the pandemic was a hoax and that the vaccines were a form of experimentation upon their race. Unfortunately there is at least one real precedent for this; the horrifically racist and unethical Tuskegee Experiment (USA, 1932-1972). The existence of real conspiracies lends plausibility to imagined ones.
Research into links between political affiliations and conspiratorial thinking shows that right and left wing are equally represented; the more relevant factor being the extremity of the individual’s political leanings.
Psychologists have identified six cognitive processes common to people who believe in conspiracy theories:
1 - Proportionality bias - the intuition that important events could not have benign causes; for example, some may struggle to believe that a celebrity could die of mundane causes, and speculate alternative explanations
2 - Intentionality bias - the tendency to see human intention where there may be none
3 - Pattern perception - the tendency to perceive patterns where there may be none
4 - Jumping to conclusions - the tendency to draw conclusions pre-emptively, without sufficient evidence
5 - Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for, remember, and evaluate information such that it does not contradict one's established views
6 - Conjunction fallacy - the tendency to incorrectly estimate the probability of a combination of two or more events as greater than that of the probabilities for any one of the independent events to occur.
These thinking patterns are similar to those found in people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. To put things a little more simply, the person cannot believe that things just happen without a person or persons being responsible. A paranoid person gets a flat tire and thinks it must be the CIA putting nails on the road to make her late for work. She sees a pandemic spreading out of control and thinks it is more likely to be the work of evil foreign scientists rather than simply the result of a natural virus mutation.
Another point to consider is the fact that a person who subscribes to one conspiracy theory is more likely than not to also believe in others: an “anti-vaxxer” will often also fear “chemtrails” in the sky, etc. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for one person to believe in conspiracy theories that contradict each other –
Princess Diana was murdered AND Princess Diana faked her own death – consistency being as unimportant to the individual as rational objectivity.
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