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    Nick Cohen: Setting minds right on conspiracy theories Archived Message

    Posted by margo on April 2, 2019, 9:32 am


    It’s far easier to be hoodwinked if you really think they’re out to get you
    Nick Cohen

    From Brexiters to white supremacists, we must face down conspiracy theorists

    The Guardian/Observer -- DO THEY think I’m a fool? Do they take me for a total bloody idiot? They fix the game. They take the piss. They laugh at me behind my back, despise me, ignore me and then try to order me around.

    Who’s telling me that? Everyone is telling me that.

    Jeremy Corbyn says: “The people who run Britain have been taking our country for a ride. They’ve stitched up our political system to protect the powerful… they’ve rigged the rules to suit themselves.” And they expect me to do what, obey them? Accept their rigged, fixed, stitched-up system and be grateful?

    Why? They don’t listen to me. They don’t listen to anyone. A “Remainer” parliament is conspiring against the people, says the Brexit right. MPs are “dangerous vultures” doing everything to “demonise the Leave campaign and get the media to portray patriotic voters as hoodwinked imbeciles”. Others may be fooled but I see through them. I know who is really in control.

    On the far left, it’s the Jews who are “part of a conspiracy to undermine” Corbyn, “the most honest man in politics today”. On the far right, it’s Muslims and their cronies. It says here in a petition signed by 600,000 people, that the establishment ordered “Tommy Robinson to be arrested and jailed for reporting on Muslim grooming gangs… [and] informing the public of all the wrongs committed in the name of Allah”.

    Don’t tell me I’ve got it wrong. Don’t tell me I can’t get a promotion because I’m not good enough, that Brexit isn’t working because Leavers promised the impossible, that the Rothschilds don’t control the world, that the PC elite don’t despise working-class whites and give Muslims special treatment. No one wants to hear all that old stuff. Britons have had enough of experts.

    Hard though it is, we ought to sympathise with all who believe life is against them, for life will be against us all in the end. We ought, at least, to expect to meet the man who blames his wife and children for failure at home, jealous colleagues for failure at work, little Hitlers in the bureaucracy for the failure of his business.

    You, me and just about everyone else has felt, or will feel, bitterness and self-pity. They are not exceptional emotions. We are at an exceptional moment because paranoia is nurtured and exploited by the powerful and turned from everyday bitterness into global ideologies. An under-reported consequence, which makes sense as soon as you think about how easily supporters of Johnson, Trump and Corbyn can lie, is the collapse of ordinary morality.

    A grim series of psychological tests conducted by Daniel Jolley and his fellow researchers at Staffordshire and Kent universities found that belief in conspiracy theories increased the paranoid’s willingness to engage in crimes. Not the grand crimes against humanity of the white supremacist, who massacres Muslims because he has learned on the web that the globalist elite wants to make whites a minority in their own countries, or the Islamist conspiracist who massacres Parisians because he believes Zionists and Crusaders are plotting to destroy Islam.

    Rather, the mean little crimes at the other end of the spectrum: running red lights, fraudulently claiming money back from a shop, passing off shoddy goods to unsuspecting eBay buyers.

    Those who believed in specific conspiracy theories – that “the establishment” murdered Diana, Princess of Wales, because she was embarrassing the royals – or had a general suspicion that hidden forces manipulated their lives were more likely to lie and cheat.

    The rules are for losers and the smart cheat before they are cheated

    When participants were given paranoid literature to read before the tests, their willingness to cheat increased. And why shouldn’t they cheat? I hear them ask. If there’s one law for them and another for the rest, the rules are for losers and the smart cheat before they are cheated.

    In good times, conspiratorial thinking is seen as a passive strategy that confused individuals use to make sense of a complicated world. In our time, it is an active danger to individuals and countries. In Britain, America and much of Europe, a feedback loop has been established. People who would once have suppressed prejudices about women, Jews or Muslims, or barely realised they had them, see a Trump or a Corbyn appear and expect the respectable to assert their values by slapping him down. The respectable try – and fail. Trump becomes the most powerful man on Earth. Corbyn wins the Labour leadership.

    Those dismissed as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” tear Britain apart as they babble mad slogans about a Europeanised elite conspiring against “the people”.

    With approval from on high, the already prejudiced can let rip and those who suppressed their hatreds learn that the way ahead is to let rip too. What was once shocking becomes normal: rightwing thugs murdering one MP and threatening many more; leftwing thugs campaigning against Jewish women who speak out against racism. In our times, it can almost appear the victims’ fault. Don’t they realise how Britain has changed? Don’t they know they are bringing trouble on themselves? We can’t have a people’s vote, insist conventional politicians and broadcasters who once told us to never give into terrorism, because the far right will rise up.

    Fighting back requires abandoning tribal allegiances to the left and right. How you think is as important as what you think and at no time more so than now.

    Conspiratorial thinking must be hit early and hard before it becomes too powerful to contest. We must point to the basket case that is Britain this weekend – without a coherent government to rule, a competent opposition to take over or a clue how it will it get through the next week – and say that this is how populism always ends.

    And if people scream about you treating them like “hoodwinked imbeciles”, you must have the confidence to say that “hoodwinked” is exactly what they have been and that if they doubt it, they need only look at the catastrophe that surrounds them.

    LINK https://www.dumptheguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/30/far-easier-to-be-hoodwinked-if-you-really-think-they-are-out-to-get-you-conspiracy-theorists

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