The Big Business of Conspiracy Theories: Measles, Floods, and a Culture of Mistrust

What we are currently witnessing in the United States is the deadly effects of the combination of capitalism and conspiracy theories coupled with a generalized mistrust of social institutions. For instance, after the massive flooding in Texas and the slow response of governmental agencies, instead of tying this tragedy to climate change and the lack of an effective governmental response, Marjorie Taylor Greene has focused on a secret plot to inject chemicals into the atmosphere to control the weather. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. has responded to an outbreak of measles by continuing to reject the science of vaccinations. Both of these political figures have profited from their ability to convince others that the true science is fake and a fake science is true.

From a Freudian perspective, it is essential to look at how these conspiracies begin with a mistrust in science, democratic institutions, and journalism. Moreover, this lack of belief is coupled with a rejection of reality: Since scientific evidence is either ignored or dismissed, the hole left in our understanding is filled with a totalizing mode of paranoid knowledge. Of course, part of this process involves the fifty-year Republican demonization of the government. Just as Reagan said that the government is the problem and not the solution, and Thatcher said there is no such thing as society, we are now witnessing the result of the desire to debase the state in order to justify the cutting of taxes for the wealthy.

Since powerful corporations and individuals do not want to pay for moving off of carbon, they engage in a collective process of denial. Furthermore, because the populace does not understand how we have undermined our own environment by creating the conditions for extreme weather, they respond to natural disasters by falling back into delusional explanations. This combination of mistrust and paranoid knowledge is enabled by a technology-driven, deregulated mass media system with a very low bar of entry.

While one could consider my explanation as another conspiracy theory, it is vital to be able to distinguish between the scientific use of reason and the paranoid investment in untrue patterns. In fact, if we think of ChatGPT as a pattern-recognition machine, we can see how our minds automatically seek out symbolic associations that are then confused with causations. One possible explanation for this type of delusional thinking can be related to how all animals have to anticipate danger and rewards by scanning the environment and looking for clues. For example, when an animal hears certain sounds or sees the outlines of specific objects, it interprets these sensory perceptions as indications of threats. In the case of human beings, partial sensory inputs are related to the anticipated repetition of past scenes of rewards or punishments. For example, the reason why we have anxiety dreams is that our minds generate symbolic versions of past threatening interactions.

Since the primary mind fills in the gaps of information with holistic understandings and images, we experience perceptions through the lens of ideal forms. As Lacan insists, the first ideal form that is encountered involves the perception of the body, which on the level of pure perception is only seen as a collection of fragments. Our sense that our body is a bounded unity is then an imaginary interpretation based on the internalization of an ideal form. Moreover, this virtual representation of space and vision is coupled with a paranoid totalizing of knowledge and meaning. On the most basic level, the human mind associates objects that occur in the same time or space or share certain characteristics, and then these symbolic associations allow for one to mistake correlation with causation. As a form of magical thinking and superstition, we cannot stop ourselves from forming symbolic association, substitutions, and displacements. Likewise, just as we cannot control the content of our dreams, we do not intend the formation of our symbolic understandings. As Freud insisted, everything in our dreams is a symbol for something else, and this poetic imagination is coupled with the translation of thoughts into perceived scenes.

Since most people reject Freud, they end up relying on a false psychology to understand how our minds actually function. Due to the fact that we want to believe that we have total control over our own thinking, we fail to comprehend the automatic and irrational aspects of our thoughts. Thus, our mental primary processes are unintentional, irrational, and indirect, and we are prone to paranoia and conspiracy thinking.

Freud posits that not only do we have to learn how to separate our internal thoughts from our perceptions of the external world, we also have to give up the fantasies and delusions that feed our desire to be all-knowing. Yet, we also have to learn to trust others but also verify the effects of that trust. What we are currently experiencing is the effects of mental grandiosity combined with social mistrust, and the result is the unnecessary loss of lives.