In the twenty-first century the most common first step in the journey down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole is watching a video. The reasons why people watch the video in the first place vary. It might just be random chance, or hearing about the theory from a friend, or seeing some discussion online. Intrigued, and initially quite skeptical, they decide to do a little research, so they look something up online, or they watch a video that their friend recommended for them. Today it’s largely YouTube videos, but for older theorists it might have been from a shared DVD. That’s what happened to Copenhagen professor of chemistry Niels Harrit:
Interviewer: Tell me how you decided to take on this, one of the most controversial issues of our time, the events of September 11.
Harrit: This more or less is a torch which somebody gives you, destiny, and you get involved. My story is not very different from millions of other people, because on the day, and the day afterwards, I didn’t think much about it. I, maybe I accepted that there were terrorists who could hijack airlines and they smash into the Twin Towers, etcetera. But it wasn’t before 2006 when I accidentally saw a DVD on Building 7, and this was shocking for a natural scientist, because I simply couldn’t understand what I saw.1
Similar tales are told by many former (and current) believers. For example, Martin Beard, once a highly active member of the UK “Chemtrail” scene:
My story goes back to 2007 when (in my late twenties) I was a single bloke still in pub mode and getting pretty sodden drunk each weekend (and most nights) just because I could. Whilst working for one of the biggest Pharma companies in the world, Eli Lilly & Company, I was introduced to big bearded South African chap who asked me to take a look at the Zeitgeist movie … That’s where it all began …
From there I was amazed at what I thought was absolute proof the world we live in was a complete lie. It snowballed from there, Alex Jones, David Icke, Edge TV, The UK Column. … My whole world changed in a few months and I very quickly became a recluse, spending more and more time sitting in my then flat and drinking lots to numb the pain of this so-called truth.2
A common factor seems to be having some spare time. These are not short videos you might just happen to watch during your lunch break. Zeitgeist, (the movie that brought Beard, and many others, down the rabbit hole) is over two hours long. Zeitgeist is a rather odd movie that starts out with some speculation about Jesus before delving into 9/11 controlled demolition theories, Jewish world bankers, and the forced implanting of microchips into people to enslave them. The DVD that Harrit saw was probably the more conventional 9/11 conspiracy video Loose Change, which runs up to 130 minutes, depending on which version you choose. Once they start, people often binge-watch multiple conspiracy videos. Sometimes they watch the same video over and over again. You get the sense from talking to them that it’s something like a drug, that the “truth” they feel is in the video is activating some kind of function in their brain, resonating with them, and fulfilling some kind of need.
There are certain personality and psychological aspects that correlate with a tendency to believe in unfounded conspiracy theories. There’s the need to feel unique, an overdeveloped tendency to find patterns in things, there’s factors like openness to new ideas, agreeableness, intelligence, and attitudes about authority. Researchers have found some rough correlations between various factors like these and conspiracies.
But these factors are things that everyone has to a varying degree; the correlations are also generally quite small—having one or more of the personality factors simply raises the probability that any random person might be a conspiracy theorist. It does not mean these are the actual causes of conspiracy thinking.
Beard did not become a conspiracy theorist because of some need for uniqueness or because his favorite political party had lost the election. He became a conspiracy theorist because he watched Zeitgeist at a time in his life when he was alone and getting drunk every night. While there may well have been personality factors that made his descent into the rabbit hole both more probable and ultimately quicker and deeper, it’s also very likely that had he not seen Zeitgeist he would have remained out of the hole.
Journalist, activist, and artist Abby Martin was seventeen at the time of the 9/11 attacks. An early interest in journalism was triggered by her high school boyfriend enlisting in the military after the buildings fell. Growing skepticism of the official justifications for the Iraq War influenced her journalistic writing and a ready embrace of “alternative” sources of information quickly led to her exposure to 9/11 conspiracy theories.
In a YouTube video, Martin gave an overview of her route down that rabbit hole at a time when she was deep inside it, at a March for 9/11 Truth on the streets of Santa Monica in 2008. The twenty-four-year-old Martin was the organizer of the San Diego 9/11 Truth Meetup group and an active member of the general 9/11 Truth community. While marching down Wilshire Boulevard carrying a sign saying 9/11 TRUTH NOW, she was asked if and why she thought that 9/11 was an “inside job.”
Absolutely it was! I know that because I’ve researched it for three years and everything that I uncovered solidifies my belief that it was an inside job and our government is complicit in what happened. … I saw the Pentagon, which confused me, and I started researching more, and I saw Building 7, and I saw the demolition of the two towers right in front of my eyes … it’s someone telling you an apple is an orange, you just have to stretch your own mind to know what you are seeing is true.3
Martin was then asked what the most compelling evidence was of an “inside job”:
Absolutely Building 7, without a shadow of a doubt. Building 7, no doubt in my mind. Building 7 was brought down by controlled demolition. Anyone who looks can see that. It’s so weird, it’s like black and white. Nobody can look at that building and say that was brought down by fire. There’s nothing there, there’s no debris. Even the Twin Towers, you look at ground zero, there’s nothing there, there’s just powder, where did a huge 110-story building go?
She then puts this in the context of her overall worldview, one where the people in power exert such a strong control over the media that basically everything is a lie, and people don’t see what she sees.
It’s just shocking, and the fact that they did it in broad daylight, it really is infuriating. And the people can’t see it, because like the Nazi propagandists said, it’s a lie so big that people can’t see it, they can’t believe it because it’s so big, and so in your face.
I’m here, and I’ve been a 9/11 Truth activist for about three years, because I feel it’s the most important issue to expose. They don’t want any evidence to be uncovered about 9/11 Truth because that would ruin their whole system, they have everyone under this grid watching TV like zombies believing everything they see on television. So if they let one piece of evidence slip out then that could ruin their whole grid.
By 2014 Martin had largely backed away from the more extreme claims of controlled demolition and moved to a more reasonable position of simply criticizing the way the government responded to 9/11 and then exploited it. She appeared on Jesse Ventura’s Off the Grid show at a time that Ventura was still pushing the more convoluted theories of controlled demolition, yet they did not discuss those theories directly.4 In a rather bizarre juxtaposition, Abby Martin mentioned her prior belief in controlled demolition being brought up as a smear campaign, seemingly unaware that Ventura himself still claimed to hold those exact same beliefs, especially about Building 7.5
But what did Martin mean when she said, “I saw the Pentagon, which confused me, and in 2005 I started researching more, and I saw Building 7”? It’s very likely that she simply saw a combination of 9/11 Truth websites and 9/11 Truth videos like Loose Change (2005). Her comment about “someone telling you an apple is an orange” is a direct reference to a popular 2007 YouTube video by Anthony Lawson that contrasts the collapse of Building 7 with conventional demolitions of similar-shaped buildings.6 Her comments about the towers being “just powder” reflects many videos from that time (and to this day) that claim that the buildings were somehow turned to dust by unknown means like “nanothermite” or energy beams from space. Even her talk of the “big lie” is a reflection of similar claims in Loose Change and the 2007 Zeitgeist movie.
Abby Martin’s route down the rabbit hole seems far more self-directed than Martin Beard’s, but they both share that same key aspect of their journeys being both started and accelerated by the watching of seductive videos.
Your friend will almost certainly have had a similar initial experience at some point. They watched a video, that video led to another video, and they fell down the rabbit hole. That’s the most common “how” part of the equation. The next thing we need to focus on is “why.” Why did they get so easily sucked in? And if we figure out the how and the why, then what can we do about it?
Predispositions
One of the more common questions people ask about conspiracy theories and conspiracists is: “Why do people believe in conspiracies?” Is it a personality type? Something in the way their brains are wired? Some trigger event in their past? A reflection of their intelligence? Mental illness? The way they were brought up? Evolutionary brain functions? Something lacking in their education? The influence of their peer group?
While it’s understandable to want to be able to say things like: “People believe in conspiracies because of X,” the truth of the matter is that there’s no simple answer for any one individual like your friend. Even if we consider wider populations there’s no single clear correlation between any one factor (such as intelligence) and conspiracy thinking.
In a certain sense this question is not important. Something I’ve increasingly realized over the years, and something that has been greatly confirmed by the research I’ve done for this book, is that anyone can fall down the rabbit hole. It’s true that certain factors seem to make it more or less likely to happen, but the key thing seems not so much the personality types or certain mental states of the individual, but rather their exposure to certain types of convincing information, like videos.
One simply cannot point to a single pre-existing factor, or even a constellation of factors, and say this is why a particular person fell for a particular conspiracy when they first began to be exposed to this new source of information. Conspiracy theorists are normal people just like you and me. But they are normal people who fell down the rabbit hole, whereas you and I were lucky enough to stay above ground.
That said, understanding how personality types and traits affect the speed and ease of one’s descent into the rabbit hole is a useful part of understanding the entire picture of any individual. Perhaps your friend is actually one of those individuals whose conspiratorial thinking is closely tied to a particular mental quirk they have. Perhaps there actually is something that happened to them, or something about their current emotional situation that’s a driving force in their obsessive researching and automatic distrust of authority.
Mental quirks, psychological abnormalities, are only a part of the picture. Everyone has mental quirks, but we also have normal aspects of the way we think that pretty much everyone shares. There’s ordinary cognitive biases like the Dunning–Kruger effect, where people overestimate their own abilities. There’s confirmation bias, where we tend to gather evidence that supports our theory and reject contrary evidence. There’s biases from too much information, from selective memory, from pressure to make decisions, and from imperfectly filling in the gaps in information.7 These are not aberrations, these are natural functions of the way our brains work. Biases are an inescapable part of human thought, and any honest thinker must give equal effort to both trying to avoid them in their own thinking, and to identifying them in the thinking of others.