The Foundation of Collective Insanity?

There have always been fairly widely shared delusions out there -- from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to the Illuminati, to the Reptiloids, and on and on endlessly. (The Illuminati was a real society of secularists in Bavaria but it was outlawed in 1790 with the encouragement of the Catholic Church. The delusional theory is that they continue to exist and secretly manipulate world events.) I wouldn't say that crazy beliefs have necessarily always been way out on the fringe. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for example, has at times been widely believed. But it does seem that the takeover of much of one of the two major parties in the U.S. by outright batshit insanity is something new, at least in recent times. 

Marin Cogan interviews NYT reporter Elizabeth Williamson, who traces the trajectory of craziness to the "false flag" claims about the Sandy Hook school massacre, thence to pizzagate to Covid-19 conspiracy theories to QAnon to the Big Lie about the 2020 election. One of Williamson's premises is that similar nutso responses to novel and shocking events have happened regularly in the past, but now they are amplified by social media. (Think of the moon landing.) There might have been similar claims about the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, but if so we didn't hear about them because the channels to amplify them didn't exist. Alienation from authority and expertise by a growing segment of the population also contributes. As Williamson says:

There’s another reason why Sandy Hook was one of these watershed moments. It came at a moment when President Obama had just been reelected and there was a reaction to his election in general, this sense that he was an outsider and was going to propose some sort of draconian measures on people. His presidency was fertile ground for a lot of conspiracy theorists.

Or, to put it a bit more clearly, since Williamson doesn't seem willing to do it, Barack Obama had too much melanin and that felt threatening to Republican voters. Anyway, for people who feel that  history is passing them by, being "in the know" feels empowering.

It’s less about politics than psychology and a need for social connection and status. Many of the people that I interviewed for the book who are conspiratorially-minded started out being on the political left and then they moved to the far right. What I learned through the psychologists and the political scientists I interviewed for the book, about the motives behind the spread of these conspiracy rumors, is that it can be about fact-finding, it can be about a shared doubt in the official narrative. There’s an element of self-esteem involved — they are possessors of superior knowledge. It’s, as one family member described it to me and psychologists have confirmed, an element of narcissism: You’re the only person who knows. There’s a sort of smugness I noted — “I guess you only understand half the narrative at best” — that kind of thing.

The big problem here is that evidence and reason are of no use against these beliefs. They aren't about the standards that the reality based community uses to assess truth, they're a foundation of identity. I don't know what to do about it.