With the violence at the Capitol last week, the upcoming potential impeachment and the specter of more violence on Inauguration Day, I thought I would revisit a post I made 4 years ago, about a month before Trump was elected.

Even at then, I was concerned about the influence of conspiracy theories. At that particular point in time, in the years after the crisis and where Occupy Wall Street was gaining momentum, there was a devoted following that believed the financial system, through the Federal Reserve, was rigged against the common man. This theory purported that this system was designed to keep people oppressed and there were shadowing figures that controlled the world through the Federal Reserve and that their goal was world domination and to maintain their power and wealth.

It’s an alluring story were it true but my worry was that this type of thinking was dissuading people from empowering themselves financially. If you were liable to believe such a theory, then it would destroy any sense of personal responsibility that you may have had to educate yourself on financial matters such as budgeting, saving and investing. The more likely response this would have produced is to say we are all cogs in the wheel of this grand scheme. That assets like cash, bonds and the stock market are all a ruse for them to try to take your money from you, so you may as well not participate in it.

It gets worse because this theory is often intermingled with anti-Semitic tropes that somehow seemed to have endured even the horrors of WWII and were no doubt espoused by some of the folks who marched on the Capitol last week. These include conspiracies about the Rothschilds and Jews in general, controlling the banking system which I discussed the origins of in that 2016 post. But why do people fall victim to these conspiracy theories and what can people do to avoid falling victim to them in the future?

Psychological Drivers

Having spent a good deal of time in academia, I know that when I have questions, I’m usually not the only one so I sought out research done by psychologists to tackle these questions and came across some interesting takeaways.

The first is that the motivations behind why people are attracted to conspiracy theories are pretty well documented. The consequences of following these theories are not. As I alluded to above, I believe that there is a segment of the population that believes the monetary and financial system is set against them, which dissuades them from becoming financially literate and blaming their economic situation on something other than themselves. For consequences in other areas, it’s clear from recent events that people believe some theories strongly enough to be moved to violence as well. So although I believe the outcome of following these theories is either extreme apathy or extreme actions, this is just my personal heuristic and not based on any tested research. Understanding the psychology behind it all though, helps us get a window into how we can avoid falling victim to it ourselves and here is what one the research review I came across found:

Epistemic Motives – Conspiracy theories appear to provide broad, internally consistent explanations that allow people to preserve beliefs in the face of uncertainty and contradiction. This belief tends to be stronger in people that seek patterns in the environment, people that are dissatisfied with mundane, small scale explanations for events or people that feel distress as a result of being uncertain. The authors find that this motivation tends to be more common in people with less education and less training in analytical thinking.

Existential Motives – The research found that people with existential motives want to exert control over their environment as autonomous individuals and as members of a collective. The theories may offer people a feeling of safety in the form of cheater detection in the sense that the threat the supposed cheaters pose can be reduced or neutralized by their knowledge of the conspiracy. Other research indicates that conspiracy belief is strongly related to lack of sociopolitical control or lack of psychological empowerment.

Social Motives – Its human nature to want to belong and fitting into a group of like minded people is one way some people can derive that sense of belonging. Conspiracy theories can also help one maintain a positive self image or maintain a positive image of a group that one belongs to. Experi- mental results suggest that experiences of ostracism cause people to believe in superstitions and conspiracy theories, apparently as part of an effort to make sense of their experience. These can include groups perceived as having a lower social status, lower income and the losing side of a political process.

In the latter motive, I have noticed that conspiracies are seemingly infiltrating popular narratives on both sides of the political spectrum here in the US. Not long after the 2016 presidential election, a narrative started to developed in the left that Russian bots and fake accounts had somehow swung the electorate in favor of Trump. This hid the fact that the Democrats may have underestimated the unpopularity of their candidate or underestimated the enthusiasm of their base to bring out the voters.

Likewise, those on the right and some of their enabler politicians have continued to push a narrative that the most recent election was “stolen” and that if only the truth was revealed, the true winner could take their rightful place.

Editorial Boards

The reaction from social media companies was initially to label some forms of speech and information as misleading. The next step came as temporarily blocking people the platforms determined to be disseminating misleading information and most recently to ban thousands of people, including the current president, from their platforms. The debate has already been raging as to whether this is fair for these companies to police the speech of their users. Alternative social media outlets which promise not to control speech have popped up and even those have had a difficult time in some cases when their web hosting was pulled like in the case of Parler.

Many are cheering the banning of certain people from popular social media platforms and they are correct that those platforms, as private companies, have the right to do so. However this will only speed up the build up of alternative platforms which don’t limit the views or the speech of their users, no matter how extreme they may be. In fact you could make the argument that this signals the end of the Wild West of social media when it looked similar to newspaper media when it could first be cheaply made and distributed in the early 1800’s. At that time there were a number of competing papers and it wasn’t clear who could be relied upon for factual information. Those that set a particular editorial standard, like the New York Times, set themselves apart and were able to amass a strong following that kept the paper going while others folded. Social media outlets may be headed in this direction with something like an editorial board to verify content and check extreme views, similar to how the Wikipedia board governs its content.

But that is all for big tech to decide. Apart from these large platforms, we need to acknowledge that there is never going to be a utopia where conspiracy theories don’t exist. As described above, much of the lure of conspiracy theories are that they allow people to maintain their worldview despite evidence that contradicts it and provides some with a sense of control in a world where many of us are not in control of everything that affects our lives. I would much rather see individuals and groups take a bit more personal and collective responsibility for their positions and what happens to them than revert to conspiracy theories that absolve them of any blame.

Self Empowerment

This brings me back to my point about conspiracy theories in regards to the financial system. Too much apathy and lack of financial education has led people to think that they have no power within the financial system. This couldn’t be more untrue. Apps like Acorn allow you to invest your spare change for those that have trouble saving. For those that don’t know where to start in terms of investing, besides this blog, there are tons of resources available via books, YouTube, Investopedia and online courses that will enable you to build your financial knowledge and empower yourself with that knowledge.

The world is not going to stand around and hand a good life to you. As Eric Thomas said “The Bentley never goes on sale.” It takes an active participation in consciously building your own future to be successful. Whether that means moving away from the place you grew up because there are few jobs there, going to school to gain more employable skills to increase your potential income, or mapping out a strategy for your small business, taking personal responsibility for your position in life and your future is when the change begins, not when your government, boss, mom or the Illuminati decide to change. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, no one likes to move out of their comfort zone but that is where the growth is. There are many things that we as individuals cannot control but it doesn’t mean we need to let the conspiracy theories be the roadblock to our own individual empowerment.

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