OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: A culture of credulity

There is no conspiracy theory so silly that people won't believe it.

There are still folks out there who'll argue that Pizzagate--the bizarre theory that hacked and decoded emails proved Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and other Democratic leaders were running a child sex ring out of a hip Washington, D.C., pizzeria--is a real thing. There are folks who still insist Barack Obama has not done enough to prove he was born in Hawaii. People will argue that the world is flat. That professional wrestling is on the up and up.

I guess we could say we're in a post-truth age, because I know some of the people who promote some of these ideas don't in their hearts believe they are true. They don't believe facts matter so much as how people feel.

They're not entirely wrong about this; most of us sometimes act in irrational ways. Our emotions can cause us to disregard the evidence before our eyes. That's why casinos prosper. Enough of us believe that we can be the one to beat the odds. People believe what they want, what they think they need, to believe. One man's irrationality is another man's faith in things unseen.

People believe Alex Jones, too, even if his attorneys assert no reasonable person would. People believe that Sandy Hook never happened, that it was staged by the government with "crisis actors." More people probably believe that the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were engineered by our own government or that the moon landing never happened, but the idea is out there.

People can and do believe Obama is a Muslim, married to a man. And that Donald John Trump is super-competent leader pretending to be a boorish dolt in order to root out all the bad actors in American society. That he's actually working with Robert Mueller, who isn't really investigating the Trump campaign's possible ties to the Russian government but gathering evidence in order to arrest and imprison Obama, Hillary Clinton and other top Democrats who are, along with various high profile Hollywood figures and other celebrities and maybe Vladimir Putin, running a global child sex ring.

Yeah, that's roughly what this QAnon "theory" holds--though there are all sorts of subplots and ancillary theories that reach back into history, offering alternative explanations for the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the sinking of the Titanic, and so on, while tying it all into the hoary Illuminati hoax. I suspect that a lot of people involved in inventing and disseminating this sort of nonsense know it's exactly that. I suspect they enjoy suckering stray members of the public into believing the fantastic things they make up.

I think they might enjoy it the same way that Otus does when people take his column for real news. Gullible people can be entertaining. (Maybe the worst crime against journalism I was ever a party to was when a friend of mine, the late great political reporter John Copes, started a rumor that a politician--a constitutional officer in the state of Louisiana--was being considered as a candidate for the next commissioner of Major League Baseball. It got out of hand when a television reporter actually asked about the rumor during a press conference, and the politician, perhaps enjoying the joke a little too much, didn't come right out and deny it. It didn't get to the point where Copes actually had to write a story about the rumor he started, but it got close.)

In a way, the Church of the SubGenius' critique of belief systems is a more than fair one. Maybe the only fair and healthy way to perceive the world is as an elaborate joke.

But it's only entertaining until someone loses a few rounds in a pizza joint.

After all, we've seen moral panics cause damage before. The fallout from the satanic ritual abuse scare of the 1980s can be traced back to the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers ("The shocking true story of the ultimate evil--a child's possession by the devil"), a best-selling memoir co-written by psychiatric patient Michelle Smith and her doctor (and eventual husband).

Smith alleged that her psychiatrist-lover had helped her recover suppressed memories of how she was, as a 5-year-old, forced to participate in satanic rituals involving sexual abuse and murder culminating in an 81-day marathon that involved the devil himself and was eventually thwarted by the direct intercession of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Michael the Archangel. They removed Michelle's scars and--like Will Smith in Men in Black--zapped away all memories of the events "until the time was right."

It didn't take a lot of digging to cast doubt on the book. Michelle's mother, the prime instigator of the ritual abuse, was conveniently dead. Her father disputed her claims. Her siblings, who weren't mentioned in the book, did too. Anton LaVey hadn't even founded his Church of Satan--the group alleged to be responsible for Michelle's abuse--at the time it had allegedly occurred. She apparently hadn't missed any school during her 81-day ordeal.

Still, a lot of people bought it, and by 1983, the U.S. was in the grip of a full-scale uproar. Eventually 360 young children were identified as victims of satanic abuse at the family-run McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach in southern California. Seven members of the McMartin family were charged, and though none were convicted, the investigation and subsequent trials took six years and cost the state at least $15 million. And while the "satanic ritual" aspects of the trial were dropped relatively early on in the case, in the next few years more than 100 preschools across the country became the object of similar sensationalist allegations.

Procter & Gamble capitulated in the face of thousands of complaints about its century-old man-in-the-moon logo: A vocal minority were convinced that the trademark was a satanic emblem. After years of waging a losing public relations campaign, P&G retired the symbol.

Satanism was a subject of high school assemblies. People believed in it. (People still believe in it.) There were self-styled Satanists who made a living testifying in court. It had consequences for innocent people.

So will these lies.

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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.

Editorial on 08/07/2018

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