Overview:
Naomi Klein's book 'Doppelganger' argues that conspiracy theorists, delusional though they are, are trying (but failing) to do skepticism. They're reacting to real problems, even though they misperceive who's at fault or what to do about them.
If skepticism is a video game, becoming an atheist is like beating the first level.
This quip bundles two truths: It’s not difficult to see through the obvious fallacies and shoddy evidence of religious apologists. However, we shouldn’t stop there.
What reason is there to believe God is the only widely held belief that people are wrong about? What other conventional wisdom might be false, and where should we turn the lens of skeptical inquiry next?
Level-one atheists
Some atheists never reach this step. Once they figure out that God doesn’t exist, they congratulate themselves, announce how rational they are, and then never question anything else.
These level-one atheists, as I call them, reject religion but seem confident that all other widely held beliefs are just fine. They don’t see the need to ask—to name a few examples—whether society is still biased in favor of white men, or whether the world’s wealth distribution reflects merit, or whether traditional notions of gender are really necessary. And they tend to erupt in rage and lash out when someone else asks those questions.
Many prominent New Atheists fell down hard at this step. Take Sam Harris’ extreme hostility toward the idea that everyone, including him, has an identity; or Richard Dawkins sneering at the very existence of transgender people. They react like a religious person who’s having one of his sacred cows skewered—not with curiosity and open-mindedness, but with knee-jerk defensiveness.
I’m in favor of taking skepticism to the next level. But there are right ways and wrong ways to go about it.
That’s the lesson from Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which describes a humorous, yet all-too-serious problem. Namely, Klein—a leftist author who writes about labor, climate justice and corporate power in books like The Shock Doctrine—keeps getting confused with Naomi Wolf—who used to be a liberal, mainstream feminist who wrote books like The Beauty Myth. But she spiraled off the deep end during COVID-19. Now she’s a hardcore anti-vaxxer and “cloud truther” who allies with odious right-wingers like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
Every time Naomi Wolf says something bizarre or outrageous, Naomi Klein’s social media mentions fill up with angry denunciations. She’s overheard conversations in public places where people attribute Wolf’s opinions to her. Some people don’t even realize that they’re two separate individuals. The more she tries to insist on her own identity, the more entangled the two of them become. It’s a problem “too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” she writes, quoting the author Philip Roth.
How to talk to conspiracy theorists
The pandemic broke something in us.
The fear, the isolation, the forced closure of businesses and schools, the restriction of gatherings—it upended people’s worldviews. Many of us never went back to normal.
You may know people who used to hold liberal, secular views and are now full-blown right-wing conspiracy theorists. I know several, including formerly close friends. It feels like a pod-person transformation has happened to them, like the people you used to know have been replaced by deranged duplicates.
Doppelganger changed my thinking about how to approach these people. Naomi Klein argues that we shouldn’t write them off as hopelessly foolish or mentally ill. The problem—the very real and serious problem—is that most conspiracy theorists are angry about real issues. They’ve just misidentified the causality and the culprits.
What conspiracy theorists are engaged in is cargo cult skepticism.
For example, during the pandemic, Naomi Wolf led the charge against vaccine passport apps. She blasted out hair-on-fire claims that they would lead to “slavery forever”. She ranted that they were step one in a sinister plot to create a China-style social credit system, where your travel can be restricted or your bank accounts disabled if the powers that be deem you a troublemaker.
These were ludicrous lies, of course. Yet, as Klein points out, they resonated with people because they gave concrete form to our inchoate fears of how much power Big Tech companies have over us:
In retrospect, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that Wolf’s vaccine passport messaging struck such a chord. When she focused in on tech and surveillance, she began tapping into deep and latent cultural fears about the many ways that previously private parts of our lives have become profit centers for all-seeing Silicon Valley giants. It was as if she had taken everybody’s cumulative tech terrors—about being tracked by our cell phones, monitored by our search engines, eavesdropped on by our smart speakers, spied on by our doorbells—bundled them all together, and projected them onto these relatively anodyne vaccine apps, which, to hear Wolf tell it, took every creepy surveillance abuse perpetrated by Big Government and Big Tech and programmed them into one QR code, on “the back end.”
The words she was saying were essentially fantasy. But emotionally, to the many people now listening to her, they clearly felt true. And the reason they felt true is that we are indeed living through a revolution in surveillance tech, and state and corporate actors have indeed seized outrageous powers to monitor us, often in collaboration and coordination with one another. Moreover, as a culture, we have barely begun to reckon with the transformational nature of this shift.
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, p.86
We could have used the pandemic to repair the deep structural inequities of our society. We could have invested in air filtration for all buildings. We could have passed laws to guarantee paid sick leave for everyone. We could have raised the minimum wage and added other protections for so-called essential workers. We could have made health care a universal right, rather than a profit center or a privilege. Rich countries could have waived patents and made sure that poorer countries had access to vaccines.
Instead, it was every man for himself. Politicians treated COVID-19 as a strictly individual problem: wear a mask, get the shot, stay home if you’re sick (if you can afford to and if your job allows it). Large corporations got bailed out, while many small businesses went under. Again, it’s no surprise that conspiracy theorists latched on to this as proof that “they” didn’t have our best interests in mind.
The rich and the rest
QAnon is another example of this. We may laugh at the over-the-top paranoia of right-wingers who fear that world leaders are a Satanic cabal, kidnapping children and draining their blood to make life-extending mad-science treatments.
However, it’s not false that inequality is soaring. Nor is it irrational to suspect that the wealthy and the well-connected routinely conspire to advance their own interests at everyone else’s expense. They cheat their way into top-tier schools, hide their wealth in offshore tax havens, take payola from those they oversee, and build luxury survival bunkers in the mountains. As Klein notes, “In our era of extreme wealth concentration and seemingly bottomless impunity for the powerful, it is perfectly rational, even wise, to probe official stories for their veracity” [p.21].
The real conspiracies are boring conspiracies, but QAnon puts an outlandish face on an actual problem. When a small elite class has been able to hoard so much wealth and power, conspiracy theorists are right to fear what they might do with it—even if the specific fears they list are funhouse-mirror madness.
It’s said that hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. In that sense, conspiracy theories are the compliment credulity pays to skepticism.
In a twisted way, conspiracy theorists are trying to do the beyond-level-one critical thinking we need. It’s just that they’re failing at it. What they’re engaged in is cargo cult skepticism. It has the appearance of investigative journalism, but not the content: fact-checking, vetting sources for expertise and bias, citing peer-reviewed research, seeking out differing perspectives. Instead, they’re grasping at any source that says what they want to be true.
And yet, for all their credulity, they’re motivated by outrages that everyone can plainly see. The conspiracy theorists’ methods are shoddy, their conclusions unsupported, but they’re perceiving something true about the state of the world. That’s the puzzle piece we need to keep in mind when talking to them.