Violence, blood and satanic rituals.. Learn about the world of conspiracy theories from which no one survives

After the afternoon of December 4, 2016, Edgar Madison Welch, a 28-year-old American citizen, entered a famous pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong in the American city of Washington, carrying an AR heavy military rifle in his hands. -15", fired a shot to open one of the closed doors, he went through the door looking for children tied up for the purpose of sexual exploitation he believed were there, and when he did not find anyone, he decided to shoot a group of other bullets at one of the walls to make sure that there were no secret rooms in the back, but Nothing was discovered either.

Welch was not the father of one of the kidnapped girls, nor is he a police officer, and he does not have any capacity except that he believes in a conspiracy theory that gained widespread popularity at that period, called “Pizzagate”, which says that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate in the US elections at the time, leads a secret sect that trades With children, not only for sexual purposes, but also to kill them and drink their blood in a satanic ritual, and that this sect is working to control the whole world.

child kidnappers

“Conspiracy theorists design theories to be believable and reliable,” said Dr. Shadi Shahsafari and his colleague Dr. Behman Shahbazi, from the University of California, America, in an email interview with

, adding: “People who fall in love with such theories to act upon, to secure their freedom, their future, and the future of their loved ones."

This duo, together with a multidisciplinary team at the same university in a study (1) published in 2020 in the journal "PLOS One", is trying to answer a question that has become more important now than ever before, which is how the contemporary conspiracy theory arises and flourishes in the way that Could it explain her development of sometimes violent behavior?

In fact, the "Pizzagate" theory originated and flourished in the cyberspace, and then launched into the real world in order to influence people's decisions and their political and social tendencies alike, which enabled this team to monitor its virtual itineraries.

Shahsafari and his associates used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to analyze information circulating online about two conspiracy theories, one fictional "Pizzagate", the other real and named "Bridget". The narrative framework is created by the relationships between all the elements of the story, similar to solving a picture puzzle in which you have to collect its small parts.

Pizzeria Comet Ping Pong featuring the restaurant's logo with a star and crescent

Shadi and Behman said in their interview with "

": "Conspiracy theories, unlike real conspiracies, rely on suspicious communications between disparate domains, to make unconfirmed claims about a larger story."

You can simply notice this difference, for a real political conspiracy to allow the construction of a factory that produces harmful products in a population area would require clear relations between the factory owners and parliamentarians, for example.

But on the other hand, the beholder of "Pizzagate" will find a sharp contrast in the scopes of the fabricated conspiracy.

It all started when former White House chief of staff John Podesta's personal email account was hacked and his messages passed to WikiLeaks for publication, then social media users searched for evidence of wrongdoing to be used to promote against Clinton's campaign.

A group of visitors to sites like Reddit and 4chan linked the word "pizza" in the letters to the gender of children, and then Hillary Clinton was forcibly inserted into the story, as there was another version alleging that Clinton traveled to a secret island in order to Sex tourism on a private plane owned by an American businessman who was previously accused of luring a minor prostitute into sex, after which other publications indicated that a pizza restaurant in Washington, called Comet Ping Pong, whose owner, James Elefantis, is associated with personalities prominent democracy, is the Pediatric Operations Center, and they justify the truth of their claim that the man's name resembles the French phrase "I love children" (J'aime les enfants), and that the restaurant's logo includes a star and crescent (the emblem of Satanists), and the next steps involved linking between A group of pizza restaurants geographically creates the shape of the devil's star!

According to the study of Shadi Shahsafari, Behman Shahbazi and their colleagues at the University of California, USA, weak connections between disparate domains are the most important features of contemporary conspiracy theory.

Do you notice it?

We are talking here about the intersection of very different places, characters and functions, not only that, but the researchers in the team tell us in their conversation with "

" that there is always one weak link between every point and point in that story, by destroying it the whole plot collapses, in addition to that, the structures Narratives about fabricated conspiracy theories tend to form and stabilize quickly, while narrative frameworks about actual conspiracies can take years to settle, in the case of Pizzagate the previous steps all took only a few days to grow and flourish.

Kings of mistrust

In fact, one of the main features of conspiracy theories is the idea of ​​"accumulation of points", where you find an obsession with some people to connect everything together, and you often hear from conspiracy theorists saying: "Nothing happens by chance", and that you can connect different points to each other, each of which may indeed be true, but the links between them are very weak, at which point internal contradictions arise for this kind of plot, which the average person usually ignores because he is so caught up in the story before him which is usually so interesting.

Therefore, you will find that someone may be convinced that there is a group consisting of hundreds of thousands to millions of individuals, including pilots, astronauts, and workers in all governments and airlines, all agreeing on one secret, which is that the Earth is flat, but this person will not bother to ask: Is Statistically, can there be a single secret that hundreds of thousands of people are hiding?

This type of bias is really interesting, and for a more in-depth examination of it, the editor of "

"

turned to Dr. Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology from Union University in the United States, who is interested in studying conspiracy theories from a psychological point of view

People tend to be more suspicious, less confident, need a greater sense of uniqueness, with a tendency to view the world as an inherently dangerous place, and are also more likely to discover unreal patterns as meaningful.”

A woman wearing a T-shirt promoting a conspiracy theory promoted by the group QAnon

Hart and his team surveyed more than 1,200 American adults (2) who were asked to answer a series of questions about their personality traits, partisan biases, and demographic backgrounds. They were also asked whether they agreed with general conspiratorial statements, such as the existence of unknown secret groups that really control Global politics, groups of scientists manipulate, fabricate or suppress evidence in order to deceive the public.

, Hart said

: “Previous research has shown that people gravitate towards conspiracy theories that confirm or prove their political viewpoint,” emphasizing: “We are all more likely to believe what we think is true, especially when our identity is at stake and emotions are charged. Despite this, his research findings suggest that a constellation of personality characteristics collectively referred to as the 'Schizotypy' are found in conspiracy theorists.

DID is not a disease diagnosis, but is defined as “the tendency of some normal people, more than others, to judge irrational statements as profound and purposeful.” Remember that we are talking here about those who tend to infer meanings and motives from things that happen by chance or At random, if you show them a video of a group of triangles moving randomly, they often come up with a story related to those triangles, as if they are acting on purpose.

Referee your favorite team match

Asborn Dirndale agrees on one side with that view, but tries to expand it a little more to include more people.

Direndahl works as a professor of philosophy and the study of religion at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In general, the number of believers in the idea of ​​the conspiracy itself will increase accordingly.

"You might think that the referee is targeting your football team, especially when one of your team players is injured in the penalty area and does not award a penalty,

" Direndahl said in a statement to us in "

", adding that the matter may develop because you think that a lot of Referees work against your team, especially if you think you see a clear pattern, like telling yourself that your team never, or rarely, gets a penalty.

In this case, you are also caught in a conspiracy theory, and in a study recently published by Drindahl and his colleagues (3) in the Journal of "Personality and Individual Defenses", there are several reasons that accelerate people's capture of conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists usually consider the Internet as a source Most of the time, they tend to be less educated, and often belong to extremist political or religious groups or tend to extremism, and conspiracy theories have greater opportunities to spread in non-democratic countries.

In addition, Direndahl and his colleagues put other, more specialized reasons, consistent with Joshua Hall's view, showing, for example, that believers in conspiracy theorists are more inclined to see connections or relationships between unrelated things, as well as they tend towards narcissistic (self-centered) and persecutive (which (besides, they have more confidence in their intuition than in logic and data.

Perhaps this special category of conspiracy theorists is the one who believes in more than one conspiracy theory, even if it is contradictory. For example, you find that someone believes that some kind of alien being rules the world, and at the same time believes that there is a sect made up of 1% of the people (the richest people in the world). They control the land, he will talk to you about the relationship of this to the worship of Satan and then at the same time tell you that Gog and Magog are Europe and America and their inhabitants.

Really conspiratorial world

But the biggest problem, according to Shadi and Behman in their interview with “

”, is that many conspiracy theories “revolve around topics that have a personal impact on the believer.” This applies to almost all conspiracy theories, including those related to the harmful effects of the fifth generation technology “5G.” Through the “Pizzagate” theory that drives people to fear for their children, to the theory of harmful vaccines, and ending with even the most naive conspiracy theories such as flat earth, because if you meditate a little, you will find that this means by extension the belief that someone is planning something to control you - and people - On a very large scale, how would you act if you had this dreadful feeling?

Believers in a conspiracy theory such as flat earth usually integrate into society in a normal way, and even talk about their theories - with friends, for example - in the form of controversy mixed, perhaps with laughter. On social media, they become kings of controversy and pioneers to draw links between seemingly ordinary or coincidental things, But it sometimes happens - and increasingly recently - that conspiracy theorists turn to actions that may be violent.

Welch's case is one of the examples, but it is not the only example. Consider, for example, the case of Anthony Warner, who blew himself up in the American city of Nashville, sending messages to his friends before the bombing claiming that aliens control the world, or the case of the man who stabbed his brother with a sword in Seattle in 2019. , after he sent a message to one of his friends in which he said: “God told me it was a lizard,” referring to a well-known conspiracy theory that claims that the world is ruled by a group of lizards.

The latter case is, of course, very extreme and rare, but what about the demolition and burning of 5G towers in several countries around the world while spreading a wide wave of conspiracy theories that say that the towers are killing people?

And what about the rioters who supported US President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the US Capitol?

They belong to a group that believes in conspiracy theories that emerged several years ago called "Keo Anon".

"Once ordinary people accept the basic tenets of conspiracy theory, they come to the conclusion that violent means of political participation is a reasonable outcome,"

says Dr. Roland Imhof, Professor of Social and Legal Psychology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, in a statement obtained by

. .

In several experiments conducted by Imhoff (4), two groups of people are tasked with imagining their existence in a certain type of society, the first in a conspiracy-focused society, suggesting that a powerful secret cult controls the fate of millions, while the second group merges into a normal scenario that governments The media is transparent and trustworthy.

Next, each person was asked to answer a set of follow-up questions about the political procedures they wished to engage in, ranging from "standard" procedures such as voting, participating in political seminars, or contacting the media or politicians to present an opinion on a television program, to to "non-standard" actions, such as destroying property, harming others, or other illegal behavior, and the result was a tendency of the first group towards non-standard actions.

A previous study from the British University of Kent (5), issued in 2019, confirmed that conspiracy theorists can be more inclined to engage in “minor” crimes, compared to others.

However, the main problem facing the scope of research on conspiracy theory remains that all of this is relatively new. The focus on conspiracy theories has begun to be more precise with their spread electronically from 2016 until now, so there is still a lot to discover.

At the end of his talk with

, Shadi and Behman say: “As our world becomes more virtual, people upload their thoughts, opinions, discussions and reviews to the Internet, and while searching for answers, some want a unified theory that supports their views of the world, and conspiracy theories often work To bridge this gap.” That's the problem with our digital world. So, everything is on the Internet, a huge amount of data, true and false, and what you need to believe in a conspiracy theory is just to connect a bunch of disparate events, then make your stories, go out to the world .

Of course, at that point, we cannot fail to point out that we are currently living in an era that many researchers have called the “post-truth” era, and it is not only related to contemporary political culture, fake news has become an essential feature of the era in which we live. In it, and even things such as lying, deception and misinformation have become more like a daily habit or a digital lifestyle, and in the midst of that state of chaos we have no reference but the ability to raise the voice, or sharpen feelings to the maximum, just to win personal battles, and here you find Conspiracy theories have millions of followers.

————————————————————

Sources