40. LUNACY AD 1969
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Following the first moon landing in 1969, the conspiracy theorists immediately leaped out of the closet: the landing had been staged in a Hollywood film studio by the U.S. government in an attempt to one-up the Russians in the Space Race. A huge number of supposedly rational “proofs” of governmental fraudulence were put forward: in NASA photographs the flag planted on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was fluttering in a nonexistent breeze; there is no blast crater to mark the lunar module’s landing; the scene appears inappropriately lit by multiple light sources; in one image (see photo on opposite page) a mysterious object might be a studio spotlight; and on and on. All these allegations were rapidly and comprehensively refuted by NASA scientists.
Somewhat later, a totally contradictory story emerged: Armstrong and Aldrin actually had been on the moon—and, while there, had discovered a human skeleton wearing a plaid shirt and blue jeans, with barefoot prints nearby. The astronauts’ pictures of these bizarre finds were allegedly sequestered by NASA until one came into the possession of a Chinese astrophysicist named Kang Mao-pang, who claimed a giant cover-up because “the Americans apparently feel that nobody else in the world is privileged enough to share the information.”
The story of the skeleton seems to have originated in the supermarket tabloid the Weekly World News, hardly the most credible of sources. But it spread across the Internet like wildfire, as it was posted and reposted, many years after the event, again and again. That it bore repeating at all ought in principle to be hard to believe—though of course, to weary observers of the human scene it isn’t at all—but even more amazing about this bizarre episode is the finding by sociologists that if you believed one story (astronauts never went to the moon) you were very likely also to believe the other (they found a skeleton there). This is cognitive dissonance—the ability to simultaneously entertain two entirely contradictory ideas—taken to an unusual extreme. So what was going on?
Well, one of the great myths of our time is that evolution is a process of fine-tuning by which living organisms become optimized to their environments. In fact, as evolutionary theory has itself evolved, it has become ever clearer that evolutionary change results from all sorts of different influences, some of them completely random with respect to adaptation. Accordingly, human beings have not been optimized by nature to any specific condition; the human brain is a case in point.
Human beings are sharply distinguished from all other animals in being able to reduce the inputs from their senses into a vocabulary of mental symbols, among which they can make complex associations. This ability to make associations is the basis of our vaunted rational abilities. Yet it is one that was quite recently grafted onto a much more ancient ancestral brain, gradually accreted over literally hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution, that functions in a more intuitive and emotional manner.
It is the presence of this ancient brain lurking beneath the more recent rational veneer that ensures that we are not all Spocks—cold, calculating machines. Thank God for that; but this odd combination of ancient intuitive and newer rational mechanisms also means that our brains sometimes express themselves in irrational ways, occasionally defaulting, for example, to conspiracy theories where no conspiracy exists. Perhaps the nastiest recent example of this human deficit followed the mass murder of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where grieving parents were assailed by threats from mainly anonymous zealots, some of whom apparently believed that the event had never taken place and was instead a political stunt by gun-control advocates.
Even the sanest among us are prey to this kind of thing: not long ago, a survey showed that 63 percent of registered voters in the United States currently believe in at least one political conspiracy theory. And rather than being fixed, this tendency appears to be highly responsive to external circumstances. In good times, people tend to be more complacent and contented. But when they feel helpless and unempowered, they are much more liable to believe in conspiracies (see also chapter 2, Apocalypticism).
Most likely this is because feeling that you know the explanation for some important event (and perhaps especially when you think that others don’t) confers a sense of agency and control. And it is fear of losing that control that apparently explains the “backfire effect” whereby, in the words of political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “efforts to debunk inaccurate political information can leave people more convinced that false information is true than would have been otherwise” (emphasis ours).
The underlying feeling of control is entirely our subjective creation. But no matter: for better or for worse, we live as much of the time in the worlds that we create in our heads as we do in the real one.