The Age of Conspiracy?

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Hello, I'm Professor Brian Cox, CBE FRS.

I'm Robin Ins, PCW, PCW, which means I am a pointless celebrities winner twice over.

Just so you know, one of my greatest dancers was Alderney, another was Eve Ferret.

Anyway, and this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Now, human beings have a habit of always living in the worst time possible.

The past is a place of rosy nostalgia where old women would unicycle to communion balancing a pint of beer on their head.

And the future is a place where we've all moved to a luxury centre park on Mars.

The only time that's rubbish is the present, which tragically is where we always have to live.

Now, in the 21st century, it seems popular to believe that this century is where the human species jumped the shark.

After decades of reason and progress, we became a world of crackpots and conspiracy theorists.

Even Brian, in fact, this is what you won't believe, he is not immune to crazy pseudoscience, right?

The other day, he was telling me, this is right, basically, he told me that one particle could go through two slits at one time, right?

But typically, being a pseudoscientist, he then went, oh, but only if you're not looking.

What a crank.

You see, here's the problem with creating shows that are balanced.

If indeed you should balance drivel.

For 13 years now, I've attempted to present a science show celebrating the most remarkable strides we've made as a species in understanding the deep structure of nature and the majesty of the heavens while sharing the stage with the man who doesn't understand interference phenomena.

Trying to explain why people believe weird things to Brian is like, like, for instance, people who believe that the earth is flat, is like talking to Mr.

Data basically in Star Trek, because he just, his brain implodes.

You just

do not understand.

People make decisions based on emotion, not facts, an equation.

What is love?

Today, we're looking at how we come to believe ideas about the world that go against all the evidence and how we twist the evidence to fit with what we want to believe.

Has conspiratorial thinking changed as our worldview has changed, shaped as it is by the new scientific discoveries and new philosophical movements that shape our world.

Joining us to discuss this are a philosopher, a zoologist, a social psychologist, and a writer who reacted to not understanding a lecture by Brian Cox by writing a play all about it, which I felt was a bit extreme.

But anyway, they are.

I'm Professor Matthew Cobb at the University of Manchester, and I think the most interesting conspiracy theories are those that are true, like the conspiracies by big business to make us believe that tobacco wasn't harmful to health, or that there was a problem about the overwhelming majority view that there is climate change and it's anthropogenic.

My name is Timotej Fermola.

I'm a professor of media culture and society at the University of Oslo in Norway.

And the oddest conspiracy theory I've heard, I heard it the other day when I was in a German town called Bielefeld, is that Bielefeld does not exist.

My name's Karen Douglas and I'm a professor of social psychology at the University of Kent.

And one of the strangest conspiracy theories I've come across, also relatively recently, is that the Disney Corporation released the film Frozen deliberately to change Google's algorithm so that when people searched for Disney Frozen, they no longer came across information about Walt Disney having been cryogenically frozen.

I'm David Bidiel, and I once said that conspiracy theory is how idiots get to feel like intellectuals.

And I think that was borne out by the Flat Earth Society, who someone from the Flat Earth Society did once say that they were a very respectable society who had members all around the globe.

This is our panel.

Matthew, it does feel at the moment as if we're in a world where the facts that underpin our civilization, so science, is under attack and it often feels like it's under attack like never before.

But is that really the case?

Well I think there's obviously been an amplification through social media and through mass communication of many of the more interesting ideas.

But I think this goes way, way back and has always been with us.

Francis Crick used to get letters from strange people and he would write on them, file under madmen, and then they would all be put in the filing cabinet along with all the other crazed ideas about the origin of the universe and so on.

Newton, somebody who you would admire, I'm sure,

his laws of motion enable us to put satellites around Jupiter, but at the same time, because there were things he didn't understand, that he was groping to try and understand how the universe worked through what we would now call alchemy.

He thought that metals were alive, and indeed that in some way the universe was alive too.

And he was searching for the Philosopher's Stone, which would be a way of turning base metals into gold.

So like Harry Potter.

Exactly like Harry Potter.

That's where it comes from.

It's all about, it's actually a whole conspiracy, all the Harry Potter films, conspiracy to get over Newtonian mechanics.

That's what all the flyings are doing.

But that's a, I mean, I find that fascinating with Newton as well, the fact that he basically didn't think that his laws of motion, he thought they were very much the kind of thing, they were okay.

But his essay, you know, his huge work

Daniel from the Bible, that was what people would remember him for.

No one would care about gravity.

Well, they'd care if you could find a way of turning base base metals into gold, and you'd get very rich.

But of course, the government was very worried about this.

This was something that affected chemists throughout the 17th and 18th centuries as they tried to turn base metals into gold.

That what would then happen to the value of the currency?

It would collapse if all of a sudden this turned out to be not proper gold that had been mined in Peru or wherever, but was in fact this kind of weird gold that somebody had made in

a laboratory somewhere in Europe.

But what I find, I've only just realised, and you telling that now, that must be the reason they made him the head of the Royal Mint, because he was the head of the Royal Mint, so they saw him as a kind of rumple stiltskin character who would just say, brilliant, we'll get Newton on our side and he'll just be weaving all this gold for us.

How's it going, Is it?

Not as well as it hoped.

So basically, Newton just thought of the physics as a hobby.

Is that right?

No, he was, I think, that his physics and what we would call his alchemy were part of the same way of understanding the universe.

It's just that one of them was better and more accurate and more predictive and we've retained it than the other stuff which slowly it did transmute, but not into gold but into chemistry by the end of the 18th century.

But some of the ideas, you know, they now look crazy to us.

They look like they've been they should be filed under madmen.

Metals aren't alive.

The universe isn't alive, but that was his way of trying to deal with something that he couldn't understand.

And Tim, if we come to the twentieth century and through the twenty-first century, so the way that we think about facts, the way that we think about the world

is mirrored and intertwined with philosophy.

So could you outline

the philosophical movements that we see as we move through the 20th century into the 21st century?

Yeah.

So and I'm sure some of the audience know this.

And this is a very crude explanation of a

kind of a categorization that is far more complex and far more broad, so I'll surely miss out on some things.

But generally speaking, there is this thing called modernity, and this is all the industrial processes, but what we associate modernity with these days is this idea of progress at all cost regardless of whether this was scientific progress or political progress all kinds of progress and you're willing to I guess sacrifice everything in order to achieve that right and so if we think of modernity which is the late 19th early 20th century we think of enthusiasm and absolutism but we also think and this is quite important we think of the tragedies and the terror and the catastrophes that emerge as a result right so the enlightenment ends in the French Revolution with Saint-Just throwing everyone under the guillotine.

Communist Russia, pogroms, and so on and so forth.

So all of these

projects for progress end up in disaster.

And so what postmodernism then is, which is the kind of the dominant register of experience that follows from that, that is not singular, but the dominant register of experience that follows, roughly after the Second World War, is people saying, oh dear,

this went quite terribly.

Let's not do this, right?

Let's not tell each other these huge stories that explain everything.

Let's instead

assume that we need to take them apart.

That will be the leftist, the progressive kind of postmodernism.

Or let's assume that there's only one ideology or one grand narrative left in the boxing ring.

And this is Francis Fukuyama who said that it's America, which was convenient because he was American.

And so,

but the right and the left, whether you say America is where it's set, or whether you say we should not tell these big stories, we should take them apart and show that patriarchy here, capitalism, and so on and so forth,

both of them imagine an end of the future, right?

This is it, they say.

Let's not go there.

Let's not do those things anymore.

And in Britain, I think it's called Tina.

Sorry, in Britain, it's called what?

Tina?

Tina.

There's no alternative.

Really?

I've never heard.

Do you know that?

Because I just thought you were talking about someone called Tina.

Yes.

I was doing both at the same time.

But also, I was talking about Margaret Thatcher's notion of there's no alternative.

And so this eternal present, postmodernism, works really well.

It's called the holiday from history also.

And then suddenly you have a generation, I guess my generation, the one next after that,

that is taught or has always sort of been raised and been taught those principles at school that, you know, there's just your opinion and so on and so forth.

And then the world appears to fall apart, right?

Climate change, political upheaval, enormous economic inequality, socio-economic inequality.

And so they are like, oh dear, what do we do now?

And so how do you build a new future and how do you establish new truths to get you out of this moment without having the tools to do that?

There's this artwork, a very famous artwork by the Lebanese-American artist, Annabel Dau.

And she has this piece, it's called Which Side Are You On?, in which she asks people on the gallery which side they are on.

And you understand immediately listening to it that they don't know.

They have no idea what to say, right?

They'll joke or or they'll be very serious, but they don't really know where to go with that.

And I think the reason is that they understand, like most of us do, that there's no one side that is definitely better than the other, right?

You can't really make that choice, right?

I don't know.

It's also an open question.

So if I say arsenal and someone else says human rights, you know, you feel like a terrible human being for having just said arsenal.

I mean, maybe

generally.

That's not a fixture I'm aware of, though, is it?

Is that the Europa League?

I don't know.

It's the only league the Europeans still play.

If you're this captain on a ship, that's the model, by the way, for postmodernism in philosophy, captain on a ship moving between islands but never going onto one island, but keep moving between them, what do you do when the ship sinks?

And so I think this is this question, this is this metamodern question, and apparently...

it's just putting stuff together and hope for the best.

Yeah, you can see, Karen, how this poses a challenge to a scientific worldview.

Just the idea, as you said, that you can alight on many different islands.

You can't, right?

If you're talking about just very simple scientific ideas, like the Earth is spherical, and we're going to get to that conspiracy theory later.

So,

can it,

as you described, Tim, this move from,

I suppose, you're talking about celebrating progress, I suppose, 19th century,

simply speaking, so a celebration of science to a more distrustful society.

But yeah, I think it is true.

A lot of people, a lot of people in my line of work are saying that we are living in this kind of society where people are trusting science much, much less than they used to.

They're trusting the experts a lot less, and instead they're trusting information that their auntie has told them or that somebody has come across on the internet.

And so the science kind of matters less than the information that you can kind of just find yourself by looking here, there, and everywhere.

And that's kind of what I'm interested in.

I'm interested in why people will opt for these sorts of explanations that they will find that aren't particularly factually based or information that they've just found somewhere or someone's told them about rather than information that is derived from science.

So I'm interested in the psychology of conspiracy theories and why people will go for these sorts of explanations as opposed to scientific or more rational explanations.

So So, I think the reason why people believe in conspiracy theories at heart is because it's reassuring.

And it's reassuring because the world is, in fact, full of random, you know, a quantum physicist can tell you this, the world is full of very random accidental stuff

and it's very hard to process.

And so, it's simpler just to think that there is a force or a number of forces that you or only you and your mates on undiscovered.com have managed to crack a code that you've cracked that sorts out the world.

And even if that's evil, it's more reassuring to think that there are people in control, there are shadowy forces, I say people, they could be lizards, in control than the idea that the world is generally random.

I mean, speaking personally, I once saw an American comedian, and I don't remember this guy's name, which is really bad of me because I've quoted this quite a lot, but

it's an important thing from my point of view which is when he came on stage he just said I blame the Jews it's quicker that way and

the thing is that the reason that Jews are so often and almost every conspiracy theory does end up with this idea of the Jews is that really the Jews are just stand-ins for the idea of a kind of superior force that's somehow evilly controlling the world and although it leads to genocide at some level what the people want who imagine that is that that force is there because it comforts them.

It comforts them and makes them think that life is not just completely random and accidental.

But that's, David, what I find interesting about that, and I wouldn't disagree at all, is it doesn't seem to bring happiness.

I very rarely, if I've ever ended up in an argument with a flat earther, with the moon hoaxer, with someone who doesn't believe, you know, the Joe Biden won the election, I never see them appearing to be cocker hoop.

They always seem to be furious as well.

So that's what I find fascinating: is this it is both comforting and seems to make people utterly infuriated all the time.

Yeah, because comfort, what I mean by comforting, is it's more about identity and having a stable identity about yourself than it is about any idea of happiness.

And the reason why I think that it's grown a lot over the last 15 years is, of course, social media is a marketplace of identity.

Social media is not a marketplace of ideas.

It's a marketplace of identity.

It's about broadcasting who you are.

And what's the best way of broadcasting who you are?

It's I believe this.

And often, if you believe something extreme, then you're turning up the volume on your identity.

Yeah, with the social media, I mean, I'm also thinking, right, so if we all agree that conspiracy theories they reoccur throughout history, but they're more common or more prevalent at moments of crises.

It also seems to me that with, I mean, you mentioned social media, we can also go back to the advent of modernity and cinema, right, where we also see a momentary rise in conspiracy theories.

It also seems to me that the medium or the medium specificity is quite important, right?

In early film philosophy, there's always this distinction between the theater and film, right?

And in the theater, you have a kind of of a physical closeness, right?

If I would now fall and break my leg, and one of you was a doctor, I think hopefully you'd feel responsible to jump on stage and help me out, right?

So there's kind of a physical we're in it.

This is England, they'd be too embarrassed.

They want to get up, but they go, well, what if he's just sprained and then he stands up just as I get there and then, oh God, no, no, no, no, no.

Let him writhe in agony for an hour or two yet.

Also, some people here might be thinking, what if it was a false flag?

What if it wasn't real?

What if it's all part of the BBC trying to control the world, his broken leg?

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean,

I hope at least that we will be in it together, right?

There's a kind of a physical presence, there's a kind of an access we have to each other.

At the same time, there's a distance, right?

We're sitting here, we have also loads of space, and you're all sitting there with less space, right?

Quite cramped.

So there's a kind of distance as well.

Whereas with cinema, of course, if you sit in the theater and someone on stage falls, I mean, it's insane, right?

You can't help that person with their broken leg, right?

There is that kind of epistemic distance.

You're no longer in the same world in a way.

However, because of close-up and repetition and so on, you do get a more of a sense of closeness, right?

Of intimacy.

So it's a simultaneous kind of closeness or intimacy and not having to bear that immediate responsibility or kind of an ethics of being together, which also allows you, I suppose, to go about it in a very different way, right?

And so if you go from cinema, where you're still with loads of people, to television, where you're just with your family on the sofa, I guess, guess, to then social media when you're on your own in your bed with your phone, or on the loo, whatever.

You create those very different kinds of relationships of intimacy and distance in a way.

So the ethics change entirely, which seems to me quite beneficial, if that's the word, for the emergence of more or the popularity of conspiracy theories.

But the root,

I mean, I think I would contest your suggestion that it's the root of conspiracy theories is to do with changes in modernity or or whatever and i think the example uh of say the protocols the elders of zion which is you know a fake conspiracy theory cooked up but then consumed by people from the the the late part of the 19th century onwards demonstrates that that this is this is to do with as david said other social factors of uncertainty and fear and holding on to something that you can that explains something that is otherwise incomprehensible and now you know clearly we've been going through a very interesting last 20 years with an awful lot of things.

It does seem as though history has sped up.

I'm not sure that's true, but that's the feeling you've got.

And so maybe that, as well as the social media, is helping to explain why there is the explosion of increasingly crackpot ideas for life.

I think the modernism thing is interesting because I think the other thing that's very important with conspiracy theory is story, is narrative.

You know, we are the only animal that really has narrative, and we constantly try and create stories out of our lives.

Again, that's an illusion.

Life

doesn't really have narrative, it's just a series of random events.

But if we create narrative, then we can create narratives of, oh, you know, here's a thing that's gone wrong, but I know how to bring it to justice.

And that's an arc, right?

And it provides a kind of satisfaction in people's minds.

And so the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is that.

It's a story.

It's a story about villains controlling the world, that the conspiracy theorist is then the hero because they've cracked that code.

Now, none of that is true, but the story allows us to make sense of the world.

I was just just going to chip in on the issue of social media consumption as well.

And of course, I think that has really changed how people can communicate and find

conspiracy theories and other types of odd beliefs, if you want to use that word.

But also, it helps people to find like-minded individuals, which relates to the issue that you mentioned about identity, finding groups of people who agree with you and with whom you agree.

At the same time, it also allows you to filter out information that you don't agree with, you don't want to listen to.

So it's a way that people can preserve a niche or unusual belief because they don't need, they can just ignore other pieces of information.

So people become, I guess, consumed

in these particular groups or information bubbles or whatever you want to call them.

And it's a way of holding on to the belief by basically ignoring what anybody else has to say.

You can just tunnel your information consumption in a particular direction and just keep it there.

I wanted to just on the protocols of the elders of Zion, just because that was brought up, and this seems to me an interesting thing, which is, as far as I know, that was debunked quite quickly, and they even found the root of it actually came from a fiction originally, was turned into supposed.

So, even though it's been debunked,

people somehow seem to have an interest in the psychology of being able to say, I know this isn't true, but it doesn't mean it's not true, which seems to be what is going on there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And people are very, very good at rationalizing their beliefs.

And they think, well, you know, this isn't maybe I've not come across any evidence to say this is true, but I also haven't come across any evidence to say that it's not.

And people, if they do believe something, which may be kind of wrapped up in various different prejudices, they are very, very good at protecting those beliefs and coming up with strategies to be able to, I guess, shield themselves from other other types of information.

And one tool that conspiracy theorists use quite a lot is accusing anybody who says otherwise that they're in on the conspiracy.

They're part of the giant conspiracy themselves.

That happened to me when I so I did a documentary about Holocaust denial that was on BBC Two a little while ago and I spoke to Holocaust denier and I said to her at one point so all these you know like my family large members of my large section of my family was murdered by the by the Nazis so I said so where are they right if they weren't murdered by the Nazis, why haven't they come and seen me by now?

Where are they?

It's really nasty that they just haven't come out and said, No, it was all a lie.

Come on, let's have tea.

They're not doing that.

And he said, I said, So, where are they?

And he said, You tell me.

Meaning, you're a Jew, so you obviously know.

He also said at one point, because it was a BBC documentary, that he didn't trust me anyway because Jews run the BBC.

And I said, Well, I promise you, if I was running the BBC, I'd be on it a lot more.

But as you say, none of this made any difference to him.

Absolutely none of it.

I could have joked, I could have said logical stuff.

It was all just gristed to the middle of, well, obviously I'm right because you're on the conspiracy, as you say.

I love the fact that what you have to do now is you have to carry a briefcase of all of your rejected TV projects to prove your point.

20 years of rejected plays.

Everyone a masterpiece.

Tim, it's easy to see

this arc of philosophy that you described, from modernism, postmodernism, then to metamodernism, it's easy to map that onto a rising conspiracy theory.

I mean,

I know nothing about philosophy at all.

So I would tend, when you say the word postmodernism, I tend to think that it's a, it almost feels to me like an anti-intellectual movement.

So you can correct me on that, in the sense that everything becomes possible.

There are no real facts that we can hang on to.

So is that I'm sure you're going to say it's a gross oversimplification.

And my question is, is it's a gross oversimplification.

But also whether um this the the philosophical tides uh make space for people to say well my i i have an opinion that the earth is not going around the sun or i have so or i don't like these vaccines or whatever it may be

yeah i mean i would i would say yes to the extent that i don't think and i'm sure that there are many people who associate with or who think of themselves as postmodern thinkers or whatever, that they would deny the very existence of truth.

But the way I've always understood it is more that there is an emphasis on the contextual nature of truths so something is true here but not necessarily there that is not to say that it isn't also true there but to assume as much would be tricky and so I think for postmodernism it's very much about that understanding of on of having the the contextuality of a truth however I do think, and we see that now, that it also allows the liberty for a kind of radical

taking apart of the very idea that there is a truth at all.

And so, I think that postmodernism allows to question every single truth.

It is just that now, now that suddenly the world doesn't seem so certain, but you're bringing up other truths just sort of from the gut.

There is a difference, though, between questioning truths, which you might call skepticism, which lies at the heart of science.

But something you said, that the idea that what is true over here is not true over there, that really does go to the heart of science, in that it's fundamental that what is true here is true over there.

That the chemistry that exists on Earth is the chemistry that exists in the distant stars.

So that does seem to run counter to the basic founding.

Except it's not Brian, is it?

Sorry,

well,

it is.

I'm going to posit something to you, which is that relativity suggests that what is true over here is not true over there.

No, no,

there's a logic.

Oh, I've got him.

I've got him.

No, you haven't.

You've the opposite of got me.

Oh, okay.

No, no, no.

Relativity is a very well-defined mathematical theory.

It is true across the universe.

No, I'm not saying that relativity isn't true,

but the relative speed of something is different, or the relative depending on where the person is, or the train is, or where they are, or the light, you know, all that is different.

Well, it's interesting.

I mean,

no,

you're talking nonsense in a very deep sense.

However,

you do raise an interesting point because it was.

This is like a Radio 3 programme, isn't it?

Not many will listen, but they will be greatly inspired.

Because

it does raise

this idea.

So relativity was

taken, as was quantum mechanics, as a part of that movement that led apparently to

the undermining of certainty in science, that the world is not clockwork anymore.

That's a misreading of the science, actually.

But maybe Matthew would like...

Yeah, I mean, I think that this perhaps reveals philosophy's interest in the wilder realms of physics.

And if you think about what's happened in biology since the Second World War, rather than us losing our way, quite the opposite.

We have understood life down to the most exquisite molecular level.

We can manipulate it in all sorts of ways.

Our understanding of genetics has completely transformed our understanding of evolution, of physiology, of everything, medicine.

So, in in a way, I mean, it seems to me like you know, philosophy is going over there and biology is steaming ahead, still stuck in the old onward to a glorious future modernist view that you've said is kind of out of fashion.

Well, that's what I wondered, Karen, about you know, how true is it?

We started off by talking about this, that are conspiracy theories more rife?

Is part of that because the universe has become more certain and we are surrounded by information?

So, as you know, as David was saying, this idea of trying to find some certainty becomes more desperate when you have so many possibilities.

Well, I think that some people would argue that conspiracy theorising, this way of thinking, has always been with us.

So, evolutionary psychologists would say that this is just a natural way that we deal with situations where there could be potentially a hostile group who is trying to do something bad towards us as a kind of safety or survival mechanism.

And I guess you can trace conspiracy theorising back a long long way so I think that they have always been with us but I think one of the reasons why we're seeing so many more of them now apart from perhaps use of social media and just the ease with which we can find this information now is that particularly in the last couple of years we've just all been dealing with a horrendous crisis situation and a situation like like the pandemic has just been absolutely fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

It has all of the necessary ingredients.

You have situations of uncertainty, people feel that they're out of control, they feel that they don't have any power over the things that are happening to them, they feel lonely and isolated, and all of those things put together, as a psychologist, this is what I would say, just provide a perfect storm for conspiracy theories to flourish.

And I think

that's what we've seen in the last couple of years at least now.

But they have always been with us.

I suppose that is the bottom line.

They're nothing new, but in times of crisis, we do see much more of this sort of way of thinking as people are just trying to make sense of a very, very complex situation that they're really struggling with.

And we also know that if you believe in one of these sorts of narratives, you're more likely to go down this rabbit hole and find others and kind of get a little bit lost in information.

If it's part of our nature, which is you describe it, it's been around essentially, I think, as old as time.

When you have civilization, you have conspiracy theories.

There is part of our nature.

There are two questions that arise.

One is, is it possible to eliminate them?

And the second question, though, is it necessary or even desirable to eliminate them completely, given that it just seems to be part of the human condition?

Yeah, good questions.

I think that some people would say, no, we should not eliminate this way of thinking because it's quite similar to just a general cynicism or scepticism that you want to encourage.

But of course, it isn't exactly the same as this if people are rejecting science and not getting vaccinated and not doing things that they perhaps should be doing, then it can become a problem.

But at the same time, it raises issues of censorship and free speech and all of those sorts of things.

And I think that a lot of people would say, no, you should never, you should never tell people that you shouldn't believe in conspiracy theories or be sceptical in any kind of way.

But in terms of getting, like, if you wanted to get somebody not to believe in conspiracy theories, that is possible, but general debunking isn't really successful.

So the same kind of processes are that people use to get them out of cults, the same kind of because it's very cult-like.

Yeah, similar, yes.

So, like, de-radicalization types of techniques.

Another technique that's being used a bit now is they call it inoculation, and it is kind of just like

giving someone a vaccine.

So, you give someone a very weak piece of misinformation or a very weak form of a conspiracy theory, and then when they come across a stronger influence attempt, they'll be more able to reject it.

And sometimes, giving people just factual information before they come across a conspiracy theory can mean that the conspiracy theory is more difficult to take root.

But, on the other hand, once you present the conspiracy theory first, trying to debunk it is

more of a challenge.

Is it like a kind of psychological whack-a-mole?

So, So, if somebody, you know, you get them to decide that the virus isn't caused by 5G, but then all of a sudden they're going to think, well, actually, maybe the Earth is flat.

Do you think that there are kind of conspiracy-minded personality types that are going to search for those kind of explanations?

It is absolutely like that.

And I think that some scholars would argue that there is a general kind of mindset that makes people more attracted to conspiracy theories than other types of explanations like that.

So on that note, is whack-a-mole an actual game or is it just something used in analogies?

I think they play it in American Fairgrounds.

Do they?

With real moles.

Yes, absolutely.

Moles were hurt in the making of that game.

Wow.

I don't know.

It's got I've never heard of this.

So this is

something to take with you when you go home, the whack-a-mole game.

It doesn't really exist

like that German town.

I'm interested.

Can you enlarge a little bit on the German town that doesn't exist?

What's the basis of that conspiracy theory?

I think it was satirical from the beginning.

I mean, Angela Merkel made the same

place.

I think they would ask you the question, do you know anyone from Bielefeld?

Have you ever been to Bielefeld?

And the answer to that question will, I mean, almost inevitably be no.

And I think if you have been there, some of us have been there.

It's a forgettable town.

Right.

But the Germans, with their famous sense of humor, have been making this joke for decades, as it turns out.

Would it work with Swindon?

Do you think?

Well, I think that's quite interesting because that does seem to connect with some, you know,

the idea that there do now seem to be people who will not believe something unless they've actually experienced it.

So, well, you say Peterborough exists, but I've never been there.

And you kind of just, that bit of just accepting that there will be some things you have not done, but the fact you haven't done them or the fact you haven't been there does not mean they don't exist.

It doesn't require you to actually go there to then bring it into existence.

Well, I think that there's clearly an appetite for this kind of things aren't real business because there's that satirist in America who started putting up posters saying pigeons aren't real.

And this was a joke.

He was just making a joke.

But then he was saying

they're all drones and robots.

And then people started believing it.

Now,

he's a joker, and now he's making a nice bit of money out of t-shirts with pigeons aren't real and all the rest of it.

But there are lots of people who are now convinced that pigeons are not quite men in suits, but they're all drones and robots.

I still like that idea of just giving people a homeopathic amount of the JFK assassination, and the next thing you know, they believe lizards rule the universe.

That's a good example, though, JFK, right?

So David Ronovich has written a book about conspiracy theory called Voodoo History.

It's a really good book.

And he sort of begins it by saying,

you probably think that you're someone, because no one who is an actual conspiracy theorist would write, would buy a book debunking conspiracy theorists.

So it's for people, you might say, like us, who think, like, no, we don't believe in all this.

But he he begins by saying, there's probably one you do believe, and it's JFK.

He says that probably people in here can do it.

Who here thinks JFK has a bit of conspiracy to win the assassination?

Put their hand up.

Oh, there's someone over there who's back to the left.

Yeah, there's a few people.

Now, I know it's not television, but I'm going to say a few people put their hand up.

But I probably thought that, more or less.

And then he points out, which is not generally known, it might be generally known, but not known to me, that six months before he shot JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to shoot a retired general called General Edwin Walker with a sniper rifle and blah, blah, blah.

And that, you'd think that sort of would be in the mix of all these people saying, well, what about this?

The warranty.

Well, exactly.

He tried to and failed.

So how would he suddenly be able to hit something when once he hadn't hit something before?

You don't have the conspiracy mindset.

Also, David, do you?

General Edwin wasn't in a convertible, as far as I know.

No, but my point is that, you know, there are some conspiracy theories that even someone like me, who's very like, think, oh, I would never believe in a conspiracy theory, probably just ended up

by osmosis, vaguely thinking there might be something in that one.

And JFK is probably, probably, as you say, the kind of,

you know, the, what's the word, the entry drug for conspiracy theories.

Because one of the other things I think about conspiracy theory is once you start to believe it, it's very difficult to row back on it.

It's like

everything else has to fall in to line with your conspiracy theory.

Otherwise, you have to say, I was wrong, or we were wrong, which everyone finds very difficult to say.

I read this thing the other day that Mark Twain said it's much easier to fool people than to get people to admit that they were fooled.

And you can see this because lots of people still support Brexit.

The balance, Naam, not even bother.

And also, thank you for that.

It was not at all difficult to get into the country this morning.

Does it, I suppose the question is,

does it matter?

We've covered that a bit, but

in terms of solutions, given that it matters that we all agree on some shared facts in a society such as ours, where it's very necessary, as you said, during a pandemic, for example, or with the challenge of climate change, for example, we have to all agree on some shared facts.

I think it's also really important that people are challenged on things like holocaust denial or that sandy hook was uh was some kind of setup all these things these are deeply offensive and also very very damaging things that people actually believe to be true yes i mean every time develops its own critical tools right i don't think we should think about it in terms of reversal or going back or any of those things i mean i think we need to figure out new and perhaps adaptive models that will will provide us the tools by which we can make sense not just of what's happening now, but also of what's happening tomorrow, right?

That's why it also never makes sense if you're just debunking some kind of weird Trumpian conspiracy theory, right?

That's not the problem.

The problem is, as you also mentioned, and you, there's a kind of a type or there's a kind of an attitude behind it of, you know, having this hermeneutic over-determination everywhere.

You're seeing that stuff sort of everywhere potentially.

So it seems rather that we need to find a new vocabulary and a new kind of, I don't know, a set of critical tools that will help us not just here or now, but precisely to bridge that.

Isn't the thing we really need to teach at school, and we don't do this in England anyway, and that's philosophy.

So, in France, all the students, whatever kind of baccalaureate they're studying, they all have to sit the philosophy paper.

They all learn the basics of philosophical thinking, of thinking about thinking, and therefore, you know, it's not critical thinking, but it's actually a deeper way of trying to think about how we know things.

And

as a university lecturer, when we get students who've done the international baccalaureate rather than A-levels, they've got a much broader way of thinking, a much richer understanding of the world than your average English student.

So, for

any students out there listening thinking about what they should do, study philosophy.

I would love to agree also, but of course, we've seen the political situation in France, and although it's like everywhere, incomparable, and I'm saying this with respect and on the BBC, incomparable to the UK situation,

Which, I guess, to many of us who aren't living here seems quite funny.

You know, Le Paire is up, you know.

I mean, the situation in France is also quite awful, in spite of philosophy.

Yeah, so we, thank you so much.

We have also asked our audience what conspiracy theory they'd like to start.

And obviously, Tim started the conspiracy theory that Tina Turner is somehow in charge of everything.

We found that out earlier on.

What have you got, Brian?

Well, pi is 4.1.

But it can be, it just depends on the geometry of the surface.

So that's not a conspiracy theory.

It's an accurate description of a curved surface, Riemannian geometry.

So what is true over here is in fact not true over there.

We're talking about the difference between the geometry of surface.

Leave it, Brian.

I've won.

I've never seen you look happier.

The door handles exist solely to catch on tall people's trouser pockets to publicly embarrass them.

That's from Ben.

You'll see him as he walks out with his trousers flapping about.

Schrodinger's cat was actually a strawberry.

We have a distinguished guest on the panel because, Matthew, you were at the initial, the original strawberry

discussion.

It's very exciting.

How do you know the strawberry is dead?

Well, you send two of them through a slit, and as long as you don't

thank you very much to our panel, Karen Douglas, Matthew Cobb, Tim Vermon, and David Bedeal.

Next week, for the purposes of balance, we're going to make sure that we have an entirely non-animal panel.

We are going to have guests including a vase of daffodils, an oak tree, and a punnet of strawberries, which, to be honest, the last time I saw it did not look well.

Hopefully, it's still alive anyway, the strawberry and the punnet.

Yeah, well, now Matthew's here as well.

It's like we finally created that eternal loop where people are now just trapped in 162 episodes going round round and round, returning to the dead strawberry alive again.

Really?

How do we know if it's dead?

Well, it's dying.

It's not dead.

Goodbye.

Die.

In the infinite monkey cage.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Feeling now nice again.

Can you remember the worst day of your life?

How would you feel if someone told you that day never happened?

That you were being paid to make it up?

For people who've lived through terrible disasters, this is a shockingly common experience.

I'm Marianna Spring, the BBC's disinformation and social media correspondent.

In the BBC Radio 4 podcast, Disaster Trolls, I investigate how people caught up in the Manchester Arena bombing and other UK terror attacks are being targeted with extreme conspiracy theories and abuse.

Join me as I uncover evidence of the trolls blighting the lives of people right here in the UK who now want answers and justice.

To hear the podcast now, subscribe to Disaster Trolls on BBC Sounds.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.