QAnon believers are right about one thing.

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

?? If you’d prefer to listen to this week’s instalment, go here for the audio version of New World Same Humans #33. ??

Two weeks ago Facebook banned hundreds of accounts associated with the online conspiracy theory QAnon. Meanwhile a Republican politician who has endorsed the movement, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is almost certain to be elected to Congress this Autumn.

A number NWSH obsessions are in play here. Think the nature of power, the future of democracy, and the impacts of a connected world on our collective consciousness. So this week, reflections on all this. And on the powerful truth that I think does much to explain QAnon’s wild success.

Remember, Fast Download is the default read; go to the full essay for the details.

I’ll be back with news and super-fast analysis in Wednesday’s New Week Same Humans.

?? Fast Download: What QAnon Believers Are Right About

?? We all love a good conspiracy theory. In 1991 a German historian called Heribert Illig made an incredible discovery: the early middle ages were a fiction. Illig said that powerful political figures had fabricated the events believed to have occurred between 614 and 911, and inserted their inventions into the historical record. The Phantom Time Hypothesis was as bonkers as it sounds. But admit it: there’s something compelling about Illig’s fantasy.

???♂? QAnon is rampant. Today, we face a more troubling example of the conspiracy theory genre. QAnon followers believe the US is run by a deep-state cabal of Satan worshipping child abusers, and that Donald Trump is about to expose this secret. Trump is leaning in: a Media Matters investigation found he had retweeted or mentioned QAnon-affiliated accounts at least 216 times this year.

?? To explain QAnon’s success, look beyond the obvious. The internet, global lockdown and a world of increasing complexity all help fuel conspiracy theories. But there is a deeper, underlying reason for QAnon’s success.

?? Our world is built on false stories. The deep truth fuelling QAnon? The mainstream stories we tell ourselves about our world also fantastical and absurd. And overarching all these stories is the big Fairy Tale of the 21st-century, which is that Nothing is Wrong; that we can continue to live as we do now and avoid an existential environmental disaster. This narrative does not make sense. Lockdown has broken many of our old patterns, and intensified our awareness of the fictions that govern our lives. It’s become impossible to hide from a growing sense of unreality.

?? To beat QAnon, we need a better story. QAnon is a kind of religious belief; we won’t beat it with reasoned argument. Instead, we need a Big and Emotionally Satisfying Story that makes sense of the world we now live in, and points the way towards a brighter future. Our mainstream politics – liberalism, conservatism, even the green movement – have failed to offer such a story. In the absence of good explanations, people have invented their own.

?? Our new story must be founded in the truth. The way to beat QAnon, and the only future for progressive politics, is via difficult truths: about work, automation, nation states, and the future of our planet. We need a new story that confronts these realities, explains their meaning, and points towards a brighter tomorrow. The challenge is as simple as it is difficult. We need to find new ways to tell the truth.

?? We all love a good conspiracy theory

In 1991 a German historian called Heribert Illig hit upon an incredible discovery. The early middle ages, Illig realised, never happened.

In fact, the years 614 to 911 and all the events they contained – including the rule of Charlemagne, the Viking raids across Europe, and Britain’s King Alfred the Great – were a fiction invented by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II. Illig believed the pair had colluded to invent 300 years of European history, and to weave their inventions into the historical record. Their motivation? They wanted to fast-forward through the centuries so their reigns fell across the year 1,000, thus enhancing their own historical significance. In fact, said Illig, Sylvester and Otto lived around the year 700. Which means, in turn, that it is now 1723.

Convinced? Illig’s Phantom Time Hypothesis enjoyed a run of popularity in Germany in the 1990s. And today his ideas inhabit a ghostly online afterlife. But no credible historian has ever taken them seriously. In the annals of mad ideas about our shared past, they have been only a moderate success.

But admit it, there is something compelling about Illig’s fantasy. The thought that the middle ages are a massive historical fraud is kind of exciting.

And therein lies the problem. There’s no way around it: we humans love a good conspiracy theory.

???♂? QAnon is rampant

In 2020, we must confront a far more popular, and more troubling, example of the genre.

The QAnon movement pushes a convoluted set of far-right and anti-Semitic stories, at the centre of which is the idea that the US is run by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping child abusers. That cult supposedly includes high-profile politicians, Hollywood stars, and billionaire bankers, who are engaged in an underground battle against the hero of this story: Donald Trump. Trump, say believers, has been battling the cabal for years, and soon he will expose them via a series of arrests that will take down much of the US political and media elite.

The QAnon movement can be traced back to 2018, and the pages of the internet messaging board 4Chan. But it has seen wild growth during the pandemic. In August Facebook said it had banned more than 790 QAnon-associated groups with at least 4.5 million followers, and 1,500 associated ads.

The scale of the problem is such that mainstream US media is now running advice on how to deradicalize relatives. ‘I’ve come to accept that the person I knew as my Mom is probably not coming back,’ says one young man in this excellent investigation by the BBC.

It now seems unavoidable that widespread fury at an imaginary cabal of all-powerful Satanists will play a significant role in the November Presidential election. Trump has described QAnon followers as ‘people who love our country’. A Media Matters investigation found he had retweeted or mentioned QAnon-affiliated accounts at least 216 times this year.

?? To explain QAnon’s success, look beyond the obvious

Why is 2020 proving such fertile ground for QAnon?

There are obvious reasons. The internet is a conspiracy theorist’s paradise. The pandemic plunged us all into a weird form of stasis; people have had far more time, and reason, to become invested in strange ideas. And we live in a world of overwhelming complexity, which produces a thirst for stories that seem to make sense of the chaos.

But I think the foundational cause for QAnon’s success remains relatively unexplored. That cause strikes at deep underlying aspects of this historical moment, and the stories we tell ourselves about it. And it points the way towards a fightback against both QAnon and the conditions that have made it possible.

?? Our world is built on false stories

It’s easy to scoff at QAnon followers for falling prey to a patently fantastical and absurd set of ideas.

But we talk less about how QAnon’s ability to capture minds is fuelled by a powerful underlying truth. That is, that the mainstream narratives that govern life in 2020 are also fantastical and absurd. And moreover, that this has become impossible to ignore.

Let’s generate our own convenient fiction, and say that this story begins with the 2009 financial crisis.

Back in 2009 the global economy teetered on the edge of an impossibly high cliff. For a few weeks serious politicians worried that advanced societies would collapse into chaos. And yet, after some talk of reform we patched our highly financialised economies back up, invented hundreds of billions of dollars of new money, and went on as if nothing had happened. The sense of living in a kind of unreality has only grown since then.

To live in an advanced consumer democracy society today is to live inside a tapestry of fairy tales. We go about our lives as though continued economic growth is what we want, when for many of us it isn’t. We pretend that full employment is desirable and attainable, when it is not, and when – as the late anthropologist David Graeber so memorably observed – many people secretly feel that their job is a meaningless confection. We build our democracies on the idea that humans are free and rational decision makers, when we all know that they – and we – are not.

And overarching all these fictions is the big Fairy Tale of the 21st-century, which is that Nothing is Wrong. That we can continue indefinitely to live as we do now, and also avoid an existential environmental disaster. Day to day, we go on as if this were true. But the science tells us, and we all know, that it isn’t.

The pandemic has only intensified this sense of unreality. It has ruthlessly exposed the emptiness of some of the sub-stories we told ourselves, such as that about gathering together in offices. In so doing it has opened a psychic space in millions are bound to ask deeper questions. In 2020 even the most conventional person has had time and reason enough to wonder: does this world, and my life inside it, really make any sense? Are we crazy here?

Seen this way, the followers of QAnon are only half wrong. Or, to put it another way, they are half right.

The world really is built on fairy tales. And those fairy tales do often serve the interests of powerful elites. QAnon followers are right to think that the mainstream offers them no convincing explanation of the world they live in. Their error lies in what comes next – in the answer they reach for.

?? To beat QAnon, we need a better story

This, it seems to me, is the fertile ground in which QAnon and other conspiracy theories currently grow.

To spend a day in 2020 – to get up, work for your employer, go the shops, watch the news – is to inhabit a lurid pseudo-reality in which the explanations we make of our own behaviour make ever-less sense. The people know it; the elites know it. The people know the elites know, and on, and on.

So what to do? How can we prevent QAnon and similar conspiracy theories playing an ever-greater role in our collective lives?

Mainstream media is full of sensible injunctions when it comes to dealing with individual cases. Don’t mock or belittle believers. Offer facts and reasoned argument. Don’t force things; leave them space to climb down in their own time. Meanwhile, others say we must regulate the output of social media giants, so that they don’t continue to turn conspiracy sparks into raging infernos.

This is all reasonable enough. But in the end conspiracy theories won’t be defeated by reasoned argument. Belief in QAnon is akin to a religious practice; something taken on faith, worn as a badge of identity, and not amenable to reason.

What we need, then, is an alternative story. One that lands at the same pre-rational level. More specifically, we need a Big and Emotionally Satisfying Story that makes sense of the world we now live in, and points the way towards a brighter future.

There’s a name for the domain of human activity meant to give rise to such stories. It’s politics. And it’s here that we arrive at the central failure that has fuelled the rise of QAnon.

Today’s big political narratives, offered by liberalism, conservatism, and even the mainstream environmental movement, do not make good sense of our lives. Mainstream politics, and particularly progressive politics, has failed to come up with a compelling explanation of the 21st-century, or to devise a compelling picture of an alternate, brighter future. Instead, we exist inside a kind of ideological whiteout, cleaving to old stories – about money, markets, rational choice, consumption – that were always shaky, and that became impossible to believe after 2009.

Humans abhor an explanatory vacuum. Faced with an absence of convincing explanations, it’s no wonder people have made up their own.

?? Our new story must be founded in the truth

If we want to stop conspiracy theories such as QAnon, we need to develop new and compelling stories.

Stories that tell the truth about the world we live in, and the fictions upon which it is built. And stories that make clear a better future is possible, if only we reach for it.

No mainstream politician in 2020 is willing to say that much of the work done by ordinary citizens is unnecessary; that we can and should automate those jobs away, and pay those citizens to do something else, outside the mainstream economy. Or that nation states no longer make sense, because the key challenges we face in the decades ahead are borderless. Or that we must accept significant changes to our way of life if we are to prevent catastrophic global heating.

But the future for progressive politics – for a politics that counters the populists and conspiracy theorists – can only be through these truths. They must form the foundation of any vision of a better future: one in which work has been redefined, we have relinquished our dreams of infinite economic growth, and we are no longer sleepwalking towards environmental meltdown.

These truths will be hard to hear. But if we avoid them, people will continue to seek certainty elsewhere. If we build our system on a set of licensed fictions, we shouldn’t be surprised when some turn to unlicensed, fantasy-grade equivalents instead.

The solution is as simple as it is difficult. We must find new ways to tell the truth.

The truth is out there

Thanks for reading this week.

People embrace conspiracy theories in an attempt to make sense of a disorienting world. The impulse is universal; it’s just that they take a wrong turn.

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See you next week,

David.

David Mattin sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Consumption.