Many people buy into paranoid conspiracy theories. Perhaps this should not be surprising. After all, about 3% of the population is fantasy prone. That is to say, they are prone to believe they have been abducted by extraterrestrial aliens, or they are likely to entertain a similarly outlandish claim.
However, many more people are likely to believe in somewhat less outlandish claims, such as the idea that the government is hiding information about visitations to Earth by extraterrestrials. Some of these notions are clearly absurd, but relatively harmless. However, some are downright sinister.
Perhaps the most insidious paranoid conspiracy theory was launched by the authors of The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion. This book allegedly contains information from secret meetings of Jews conspiring to take over the world. It was first published in about 1903. However, by 1921, The New York Times had definitively exposed it as a forgery. Its inspiration came from an 1864 political satire by Maurice Joly titled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, and other sources of nonfiction.
Many Afrocentrists and reactionary Black nationalists have quietly retreated away from the claim that the book is accurate and true. However, many people continue to embrace it. The Nation of Islam has sold it for years, and many ultra-reactionary Muslims in the Arab world continue to take it seriously.
One of the more recent conspiracy theories is the belief that the U.S. government was responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11. For example, many conspiracy theorists claim that thermite was used to demolish Building Seven at the World Trade Center.
According to Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, thermite is defined as “a mixture of finely-divided metallic aluminum and ferric oxide that when ignited produces extremely high temperatures as the result of the union of the aluminum with the oxygen of the oxide used in welding incendiary bombs, etc.”
Some conspiracy theorists claim that the site is covered with “unexploded thermite.” However, experts that have used thermite, including military grade thermite, say that this is not possible, because thermite itself is not an explosive. It is a hot-burning powder that once lit, creates its own oxygen while it is in the process of burning.
Conspiracy theorists point to an I-beam from Building Seven, which is cut sideways on an angle, as evidence that the U.S. government was involved in the explosions. Yet experts on thermite say that it could not cut an I-beam in such a manner.
Still, conspiracy theorists claim that the collapse of the building could only be explained by the idea that it was blown up intentionally. However, the heat of the fire caused by the crash was intense enough to melt the steel beams. Furthermore, there was tremendous weight from the dozens of stories above. Moreover, there were tumbling materials from one destroyed tower that caused a huge hole in one side of Building Seven, bringing down several beams.
Conspiracy theorists love to make claims for which they have no evidence. For example, they claim that there is no way that the heat could have melted the beams. However, good scientists dismiss such talk. For example, Mark R. O’Brian, a professor of biochemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo, wrote an excellent article in the August 14, 2011 issue of The Buffalo News. Titled “Don’t believe unfounded claims about 9/11,” the author discussed the many extraordinary claims of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. He writes:
Could the collapses have been caused by an atypical controlled demolition with the explosives placed near the airplane impact? MIT professor Thomas Eagar explains that the fires would have been sufficiently hot to weaken the steel columns so that they could no longer support the million[s] of pounds of building above them. This means that the fires accomplished what explosives could have done, and so there is no need to invoke explosives as an explanation. Although our intuition may tell us that the towers should have tipped over rather than fall straight down, engineers know better. Buildings are composed mostly of empty space, and the path of least resistance is straight down. This explains the superficial similarity between the World Trade Center towers and a controlled demolition. (p. G2)
There have been many other off-the-wall conspiracy theories. Some people maintain that AIDS was created in a lab at Fort Dietrich, Maryland to intentionally kill Gays and Blacks. Some believe that the U.S. government bombed Pearl Harbor for their own insidious purposes.
However, conspiracy theories can sicken and kill people. For example, many people in Africa, particularly Muslims, are distrustful of the World Health Organization (WHO) and Western doctors that could treat their children with polio shots and other vaccines to combat diseases. These people would rather let their children go untreated than to hand them over to the alleged Western conspirators with the cures.
In the U.S., many African Americans distrust medical professionals and refuse to visit physicians. Many of them believe that doctors are part of a giant conspiracy to make Black people sick and send them to early graves. Ironically, as a result, African Americans continue to get sick more often and die earlier than their non-Black counterparts.
Still, it is important to understand why so many people buy into paranoid conspiracy theories. One of the main reasons is that real conspiracies have occurred. The Tuskegee Experiment, in which hundreds of Black men were allowed to go untreated for syphilis for several decades, is perhaps the best example. There have also been thousands of radioactive experiments carried out on U.S. citizens dating back to the 1940s. Moreover, Western governments, including state governments in the U.S., have sterilized tens of thousands of people against their will.
As humanists and skeptics, we should be much more concerned about preventing such horrendous human rights abuses than we are about combating paranoid conspiracy theories. Indeed, the best way to combat paranoid conspiracy theories is by fighting for a truly democratic world in which conspiracies never take root