Belief beyond reason

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This article was published 10/08/2024 (395 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One quarter of Americans, as many as 80 million people, believe that a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles secretly control the government, media and financial worlds. These are the globalist elites of the “deep state” who rule the world while buying children to rape, mutilate and eat. They also believe that, behind the scenes, Donald Trump and a mysterious government insider known as “Q” are fighting a desperate battle to save humanity from these monstrous elites.

Jesselyn Cook, an award-winning NBC News investigative journalist, argues for a more nuanced understanding of people who believe in the unbelievable. Rather than automatically dismissing them as unreachable lunatics, we should recognize that many are intelligent, seemingly normal individuals who, for one reason or another, have come to see the world through the lens of the QAnon conspiracy theory. And in The Quiet Damage, her chilling message is that none of us is immune.

Cook tells the stories of five families torn apart by the QAnon conspiracy. To protect their privacy, they are all identified by pseudonyms. They include a brilliant lawyer who had voted for Barack Obama, an employee of a Christian radio station, a retired, liberal-minded university administrator, an African-American with a history of lifelong discrimination and a Bernie Sanders supporter.

Cook attributes the seduction of conspiracy theories to apophany, the human brain’s natural tendency to seek patterns even where they don’t exist. QAnon lays out unsupported conclusions and asks its followers to do the “research” to connect the dots. For example, after Q suggested that Disney was a pedophiliac corporation, eager followers inspected classic Disney films frame by frame and, lo and behold, found a plethora of phallic-shaped objects hidden in the cartoons.

For the family members swept down the rabbit hole of QAnon, the trigger often was a desire to find comfort from endless, depressing news of climate disasters, wars, economic insecurity, random shootings and crumbling public services. They were not seeking objective truth. They were seeking answers that would make them feel better.

“Emily” appeared to have the perfect family. She and her husband, a successful doctor, lived with their three children on a hobby farm outside Nashville, Tenn. That idyll ended when her husband, bankrupted by a gambling addiction, died by suicide. Needing to provide for her children, Emily went back to college to study law as a means of giving her life a new meaning by finding justice for the powerless. Graduating with top honours, she specialized in crimes against children.

After her children left home Emily, who had been an enthusiastic Democrat in Republican-dominated Tennessee and who had voted twice for Obama, by 2016 was openly supporting Donald Trump for president. Her husband’s suicide had destroyed her dreams of a happy retirement together, and the anger against him that she had suppressed erupted when she was now left alone by her children. In her loneliness, she found her way to QAnon YouTube videos.

Emotion-driven and solution-focused, their alarmist messages were interspersed with praise for the viewers as independent thinkers willing to step outside their ideological comfort zones. Soon Emily was using her own social media account to claim that Mike Pence had been cloned in a test tube, Michelle Obama was a man, George W. Bush was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and John F. Kennedy Jr. (dead since 1999) would become Trump’s vice-president.

When her son Adam tried to reason with her, she sent him an email calling him a spoiled evil brat. “Shed my DNA,” she wrote, “I am DONE WITH YOU.”

This was typical of the heartbreaking vitriol tearing the families of QAnon’s victims apart.

Cook ends by suggesting ways to rescue family members from the delusions of QAnon. One thing not to do is rely on rational arguments; you can all too easily be brushed off as a dupe of the deep state. Cook advocates treating the problem as a mental health issue but, sadly, admits how difficult that can be.

Winnipegger John K. Collins wants to believe that somewhere over the rainbow, somebody is writing an optimistic non-fiction book.