A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  When we say that the new conspiracists simply assert things and expect others to affirm and repeat them, without evidence or connection to anything verifiable, we do not mean to posit a crude epistemology in which true beliefs are based only on observations that we directly collect and investigations that we directly conduct. Much of what we know, or think we know, we take on trust.

  We “know” that vaccines do not cause autism in part because we trust the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who, based on research, attest that this is the case. We “know” that natural selection explains the diversity of species even though we have never studied the fossil record personally because we acknowledge the authority of paleontologists who subject their conjectures to the scrutiny of others through a process of publicizing findings, testing and refining them, and opening themselves to the possibility of refutation. This of course is the process that goes by the popular name “the scientific method.” Little of our knowledge depends on direct access to the relevant data or on investigations we carry out ourselves or on direct personal experience. We rely on others.

  The fiduciary basis of knowledge makes us vulnerable; if the community in which we place our trust gets it wrong or is corrupt, then what we take to be knowledge may be unjustified and erroneous. Some put their trust in a community of scientists and public health officials who affirm that vaccines do not cause autism; others put their trust in an internet community of anonymous conspiracists who affirm that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman is running an international child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria. What is the difference?

  At the level of the individual who gets his or her knowledge from others, there is not much difference. The difference is found at another level, in the characteristics that define the community whose authority we accept on trust. In one case, these communities are defined by their commitment to publicize the evidence on which their conclusions are based, and thus to subject them to the scrutiny of others. In the other case, the community is defined by access to private knowledge that is unsharable, and by tribal loyalty. The community propagating Pizzagate is defined by the secret key that allowed it to decipher the meaning of Podesta’s emails, and by its irrepressible loathing of Hillary Clinton.

  When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something. Reflecting on Donald Trump’s historical mishmash of a statement that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War (which began sixteen years after Jackson’s death), George Will dissected the president’s words to underscore the essential character of his thought. It is not that Trump suffers the disability of an untrained mind tied to “stratospheric self-confidence,” Will wrote, or that he is intellectually slothful and misinformed or totally ignorant of ordinary matters of history and of the fact that he has no knowledge of that about which he speaks, or that he is indifferent to being bereft of information. It is not that he is cognitively impaired. “The problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.” This is dangerous in a president, Will observes, for it “leaves him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.”1 And when that mind demands that its reality be accepted as how things are, we are embattled by an assault on our sense of what it means to know something.

  Common Sense

  Democracy sometimes depends on trust in communities of special knowledge because it is impossible for every person to work up a scientifically grounded understanding of every domain of expertise that is relevant to politics (and everything else in life). Politics is not all about expertise, though. It is also about what we know from experience. It is about our understanding of what is plausible and implausible in the world of intractable facts. And it is about widely shared judgments that form the moral horizon line for a community. One does not need an expert ethicist to know that torture is inhumane in the extreme, for instance. Nor does one need an expert psychologist to know that separating young refugee children from their parents is traumatic. The shared world of facticity and moral judgment is what we think of as common sense, “that part of our mind and that portion of inherited wisdom,” writes political theorist Hannah Arendt, “which all men have in common in any civilization.”2

  Conspiracist claims often defy common sense in its colloquial meaning: they seem absurd to those who do not believe them. Take the claim that the US government helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Why would the government (and who in the government?) attack its own citizens and its own Defense Department? Or, to take the Jade Helm conspiracy of 2015, what motive would drive the US Army to invade the state of Texas, disarm the population, and declare martial law? The weight of political history and absence of any plausible reason put the conspiracist charge outside the bounds of common sense.

  Common sense points to things everyone can be assumed to know. Some philosophic accounts of common sense see it as an innate moral sense or an instinctive understanding or a truth about the world that has the consent of all mankind.3 That is not what we are proposing here. Other invocations of common sense see it as a mark of the reasonableness of some practical measure, as Thomas Friedman does when he invokes common sense as a counterweight to the conspiracist charge that gun control advocates are plotting to overturn the Second Amendment and “take everyone’s gun away.” As he says, “They know full well that a commonsense banning of all military assault weapons, high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, or mandating universal background checks for gun buyers or to prevent terrorists and the mentally ill from buying guns, would not curb the constitutional right to bear arms.”4 Characterizing something as a matter of common sense points, rhetorically, to the ground to which people can be rallied in agreement that a contrary claim is “beyond the pale.”

  On our understanding, common sense refers to our acceptance of the intractable facts about the world and our already existing shared experience and understanding about our social world. That is what conspiracism betrays. We need these two elements—facticity and common interpretation—for any collective action in democracy. Political discussion is only possible when we have a stock of shared understandings—this is what common sense supplies. If such and such is a matter of common sense, it is ordinarily not something that can only be appreciated by experts or by particular groups or tribes.

  Conspiracism destroys the inclusiveness of the “common” by privileging part of the people—always just a few, who affirm a particular view of reality that is dominated by the unclear but present danger coming from enemies within. True, the new conspiracists appeal to the assent of others—that is exactly the force of the Trumpian phrase “a lot of people are saying.”5 On its face, one might think that appeal to “a lot of people” is an appeal to what everyone can see and understand. That is its rhetorical power—it pretends to comply with exactly the thing it betrays, common sense. When the new conspiracists support the charge of a rigged election by claiming “a lot of people are saying,” they are not appealing to what everyone can see, however. On the contrary, “people are saying” entails a dynamic of exclusion by singling out those who “get it,” who grasp the true, unrevealed state of affairs. These knowers constitute a cognoscenti who affirm one another’s divergent sense of reality. “People are saying” is a wink to those who belong to the inner circle. It assigns authority to certify reality to a set of people “like us.” Conspiracism departs from the world in which “our lives, thoughts, and public discourse are invisibly restrained by the commonplace, shared assumptions that pass for common sense.”6

  Common sense refers to shared perceptions, experiences, and moral sensibilities, which make democracy possible. Because we share them, we can reflect on them and refer to them in our arguments and assessments and political decisions. Common sense creates a world in which it is possible for people to exchange reasons and
feelings that “make sense” to one another—even under conditions of diversity and political conflict. Common sense is a resource against the tyranny that imposes its own reality. This is why Arendt called common sense “the political sense par excellence.”7

  Arendt wrote fiercely about what she called the “sensus communis” against the background of the loss of common sense inflicted by twentieth-century totalitarianism. The “horrible originality” of totalitarianism “exploded our categories of political thought and our standards for moral judgment,” she wrote. Totalitarianism is our common touchstone of a regime using terror, propaganda, conspiracy theory, and organized violence to control and reshape not only political behavior but also how people think and what they think, sublimating or even erasing what they used to know. It epitomizes a regime that claims to own reality and creates its own malignant normality, which ordinary people are obliged to live within. As Arendt observed about the effects of totalitarianism, “The growth of meaninglessness has been accompanied by loss of common sense.”8

  We invoke Arendt’s reflections not to say that the new conspiracism is like totalitarianism or aspires to it. The twenty-first century has brought its own dangers. We invoke Arendt to underscore conspiracism’s destructiveness. And to underscore that, new century though it is, common sense is still the ground of democratic politics. Common sense is the political sense par excellence, Arendt advised, because the capacity for political action and common sense entail each other. When that connection is broken, politics comes to an end. Without recourse to the sometimes unspoken shared understanding of social and political reality embodied in common sense, the scope for collective political action closes down. It is closed down by disorientation. It is closed down by the fact that a new schism has opened up and taken over.

  A Different Kind of Polarization

  Conspiracism has created a schism more profound and corrosive than the partisan polarization that has beset American politics in recent years. This epistemic polarization has special force. It creates divergent accounts of political reality. It amplifies disorientation. And it has the capacity to reshape our relations to others.

  We are talking about a condition in which some inhabit a world where their common sense tells them that it is absurd to suppose Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman is running an international child sex ring from a pizzeria in northwest Washington, DC, and others inhabit a world where that is plausible. There is no conversation that can build a translation bridge connecting this epistemic divide; conspiracism fractures the common political world.

  Where the new conspiracism extinguishes common sense, there can be no argument or negotiation or compromise—all of which require some shared terrain of facts and a shared horizon of what it means to know something.

  What makes this especially disturbing is that epistemic polarization reaches “all the way down,” producing, as we said, polarization at the deep level of mind—distorting what it means to know something. The new conspiracist polarization pursues us all the way down in another respect: it extends from the public sphere and the internet and media into the relations that shape our everyday lives. In this way conspiracism distorts a whole range of social and personal interactions.

  Here is what we mean. As conspiracist narratives enter our workplaces and relations with family and neighbors, they eclipse the distinctive characters and experiences of these different domains. Conspiracism distorts our experience of these domains in a uniquely troubling way. We know that the separate spheres of life—the workplace, voluntary associations, informal social groups, the intimate sphere of family and friends—are characterized by different sets of norms and expectations. And we relate to one another differently when we relate as citizens, neighbors, or members of a religious congregation. We have many-sided personalities, and we flourish when we can make moral use of pluralism. A pluralism of separate spheres and shifting involvements among them—that is the personal meaning and value of living in a free civil society. Conspiracism produces epistemic polarization, which can overwhelm the distinct norms and expectations that define these separate spheres and that shape our experiences there. Our way of relating to others in voluntary associations or neighborhoods or workplaces is flattened out. The atmosphere is charged. We begin to ask just one question about others, a question that comes to us from the political sphere but is not the usual political query: not, Do they share my politics? or, Do they agree with me about how to vote? but rather, Do we inhabit the same reality?

  We are by now accustomed to partisan polarization. Since the 2016 campaign, it has intensified; people who might not have thought about how friends or neighbors voted in the election now cared intensely. The vote for president became a source of alienation of affection and strained or severed relations. Coworkers, neighbors, and family members who supported the opposition were now viewed as alien, even as demented. People went to psychiatrists about their ruptured friendships and sleepless nights, and psychiatrists went to their psychiatrists. We’ve experienced this for ourselves or heard or read reports like this one: “I feel like I’ve been living with a lot of people wearing masks, who have been hiding their true selves, and now, with this vote, their true selves are more apparent.”9

  Similarly, many people have experienced epistemic polarization firsthand and close by. For those who think there is no evidence to show that Hillary Clinton is given to violent criminality, to learn that a friend thinks she ran a pedophile operation would alter the relationship, if not destroy it. There is no common ground on which a conspiracist and a disbeliever can stand to argue about the matter. To discover that a friend subscribes to the QAnon conspiracy, to which we turn shortly, is to see an abyss open up between you.

  Conspiracism produces a more disorienting schism than partisan polarization because it affects both political values and identity and basic perceptions of the world. And these are difficult to cabin or contain; totalizing, conspiracism begins to infect domains outside politics. Disorientation is accompanied by anxiety when we witness conspiracists in power attempting to impose their reality on us. Conspiracist-minded officials and their followers are caught up in fabulations immune to reasoned refutation. Their reality is unrecognizable as reality. And adding to our disorientation is that we see many people accommodate themselves to it.

  The dark possibility spreading out from this epistemic gap is the end of politics. Given free rein, conspiracism augurs not an end to government—coercion by state officials will continue, after all—but an end to politics. Politics is the clash of competing interests and opinions, joined to argumentation and negotiation, from which collective decisions emerge. It is shaped by processes and institutions judged legitimate. But politics is also the arena in which the common sense of ordinary people sets the terms of a shared reality. We are far from the end of politics. But this is what is at stake in the assault on democratic foundations—on parties and knowledge—and in the war on common sense that gives life to the unsettling question, Who owns reality?

  Fabulation

  The challenge of alternate reality arose in a pointed way in the summer of 2018, when supporters began to appear at Trump rallies carrying signs and wearing shirts with the block letter Q printed on them. The signs referred to the QAnon conspiracy we mentioned in chapter 1, a conspiracy so convoluted as to almost defy description. Here is a summary. It begins with Pizzagate, the allegation that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman colluded in an international child sex ring centered in a Washington, DC, pizzeria. It then extends the Pizzagate plot by casting every president since Ronald Reagan as a participant in child sex trafficking. Every president, that is, except Trump—who alone is taking on a “worldwide ring of blackmailers” that includes these child sex traffickers, as well as liberal globalists and Jewish bankers. According to QAnon, the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election is itself a ruse. Actually, according to QAnon, Trump and the special prosecutor are acting together to distract attention from
their secret plan to shut down the ring, which has infiltrated the US government. The day of reckoning is approaching when Trump will declare open war on the conspiracy, assisted by John F. Kennedy Jr., who faked his death and will now return. Tens of thousands of arrests will be made and thousands of corporate CEOs will resign. Their covert rule will be ended, their secret power overturned, and Hillary Clinton will be locked up. “This is what draining the swamp looks like,” says one poster on the 8chan message board. QAnon is about a conspiracy to thwart a conspiracy.10

  QAnon’s development is instructive. It began with posts on the 4chan message board left by “Q,” putatively an anonymous government employee who claimed high-level access to the secret plan. Message boards like 4chan and 8chan are virtual communities where conspiracists gather and exchange suspicions and conjectures. Q posts his clues, or “crumbs,” as they are called, and anonymous posters step in to unpack their meaning. The rambling, expansive, incoherent character of the conspiracy reflects its origins in hundreds and thousands of separate “researchers” who analyze and “validate” Q’s clues.11 For instance, a photograph of Trump receiving a basketball jersey from the University of Alabama with the number seventeen on it is taken as verification of the Q conspiracy—the letter Q is the seventeenth in the alphabet. In fact, the number refers to the year 2017, and the same team gave President Barack Obama a jersey bearing the number fifteen in 2015.12 The process mimics collaboration and peer review: someone posts a hypothesis and others ignore it, reject it, or accept it. Something is accepted when others on the board repeat it and build on it. This is the endpoint of the new conspiracist process at work: bare assertion validated by affirmation—by “a lot of people are saying”—culminating in a piling up of fabulation on fabulation.