It was a novel that had the entire nation talking. The response to it revealed how divided our society had become. The author had intended the novel to be a dystopian view of where things were heading if the nation couldn’t find a way to work through one of its long-standing issues.
The novel begins when the Vice President hires a zealot to kill the President. They had fundamental differences on what could be done to resolve the nation’s main dividing issue. Thankfully, the assassination attempt failed.
Then when a new President was elected, he was poisoned just 30 days after taking the oath of office. The new President had contrary views on the nation’s main dividing issue. Two Presidents later the current President died after serving only months in office, again from suspected poisoning.
Later, those who were favorable to one side of the issue had fallen on hard times through a series of bizarre incidents. The fact that all the bad things happened to those who had taken a similar position led to a virus of conspiracy theories. Rather than quell the nation’s divide, it inflamed it.
The novel was called The Adder’s Den by John Smith Dye in 1864. Dye had concocted a chain of conspiracies that spanned 30 years of our nation’s history leading up to the Civil War. There was no validation of the book’s claims. The issue involved was slavery.
Conspiracy theories have had a long-standing place in our nation’s history. Our brains are not designed to pursue the truth. And that’s why it has become so easy to foster negative images of others through falsehoods. The frontal regions of our brains are where we reason, but this part of the brain works slower than the older part of the brain that reacts to threats.
Our social identities also influence how we believe. We are prone to forgo our own thoughts in favor of those in our identity groups. Thus, if those in our group buy into a conspiracy, we are likely to do so.
Our belief in conspiracies is no more prevalent today than at other times in our nation’s history. There have always been those who try to persuade through fear generated by conspiracies. Social media has not accelerated conspiracy theories, it has just changed the distribution channel. The only good thing we can say about misinformation is that it is not sustainable. People don’t really buy into the lies, and their seeming endorsement is expressive responding. They don’t want to be out of place in their identity group, so they express acceptance even though that acceptance is, in fact, not there.
Just imagine how we might rid our society of those who try to win support through conspiracy theories. That’s a question that is vital to democracy in the 21st century. As of now, we have no answers.
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“The real rulers in Washington are invisible and exercise power from behind the scenes.”-Felix Frankfurter (Supreme Court Justice)