Another epic and irritatingly rational Comment of the Day from Extradimensional Cephalopod, this one on the thorny topic of discussing unlikely conspiracy theories with true believers. Almost all of E.C.’s contributions to Ethics Alarms topics are helpful and impressive; this is one of his—its?—best.

This is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “How Should We Deal With Friends Who Believe Ridiculous Conspiracy Theories?”:

Your friend has arrived at a conclusion that is based on, generously speaking, an implausible interpretation of the evidence surrounding the Titanic’s disaster. If he were looking at the evidence with no biases, he presumably would not have come to this conclusion. Therefore, I suspect that he has either an emotional attachment to the conclusion, or an emotional attachment to the process he used to reach it.

An person’s attachment to a conclusion might be as personal as a belief about what that conclusion says about them or someone they respect, or it might be as impersonal as preferring a more pleasant view of the world, such as one where disasters don’t just happen by accident.

An attachment to the reasoning process may be based on a fear of not having a good alternative reasoning process to turn to, a fear of what conclusions those alternative processes might lead to, or (similarly) an attachment to another conclusion that they arrived at through their current process. For example: “I have to believe this person wearing a cape is a bad person, because if people who aren’t bad can wear capes, that means that maybe I did a bad thing by attacking those other people for wearing capes.”

I’d like to talk with your friend and see how his worldview compares to what I suspect it is. My preliminary hypothesis is that your friend’s subconscious reasoning process is loosely based on the following premises, which I am not rendering judgment on at this time:

1. The Federal Reserve is bad.
2. J. P. Morgan was bad.
3. If Guggenheim, Straus, and Astor had survived, the Federal Reserve would not have been created.
4. It is unpleasant to think that the Federal Reserve was inflicted on the United States, and/or that the Titanic sank, because of mere bad luck.

In other words, sometimes it is far more pleasant to think that a bad policy or catastrophic event happens because of bad actors engineering it, and not because of random disaster. Whether the real J. P. Morgan would consider it a good idea to sink an entire ship in order to kill three political opponents is irrelevant. What the most likely cause of the Titanic’s sinking is, given the evidence and testimonies at hand, does not enter the equation.

The top priority for a true conspiracy theorist, as opposed to a regular person who suspects deceptive machinations by a company or government, is to find an explanation for the world’s ills that makes them part of a plan. This is an encouraging worldview. The agents that create that plan can be outsmarted, revealed, and overpowered. A person who takes on such an enemy has a noble purpose in life. A person who identifies enemy activity performs a valuable public service whenever they share what they know.

(This worldview is older than you may realize. You may have heard sermons about how the Devil is constantly working to trick and afflict mortals with his infinite cunning, and how the only protection is to believe and do as one is told and not listen to alternative possibilities. It’s the same principle as a modern conspiracy theory, just serving a particular set of cultural values.)

A world where bad things just happen sometimes has no unifying order, or at least not one that humans can readily perceive. A human living in such a world may struggle to find direction. There is no obvious most important problem, no ultimate skill or secret knowledge that can end the nightmare of confusion and drudgery that grinds away at people. No nexus of purpose, and no simple way to make it stop. The world doesn’t look like this because someone warped it to be this way, ready to revert to something better when they’re defeated. This is how it looks naturally. Making it better requires insight, constructiveness, and ongoing work. For someone who hasn’t seen that before, they might not realize the world can get better unless a villain is the reason it isn’t already.

One thing I share with conspiracy theorists is the refusal to resign myself to allowing the world to continue stumbling headfirst into tragedies. The closest thing I’ve got to an ultimate skill is that of helping people to understand each other and work together, to learn from each other’s perspectives and skills and combine them to create better situations. That collaboration will accomplish more than any one person could alone. The trick is that to figure out how to make it work, you have to be completely honest with yourself. If a hypothesis doesn’t fit reality, you have to let go of the joy of pretending it does. You have to do the work of continuing to learn and unlearn, with the faith that eventually you’ll put together something really useful.

It’s worked for me, at least.