Opinion: Want to convince a conspiracy theory believer they're wrong? Don't start with the truth

Not long ago, a millennial father of two in the Midwest whom I interviewed was convinced that many of our elected leaders like to feast on the flesh of children. He feared that the world was at the mercy of a depraved club of the richest and most powerful among us, one armed with space lasers and clones.

Most shocking to those who knew him weren’t the conspiracy theories themselves. It was that he had come to believe them. Nearing 40 years old, he was a college-educated, upstanding guy with friends, a family and an established career. How, they wondered, had this perfectly sane person gone crazy?

It’s a question more and more Americans are asking about their own loved ones. As disinformation permeates our culture, the road to QAnon-type territory is getting shorter. Healthy skepticism easily gives way to undue suspicion. The dizzying public reaction to Donald Trump’s near-assassination was a perfect illustration: Observers across the political spectrum raced to fill the information void with baseless assertions that have gained momentum despite mounting evidence to the contrary, revealing a nation increasingly at odds with reality.

The statistics are as stunning as the falsehoods. Millions of people now believe that the government, media and financial worlds are “controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles,” according to recent polling. These aren’t loosely held views. While reporting for my book “The Quiet Damage,” I talked to people all over the country who had tried until they were blue in the face to make the conspiracy theorists in their lives accept the truth.

But the truth is almost beside the point.

It seems entirely sensible to fight fiction with fact. In spite of passionately professed allegiances to “the truth,” however, ardent conspiracy theory adopters seldom have a desire to be accurately informed. Belief in the unbelievable, in many cases, stems from desperation to meet fundamental human needs, such as feeling valued and having a purpose. Over the last three years, while interviewing hundreds of disinformation-splintered families, it has become clear to me that facts alone can’t fix this. The solution begins with treating conspiracy theory obsession not as a sickness but as a symptom.

For the Midwestern father, the trouble began after an injury largely robbed him of his mobility — and, in turn, much of his life’s meaning. Once an active family man, he was suddenly stuck in a chair. His wife took up solo hobbies and completed the housework alone; his children played with friends instead of with their dad. If he couldn’t fulfill his role as a husband and father in the ways he always had, who was he?

In the QAnon quagmire, which he eventually stumbled into online, he was a patriot helping to bring “deep state” corruption to light. One of the good guys fighting the good fight. Someone who mattered again. During his gradual journey from QAnon-curious to feverishly embracing the most crackpot claims, his critical thinking skills didn’t mysteriously vanish — they were overpowered.

Human needs are just that: needs. Our innate need for things such as meaning and belonging is superseded only by what the body requires for subsistence, and not by any thirst for accuracy or truth. When these needs go unmet, we can become desperate to satisfy them by whatever means necessary. And the conditions that leave people deprived of what they need and susceptible to irrational conspiracy theories are common — and commonly overlooked.

In movements such as QAnon, the lonely find belonging, the aimless find direction and the angry find validation. Consider baby boomers, who share an alarming amount of fake news online. Many people believe that some mix of cognitive aging, poor digital literacy and too much Fox News is to blame. But this overlooks a bigger issue. Conspiracy-theory-entranced seniors have described to me how, before adopting a QAnon-like brand of what some called “activism,” they felt as if society no longer valued or had use for them. Facing what experts have identified as an “epidemic of loneliness,” they yearned for purpose, community and fulfillment.

By their nature, conspiracy theories provide all of the above. They give supporters an enemy to oppose and a cause to rally around. It’s not difficult to see how churning out Facebook posts (errantly) warning about killer COVID vaccines could have felt like a gratifying self-appointed job in retirement. Or how latching onto delusions that offer convenient answers and clear villains in times of debilitating uncertainty can restore feelings of agency and security.

There’s no singular mold of conspiracy theorists or set of circumstances that shapes them. In my research, I’ve encountered people of all generations, classes, races and political leanings. All had their own reasons for believing and their own needs to satisfy. A political psychology study published on factors that predispose people to conspiracy theories shows that those less capable of “bouncing back” from hardship are more susceptible, suggesting that espousing these views can be a crutch. At the deepest level, then, it doesn’t necessarily matter to believers whether Taylor Swift is truly a psy-op or chemtrails are poisoning the skies. What matters is how clinging to such convictions serves the believers’ underlying needs.

In the end, it wasn’t the truth that saved the Midwestern father, though he has come to see it clearly again. After badly damaging his life at rock bottom of the rabbit hole, he carved a long, sometimes bizarre and profoundly difficult path toward recovering his sense of purpose as a parent and partner. Only then did the ludicrous lies he’d been so consumed by lose their hold over him. He no longer needed them.

Success stories like this will remain rare if we don’t shift our approach to this crisis. We’re living in a moment where a slew of critical stressors, including an unprecedented election season and an artificial intelligence boom, are fueling a tsunami of disinformation and leaving many of us mentally and emotionally compromised. As more Americans turn to conspiracy theories to cope, we must remind ourselves that we can’t do away with delusions that meet people’s fundamental needs by simply debunking them. We need to focus on the cause, not the symptom — to look past the lunacy and probe the roots of our collective vulnerability — because none of us is as immune as we would like to think.

Jesselyn Cook is a reporter and journalism lecturer. Her new book is “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family.”