For a very long time, for decades really, but especially since 2016, I’ve been trying to figure out how ordinary people united by a cause or by a point-of-view, can arrive at a point where they can believe absurdities and do terrible things.
So let me begin with a story about a conspiracy and about the power of belief in changing a mind.
Sometime in the summer of 1969, my friend and I sat in my room and played several songs by the Beatles. I no longer remember which ones. Paul had been reported to have died in a car crash and his place in the band taken by a look-alike. The rest of the Beatles were said to have planted clues in various songs that told the story of his death and how it had been covered up. At one point we looked at each other and both of us said something like “Damn!” or “Yes, Wow” or something equally banal as for a few hours or a few days we believed in the conspiracy. We were both 16 years old, and we believed. We believed the clues we conjured out of mumbled lyrics and from gossipy items in Rolling Stone.
Not for long. Even at 16, we also had a healthy regard for facts, and when Paul and his wife and children emerged in Scotland as very much alive, I don’t even think we felt foolish. Someone had played a joke. We had fallen for it.
I remember the feeling of believing though. We knew a secret. We were on the ‘inside’. We belonged to something much larger than ourselves, a coterie of the faithful, and we had pledged our loyalty to the Beatles by believing. This is important. Believing in a conspiracy is also about loyalty and steadfastness, two qualities never to be underestimated in believers. For that brief moment, common sense and objective reality did not matter. We thought we knew better.
Now, bring together many of us in a festive atmosphere, give us a skilled demagogue, a charismatic figure to articulate our insights and to give us a common enemy – say John Lennon or Yoko or the Beatles’ manager, and then add the power and universalizing influence of the internet and podcasts and talk radio and the dark web and mass rallies and one news channel spewing conspiracies and bile 24/7 (Yoko Plotted Paul’s Death! John’s Jealousy Drove Paul to Despair! John is a Russian Agent!) and throw in gun culture on top of it all and economic disaster and a painful economic evolution and maybe the mass deaths and disorientation of a plague, and most of the elements are in place for maximum paranoia and a very dark energy. Where does all that energy find its outlet?
One feels swept away. One must act. Too much is at stake to remain passive.
Belonging to a like-minded group, a crowd, a mob, an evangelizing, absolutist faith means to leave this poor, singular dissatisfied self behind and belong to a larger entity. It means a suspension of loneliness. It creates connections. It fills up time. It sweeps boredom away.
If the threat is large enough, if the threat is made to seem existential, if the enemy is identifiable and within reach, and if one can act in a crowd, a swelling, heaving thing, a shouting thing, a breathing thing that exalts emotions, then how much easier to strike out, rush a police line, obey orders, wield weapons, stomp a body, shoot, kill?
How would an ordinary person justify this?
To compartmentalize means to put a troublesome or onerous or distasteful or worrisome or ugly part of one’s life … away. It does not vanish. It retreats. One wills it to retreat.
One tries to move whatever it is to another dimension, at least temporarily, and sometimes for the rest of a life. Move on, make up stories, evade, drink, seek out normalcy.
But there’s this too, an emotion more powerful than belief:
Maybe the dirty secret is that too many of us like to hate more than to love, and when we can gather with others who hate like us in a room or a crowd or a movement, then our hatred feels warm, it feels wholesome and righteous, it feels like justice is at long last coming true.
Believe, hate, smash, and then put it in a box, bury the box and when someone asks, “What did you do?”, soften, deny, lie, turn away, drink, forget (but one never forgets, not really).
And amiable Matty from down the street, William who you have known for years, Melissa who is such a good mother, go back to their ordinary lives and when asked will say, “I never knew. It was others, not me. They had it coming, but I did nothing. That past is gone, we must go on. Lies, all lies. Never happened. Leave me alone. Go away. It’s over, why bring it up?”
Ordinary people are capable of great courage and of great empathy but also of monstrous actions. Until waves of pressure are applied, until times of great turmoil, we cannot be certain who will choose which path.
