What is true? (Part 2)

Conspiracies and conspiracy theories running wild

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

You can read the first part of this essay here.

The pandemic was a defining moment for millions of people, particularly in Western countries. For all of us, the world we knew disappeared, along with many of our certainties. We never thought that our governments could become so authoritarian and display totalitarian tendencies so quickly, nor that so many people would go along with it and even call for tougher measures. Many of us lost friends and fell out with our families because they considered our rejection of the 'morally acceptable' behaviour to be wrong. Our loss of trust in our elite institutions was profound, if not complete.

However, as human beings, we cannot expand our knowledge without trusting others. We don't have time to discover everything on our own, and to comprehend much of what is happening in the world, we would require knowledge and skills that are beyond our reach.

Some things are easy to verify without much expertise. Despite the cover-up by almost all US mainstream media, for example, it was relatively easy to determine with a high degree of certainty that President Biden had suffered from dementia throughout his term in office by watching some of his public appearances on YouTube.

But can we be sure that anthropogenic climate change is an indisputable fact? We can more or less easily find out or know through our own observations that the climate is warming, but very few people understand climate science sufficiently to be able to make their own judgement about whether the warming is due to GHG emissions or due to natural causes. Most people have to trust others who they believe to be trustworthy.

Is human-made climate change a hoax?

Early on in the pandemic, when I realised that all our institutions were promoting a false scientific consensus to justify their authoritarian policies, I suspected that the resulting breakdown in trust would cause people to doubt the science of climate change, too. In 2021, I wrote the following in an essay:

During the pandemic, it was striking how widely the media, governments and scientific institutions promoted the false narrative of an apparent scientific consensus on lockdowns and face masks. This form of weaponisation damages the credibility of science as a whole. A layperson who has discovered over the past year how the media distorts the way science works may also have become much more sceptical about climate science.

Over the past four years, I have observed an increasingly strong pattern: if you are unvaccinated and were strongly opposed to lockdowns, there is a good chance that you also believe anthropogenic climate change is a hoax intended to control people. 

Why is there such a significant correlation?

I have met quite a few of these people. They are not lunatics, and I consider at least some of them to be highly intelligent. Perhaps it is simply their superior critical thinking skills that have led them not only to see the flaws in the Covid regime, but also to conclude that the consensus on climate change is false.

Alternatively, given that climate change is such a complex issue, it is easy for even highly intelligent people to believe one thing or its opposite depending on who they trust.

Or perhaps it's a combination of both explanations?

I think we still have a lot to learn about the impact that social media has on our brains. Although we may think that we reach conclusions purely through rational thinking, much of what we believe is actually heavily influenced by the opinions of people we trust. For instance, if people we trusted during the pandemic offer alternative theories contradicting the scientific consensus on climate change, and these ideas repeatedly appear on our timeline, we may end up believing them. This is how epistemic bubbles emerge and how truth is socially constructed.

I don’t rule out the possibility that the climate consensus is completely wrong. As I discussed in the first part of this essay, mistrust of any scientific consensus is entirely justified. To me, believing in science means believing in a process that continuously questions and attempts to falsify conventional wisdom, as famously argued by Karl Popper. 

However, as Thomas S. Kuhn made clear in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this is not how science normally works. Instead, Kuhn describes it as a 'highly convergent activity based firmly upon a settled consensus acquired from scientific education and reinforced by subsequent life in the profession'. Even if there is a high level of scientific consensus, as in the case of climate change, where it is often claimed that 97% of climate scientists believe that global warming is caused by humans, Kuhn argues that ‘anomalies’ could one day accumulate and trigger a scientific revolution leading to a paradigm shift.

None of this implies that the consensus on climate change is inherently flawed, and I remain unconvinced that there is substantial evidence to suggest it is. After all, why don't some of the fiercest critics of mainstream climate change policy, such as Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, question the anthropogenic nature of climate change? As far as I am aware, no established climate scientists have stepped forward to assert that global warming is a hoax designed to control the population. If the entire climate consensus were an elite conspiracy aimed at controlling people, we would expect to see some courageous researchers breaking ranks and revealing the truth.

However, while the relationship between human-caused CO₂ emissions and the greenhouse effect is well established, the IPCC has never claimed to be certain that almost all of the warming over the past 100 years or so is due to this effect. In its latest report, the IPCC states a 'likely range of human-induced warming', leaving some room for the possibility of natural causes. In fact, the consensus among climate scientists regarding the extent to which global warming is caused by human activity appears to be weaker than one might assume from media coverage, and is certainly not as high as 97%.

With all its inherent complexities and uncertainties, I continue to believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and not an elite conspiracy. However, as I have argued before, I do think that the ideas of a climate crisis and climate emergency are being used to control people. This is not a plot planned by people in faraway places, but, as Matthew Crawford argues:

Climate provides the ultimate emergency, which is, from the perspective of a technocratic power, ideal because its problem is essentially insoluble or very long-term. […] Climate catastrophism is overblown just as a matter of assessing the crisis but it has to be catastrophized maximally in order to scare people into giving up not just freedoms but a whole lot of activities that are woven into life at every level.

The big Zionist conspiracy

Another emerging shared belief among many Covid dissidents is that a big Zionist conspiracy is behind much of what is going wrong in the world. 

​​To be clear: conspiracies exist and happen all the time. For example, Andrew Lowenthal and others have exposed the censorship industrial complex, whereby governments and major donors conspire to manipulate public discourse via fact-checking organisations and other methods. We were told that it was a conspiracy theory to claim that the so-called mRNA vaccines were actually gene therapies. Much to the chagrin of those who guard the official narrative, a video from a speech in October 2021 shows the president of Bayer's pharmaceutical division expressing his delight at rebranding these ‘cellular gene therapies’ as vaccines, as he believed this will boost sales of gene therapies in the future.

The continuous defamatory use of the term 'conspiracy theory' in recent years is entirely intentional, serving to protect the official or morally acceptable narrative.

Of course, this does not mean that conspiracy theories are always true. Many are certainly not. At best, they are conspiracy hypotheses lacking the substantial evidence that would turn them into theories.

I find it hard to believe that a small group of powerful people are secretly controlling the world when there is no evidence to support this claim. While wealthy and influential individuals can undoubtedly exert considerable influence and pull levers that affect world events, this does not mean that they control the world. In the United States, for example, powerful Zionist lobby groups openly influence public opinion and policy regarding Israel. But the world is too complex for everything to be controlled by any group, behind closed doors and without any traces being left behind.

The idea that Jews or Zionists control the world is, of course, nothing new. However, when our elite institutions have lost all credibility and people are angry about current events, such conspiracy theories become much more prevalent. At least you have a group of very wealthy and seemingly evil individuals to blame for your misfortune. 

In my opinion, Mattias Desmet provides a better explanation for this popular conspiracy hypothesis:

It’s true that there are more Jews and even Zionists at the top of the global power pyramid. After all, Jews are overrepresented at the top of nearly every pyramid. Their extraordinary drive to excel plays a role in this, among other factors. Solzhenitsyn provided a good description in his book Two Hundred Years Together of how Jews were involved in the rise of the Soviet Union. The gist of it is this: Jews are overrepresented in the entire upper layer of society, including the layers that promote totalitarianism. They are therefore equally overrepresented in both the good ‘projects’ of humanity and the bad ones. In other words, aside from the fact that they have a drive to excel, they are ordinary people with the universal struggle between good and evil in their hearts.

How can we get closer to the truth?

So, where does this leave us? Expanding one's media diet by listening to and reading independent journalists helps to bypass some of the propaganda we are exposed to by the mainstream media. It also helps us identify such propaganda. However, distrusting our elite institutions does not automatically help us make better sense of the world.

We can delude ourselves into thinking that we and the other members of our group are smarter than everyone else, to the point where we start believing that everything is a conspiracy. We can also be deceived by an ever-growing amount of increasingly sophisticated propaganda to which we are exposed without realising, such as NATO's cognitive warfare or the Brussels media machine. And all this before AI becomes even more sophisticated at manipulating us in the coming years, whether because real people intend it or because AI creates large-scale confusion that was not originally intended by humans.

Ultimately, we will need to figure out how to build new scientific and media institutions that are immune to forces trying to prevent them from focusing on finding and telling the truth. We must also find ways to stop the internet, social media and smartphones from making us increasingly stupid or cause our society to become more dysfunctional. As societies, we need to evolve to ensure that our hyper-novel technological environment improves our lives instead of making them worse.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a plan for how to achieve this, and I suspect it will take us a long time to work it out.

In the meantime, however, I believe that we can learn to navigate an information environment in which it is increasingly difficult to know which sources we can trust and what is true.

Firstly, accepting that we can never be absolutely certain about anything is a useful principle, regardless of how trustworthy our institutions are and how much AI is in charge or isn't. We must learn to live with uncertainty and make decisions knowing that nothing will ever be absolutely certain.

I don't know with absolute certainty that anthropogenic climate change is true, but my working hypothesis, based on the evidence I have seen and the degree to which I find it plausible, is that it is. At the same time, I can entertain other hypotheses that might turn out to be true but which I currently consider to be significantly less plausible. Being open to different hypotheses enables us to stay curious and learn from new evidence as it emerges.

Secondly, it is impossible, inefficient and mostly pointless to try to gather all the information on a given topic. Very few people have the time to delve deeply into a subject, and even when they do, they often don't know which sources to trust. This is why we cannot live without experts. We need to be able to trust experts. In order to make decisions under uncertainty without wasting time, we need a method of identifying which expert is more likely to be right than someone else.

One way to do this is to assess their predictive power. If someone or a group of people has made many predictions in the past that have turned out to be correct, they may have a better model than others, regardless of their credentials. Next time they make a prediction, we might expect them to be right again rather than someone who has been wrong more often than right. 

As Bret Weinstein always says, predictive power should be our guide. For example, as Weinstein points out, it is common knowledge that, in 2003, the neoconservatives in the United States lied to the world about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction, leading their country and the so-called 'coalition of the willing' into a disastrous war. Now, 22 years later, the same people, as well as a new generation of neocons, are arguing that Iran is close to having nuclear weapons and that the US needs to attack Iran to destroy them. We should probably be very sceptical about the possibility that they are right this time.