The Conspiracy World Is Changing. Are You Ready For It?

It’s been three months now since the release of Thrive, the New Age/conspiracy movie that’s been pushed heavily on the Internet. Probably many of my readers know that I run another blog, Thrive Debunked, which is dedicated to exposing the factual errors and distortions in that movie. As you’ll see there, I have my doubts whether Thrive is really achieving the sort of breakthrough success that its makers might have hoped for it. But aside from that, for me at least, as a debunker, Thrive has been an important milestone in my view of the conspiracy theory underground. Simply put: Thrive demonstrates how the conspiracy world is changing. I’m not sure that other debunkers really understand how it’s changing, or are prepared for it. That’s the subject of this blog.

The best and most concise way I can put it is this: conspiracy theorists do not want, today in 2012, what they used to want ten, five or even three years ago. The endgame for them—the “finish line,” if you will—is no longer to convince significant numbers of people in the mainstream that Conspiracy Theory X or Y is factually true. Nowadays, conspiracy theories are being used as a vehicle to advance other ideas, usually a set of ideological or even religious principles. The factual veracity of conspiracy material is no longer as important as it once was. Consequently, debunkers of conspiracy theories—who are focused on what is factual, rational and supportable in objective terms—are going to find themselves increasingly outclassed in this new environment. Before we get there, however, a history of sorts is needed.

The Good Old Days of 9/11 Truth: When Facts Mattered

In many ways, the conspiracy theories surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 created the paradigm that many conspiracy theorists and debunkers alike came to understand as the rules of the game. 9/11 was the most traumatic national event of our time, comparable in psychological impact to the previous #1 generator of conspiracy theories, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. 9/11 also happened at an interesting time: the Internet was just beginning to reshape public discourse and the way people communicate. If you haven’t read this blog I wrote about the rise and fall of the 9/11 Truth movement, and why the simultaneous rise of social media was critical to it, you definitely should. That blog references a terrific article by former JREF debunker Ryan Mackey laying out that subject in exhausting detail.

The thing about 9/11 was that facts mattered. The conspiracy theory was all about what Truthers said really happened. After 9/11, and particularly in the heyday of the 9/11 conspiracy theories in 2005-06, all the Truthers were running around out there, especially on the Internet, shrieking about free-fall speed, squibs, “Pull it!” and Able Danger. What they wanted was to convince significant numbers of people that “9/11 was an inside job.” Everything Truthers did in this period—Alex Jones standing at Ground Zero with a bullhorn, Steven Jones publishing his fraudulent paper, Richard Gage’s laughable hijinx with cardboard boxes, calls for a new investigation, etc.—were aimed at convincing people to reject what conspiracy theorist call the “official story” and instead embrace an alternative (i.e., conspiracy) explanation. Even the name of the movement indicates this: 9/11 Truth. All of the misguided “activism” by Truthers was designed to get people to believe their version of what happened. When truth is your bottom line, the rules of the game involve proving what’s true and what’s not.

Debunkers of conspiracy theories, especially those who (like me) began serious large-scale debunking by refuting the arguments of 9/11 Truthers, eagerly responded to the call to battle. James Randi, in many ways the patron saint of debunkers, set the paradigm when he debunked charlatans and fake psychics in the 1980s: collect the facts, marshal your evidence, take apart the nutbars’ claims piece by piece, and demonstrate to all the world how and why they’re wrong. For all their fury and bluster, Truthers couldn’t make their version of 9/11 stick because they were arguing their version was objective fact, and their “facts” were always wrong. It was no contest. 9/11 Truth simply wasn’t very truthful.

These days are, unfortunately for many debunkers (and Truthers), over. 9/11 Truth is dead. The fantasy that the Bush administration, Mossad or the Illuminati did 9/11 will never achieve any form of mainstream acceptance. Truthers lost this battle. There aren’t many of them left, and you’ll notice what few that do still exist are caught in a time warp, arguing as if it’s still 2005 (or 2002) and no one has yet debunked “jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough” or “there was no wreckage at the Pentagon.” This paradigm of conspiracism and debunking is in the past.

The Movies, Part I: From Loose Change to Zeitgeist.

As Ryan Mackey argues, 2005 was a pivotal year for the 9/11 Truth movement. It was not only the year Loose Change, a fact-free documentary created by three college kids, was released, but it was also the year YouTube got its start. With YouTube, suddenly you could make movies at home and spread them around the Internet. The reasons why conspiracy theorists love YouTube are numerous and complicated, but this is the one that concerns us here.

Despite being factually wrong on every major claim it made, Loose Change was supposedly a documentary. In it, conspiracy theorists Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas and Korey Rowe packed just about all the major 9/11 conspiracy theories into one film (later recycled in various recuts and quasi-sequels) and spun it loose on the Internet. But the point of Loose Change was still the same goal as all Truthers were trying to reach: convince the world that “9/11 was an inside job.” Loose Change was so packed with conspiracy nonsense that it took a while to debunk, but the end result was the same: the movie was discredited, its fan base fell away, and its claims are now just more dull conspiracy theories. Dylan Avery has disowned the film. Jason Bermas is working at a pizza restaurant. As 9/11 Truth died, so did Loose Change.

But as all successful movies do, Loose Change spawned imitators. Easily the most popular imitator of Loose Change was the infamous Zeitgeist: The Movie. Created by young New York musician Peter Joseph Merola, Zeitgeist, released on the Internet in 2007, sought to do Loose Change one better by not only alleging that 9/11 was an inside job, but also that Christ never existed, Christianity was a conspiracy by kings and religious leaders, and evil bankers rule the world through the Federal Reserve. Zeitgeist has no more truth in it than Loose Change does, but the bankers-rule-the-world and anti-Federal Reserve stuff opened, perhaps even without meaning to, a new chapter in conspiracism: it was the first attempt, at least on the Internet, to advance a political agenda through the use of conspiracy theories.

If you look at the various false claims in the third part of Zeitgeist, you’ll notice that a lot of its ideas track pretty closely right-wing, quasi- (or full-fledged) libertarian notions of property and state control, undergirded with an economic ideology borrowed heavily from the discredited “Austrian school of economics.” Do you know who else believes in Austrian economics and hates the Federal Reserve? Yup, you guessed it: Ron Paul, who first came to national prominence in 2007-08, largely as a result of his stance on the Iraq war, which was then very unpopular. It should come as no surprise to you that Ron Paul has himself flirted heavily with the conspiracist underground, most notably in his blistering racist newsletters from the 1970s through 1990s, and then later more directly when he began lining up with global warming deniers. The connections between conspiracism and political/economic ideology, particularly of a libertarian political stripe, are beginning to show.

I think Zeitgeist owed its success to this dubious flirtation with ideology. If the film had just been about conspiracy theories, it would have peaked and receded, like Loose Change did; but by very subtlely introducing its viewers to certain political and economic ideas, which hinted at (but did not openly assert to be) a “cure” for these evil conspiracies, it offered its conspiracy audience a ray of hope. Well, yes, Christianity is a lie, 9/11 was an inside job, and evil bankers rule the world, but there are people out there who espouse policies that might change that! This thought was not fully-developed in the first Zeitgeist film, and it was still too early to have a big impact. That was about to change.

The Rise of Conspiracy Ideologies

Zeitgeist began to change the conspiracist underground because it started to reach beyond questions of simple facts. When you found yourself arguing with a fan of Zeitgeist, chances are you were also going to end up arguing about Austrian economics, Ron Paul, and whether capitalism does or doesn’t work. Certainly it was not lost on people like Peter Joseph Merola that, if you hold the attention of significant numbers of conspiracy theorists, you’re looking at an audience to whom you can sell an entire pre-packaged ideology, and they’ll buy it because they trust that, by signaling that you understand “the truth,” you are automatically a sage. Merola turned this nascent observation into Zeitgeist: Addendum, released in 2008, which clumsily grafted a pre-packaged, soup-to-nuts utopian ideology, called the Venus Project, onto a conspiratorial worldview. The result was the “Zeitgeist Movement”: probably the world’s first Internet cult based on conspiracy theories.

The capability of using conspiracy theories to sell—and I mean literally sell—a belief system to a receptive audience is even more marked when you consider Desteni. I first heard about Desteni last year, but it’s no accident that this cult, run by creepy South African ex-cop Bernard Poolman, got its rise in the 2007-08 time period, about the time 9/11 Truth was ramping down and the Zeitgeist Movement was ramping up. You can read more about Desteni in my various blogs about it, but suffice it to say it’s a very crudely-crafted religious order with a great deal of self-contradictory New Agey dogma and, like Zeitgeist, a ready-made happy ending: the “Equal Money System” that’s supposed to transform the world into a bottomless horn of plenty. The real reason for Desteni’s existence, however, is the multi-level marketing scam that it sells its members at steep and totally nonrefundable prices. Desteni at least tried to diversify its conspiracist base by relying on a whole host of conspiracy theories, instead of Zeitgeist’s three, but the main thread consisted of ideas spun off from British conspiracist David Icke, who believes that reptilian shape-shifting aliens secretly control the world. Desteni also dabbles heavily in New Age concepts like channeling and past life regression. This too is important, as we’ll see.

Desteni was too transparent a deception, and its ideology too alien and bizarre, to attract more than a handful of high-commitment members. But I cite it here as an important example of demonstrating how conspiracism has begun to change. I noticed, when I argued with Destonians, that factual assertions about the fraudulence of the conspiracy theories they believed in didn’t make much of an impression. That’s not new; arguing facts to a 9/11 Truther usually doesn’t make an impression either, but that’s for a different reason. Truthers are inaccessible to facts because they don’t know what the facts really are, or they refuse to believe that a particular fact is true. Believers in conspiracy ideologies like Desteni, however, are inaccessible to facts because the facts don’t matter very much to them in the first place. To them, whether David Icke’s reptoids do or do not exist isn’t very important. What’s important to them is their “Equal Money System” or the righteousness of their slogans like “self-forgiveness” or “what’s best for all.” Similarly, if you argued with a Zeitgeister at any time after 2008, you would find they’d much rather talk about their Venus Project ideology than about the conspiracy theories that brought them into the movement in the first place. The ideologies themselves were becoming more important than the facts. This is also why you see groups that espouse this ideology becoming increasingly cult-like.

Do you see where we’re going with this? The marriage of conspiracy theory to political, economic or religious ideology makes each side of the equation self-reinforcing. Arguing against the conspiracy theories is “missing the point,” in believers’ eyes, because the ideology, not a factual narrative, is what they want to sell you; however, the reason they want to sell it to you, and most likely the reason they bought it themselves, is because it was offered as a cure for all those horrible conspiracies. It’s no longer enough for a debunker to come to the table armed, as James Randi did in the 1980s, with facts and logical reasoning, ready to prove to the world what really happened. Now, in addition to refuting factual errors and lies by conspiracy theorists, a debunker has to argue why the Equal Money System or the Venus Project won’t work, why Austrian economics is crankery, or why voting for Ron Paul is a terrible idea. The rules of the game are changing.

The Movies, Part II: From Zeitgeist to Thrive

One thing that debunkers can take solace in: conspiracy-ideology packages, like Zeitgeist and Desteni, are difficult to sustain. The Zeitgeist Movement imploded in 2011 for a number of disparate reasons, including fractious infighting over fundraising, the egotism of its leaders, dreadful press occasioned by a string of disasters that began with the Jared Lee Loughner shooting in Tucson, and loss of public interest in the movies that were its mainstay. Desteni cratered at almost the same time when it was banned from YouTube, thus cutting off its main means of recruiting new followers. In each case the ideology attached to the conspiracies was not attractive enough to gain a self-renewing base of new followers. Both the Venus Project and Desteni’s Equal Money System are extraordinarily flimsy ideologies, riddled with self-contradictions, unanswered questions, and a pyramidal structure that depends on periodic infusions of dogma from the leaders at the top. The fact that both of these organizations were utterly inept at marketing themselves to the public didn’t help either. Furthermore, their hearts just weren’t in it. Zeitgeist could never break away from the 9/11 Truth paradigm that spawned it: ultimately it was still, deep down, about the factual veracity of those conspiracy theories from the first movie, and support for the utopian Venus Project was a mile wide and an inch deep. In the case of Desteni, the ideology was transparent to begin with, merely a sham for the true purpose of the group, a multi-level marketing enterprise. Nevertheless, the failure of these groups taught the conspiracy underground some valuable lessons.

Fast-forward to the end of 2011. 9/11 Truth is dead. The Zeitgeist Movement is dead. Osama bin Laden is dead. Barack Obama’s birth certificate is no longer open to question. Now, suddenly, here comes Thrive.

Two things are unique about Thrive: the sheer volume of conspiracy nonsense that it flings pell-mell at the audience, and the firm New Age milieu from which its makers seem to have come. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Thrive mimics Zeitgeist in a three-part structure, but the division between the parts is functional more than thematic, and the parts bleed into each other pretty fluidly. The early part of Thrive carefully telegraphs to the audience various traditional New Age concepts: crop circles, UFOs, ancient astronauts, alt-med cures, and homespun inventors bucking the evil of Big Science with their free energy machines. The middle section of Thrive churns conspiracy theories, as many and as fast as possible: the “Global Domination Agenda,” UFO cover-ups, 9/11 inside job, “false flag” attacks, Rockefellers, chemtrails, cancer cure suppression, etc. The latter segments of the film are more aimed at pushing a certain philosophy: taxes are theft, money is slavery, the Federal Reserve is evil, etc. When combined with Thrive’s “action points” that it pushes especially heavy on the website, it completes the marriage of conspiracy theories to ideology, specifically (I) New Age religious or quasi-religious beliefs, and (II) libertarian economic and political agendas. I say that these three parts are largely functional because if you put the three together here, in a nutshell, is what Thrive is saying:

• Part 1: “We [makers of Thrive] are New Agers and we believe in traditional New Age concepts.”
• Part 2: “The reason our New Age concepts haven’t transformed the world is because the evil conspirators keep thwarting us.”
• Part 3: “In order to stop all these awful conspiracies, we recommend you embrace New Age concepts and libertarian economic/political beliefs.”

As I detailed in a post on the Thrive Debunked blog in which I described my conversation with an academic who studies conspiracy theories from a religious standpoint, Part 2 may be the key section of the film. This scholar told me the following, in a conversation he gave me permission to post:

“I suspect that what’s going on is that New Age, now entering its third generation, has developed a theodicy. Now, this is a theological term, but it essentially means an explanation of the existence of evil – why bad things happen to good people. For some of those in the New Age milieu – Foster Gamble, David Icke, Whitley Strieber, Duncan Rhodes and others, all incidentally in middle age and with a long term involvement in the New Age milieu – an explanation is needed as to why, if we’ve entered the Age of Aquarius, is the world less peaceful, equal and progressive than ever? Conspiracy theories offer such a theodicy – the New Age hasn’t happened because evil people prevented it from happening.

There are a number of reasons why these two milieus found common ground. One, they share a number of common themes, from UFOs, lost ancient civilisations to a critique of global capitalism and mainstream pharmaceuticals. Also, conspiracy theories and religions are unique in seeing the progression of the world as the result of hidden, non-falsifiable agencies.”

There you have it. Thrive is essentially a religious text, but with a number of secular implications. It begs, pleads and even tries to frighten its audience into believing in New Age concepts. At the same time, it pushes a political and economic agenda that proceeds very solidly from a libertarian corner. Foster Gamble even denounces democracy as an exploitative political system. It is these ideas—New Age religious and quasi-religious beliefs, and libertarianism as an economic and political agenda—that Thrive was made to advance. Conspiracy theories are merely a means to an end.

What Does This Mean For Debunkers?

What I think this means for us—those of us who spend significant amounts of time pushing back against conspiracy theories—is that, if the trend I’ve identified here is correct, our fact-based, James Randi-style approach to debunking is going to become increasingly obsolete. To put it cynically, nobody is going to care very much about the facts anymore, because the facts no longer matter to the believers of this material. As conspiracy theories become increasingly a means to an end rather than the end itself, the bottom line for believers in them is whether the goal the conspiracy theories are advancing is a desirable one or not.

I’ve already noticed this trend on the Thrive Debunked blog. Although the majority of people who post comments on the blog are Thrive fans who are angry that anyone would criticize the movie, a surprisingly few number of them seem to be angry because they think the facts are something different than what I demonstrate they are. Indeed, most of them seem to be angry because they say that by criticizing Thrive I’m preventing the world from becoming a better place by not accepting Thrive and its messages as true. This is why so many comments take a tack similar to, “you’re missing the point” or “the movie isn’t meant to be debunked.” When the movie is attacked, its fans instinctively leap to the defense of its ideology, whereas leaping to the defense of its facts seems to be a secondary consideration.

From a purely rationalist point of view, this makes no sense. In a rational frame of mind, belief that crop circles are made by extraterrestrials or that a Global Domination Elite is trying to take over the world is only justified if the facts demonstrate that those things are worthy of belief. But Thrive utterly rejects rationality. Even if you expose its falsehoods with undeniable facts and ironclad reasoning, believers will say, “Okay, so what?” Now suddenly the debate shifts from what actually happened to what ideology is best to fix the world’s problems. That’s not a conversation in which traditional debunkers have an inherent advantage over anyone else, because you’re not arguing facts anymore.

The world was much easier when the main purveyors of conspiracy theories were interested mostly in convincing people that their version of the facts was correct. The main point of this blog is this: we don’t live in that world anymore. Thrive proves it.

The Future?

I’m not very good at prognosticating. However, I’m going to throw out a prediction that I think has at least a chance of coming true: in the future, conspiracy theories are going to appear more often as a tool than as an end to themselves. As Thrive demonstrates, conspiracist thinking is increasingly becoming inseparable from New Age religious beliefs and libertarian political/economic beliefs. To believers, the factual truth of conspiracy theories is a fairly minor issue. They take it for granted, as Thrive fans do, that ancient astronauts existed, that free energy is being suppressed and that 9/11 was an inside job. Arguing those points with them isn’t worth their time. Whether those beliefs are factually supportable is step number 12 in the process. They’re already at step number 497. This is why some particularly fervent believers in conspiracy ideologies are simply shocked that anyone would question the factual veracity of their underlying theories. To them, that was an issue settled long ago.

That said, the progression is still continuing. Thrive, like Zeitgeist, is probably going to achieve its greatest impact through failure rather than success. Thrive is experiencing serious problems in reaching much of its desired audience—many conspiracy theorists think Foster Gamble, with his big pharma family connections, is trying to sell them “disinformation,” while the most paranoid raised a hue and cry over Thrive’s promotional poster, which the nutters think is “Illuminati occult symbolism.” Furthermore, while Thrive’s New Age ideology is certainly more attractive, stable and self-regenerating than Zeitgeist’s, I don’t see it likely that Thrive’s fanbase will coalesce into a viable organization under unified leadership. Certainly a lot of people out there like the movie, but beyond being a “good movie” that poses “food for thought,” I don’t think even many of the true believers will be motivated to do much about it. Conspiracy theorists are notoriously lazy. It takes more than Foster Gamble’s soothing tones and CGI pictures to motivate them.

In the future, however, that may change. Progress in the conspiracy underground is incremental. Perhaps someday, someone else peddling an ideology will decide to make a conspiracy movie that will be able to motivate significant numbers of followers to unite behind a self-sustaining belief system. This is the future I fear. The idea of believers in conspiracy theories coalescing into an organization with real-world clout—whether through legitimate political channels or, more likely, through violent revolutionary insurgency—fills me with horror. I hope, as a society, we don’t go there.

As Thrive itself imitated Zeitgeist, others are already trying to imitate Thrive. The next conspiracy movie that seems to be trying to break into the mainstream is called Ethos, narrated by Woody Harrelson (another familiar face in New Age circles). I haven’t seen it yet, but it appears to be more of the same, supposedly diagnosing the economic and political problems of the world from a New Age and conspiracist viewpoint. I, for one, am probably not going to be re-enlisting to debunk Ethos. After three years of debunking Zeitgeist and who knows how many more still to come in refuting Thrive, I simply don’t have the time, attention or effort left to re-up for yet another campaign of endless battles with Ethos’s conspiracy believers. I’m still from the old James Randi school. Perhaps I’m rapidly becoming a dinosaur.

Thanks for reading.