Ideas - How a conspiracy theory becomes 'real'

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Growing up, PhD student Sarah believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible. She predicted that non-believers faced doom in hell upon Judgment Day. Born into a devout evangelical Christian community, she draws on her religious past to understand the visceral belief people acquire in conspiracy theories — from PizzaGate to the 'stolen' 2020 U.S. election. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 21, 2022.

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Some would call his theories crazy. They then concocted a vast conspiracy involving countless monks throughout the Western world.

Yo, just laugh at you again. I said I know. I don't care. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Today's episode offers a theory about conspiracy theorists. How regular people start to believe the most irregular, we might say implausible, notions. What are they trying to hide? We're through the looking glass here, people. The biggest conspiracy theories in North America include the so-called Great Replacement Theory and QAnon.

For unbelievers, these movements invite derision and fear. But somewhere right now, a new believer is getting drawn in. My research is not to say these people are wrong and crazy. It's more to understand why they think the way that they do. Sarah is a PhD student in media studies. We're not using her real name or indicating where she's doing her work, because her research makes her vulnerable to threats and harassment. She studies people's journeys into bizarre and extreme viewpoints, especially on the political far right. Those people might not consider themselves a racist, they might not

hold white supremacist beliefs, but I'm not worried about what they actually believe, I'm worried about the effects of what they're doing to them and to the world. they actually believe, I'm worried about the effects of what they're doing to them and to the world. This episode is part of our ongoing series Ideas from the Trenches, featuring innovative PhD research from across the country. This series is produced by Nikola Lukcic and Tom Howell. We met Sarah on the windy rooftop of a high-rise. Wow, look at this. Holy smokes. This is gorgeous. This is like a community garden for the people that live here.

Sarah's life as a PhD student is a far stretch from what the Sarah of her youth would have imagined. She grew up in a subculture where some highly unlikely stories, or at least elaborately metaphorical ones, were treated as completely, unequivocally, literally true. For most of my life, up until my early 20s, I believed in the young Earth, that the Earth was created only 6,000 years ago. I believed that evolution was false,

that Noah's Ark was a literal event. So I had a large amount of beliefs about the physical world that bled into my politics and my reality fully. Sarah was homeschooled from grades four to eight. And during the times that I was homeschooled, I had homeschooling curriculum that was brought in from the US. The US has a lot of evangelical curriculum that you can purchase and teach your kids and stuff like that. I still do appreciate the times that I was homeschooled. I was able

to kind of do my own thing and learn at the pace that I wanted and kind of dig into the things that I wanted. I was kind of teaching myself type thing. Do you remember any of those things? What was a particular curiosity you had? I remember learning something about, you know, like Canadian explorers in the north and like getting stuck at the ice and stuff like that. And I was always deeply interested for some reason about like Egyptian gods and stuff like that, even though it was technically, you know, heretical. Yeah. I was always interested in kind of like anthropological stories of people, ancient societies. Yeah. And then I came back to public school in

grade eight and into high school and I remained a heavy evangelical through that time. So to any of the people that I went to high school with, I'm sorry for being so religious in high school. The church and the community built around it was central throughout Sarah's childhood. My parents were musicians, so sometimes I would attend both services. This church had services at 9 and 11.

So sometimes I would go to the sermon for the first half and then socialize with people for the second one or that type of thing. So it was a big long chunk on Sundays, sometimes from 9 to 1. And Wednesday nights there were prayer meetings, Friday nights there were like youth prayer meetings and Sunday evenings there were also prayer meetings. So it was a very big part of my life and I was very passionate about it. When Sarah was growing up, her parents restricted her access to pop culture, or at least tried to.

I wasn't like allowed to watch like, like certain Disney Channel shows. My mom's kind of rule was no live action for some reason, like cartoons are okay, but like there was something weirdly sinful about those shows for like teen girls. And like Scooby Doo and stuff like that was, was, I would try to get away with it sometimes, but it was a little bit too occult-y sometimes. I wasn't allowed to watch Harry Potter or anything like that. So that was kind of a cultural gap, considering that my generation was very much growing up

with Harry Potter, but yeah. ["Stupid Doopie Doo"] Looking for you Stupid doopie doo, where are you? Do you remember at all what it felt like and what you told yourself about why people were so different, why people seemed to not get any of the things that you knew were true? Yeah, I mean I did because I also had a lot of non-Christian friends who I'm also eternally thankful for.

And I absolutely very much respected their perspectives and their worldview. I guess the perspectives that I had about why they were different didn't necessarily come from me, but they came from, you know, the church's teaching. It's like, we have to love everybody, but, and that's the problem, but, you know, we have to understand that people that are not Christian or are not saved are technically still living in sin and technically in need of a lifestyle change. It's kind of programmed into the back of your mind to always be looking for those chances to witness or to bring your beliefs to somebody else.

It wasn't necessarily that they were like bad or sinful or different per se. It was just that I had this like overarching framework that I kind of had to apply that was like, if you're saved, you're in this category and if you're not, you're not. Yeah, you don't want your friends to go to hell when the judgment day comes. Yeah, you don't want your friends to go to hell. Yeah. When the judgment day comes.

Yeah, or I have other family members that are not saved. And you know, we also, my family, my church, believed in the coming rapture and apocalypse. And you know, the belief growing up was that that could happen literally at any time. There's a bit of urgency implied in that belief system. When Sarah thinks back to her former life, she remembers not just her beliefs, but the physical experience of believing them.

I was fully having embodied interactions with God. I knew he existed. I knew. And all the other things about the Christian literalist belief. I knew them to be true. What's an embodied experience? Well in evangelical Christianity, there's a lot of like worship is a really big part of it. Speaking in tongues, not in every church, but in a lot. I never did that but worship experiences in churches are meant to cultivate a super emotional response

where you feel convicted by the Spirit of God and many anthropologists have written about this, Tonya Lerman and as well Susan Harding, write about that process of coming under conviction I think Susan Harding calls it. That's essentially when you feel this like emotional build up during a worship time that it's in your body. And when you have that, that's kind of like a physical assertion that God is doing something.

Sarah completed high school. She practiced her religion and felt anxious for her unsaved friends. But she also nurtured a curiosity about other cultures, historically and around the world. And that curiosity led her to enroll as an undergraduate in anthropology at a regular secular university. It actually challenges my view of what far-right evangelical Christian families are like, that you went off and studied anthropology and that there wasn't a sort of a scandal at that

point. Can you talk about why you think they were okay with you going off and studying anthropology like that? Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of people don't know what anthropology is and what it implicates. So they knew I was studying people groups. And I think that they attributed it to what missionaries do. I think actually Billy Graham, the famous preacher, has some anthropological training.

So they might see it as a way to help you understand people, so therefore you can spread the word and save more souls. Absolutely. you understand people so therefore you can spread the word and save more souls. Yeah, absolutely. And my mother, like, she very much imagines me still going into ministry and using my education to go into ministry. Both of them, they wanted to support me in whatever I chose to study and that's what I did and then I turned out this way. Music Before Sarah left for university, a relative gave her a book called How to Stay a Christian in College.

Apparently it didn't work. Music Apparently it didn't work. I used to 100% attribute it to this anthropology class that I had in my second year. I read Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger about the kind of construction of biblical beliefs. Like, you know, we saw things in Leviticus that represent, like, clean living versus unclean living. And basically I was learning about the cultural mechanisms of that. I also read this book by Tanya Lerman called When God Talks Back. She's a beautiful writer and she did an ethnography of evangelical Christians in the US and she essentially showed how their belief in

God as a physical friend that you have in your everyday life is reinforced through practices and as I saw that laid out in that book I it hit me that this was me this is exactly what was happening to me so that was very much one element of it was deconstructing how the belief that I was so convinced in, aka that God was real, that the young earth is real, even though it felt to be a physical reality that I had in my in my heart etc, could be produced through cultural practices. I thought there was something so profound about that. through cultural practices. I thought there was something so profound about that. And also, I want to attribute it as well to going to university. And I lived with a bunch of my LGBTQ

plus friends that I'm still great friends with today, and other people that I didn't have the opportunity to meet when I was growing up in my small town, and they showed me such love. And I think it was just in my inclination, my personality too, I was like, well, I can't judge these people. I can't condemn their lifestyle. Like, who on earth am I to do that? So living with them really helped me expand

what I was capable of seeing and experiencing away from my hometown. And so I attributed both to them and to school. Sarah lost her faith, but she didn't tell her parents, not immediately. And it was truly because I just didn't want to hurt them. Understandable. And it was truly because I just didn't want to hurt them. Understandable. At what point did you reveal to them the path that you're on and essentially rejecting their worldview?

Yeah, I eventually told them, you know, actually only very recently. And it was because, like, some things in my life were revealed to them that very obviously implicated that I wasn't living the very like fundamentalist right wing Christian world view. So you were in the closet for about how many years then with your family? In the Christian closet, I guess from age 21 to 29. in the Christian closet, I guess from age 21 to 29. Yeah, so when I could no longer kind of hide that I was not living the lifestyle that they imagined for me, I suppose,

I had to sit down with them and I told them my process and I told them this is what happened in second year and the people that I met and how wonderful it had been to have that kind of weight lifted off of me. Evangelical Christianity can be a bit heavy and infuse you with certain feelings of trying to live up to expectations and stuff like that. They're at this point kind of convinced that it's just a phase, you know, and that I will come back.

And, but to me, I see it as like a Jenga tower that's fallen, you know, you're not gonna be able to put that back in the same way that it was. For most of her life, Sarah experienced her relationship with God as something direct and real. He was a specific physical figure, not some vaguely imagined entity. And now with the Jenga Tower fallen, she's able to understand how her beliefs came to be so strong and solid. Earlier, Sarah mentioned the influence of anthropologist Tanya Lerman.

I'm Tanya Marie Lerman. I'm a professor of anthropology at Stanford. She's the author of a few books, including When God Talks Back, Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. In researching that book, she spent years with evangelical communities, taking part in prayer groups. She was fascinated by just how far people would go to make God feel present. They would, in effect, play amongst themselves in order to

develop more skill in interacting with this person. So people would sometimes put out a dinner plate for God or a cup of coffee. The pastor once said, you know, put out a real cup of coffee in the morning. So you've got your ceramic cup of coffee and God has His ceramic cup of coffee. Has anyone expressed how God takes His coffee? No, and people were pretty sophisticated and subtle so nobody really thought that God cared how he took his coffee or I mean that's not entirely true people You know it's like but people recognize that there was a mixture of their own imaginative play and whatever God was. And so, you know, I knew somebody who would walk down to a park bench and she got a sandwich,

she was going to have dinner with God. She got one sandwich, she went down to a park bench and she and God were sitting there and his arm was around her shoulders and they were talking about their day. And she said something like, you know, I'm telling God about my day and God is telling me about his. So, you know, I mean, people did sometimes have very phenomenologically vivid experiences of, oh, I know exactly where God is sitting. He's sitting over there and I can't see him and I can't hear him, but I feel exactly where in the room He is sitting. And they have other vivid experiences. So one of the things I saw is that, you know, so the

best playful way, imaginatively rich way of engaging God is through prayer. And prayer in this kind of church is kind of daydream-like and imaginative-like and you're talking to God and you're waiting for God to talk back and you this kind of church is kind of daydream-like and imaginative-like, and you're talking to God, and you're waiting for God to talk back, and you're kind of thinking aloud to God, and you're waiting for words or images or some kind of communication to come through. And I saw two things I thought were true.

I thought there were people who were better at this prayer practice, this disciplined engagement with God than others. They liked it more, they were more comfortable with being caught up in their imaginations, and those people were more likely to say that they really were comfortable getting absorbed in their sensory worlds. So I could see some people are better than others. I also saw that people who did more praying and did more practice were more likely

to have vivid experiences of God. And so in the psychological experiment, actually I did a number of different things, but I was able to show both that if somebody who scored highly on something called the telegant absorption scale, they were more likely to say that they felt that God was like a person, they interacted with God, they had a sense. And they even said they would hear God speak back in a way they could hear with their ears,

where they would see something, they would have a sensory experience of God. I also was able to show that the more time somebody spent doing this kind of imagination-rich prayer, the more they were likely to also report those vivid experiences. Yeah, and you wrote that coming to a committed belief is a product of doing something, not thinking something. So can you explain a little bit what might be going on in a person's mind when it's the practice that is directing the thought process? I mean, I write that sentence really because I think that many people think about faith as a propositional commitment. I believe that God is real, something like that.

And in fact, what I saw is that even people of deep and committed faith, they often feel they don't believe enough. As people seek to make their experience more vivid, they are attending to those inner experiences, they're trying to cultivate those inner experiences, they're using other people to help them. What was striking to me was seeing it as a social and psychological process in which people are helping each other to change their own inner experience so they come to have a sense of this invisible being that is with them. Is this track with conspiracy theories and Pizzagate and people getting wrapped up in

these things? Pizzagate started on the internet. The story that John Podesta and I are running a child trafficking ring in the basement of the comet pizza parlor. By the way, there is no basement. Yeah, there is no basement. Do you feel like it helps explain that? I think so. I mean, I think that, you know, we see that the more people spend time elaborating

the ideas, the more they're supported by a small group of other people, the more vivid they become and also the more people feel a sense of response, they feel they have a piece of evidence that really stands out to them, the more real it becomes. But the more that your personal history is caught up with these narratives, the more that, you know, you know people around you who are reinforcing the narratives, the more you can see, interpret all of your world and the context of those narratives, the better.

So, but, you know, the internet and there are multiple channels allows people to live in their own world, gives them practices so the ideas within that world can start to feel more real. And it's about the practice and the community around that practice similar to what you were describing for the evangelical setting? Yeah, I mean, when there's an invisible being involved, then I think the practice is more important to make that invisible being feel real. Because you've always got to work to sustain that realness,

because you know, you can't see the spirit. So, you know, if you just have ideas about the spirit, but you're not interacting with the Spirit, it's not very, it's easy to give up the idea that the Spirit is there. All right. Well, your insights are at least going to make me pay attention to what I do in case it makes me believe things I don't want to. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

Thanks for the conversation. Much appreciated. Thanks so much. And Sarah is back with us. How are you doing? Hi, I'm good. Thank you. So Sarah, what's the significance of some of the ideas Tanya Lerman just talked about for your own PhD. Yeah, like what is most compelling to me is like how it's not about whether anybody has necessarily you know a lack of critical thinking skills, but instead they have a different

type of skill, almost a skill in imagination or a skill in being attentive to the experiences of their body and their creativity and it's that that enables them to see and experience realities that aren't perhaps in line with the mainstream and that perhaps involve invisible beings as Tonya was saying at the end there. A lot of conspiracies involve the activity of beings that we never really get to see, you know, whether it's the lizard people or the elite or even just a version of say a politician like Trump that we imagine to exist even if we don't get the concrete visual image of

that person doing those things that we imagine them to do. So in that sense, I think that political beliefs of this sort, and perhaps any type of political belief, is about reifying that reality through practices. And it just may be the case that certain people are better at reifying vivid realities that they don't physically see. Reifying is a great word. What does it mean again?

To solidify something as real and true even if it doesn't exist in the physical, visual, audible world. I don't want to say that other people need to stop believing in God just because they see these practices at work. There are a lot of Christians out there that live very fulfilling lives knowing that they can conjure or induce the feeling of God's presence. And that's what makes their faith vivid for them and it's kind of part of their experience of God, that kind of consciousness, but it just wasn't for me. I just wanted to say that. It was kind of an all-or-nothing situation for

me. It was either God is either completely real in these literal ways and so is biblical history or he's not, but I can imagine that for a lot of Christians out there that that already were not really using a literalist approach you know they could incorporate knowledge like what Tonya Lerman showed us and it be an even enriching part of their belief system. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also download the podcast through the CBC Listen app or through your favorite

podcast app. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth.

How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. Sarah is a PhD student who studies how people come to believe outlandish conspiracy theories are real. Sarah is not her real name, but one we're using in this episode as her work makes her

vulnerable to harassment and threats. She grew up in a conservative evangelical community, which believed literally in the biblical story of creation and the rapture, and that experience now helps her understand how practices can generate belief not just in religious communities but in broader conspiracy movements. Mostly what I do is online observational work and I don't like focus in on people themselves more so I focus on practices that are happening with digital content. So I look at how people comment on videos, like what their

reactions are to video and videos and comment sections, what comments are to like Facebook memes or memes that you would see shared in like Trump or other Cuban on Facebook groups, and I look at even the way that people make that content. This episode is part of our ongoing series Ideas from the Trenches, where producers Tom Howell and Nicola Lukcic explore innovative PhD work from across the country. Hello and welcome back to the Darling Academy. My name is Alina Cake-Pettit and I talk about etiquette, feminine

lifestyle, homemaking and being a traditional housewife. Sarah spends a good chunk of her working day exploring the far reaches of the internet, looking at how communities form and strengthen themselves. My name is Cynthia, I am a millennial homemaker. We talk about homemaking as well as femininity, and we really are a community of women who support each other along this journey. One online group Sarah spent time observing is the Trad Wife movement.

Trad Wife, of course, means traditional wife, and traditional in this case means women as homemakers. And thank you for being my sisters in this movement. It's almost like an underground movement of other women who felt the same. The TradWife movement started to gain traction online around 2017. Most offer homemade videos with an upbeat, friendly, welcoming style. And you can easily find TradWife accounts on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, where you quickly get a sense of the values the movement embodies and encourages.

The purpose behind this message and this movement is to encourage women to live more of a home-centered lifestyle if that is something that they want. Women these days have been pushed into becoming boss babes, into validating their worth through their economic output, as you have seen me mention in countless videos in the past. Women feel as though they are stuck, as if they don't have any options. And this is the reason why myself,

as well as other women on the internet, have come out and have exclaimed that they live a more traditional lifestyle because we really truly want to give you the tools to be able to achieve your life dream. TradWife influencers provide tips on how to achieve that life dream. All right, my first tip is to be honest about what your dreams actually are. If your only dream is to be a mother and a wife, do not feel small. That is a wonderful calling and we need more stable families in our society. Many women convey to me that they feel guilt and shame over desiring a life at home as if it were selfish or desiring a life with their children as

if it were selfish. When in reality a life with their children as if it were selfish, when in reality a mother tuned in to the needs of her children and graciously guarding the spending of a home and the goings on within a home is a generous and wonderful way to live. So far, so feminist in a sense, asserting women's right to live the lives they want, not be forced into a narrow social role, or demeaned for caregiving. But then typical tradwife advice nudges viewers gently toward conservative Christian values. Alright, my next piece of advice is to be mindful about your sex life. To my Christians, this of course means abstaining from sex

until you're married as the Bible explicitly warns against sexual immorality. But for all of my non-Christians you know that I dearly love you guys as well. This is going to be left up to your discretion as you don't need to abide by my scripture for your life. And then there's advice on how to choose information sources that are appropriate. My next piece of advice is to surround yourself with content that reflects your dreams. We don't need to live in bubbles,

but remember that what you consume reflects how you behave, what you think about, what you talk about, and where you ultimately will lead your life. Surround yourself with content online and in person that will benefit your goal of being a homemaker. For me, this means following accounts online that reflect cleaning, cooking, scripture, family, beauty, things that I want to improve in my life.

So a trad wife influencer might not explicitly promote any conspiracy theories at all. And yet, Sarah argues, this type of regular day-to-day online material feeds into a growing political movement. Tradwives are doing their politics every day in the most mundane way possible. They're purposely choosing to live a life that is in line with a traditionalist politics that rejects feminism, rejects progressive

politics, and kind of makes claim to this hyper traditionalist version of the world. Or they write feminism as something that's about freedom of choice as opposed to liberation for all women and stuff like that. So the content of the politics, this image of the traditional woman. And it's also something that solidifies their politics as in line with them, you know, conservatism. Or even the belief that, in the case of, like, say, Christian or evangelical tradwives, that this is the best type of activism that they can do to raise children that believe what they do. Sometimes in these accounts it's explicit that they want to raise white children that believe what they do. Sometimes in these accounts it's explicit that they want to raise white children

that believe what they do. All of them are kind of networked into this conspiracy about how traditional politics are what's needed to save the world before God returns or something like that. When you're deep in the tradwife YouTube bubble, you get offered videos that push evangelical conservative values more explicitly, like from this couple.

Feminism is not about equality between the sexes. It's about an inversion. So woman becoming man, and then libertarianism, man becoming woman. You heard a great word from... Elizabeth Elliott talks about how the woman's role is to respond and how it's the man's role to initiate. And that is very clearly what God's design was for with Adam and Eve in the garden, and the sin came when Eve initiated and Adam responded. And we can see that today, that that is the main role inversion of our culture.

It's our own lives that we've had to repent from. And yeah, so when we got married, Kelly was very headstrong, very demanding, very initiative in the masculine role. And here's me, the nice, kind, passive guy. And it's like, you know, a lot of resentment starts building. She resents me because I'm not taking the lead. I'm not having a vision. I resent her because it's like, why won't you just relax?

Quit controlling things. Quit controlling things. And, you know, so it's like, oh my gosh, we had to realize like, this is not God's way. And so for me, it's like, as the man, I have authority in the relationship of I am the one who's gonna have to give account for what our marriage, for what our family,

for what our life amounts to. Because Kelly, what she has to give an account for is did she submit to me? And did she pray for me? And did she honor me? Now a lot of people are just, their minds exploded. My mind would have exploded at this. Like 10 years ago, I'd be like, oh Scott you misogynist.

But it's like, no, there's a very real scriptural authority that if I just say, well Lord, she's her own thing. Like what she and the devil do in the garden is up to her and the devil. I was, it's this woman you gave me Lord. And that is what so and the devil do in the garden is up to her and the devil. I was, you know, it's this woman you gave me, Lord, like, you know, and that is what so many of us do. We abdicate and we watch her eat, you know, eat the fruit of becoming a man, of becoming God.

And we're like, well, let's see if she dies. And unfortunately, this goes all the way from family into institutions, you know? Whatever your politics and traditions, it's always appealing to draw this link between day-to-day family behaviors and the wider world of amorphous political institutions. It's hard to describe how that works in detail though. Sarah recommended what she sees as an especially good and recent attempt to do so, but from an extremely different point of view

than that of the traditional husband we just heard. Hi, my name is Jack Bradditch. I am a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He's also the author of On Microfascism, Gender, Death, and War. If we keep looking for fascism in all the old forms or only when it's fully formed, it's already too late.

What a word like microfascism, a concept like that does, is it tries to get at something that's prior to belief. And the belief might be a kind of claim or a cognitive attachment to something about the world or a knowledge about the world. But there's something drawing people to that. Before there's a belief, I think there's this desire to flee the material world, to create a fantasy world, a mythic world. Then that mythic world is then reimposed or imposed

on people that connects for me things like certain kinds of Christian nationalism, which seek to do that. That then also connects to like mass shooters like the Highland Park shooter who didn't have a manifesto. Some of these mass shooters don't have explicitly articulated beliefs. What they have is a way of creating, usually through digital culture, a kind of

fantasy world about themselves and others. And then at some point, they might re-enact that in a material way, you know, with actual victims. Jack Bratich argues that fully formed big fascism emerges out of pre-existing tiny fascisms and a process where they link together, building cultural power, drawing in more participants. The easiest example would be something like microaggressions or jokes. That starts in memes. It's in offhand comments that, in terms of gender, that men might have about women,

reducing women to objects. In terms of race, how races of people get dehumanized in cartoons and in humor. And the reason I think those kind of examples matter in a way now, maybe even more than before is because maybe in the past, those micro moments could be more isolated acts. They might exemplify a larger norm about sexism or racism, but they were done in small groups or interpersonally. Now with digitally connected populations and cultures, that micro is already connected horizontally to a lot of other micros, microscopic acts or microaggressions. So they already,

it's forming a sphere that is a little denser than I would say it used to be. And is there any way to gauge the degree to which this is becoming more of a problem now than it has in the past? Or is this something that's always existed and we should always be keeping our eye out for? Yeah, this is actually one of the ongoing questions within even fascism studies. How much of this has been with us for a long time and then just sort of gets Reactivated or drawn upon so what I would say and I'm gonna focus now on gender because I think that's the one That's the sphere of this that I think has really become More prevalent at least in the states, you know in the last six to eight months. I think in the States, we have begun to experience what in Europe, the kind of transnational right wing has been doing for years and years, which is to restore

patriarchal gender orders, either through policy or in everyday life. So in the States now we see, you know, obviously the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but in addition, the street level antagonism against trans youth and trans rights by right wing groups to kind of police a gender order has become heightened. So I think what we're seeing in the States is to answer your question, is a heightened version of that part of micro fascism, which is now kind of congealing in ways that make

it not just about small everyday acts of oppression, but kind of they're binding together. And that's the fascies, right? The fascies that fascism is really also about is how things bind together. So part of microfascism is understanding the forms of collective bonding. The Latin word fascus is the origin of the name fascism. It refers to a bundle of sticks tied together. But Jack points out he's not just describing a nascent political movement or an ideology exactly like the original Italian fascism of Mussolini. The social force he wants to define is more nebulous. People have talked about QAnon, for instance, as a alternate reality game or a live action role play.

To me, that part of what gets called a conspiracy is what matters, is the way that people are creating alternate realities and then trying to implement them into the world. And that is, it's hard to pinpoint that as a belief system because a number of different kinds of beliefs can fall into that. What counts as belief is complex.

Jack Bradditch makes the distinction between a fully formed belief system and what comes before belief. Earlier Tanya Lerman also divided belief into two kinds. Belief as a propositional commitment. Many people think about faith as a propositional commitment versus belief as an experience. They come to have a sense of this invisible being that is with them. Sarah's own take on the composition of belief comes partly from the work of a Danish anthropologist, Nils Bubent. Who talks about how sometimes the absence of something can be part of what compels your belief in that something.

Hi, I am Nils Bubent. I'm an anthropologist based in Denmark and I'm interested in witchcraft and associated phenomena in Indonesia and beyond. Nils is best known for his book book The Empty Seashell, Witchcraft and Doubt on an Indonesian Island. The Empty Seashell is an account of an ethnographic experience I had in the 1990s on field work in Indonesia on an island called Halmahera. And it's an account of what life is like with the possibility of witches all around.

And this is what I experienced people had. So it's an account of what local people called Gua. These are cannibal spirits that possess other people and unbeknownst to these people themselves, they then get into the business of attacking their neighbors and friends, eating their liver, but in an invisible way, such that those neighbors and friends return to their homes, get sick and often die. And historical records, and during my time in the field,

about half of the deaths that happened in the village were associated with these spirits. Now, at first blush, it seems it should be easy to figure out if a witch is attacking you and eating your liver, but all the paths to knowing for certain are blocked. These attacks happen when the victims are alone. The victims often don't remember the attack until it's very late, until they're almost dying. The witches themselves who are possessed by these spirits also don't remember what they have done and think they might be dreaming.

Niels Bubant came to view the stories about cannibalistic spirits as a particular kind of belief. They weren't definite claims about the world. They were more like an unresolved question or a doubt. In my experience of their experience of witchcraft in Indonesia, it is very much a problem of not knowing. I never found that anyone in the village that I lived in actually believed in witches. They doubted them.

The problem of proof in Indonesia in general, as I've come to understand it, is that proof is never definite. Proof that comes from the state or authorities are often fake anyway. So people that I know in Indonesia rarely trust proof. The point I'm trying to make here if I wanted to go into a helicopter perspective is to suggest that people who are engaged in witchcraft realities or irrealities if you like, because you never know whether they're real or not, are actually skeptics and pragmatists very much like we are. And the idea that witchcraft is a matter of belief, superstition and, to put

it plainly, stupidity is actually, I think, stupid itself. I think we need a much more empathetic understanding of witchcraft. Nels draws a link between the villagers' persistent doubts about witchcraft, and the European concept of a poria. It means a sense of puzzlement or skepticism, a state of disturbing, maybe irresolvable, open-mindedness. Which brings us back to the conspiracy theorists. What strikes me about modern-day conspiracy theories is how scientifically engaged they are. You know, we may not agree with their science,

but they're emulating a type of scientific thinking that I think is interesting. Where do you see that? Well, let me give an example. I will give you a conspiracy theory. For decades, big tobacco hit the fact that nicotine was deadly to people who were smoking. That's a conspiracy theory and was for a long time, except it's also true.

Lots of conspiracies actually take place. I'm not saying now that we all conspiracy theories are thereby true. I'm just saying if we want to understand the proliferation and the credibility of theories of doubt, such as conspiracy theories, I think we do ourselves a disservice to focus too much on the differences and positing an orientalist difference

between the sanity of our own beliefs or our own doubts and the insanity of other people's doubts. I think they come very much historically from the same source, and on the North American continent, but definitely also in Europe. We're talking about so many people who are interested in, half believe in, or fully believe in these theories that I think we need to understand their epistemological dynamics

and not just alienate ourselves from them. The same kind of exoticizing that we on the enlightened liberal left, and I include myself in that, make about witchcraft, I think, we're also in danger of making about conspiracy theory. Niels Bubat, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you. Niels Bubant is a professor of anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark. And Sarah joins us again. She's been listening to the episode so far. Hi Sarah.

Hi, how are you? Good. I really find it interesting that relationship between doubt and belief. What do you see as the relationship between the two? Well, in the book In the MTC Shell, as he mentioned, most people don't quote unquote believe capital B in witchcraft. But going about their daily life

and perhaps experiencing the death of a loved one or an uncertain noise outside your house, you wonder what is that or what caused that. In those micro moments, we've run into the possibility that maybe there is something else going on here. And the more we run into those moments, perhaps especially if we're scrolling on Facebook or something like that,

the more that doubt in our own reality or in the reality in the world around us propels belief in something else, maybe something invisible or something that we can't ever prove. So it's belief popping up in these moments of doubt. Anything from Jack Bradditch that you wanted to underline or respond to? Yes. Well, yeah, I mean, what really resonated for me again was that people don't have to have explicit,

fully fleshed out political beliefs or otherwise in order to contribute to something bigger or something more harmful. And that kind of resonates with the trad wife stuff because a lot of these women like, you know, they have a point. There is something horrendous about the rat race of capitalist life, of going to work and having to put your kids in daycare. Maybe daycare isn't even covered by the government, that type of thing. There is something tiring and horrendous about it. In that experienced reality, you're compelled to find something else. And it just so happens the right is right there waiting to provide the answer for you in response to your exhaustion. Then you get people participating with, you know, traditionalist practices, even if they don't have a fully fleshed out political reasoning

behind it, or even religious reasoning behind it. But it still has an effect. And another interesting thing I would say is that the claim that tradwives make, and I do believe that a lot of them fully, fully believe this, is that what they're doing causes no harm. In fact, it provides something good for women. a lot of them fully, fully believe this, is that what they're doing causes no harm. In fact, it provides something good for women. But what is being reinforced by their practices

is a politics of hierarchy and a politics of vertical power structures. And they're practicing the belief that gender norms are natural and instinctive and biological. And we just know from social sciences that that's not true, that gender roles are a product of, you know, the social systems that we live amongst. And we also know that the reinforcement of the idea of strict gender roles does cause harm to other people, to queer people, to non-binary people, and that is something

to be concerned about. What we're looking at here then is a set of people doing a set of practices that very likely they believe to have no harm. But when we look at it in the microfascist sense, going back to what Jack was saying, these are practices that contribute to something bigger, even unbeknownst to the person. And what would you say is the ultimate goal of your PhD dissertation? Do you hope that it could be used as a tool in some way to combat conspiracy theories on the internet? Yeah, I hope that it could be a tool to help conspiracy theorists or people that maybe have family members that are conspiracy theorists.

A lot of people have family members or people that they love get into conspiracies that actually really change their relationships with those people for the worse. And just in the sense that Tonya Lerman's book was influential for me, I wonder if my future work will be helpful to these people in understanding how their loved ones get caught up into beliefs that end up being harmful to themselves and others. While not straying away from showing the harm that these beliefs can cause, I hope also that my work is able to show that the answer is not to further otherize these people. And we started this episode talking

about your own growing up and your own experiences and a bit about your family. Do you think that your family will be reading your thesis and dissertation? And what do you think they might think of it? I'm not sure. They will want to support me. They will want to read it. They will want to understand it.

But at the same time, they will be pulled by their own belief to do a certain reading of it. So I don't know if they would read it in the end, if they would want to read it, but I do know that they will likely feel a pull from both directions. So we'll see. Well, good luck. I hope it produces some sort of breakthrough in terms of bringing people back together somehow, I guess. Is that, that would be nice? Yeah, perhaps that's the, perhaps that's the very overall goal is that, is just to better understand each other's processes of belief,

I think will allow us to better understand each other. Thank you, Sarah. This has been so generous of you to spend so much time with us, and all the best with finishing the dissertation. Thanks so much for having me. It's been really interesting. Good luck. Bye. You were listening to A Theory About Conspiracy Theories, part of our series Ideas from the Trenches. This series is produced by Nikola Lukcic and Tom Howell.

If you're a PhD student interested in having your work profiled on ideas, you can email ideas at cbc.ca and tell us a bit about the questions you're pursuing and why. Technical Production, Danielle Duval. Web Producer, Lisa Ayuso. Senior Producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.