A ‘quest for significance’ is the unifying thread running through this mentality and other harmful behaviours, a new book posits.
There are many theories about conspiracy theories, who is attracted to them and why.
At a time when the world is reeling from the decisions of a president who began his run by promoting one conspiracy theory (Birther) and crowd-surfed to supreme power on another (QAnon), and has put his health department under the charge of a man still promoting reprehensible myths about vaccines, I don’t think you can have too many.
Just last month the Journal of Health Psychology published this study linking belief in conspiracy theories to sleep, or rather the lack of it, with poorer sleep quality and insomnia correlating positively with conspiracy mentality and belief in specific theories.
Given what sleep deprivation does to our grip on reality, plausible.
But a new book on the topic from social psychologist Arie Kruglanski and journalist Dan Raviv comes at it from a very different angle.
The Quest for Significance: Harnessing the Need that Makes the World Go Round posits that it’s the need to matter that attracts people to certain beliefs.
That these beliefs may be deadly to others is poignantly central to the formation of Kruglanski’s ideas: he grew up Jewish in Poland in the 1940s.
The book frames itself as self-help – a descendant of Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people – undertaking to “uncover this [Quest for Significance, or QFS] psychology, spell out how it may increase your understanding of yourself and other people, and ultimately suggest how that can make you a more effective parent, spouse, colleague, and citizen”.
They find the QFS thread running through episodes as disparate as a cranky message on a 2000-year-old cuneiform tablet to terrorism to Putin’s war on Ukraine to domestic murder and rape to personal vanity, the pursuit of money, and beyond.
Conspiracy theories are only one of the harmful ways in which people may seek to claw back significance in a changing world that threatens to leave them alone, small and powerless.
“The loss of significance that people around the globe have been experiencing makes them vulnerable to a particular brand of narratives; ones that acknowledge their fears and anxieties and blame some agent or entity for nefarious plots and actions aimed at humiliating and diminishing them,” the authors write.
To the significance-deprived mind, propositions that should be absurd on their face, such as David Icke’s reptoids, offer the opportunity to rise above the undifferentiated masses by knowing something they don’t – something those with real power don’t want you to know. “[T]o be privy to a truth so scandalous and shocking makes a person feel very special, one of a select few ‘in the know,” they write.
Self-awareness is the key to understanding the motivations behind our beliefs, and giving respect and significance to others is a wholesome way to heal the need that may be behind some of them.
This is all very well, but honestly, lately your Back Page scribe has been looking around at world leaders – and prospective ones – and feeling I may have been unduly dismissive of Icke and his shape-shifting, bloodsucking reptilian overlords.
I’ll be doing my own research from now on.
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