Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer tackles the tough questions Christians face in a time when trust in institutions is at an all time low. What do we know to be true, especially when we’ve been lied to so much by the world? When does our distrust devolve into sin?
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I cannot go on social media right now without being barrage by people sharing fake news with me. And I don’t mean opinions I disagree with. I mean sharing things that are just factually untrue. It’s everything from a theory that is claiming things that just did not happen or AI generated art. Pictures that the person can’t tell aren’t real. So much of modern life is spent combating not just differences of opinion or perspective, but just outright the battle between truth and error, and this is likely to become reignited in many ways. One of those recently, Donald Trump announced that he was going to declassify all of the records concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King. And with all of those, there are different levels of conspiracy theories, people claiming to know what really happened.
And so I was recently asked on Patreon, which by the way, shameless joe.com if you want to join. I was asked on Patreon, what do we make of that spiritually? Because when you have these conspiracy theories about major world events or about really whatever, because we see this in theology, oh, the Catholic church is covering up such and such. We see it in politics. Oh, the government is covering up such and such. We see it even in sports. Oh, the Kansas City Chiefs get all the calls. You thought, I wasn’t going to mention the chief. Come on, I’m wearing red all week. In all of these areas, from the trivial and mundane and playful to the really serious accusations, we find people very willing to entertain theories about reality that are one, contrary to the mainstream narrative, that’s fine, but two, making very accusatory, damning sort of accusations about one’s neighbor. That’s where it’s not fine. So let’s get into that and kind of delve in.
As I kind of intimated, I want to make a threefold distinction because a lot of things get lumped in as conspiracy theories when technically they’re not. So for instance, if you’re someone who thinks, oh, modern Egyptologists are factually mistaken, the pyramids are way older than they appear, they were maybe put there by another civilization or aliens or something like that, that might be wrong, but that’s not by itself a conspiracy theory. That’s just, if you want to call it an alternate history, something like that, fine. If you think essential oils cure cancer, we might disagree, but by itself, that’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s just an alternate approach to medicine. So in this threefold distinction, the first and the most acceptable is just disbelieving the official version of things or the popular version of things. Frequently, the official or popular version is wrong or at least incomplete.
In fact, if you think about the great advances in medicine, say many of them wouldn’t have been made without a bunch of people willing to distrust that we have everything basically sorted out. Likewise, a detective investigating a crime, there are times where it’s really good to have that eye towards, maybe it’s not the way it seems on the surface by itself, not sinful. Where we start to get into more problematic territory is that second tier believing that the official story isn’t just wrong, but it’s actually a lie. It’s part of an intentional coverup that again, can sometimes be true, but we’re starting to get into murkier waters though. It’s not the kind of charge you want to throw out willy-nilly. And then third, the really full throated sense of the word or term conspiracy theory is not just thinking that the official version is wrong, but believing that you somehow have the real story, that the powers that be, you’re trying to cover up the actual truth.
And that’s where you’re on the shat route. Again, unless you have really good evidence, if you’ve discovered the smoking gun document, fine, great. But if it’s just you at home on the internet deciding you know better than everyone else who’s professionally looked into this, you should be extremely hesitant to go to that place just because of the spiritual implication. I’ll get into what those are, but I would be remiss if before addressing where conspiracy theories go wrong, I didn’t acknowledge why it makes sense for them to be so popular right now. To get a sense for their popularity, you have to really go back in time as it were. Imagine briefly the world of the mid 20th century where there’s a tremendous amount of trust in what we call elite institutions in the church, in churches, in Protestant denominations, in every social institution, in businesses, in the government, et cetera, people trusted the powers that be, were leading them more or less well, even if it wasn’t the president you happen to vote for even if it wasn’t your leader.
We see that in the numbers. We see it in the way things are talked about and the way press coverage works. And the problem here, although there’s a lot that’s really good about that, is that this sometimes masked real evil being done. So I want to actually start with a story that I had long thought of as basically presidential trivia before really grappling with how grave and sinful and arrogant this move was. And by that I mean the covering up of President FDRs physical ailments, his ailing health as well as his paraplegia and being confined largely to a wheelchair 1945,
CLIP:
As the global war reached its devastating climax, Franklin Roosevelt was the supreme figure of the wartime alliance, but also a man living on borrowed time. Roosevelt’s health was collapsing sa by chronic heart disease and by two decades as a secret paraplegic, one wartime American general nicknamed him rubber legs. But few Americans were aware that their president could not walk unaided or that he’d been diagnosed as being on the brink of cardiac failure.
Joe:
So in the middle of World War ii, while much of the world is relying upon American leadership, FDR Arrogantly decides to run for a fourth presidential term, which had never been done before. Even though he and those around him secretly know that his health is so bad that he is almost certainly going to die in office, which of course he does, and he waits till the end to even choose a vice president knowing he is individually going to be selecting the president for the country knowledge the American people don’t have. Now, my point here is not that an aging president would never try a move like that today, my point is that when Roosevelt did it, it worked. The media was complicit in covering for him. The other people who consulted with the president, those surrounding FDR, even those who disagreed with him strongly, didn’t sound the alarm and say, Hey, he is really sick.
And oh, by the way, did you know he’s been in a wheelchair for 20 years? It just doesn’t happen. So FDR wins a fourth term. The American people don’t find out that their president is confined to a wheelchair and then he dies. And Harry s Truman, who FDR had kept in the dark even on things like the Manhattan Project, is forced to figure out what to do with this atomic bomb he didn’t know about to someone growing up today, I would suggest that such a world is literally incomprehensible. That would never happen again. That will never happen again. But if you want to understand why things happened the way they did in the 20th century, anything from why are conspiracy theories so popular now to why did so many bad bishops cover up sexual abuse for so long? You have to understand that mindset of putting trust in elite institutions and institutions protecting their image by sweeping all problems under the rug.
This of course leads to the downfall of trust in elite institutions. You have things from Watergate to the sexual abuse scandal that start to undermine, start to crack the sort of public trust in those institutions. But honestly, what changes this in a profound way is not this or that scandal because this is a decline in trust in institutions that we see across the world, regardless of government, regardless of religion. Despite all of those things, we find declining levels of trust for elite institutions outside of dictatorships where I think it’s fair to say maybe trust levels are lower than people are willing to say publicly, but what accounts for that bigger shift then? Because you can’t just blame Watergate for people having less trust in the French government. You can’t blame the sex abuse scandal for people having less trust in the scientific establishment. What’s really going on?
Well, Martin Gry suggests a pretty convincing version. I don’t think this is the full story, but I think this is a major part of it. He’s a former CIA analyst and in his book The Revolt of the Public, he wants to know what changed and why, and he’s following world events all across the world. He’s seen revolutions and everything pop up, and he’s predicting that this is going to happen, that we’re going to see this outpouring of things like the Arab Spring, the outpouring of things like populist movements in the us, UK and France and Italy. He sees all of that stuff coming. Why? Because he notices certain trends in data. Because remember, his job as an analyst was to keep track of what’s going on in the world, and as he puts it, in the early days of his job, he came into the CIA during the Reagan administration.
It was a pretty easy job. There were not a lot of sources of information out there, so you could be well-informed on French politics or whatever pretty quickly. But then around the turn of the century, something major happens in his book, he references this uc, Berkeley study that finds that if you look at all of the information stored on paper, film, optical and magnetic media, that if you were to trace all of that up to about the year 2000, just have that be like one unit. It basically doubles in size over the course of about three years. From 1999 to 2002, the amount of world information doubles and then it doubles again, and it just is off at this kind of exponential curve, that kind of digital tsunami as he puts it. Information tsunami radically changes things because it means we no longer have to go to in the institutions we formerly trusted to find out what to think about a certain issue.
So if you think about the impact that the printing press had on the authority of the Catholic church, people could now say, I’m just going to take the Bible and read it for myself and see what I think it says. We have an equivalent version of that when it comes to what I think about world events, what I think about medicine, what I think about, fill in the blank, here’s how Martin Gury kind of explains. Now we will warn you this is, it’s about a minute and a half long clip. I don’t normally go that long, but I think he does a better job than I could of explaining the impacts of the information tsunami of leading to the downfall of trust in institutions and really paving the way for things like conspiracy theories to take hold.
CLIP:
You have to understand the great institutions of the 21st century, government media and so forth received their shape in the 20th. That was the heyday of the top down. I talk you listen, model of organizing humanity. It turns out that for this model to be tolerated as legitimate, it has to enjoy a semi monopoly over information in every domain. Remember what I said about my early days in CIA information was scarce. Hence, it was extremely valuable. The institutions that controlled the flow of information were vested with authority. They could tell ordinary persons top down what the important public issues were and often how to think about them. The information tsunami has simply swept away the legitimacy of this model. The elites today who run the system are totally demoralized for good reason. They know that their every mistake, their every misjudgment, every failed perception, every failed prediction, every self interested act, every sexual paid will be exposed and talked about endlessly. Today, elite failure sets the information agenda,
Joe:
And again, we see this erosion of trust in institutions across the world and not just in the realm of politics each year. Edelman the world’s largest public relations firm puts out what it calls the Edelman Trust Barometer. It’s an international poll analyzing how much people trust various social institutions, and what they’ve found is a quarter century long decline in institutional trust. Now, it might’ve gone back before that, but they’ve been looking for a quarter century. By 2005, they found that people were trusting their peers more than authorities, and overwhelmingly across the world we find that more than two thirds of respondents today worry that government leaders, business leaders and actually performing the worst of all journalists and reporters purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations. So both the government and the media are ranked as simultaneously unethical and incompetent.
That’s quite a potent combination. But again, that’s not just in the us. Western countries overwhelmingly reported having little trust in government or in the media and the countries that did perform well like Saudi Arabia and China probably did so because people were afraid to publicly criticize the government. Ironically, the Edelman Trust barometer was itself part of the problem of decaying institutional elite credibility when it emerged that Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates are Edelman clients. So they were paying millions of dollars to the same PR group that is putting together a report saying people in their countries really trust them. So trust in elite institutions of any kind is down, but there’s another related problem that might not have thought about. So in this widespread fast-paced information economy, it’s not just that I can fact check whatever I read in the news, it’s not just that scandals are harder to cover up.
It’s also that there is this rush to the press effect. Not only explain what I mean. Last week, Chris cia, a former CNN correspondent or analyst took to Twitter X whatever we’re calling it to do something extraordinary, to admit that he was wrong and Donald Trump was right about the origins of Covid. Now, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t know. I don’t know whether Covid originated in a wet market or in a Wuhan laboratory. I’ve heard good arguments on both sides. I’m not here to settle that for you, but I am trying to diagnose something that I found very striking, and I am not here to beat up on Chris CIA for doing the humble thing and acknowledging that he’d been too quick to trust the judgment of the CIA instead of trusting the president on these issues. Of course, he was also trusting people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, but what’s striking about this is Sia kind of realizes, oh, okay, the problem here was nobody knew what they were talking about.
Remember the twofold finding of people in 2020 and for the last five years is that their governments are both corrupt and incompetent. Not just corrupt, but good at their job, but they’re actually bad at their jobs as well. So in the midst of that, what I think a lot of people are reacting to is there were no COVID-19 experts in 2020. There just weren’t, no one had been around long enough working with it to be an expert in it. And so even the expert class was new to it. They were novices as well. They were more knowledgeable novices, sure, but the problem was a lot of the things they were saying turned out to be wrong sometimes perhaps intentionally lying to people about the efficacy of masks when there was a mask shortage, sometimes unintentionally just because the information is changing at a fast pace.
But as a result, you have a lead institutions saying things wrong and journalists saying things wrong and fact checking when they don’t have the facts in real time, but related to this. So he’s recognizing this problem like, okay, everything was too new and so we couldn’t get our facts straight. Now it is striking, he changes his opinion basically because the ccia a spokesman announced that the CIA had changed its opinion, so he’s still trusting in the elite institutions, but he’s showing why a lot of people don’t, and he’s showing why that is kind of eroded because that rush to judgment, which all of us kind of dealt with during the days of Covid where we had to make a spur of the moment sort of decision, how seriously do I take this? What’s the nature of this virus, et cetera, when none of us had a ton of information about it, led a lot of people, both experts and online to make brazen often false kind of claims.
I’m not meaning to bash the elites or the scientists or any of that. I’m meaning to say there was a pretty limited amount of evidence and evidence was coming in very quickly and people were having to adjust on the fly. I give that actually more of an analogy for the way news in general works because we often don’t think about it this way when there is breaking news. It used to be you had often much of a day to go and figure out all the facts and then put your story together and then it might make it to the morning paper. Right? Now, you often are in a rush of minutes because if you are trying to release something online, if you’re a journalist who is trying to get the clicks, because if you wait too long, if you spend two hours fact checking to make sure all of your T’s are crossed and all of your i’s dotted, somebody else is scooped it, somebody else has already gotten in there, they’ve gotten all the clicks, and your story is now a footnote, you are not getting the ad revenue, you’re not getting the traffic, you’re not getting the reputation.
And so there is this very difficult to overcome problem where there is a huge impetus to try to respond quickly. Look, I will say as someone who has a Catholic channel that is in no way breaking daily news, I’m aware that if I can respond quickly to events, people are more likely to want to watch that and I want to make things people want to watch. So there’s that balance because I don’t want to go so quickly that I’m just doing hot takes, right? Because those are often ill-informed and even mistaken, and you might make the situation worse, but if you spend four years trying to fact check something from last week, you’re wasting your time because no one’s going to care by the time you finish it. So we are in this precarious situation that the information economy right now where there is a massive amount of information coming out, not just to the journalists but to everyone else, and the journalists trying to shape stories are grappling with all of this as it comes to mold narratives that’s assuming the absolute best.
They’re still going to make mistakes and unlike before where their mistakes might’ve been caught by an editor hours before publication, now it’s more likely that mistake is going to be corrected after the fact leading to less trust in the same news sources because you see them being wrong over and over and over again. But I don’t just mean to pick on journalists because this is something I see people doing all the time. The same problem the journalists have of I want to respond to that event and I want to do so in a timely manner, but I don’t know if all the facts are correct. You see this online with less carefulness. To put it simply, for instance, last week there was a really tragic case where there was the airplane collision in Washington DC and immediately within 24 hours, there was a rumor that one of the pilots was a self-identified transgender pilot, and I mean this was clearly malicious bad faith.
There was no evidence supporting this, but they named someone’s name and this person had to go on the news to be like, no, I’m not dead. I was not involved in an air collision accident that is malicious and cruel, whoever originated that, and you can see the kind of rush to publication or rush to judgment that ordinary people engaged in spreading that kind of false story. The other thing that this, to add one more kind of reason why we’ve got this is there’s what’s called confirmation bias. So at this point, anytime I watch a football game, I know that after I go online, I’m going to hear the losing team explain why it was not that the other team was better. It was that the referees were the problem. Now to be clear, referees are imperfect, and now we have a bunch of cameras doing replay after the fact, and sure enough, you can find times where the slow motion camera captures something that a human eye doesn’t in real time.
Sure. So technology has given you access where you can see a mistake someone made in real time, but then this gets added with, therefore it must be a malicious conspiracy against my team and my team only or in favor of the other team and the other team only. We’re going to talk about football one more time. I’m just warning you, but I just mentioned this to say there’s this complicated set of things. There are real reasons why elite institutions have deserved to have an erosion of trust in them. People trusted them too much in the past, and they often abuse that trust. But second, we also have a media landscape where falsehood can flourish because it takes longer to combat the lie than it does to spread the lie. And third lies are often really appealing because they appeal to us at the level of confirmation bias because they tell us, you’re the good guys.
The other side’s, the bad guys, whether it’s the refs, the other team, the other party, whatever it is, we can be very prone to buying into narratives that yes, the other side is they’re bad and they’re malicious and they’re doing all this bad stuff on purpose, and that can be a really appealing kind of narrative. It can also be a really appealing narrative just to think even if there’s a malicious actor, at least all of this is well orchestrated and under control. So those are good and bad reasons. Conspiracy theories flourish. When do we need to worry about them? When do they become evil? I want to give an example of kind of an egregious and fairly well-known one that I think when you watch it again, is striking for another reason. You’ll see why this is the Pizzagate scandal.
CLIP:
One of the big surprises of the presidential campaign was the explosion of fake news on the internet, fantastic tales that some believe to be true.
Joe:
So that’s from eight years ago. Can you imagine someone saying that one of the big surprises in presidential politics is that people are saying things that aren’t true online? I mean, that is what Gry is talking about when he says that the elite institutions of the 20th century simply have no idea how to operate in the 21st century. That should not be a surprise in 2016 any more than it should be a surprise today, but please continue.
CLIP:
28-year-old Edgar Welch was arrested in Washington Sunday afternoon outside Comet Ping pong, a popular family pizza parlor DC Police say Welch fired at least one round into the restaurant floor with an AR 15 rifle like this one on his Facebook page. No one was injured. Police say Welch drove all the way from North Carolina to self investigate Pizzagate a fictitious online conspiracy theory. Pizzagate started on the internet shortly before election day when right wing sites that make up fake news spread rumors that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex trafficking ring. In DC court documents say Welch read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and he was armed to help rescue them. He surrendered peacefully when he found no evidence that underage children were being harbored in the restaurant.
Joe:
So that was a particularly ugly one. A guy goes in armed ready to apparently engage in violent acts to try to liberate kids who are allegedly being kept in sex trafficking, basically imprisonment in the basement of a pizza shop that turns out not to have even had a basement in the first place. That’s alarming, that’s concerning. But honestly, the chief danger of conspiracy theories in my view isn’t that you’re likely to commit acts of violence statistically, it’s just very unlikely. It’s very rare. Someone who believes these theories acts on them in a violent way. What is more likely to happen and is still tremendously dangerous is the spiritual damage, the spiritual damage that you’re doing to yourself and to your neighbor. When you facelessly believe and publicly accuse your neighbor of committing some gravely, sinful act like murder, that is itself gravely sinful. And that’s true even if it turns out your neighbor is a politician or a world leader, you don’t get the right to just publicly casually facelessly accuse people of grave evils like murder, like assassinating, JFK, like orchestrating nine 11 just because you happen to dislike them and because they happen to be a public figure.
So make no mistake, this is sinful behavior. If you indulge in this, if you’re sharing these kind of malicious stories, even if you personally bet that they’re true, if you have no basis to believe that they’re true, you are sinning in believing it and spreading it. The catechism is completely clear on that, and it’s rooted very clearly in what the scripture says about the respect we owe to our neighbor and how we think and speak of them. So in chapter four, St. Paul tells us, therefore putting away falsehood, let everyone speak the truth with his neighbor. For we are members one of another, that we owe a certain respect to our neighbor for the sake of truth and for the sake of our common membership, one of another. We are members of the same human family, and if this is another baptized person, we are members of the body of Christ.
We should be treating each other better than this. The catechism in talking about this in paragraph 24 77 says that the respect for the reputation of persons, so that’s the legitimate, there’s a bad thing called respect for persons where you treat the elite better than you treat your other neighbor. That’s bad, but there’s a legitimate respect for persons that St. Paul is talking about Ephesians four. So respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them injury, and it gives a couple examples of related sin. So you become guilty of the sin of rash judgment if you even tacitly assume is true without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor. And again, this is true. Even if your neighbor is famous, it doesn’t suddenly become okay to assume their moral fault without a sufficient foundation. And that sufficient foundation cannot just be that you don’t like them. It cannot just be that they’re of a different party or team or whatever. You need something more than that.
You are guilty of the sin of coy. Paragraph 24 77 goes on to say, when by remarks contrary to the truth, you harm the reputation of others and give occasion of false judgments concerning them. So if you’re spreading this, not only are you guilty of rash judgment, you are separately guilty of the sin of colony. You are lying about the other person, even if you think you’re telling the truth because you didn’t have a basis for that belief, you are spreading things that are untrue and that are harmful to someone else’s reputation that is sinful, and we should stop treating it like it’s not.
As the catechism goes on to say 24 79, detraction and colony destroy the reputation in honor of one’s neighbor. You don’t need to look far to see people whose lives have been destroyed by malicious falsehoods spread about them on social media. Honor is the social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honor of his name and reputation and to respect thus detraction and colony offend against the virtues of justice and charity. So we’re not playing around here. These are serious sins that we should take as serious sins, and it is no defense to these sins that you personally believe these things to be true unless you can also show why that belief is reasonable.
St. James in James chapter three describes it like this. He says, if we put bits into the mouths of horses that they may obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Then he says, look at ships also though they’re so great and are driven by strong winds, they’re guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So the tongue is a little member in boasts of great things, how great a forest is set a blaze by a small fire, sorry to Californians, who that might be triggering for. The point there is very simple, that your tongue, small part of your body, it can do some of the worst damage. And so you should treat it as seriously as the captain of a ship would treat the rudder as seriously as an equestrian would treat the horse in terms of putting the bridle or bit into the mouth of the horse to guide him.
James goes on to say The tongue is a fire. The tongue is an unrighteous world among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire, the cycle of nature and set on fire by hell for every kind of beast and bird of reptile and sea creature can be tamed and has been tamed by humankind, but no human being can tame the tongue, a restless evil full of deadly poison. Now obviously he’s not literally saying your tongue is evil, but he’s pointing you to the fact that this is where a lot of evil is coming from. How are you speaking about other people? And so this is something that I think we have not given the spiritual attention that it deserves. James goes on to say with it the tongue, we bless the Lord and Father and with it we curse men who are made in the likeness of God from the same mouth come blessing and cursing my brethren, this ought not to be so, and that’s what I would say as well.
Like, Hey, stop being okay with this. This is something that you’re doing. Stop doing it. I’ve been guilty of this myself. I’m not trying to point the finger at people I haven’t been guilty of the same sin of, but I am saying, I think this is an area where we are just not focusing on how serious of a fault this is, and we treat it as this kind of like a, oh, that’s my wacky friend. He just has some weird conspiracy theories. It’s like, no, if those weird conspiracy theories involve publicly accusing people of evil things and even indulging in my heart, then I’m convinced that you committed some horrible crime that you didn’t commit that is not spiritually neutral, that is not harmless, that is detrimental to my soul and to your honor. So how can we fight sinful conspiracy theories? And I mean here in both senses, how do I fight them in my own life and then how can we confront them if we see someone we love going down that rabbit trail?
It’s a tricky question to answer. I’m going to answer the second part at first then look at it both for us and for people we love. So Blathe Pascal in the Poe gives advice, and I know I quote this a lot because I love this, and this is a good guide for how to fix any problem you see in your neighbor. He says, when we wish to correct with advantage and to show another that he heirs, we must first notice, excuse me. We must notice from what side he views the matter for on that side it is usually true and admit that truth to him. So you’ll notice the first thing we have to do is understand what drew him to this theory in the first place. And it doesn’t mean you have to get way down the rabbit trail yourself, but maybe there is something that seems unsatisfactory about the official account.
Maybe to take a benign example, maybe that was a bad call that ref made. I don’t have to go down a rabbit trail of assuming the absolute worst about him. Maybe he made a mistake, but if I can’t acknowledge that maybe a mistake was made or maybe the official account seems incomplete, then we’re unlikely to get very far. There’s a reason I began this video by explaining the decline of trust in elite institutions is in no small part the fault of elite institutions because so often when I hear people combating conspiracy theories, they don’t acknowledge that conspiracy theories are responding to something real, and as a result it misses the mark because if I know, okay, these elite institutions have lied to me numerous times and I’ve seen them lie to me, seen them get caught in a lie, why would you tell me I have to blindly trust them?
And to be clear, I’m not telling you you have to blindly trust them. I am telling you, you can’t wildly accuse them of sins and crimes, but that doesn’t mean you have to blindly trust everything they say. But notice you have to first, if you’re going to address someone who’s down that rabbit trail, you got to see where they’re coming from and you have to affirm to them the stuff that they’re getting righted. If you want to have any success, you got to start there. Then you revealed to them the part that they’re missing. But Pascal says he’s satisfied with that for he sees that he was not mistaken then he only failed to see all sides. Now in this case, there might actually be a false conclusion, but they might be onto something and you can get that something that they’re onto and that gives them more intellectual space to realize, okay, maybe I got this part right in that part wrong, because no one’s offended at not seeing everything, but one does not like to be mistaken.
So again, remember that’s why I broke the conspiracy theory formula down in three parts. Number one, disbelieving the official or popular version of events. That’s often right. Often the official version is inaccurate or at least incomplete, more problematic is when you jump from that to saying it was done on purpose sometimes, sure, but other times it’s not. We don’t have to jump to number two and assume that this was an intentional coverup. And then jumping from there to number three, that if it’s a coverup, it must be because of X, Y, Z. That should be a pretty hard stop unless you have really good evidence that YZ is the actual truth. The mere fact that you find the official version Uncompelling doesn’t give you the leeway to make those kinds of logical leaps in spiritual judgments. So I’m going to once more give you the trivial example of the chiefs and football more broadly.
One way to address the erroneous part of these conspiracy theories is right there on that. Number three, when people believe they have the real story, press them on the details. It’s very easy for someone to say, oh yeah, it’s a conspiracy by the refs, or jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams or whatever. But then when you press them and say, okay, what exactly is your theory of what happened and why? That’s when a lot of conspiracy theories start to fall apart in an obvious way because they tend to be number one, overly complicated, number two, involving way too many people and number three for really dubious kind of motives. So we’re going to take the chief’s one because it’s tame, it’s safe, it’s apolitical, but you can apply this in any number of examples. The popular theory, if you go on the internet right now and just read the comments on any story about the chiefs winning, which is what they typically do, you’ll find people claiming that the refs gave it to them, and that sounds really good as a generic category, the refs, or if they say, oh, the NFL wants the chiefs to win, here are the problems with that.
Number one, the rules are decided on by the NFL and specifically by every one of the 32 member teams. So if you’re going to say the NFL is part of a conspiracy, either because of the rules or the enforcement of the rules to make sure the chiefs constantly win, your argument is that 31 other teams are conspiring to lose so that Kansas City can win Kansas City, not a particularly big market team. You would think that all of the financial incentives for a team would be to win, let their jerseys be sold, let them be in the Super Bowl. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense when you actually realize that the NFL is a trade association and that you’re accusing the Bills leadership of sabotaging the bills. When you say the NFL did it, that doesn’t make a ton of sense. Well, likewise, the motive for this doesn’t make a ton of sense either, because allegedly, oh, well, of course they’re going to do it because everyone wants the chiefs to be in the Super Bowl because that’ll sell more tickets and they’ll get more viewership or something because Travis and Taylor, I don’t know.
But then when you look at the numbers, it’s like, oh no, really, there’s no evidence. New York Times actually had to do an entire piece on whether there was a Taylor Swift effect on NFL membership and came to no conclusive findings maybe, but it’s just absolutely clear. It’s a pretty nebulous motive to commit a pretty serious set of crimes. And to be clear, these would be crimes. Rigging games is not something you’re allowed to do. I don’t care what uninformed people on the internet tell you, that is the kind of thing that would get you in serious trouble for, again, what appears to be a financial loss for probably 30 to 31 of those teams. And then by the way, the conspiracy is even bigger than that. Not only are all of the owners apparently in on it, but so are over a hundred different NFL referees.
Even if you assume the players aren’t in on it, somehow everyone around them is in on it and is keeping really effective tight lips. So I just bring that out to say anyone who tells you the NFL is scripted or that it’s rigged does not understand football and doesn’t understand the structure of how it works, and is sharing a conspiracy theory that if you press him on it falls apart like a house of cards. Now, am I saying that because I’m a chiefs fan who wants to take more credit for chief swings? Absolutely, but also because it’s true, there’s another way we can go about it besides just dissecting the implausibility of the various conspiracy theories. If it’s when you’re tempted to entertain yourself, remember these words from the catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 24 78, to avoid rash judgment. Everyone should be careful to interpret in so far as possible his neighbor’s thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way.
Now, to be sure there are times where someone is unambiguously being malicious or evil or whatever those things happen, no one is denying that. But what is frequently the case is that the person who is hostile politically or whatever other way reads things one way and the person who is favorable, same party, same group, whatever, interprets things another way, a more charitable way. We should strive for that more charitable interpretation. Even if you disagree with the politics of the person you’re critiquing, you should strive to interpret things as far as possible in a favorable way. The catechism then quotes in Ignatius of Loyola from his spiritual exercises where he says, every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands, and if the latter understands it badly, well the former correct him with love.
If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved. So there he’s thinking about something like if your neighbor says something that sounds heretical, what should you do? Well, you should try to interpret that in a non heretical way. Is there a way of saying, could that be read in a orthodox kind of way? And if not, what did he mean by maybe he’s just made a mistake. I don’t have to assume a malicious, I can assume an ignorant kind of interpretation, and then is there a way I can address it charitably for his good?
This is related, although the catechism would never quote this to what’s called hamlin’s razor never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. So even if you think the government screwed that up or that account is incomplete or the ref made a mistake or fill in the blank, you don’t have to then jump to they did it on purpose. It’s enough to say that probably shouldn’t have happened. I don’t have to assume bad motives, and I should strive really hard not to assume bad motives. CS Lewis, I’ll close with this in mere Christianity, gives really good spiritual example that I think should give us something to chew on as we ponder this. He says, the real test is this supposedly reads the story of filthy atrocities in the paper. So maybe that’s another country that you hate means he’s giving these words during World War ii.
So he’s even thinking of giving the benefit of the doubt to the Nazis. But whatever the case, suppose one reads the story of filthy atrocities in the paper, then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true or not quite so bad as it was made out, is one’s first feeling, thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that. Or is it a feeling of disappointment and even a determination to clinging to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? Notice that move. It feels good to believe that the people who oppose you are moral monsters. It does. It shouldn’t, but it does, and you have to watch that and resist it internally because believing we don’t just have a reasonable disagreement, but they’re really horribly wicked bad guys. Makes me feel better about myself because I oppose them.
Everyone, regardless of your political affiliation, regardless of your religion, regardless of anything, like every one of us is prone to that, but you have to watch out for that, and Lewis is going to tell you why. He says, if it’s the second step, if it’s that one where you want to hold on to the wicked interpretation, even when you find reason to believe you shouldn’t, then it is, I’m afraid, the first step in a process, which if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head later on, we shall wish to see gray as black and then to see white itself as black. You can see that politically, people who go in for malicious kind of theories about what their political opponents believe and what they’re really up to, who really are convinced that they’re child traffickers or Nazis or whatever else.
If you really go in for that and you start to think that black is a little blacker, the number of people who get pulled into that orbit seems to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so then it gets to a place where anyone who disagrees with me on anything is a fascist. Anyone who disagrees with me on anything is a totalitarian or whatever the preferred insult of your group is, that’s bad because now not only has black gotten blacker, but gray has gotten blacker and white becomes black as well. Finally, Lewis says, we shall insist on seeing everything God and our friends and ourselves included as bad and not be able to stop doing it. We shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred. That’s what I worry about because there is an authentic conspiracy that we haven’t talked about, and that’s this as St. Paul reminds us in Ephesians chapter six, our war is not against flesh and blood. The person you think of as your enemy is not your enemy. Our war is against powers and principalities. There is a conspiracy of demonic forces to tear us apart, to make us more wicked and less loving towards one another, and that’s the conspiracy we need to be fighting against. That’s what we need to be resisting for our good, our neighbor’s good, and ultimately even for our salvation. For Shamless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.