I’ve been following the
controversy surrounding Barrack Obama’s pastor, Reverend Wright with amazement.
Mind you, I am not amazed at the words that Wright spoke, but at the fact that
those words stirred up the amount of disbelief they did. I’ve lived in the USA a
short time, but long enough to understand that conspiracy theories are the bread
and butter of the average human being. Is it really surprising that several
believe that HIV was designed in a laboratory and African peoples deliberately
infected with it? Is it surprising that people believe the federal government
was involved in facilitating the influx of drugs into inner city communities a
few decades ago? It shouldn’t be surprising at all, folks. We’re living in the
age of paranoia, and given the events of the past 500 years, understandably
so.
Just take a look at the annals
of recent human history and you will see a legacy of brutality and sadism that
will wrench your insides. Governments have been known to turn a blind eye as
atrocities are committed. Not surprisingly, governments have also been
implicated in sponsoring assassinations and forms of experimentation on
civilians. Think of the Holocaust and of the racist experiments carried out by
the likes of Dr Mengele. African Americans certainly can’t afford to forget the
Tuskegee experiment. And who knows what happened in South Africa under the
apartheid era. The indigenous societies of the Americas and Australia also have
sad stories to tell.
Unfortunately, we readers of
history have short memories. We forget how much power we cede to religious
leaders, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians to make decisions about our
everyday lives, and then we are shocked when one or more of these people is able
to use that power to cause irreparable damage. Victims don’t forget, though.
Perhaps it is the memories of the victims that makes us uncomfortable and makes
us want to turn the page when confronted with uncomfortable truths from our past
and present. And yet, even when we willfully forget, there is something in us
that maintains a fearful fascination with what we call evil. If you don’t
believe me, pay close attention to religious and political discourse, to the
types of books that top the best seller lists, and to the most popular
programming on television. You will start to suspect that the American public,
and humanity at large, is obsessed with the idea of dark, powerful, underground
forces controlling the world.
Frequently, conspiracy theories
are dismissed in the media as ludicrous or absurd. Very few take the time to
examine the relevant question: why do people believe in them? It’s not necessary
to share a person’s beliefs in order to understand where those beliefs are
coming from. So why, when faced with these theories, does the mainstream media
tend to shut down any attempt to examine them or discuss them? Why do reporters
and anchors spend more energy being offended that people can believe such
theories, than investigating the theories and the people who subscribe to
them?
I suspect that conspiracy
theories have such a strong hold on people because, first of all, there’s a
certain amount of truth in them. For instance, the idea of a government
designing viruses for specific population groups is not a far remove from the
following facts: that some nations are acknowledged to possess biological
weapons, that the Tuskegee experiment on African American men was allowed to
proceed, unhindered. When these facts are brought together in an environment
where racial injustice, prejudice and suspicion prevail, then a conspiracy
theory is inevitable.
Secondly, conspiracy theories
manage to tie up all the loose ends and to explain the mysteries that the
official narrative leaves unaddressed. Official theories explaining the origins
of HIV/ AIDS and its epidemiology are often self-contradictory and convoluted
while the conspiracy theory gives a clear-cut black and white explanation; no
ambiguous grays are allowed to linger. The result is that people are more
attracted to the version with a clear beginning, middle and end and where the
good guy and the bad guy are easily distinguished from each other.
Thirdly, conspiracy theories
tend to fit in with the predominant Judeo-Islamic religious narrative in the
community. If the community is Muslim, Christian or Jewish, then it is
predisposed to believing in scenarios that end in catastrophe (the apocalypse,
the end of the world, the decimation of the entire community by disease) and
involve a battle between good and evil.
Conspiracy theories should not
be dismissed, however ludicrous they may sound. If people believe strongly in a
conspiracy theory, then it is probably because they are living in fear and
believe they have no power over their own destiny. These feelings are
understandable among people living in extreme poverty, people battling an
epidemic that has crippled their entire society or people who have been
victimized time and again and continue to be victimized. Journalists are
uniquely placed to identify the fears that predispose people to believing
conspiracy theories. By examining those fears and asking questions about them,
they could expose gross inequalities in society, thus provoking people to
address those inequalities.
Admittedly, that is an idealistic scenario. Media exposés don’t always lead to corrective
actions being taken. However, I would like to believe that talking about our
fears as a community could help us gain some kind of agency and make it possible
for us to dream of surmounting the Kilimanjaros in our lives.
This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Please feel free to
use my writing for non-commercial purposes and do credit my name, Rose Kahendi,
as the writer.
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