A Fraction Too Much Fiction

Eccentricities or misinformation? After the storming of the US Capitol, Samantha Trenoweth asks, how dangerous are conspiracy theories?

- Samantha Trenoweth

Jitarth Jadeja is a nice guy. He’s 33, he lives in a comfortable house in suburban Sydney with his family, who he loves and who emigrated from India when he was a tot. He cares about things like a fair go for all Australians, looking out for your neighbour, respecting your parents, being a good friend. But two years ago, Jitarth wanted to see a whole bunch of people, whom he’d never met, publicly hanged. Two years ago he believed that Hillary Clinton was at the centre of a satanic paedophile ring, and admits with deep regret that he’d have been happy if she’d been murdered.

“It’s a mass delusion that’s being passed from person to person,” Jitarth says now, looking back to the two-and-a-half years he spent obsessively following and genuinely believing the conspiracy theories he read online, including the now infamous QAnon, which fuelled the insurrection at the US Capitol in February. “It’s like a coronavirus of the mind,” he adds. “It’s highly infectious, has different strains and there’s a race to find a cure before it mutates into something much more lethal.”

That thousands of people, driven by disinformation and delusion, could attempt to overthrow a democratically elected government has certainly brought conspiracy theories into the political spotlight. But those who study them insist there’s nothing new here.

A brief history of lies

“Conspiracy theories have always been with us,” says Karen Douglas, Professor of Social Psychology, at the University of Kent in the UK. “There’s even evidence of conspiracy theorising in ancient Rome.”