Home Blog Page 85

Beware the ‘They’: once we believe in hidden, evil cabals, we can be convinced of anything

Aaron Rabinowitz
-
0
Beware the ‘They’: once we believe in hidden, evil cabals, we can be convinced of anything

Beware the “they”. No, I don’t mean the shadowy cabal that some say runs the world, I mean beware of anyone who starts to talk about “they” or “them” when explaining why things aren’t quite as they seem. At the heart of every conspiracy theory is the key premise that “they” – the mysterious conspirators – are controlling the flow of information such that the evidence needed to out them is suppressed and replaced with mass media misinformation. The fact that all conspiracy theories posit a “they” may seem trivial, but it’s worth focusing in on the nature of this premise, because it ultimately allows one to believe anything. That complete dissolution of an individual’s capacity for genuine skepticism is what makes even trivial conspiracy theories into potentially dangerous on-ramps to a very dark spiral.

For folks not familiar with how conspiracy theories work, consider Qanon. Qanon could rightly be described as an all-encompassing conspiracy. It is massive in scope and tends to absorb all other conspiracy theories into its framework. Very briefly, Qanon is an updated version of the antisemitic blood libel myth that claims there is a secrete elite cabal of paedophiles who traffic in children for both sex and to siphon off a chemical called “adrenochrome” that “they” then inject to stay young. At this point, Qanon contains so many absurd and even contradictory moving parts, you’d expect it to collapse under its own weight. On the contrary, at least until recently Qanon’s membership has been growing. It now includes between two and twelve representatives in Congress and was heavily implicated in the Capitol hill riot. All despite zero manifestation of the promised crackdown on elite paedophiles, as well as investigative journalism exposing the fraudster likely to be running Q. How could such an absurd narrative gain so much traction in the general population? Revelations about Jeffery Epstein and his subsequent death certainly help fuel the fire, but I think the main cause is more systemic than circumstantial: once you start down the path of “they”, it’s hard to stop.

A Qanon flag at a rally in Virginia with the tag line "Where We Go One We Go All". Image by Anthony Crider (CC-by-2.0)

For folks who are familiar with conspiracy theories, Qanon’s resilience will come as no surprise. Conspiracy theory communities tend to be even more resistant to conflicting information than regular human communities, which are already pretty bad on this front. There are a variety of mechanisms that contribute to that epistemic resilience, but I think the among the strongest , the one that conspiracy communities always fall back on, is the appeal to “they”. “They” don’t want you to know the truth, and “they” are sufficiently powerful that it’s reasonable to infer you don’t have the full truth. Once you have that argumentative move in place, it serves as an unbeatable counter to any conflicting information. Documents that disprove the conspiracy? Obviously forged by “they”. A public statement made by Trump himself disavowing Q and calling the whole conspiracy nonsense? Simple, either “they” got to him and forced him to make that statement, or he’s bluffing to draw them out. Once it’s formed, every piece of information can fit neatly into the epistemic permission structure.

It would be bad enough if the “they” premise merely made conspiracy communities immune to conflicting information, but there’s an inverse problem that’s just as dangerous. The same “they” premise that can undercut any conflicting information also allows for the unfettered incorporation of any new information. If “they” are really the all-powerful manipulators of information that conspiracies like Qanon demand, then “they” could be suppressing the truth about anything, and are probably suppressing the truth about a great many things. In that mindset, all conspiracies become equally plausible, and the result is a tendency towards Qanon type Ur conspiracies that create a space where conspiracy theorists from all walks of life can come together and join in the Massively Multiplayer Online narrative game. There’s good reason to think that the experience of shared narrative formation combined with the endorphins produced by feeling like one of the epistemic elect drives a lot of engagement in these communities, and the open door nature of the “they” premise means there are always new narrative adventures to join.

In an easier world, you could simply see someone citing a “they” and move on with your life. The unfortunate reality is that we cannot simply dismiss any theory that posits a conspiracy, because documented examples of conspiracies exist in the world. There have been and likely still are “they” out there, having some amount of influence. Some of them are likely to actually be pedophiles. Statistically, some of them will involve people of Jewish decent. How do we address the spread of conspiratorial thinking in a world of competing power systems?

What we need is a meaningful way to distinguish between Conspiracy Theories in the problematic sense and theories that involve exposing genuine conspiracies. As with other kinds of flawed but persuasive arguments, there is no simple formula for separating the wheat from the chaff here, but there has been some interesting progress with this on the AI front. The culture analytics group at the University of California are working on a program that can detect the “signs” of conspiracy theories in online conversations. In the process, they’ve exposed some interesting commonalities amongst Conspiracy Theories that might distinguish them from genuine investigations into conspiracies. For example, Conspiracy Theories tend to form rapidly, due to the addictive nature of collective narrative formation games. Conversely genuine investigations take years to get a complete picture. Conspiracy Theories also tend to be overly complex and aim to explain way too many things. Actual conspiracies, on the other hand, tend to explain discrete events, as in the case of the Bridgegate conspiracy.

There are still a variety of problems with these criteria. Conspiracy theorists will argue that their theories are aimed at discrete events, such as 9/11, or the assassination of JFK, or the death of Jeffry Epstein. I personally struggle to square these criteria with the Christian conspiracy exposed in Jeff Sharlet’s The Family. Sharlet claims that a substantial cabal of evangelicals have significantly influenced American foreign policy and provided material support for harsh conservative laws like Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act. Similar reporting has argued that Evangelical Christians are influencing foreign policy with the explicit aim of bringing about the end of days by creating the right environment for the events of Revelations to unfold. These religious zealots have infiltrated our government at the highest levels and have substantially influenced foreign policy around places like Israel for the sake of achieving their ends. This has even produced a great deal of coordination between these fundamentalist Christians and many Pro-Israel Jews, because a key part of Evangelical Christian eschatology involves Jews regaining control over Jerusalem and reconstructing Herod’s temple where the Dome of the Rock currently stands. Prophecy or not, that would likely precipitate something that would look a lot like the end times.

If I’m comfortable saying that The Family and other religious cabals are influencing global politics, how can I confidently say they’re the only religious cabal that exists and has that level of influence? I don’t think a perfect formula exists to draw the distinction. I hope the reason I believe what I believe is because I’ve examined evidence presented by experts on these two subjects and found the evidence for The Family much more robust than the evidence for Jewish conspiracies to wipe out the white race or keep everyone enslaved. Sharlet’s theory avoids the criteria of having formed rapidly through online narrative formation. It’s debatable whether it fails on scope, since you could argue it’s primarily used to explain discrete choices by evangelical conservatives in America, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t end up explaining a lot more.

A shadowy figure holding their palm out

One major difference for me is that Sharlet never claims The Family has the kind of absolute grip on information that makes claims of “they” so dangerous. While it’s likely that The Family, along with other conservative groups, have heavily influenced the conservative media environment, in the end their power appears patchy and narrowly focused, rather than absolute and ubiquitous. I think these are sufficient distinctions, but as always it’s not nearly as strong a case as I would prefer.

Let me wrap up with a related question that commonly arises when discussing the “they”: Why does “they” so often turn out to be “the Jews”. If you’ve spent much time around conspiracy theorists, you’ll understand this isn’t just a punchline, there really is a reliable principle that, over time, the odds that any Conspiracy Theory will come to include the Jews approaches 100%. Ironically, this forms a kind of inverse of Godwin’s Law, the internet rule that, as the length of an online argument increases, the odds that someone will be accused of being a nazi also approach 100%. With the reverse Godwin, though, the mechanism is not as simple as people inevitably reaching for a universally reviled baddie, though it does retain some of that flavour.

My theory for why all “they” inevitably come to include “the Jews” is that Jews have dominated as the go-to group for scapegoating through much of history, and so when modern conspiracy theorists go to “investigate” who “they” really are, their inability to resist absorbing conspiratorial thinking, combined with the ubiquity of conspiracies about the Jews, makes it vanishingly unlikely that the Jews will play zero part in their explanation.

You may still wonder why Jews have historically been the most common scapegoats in the Abrahamic world. My sense is that it really does go back to their being scapegoated for the death of Jesus as a marketing gimmick for Christianity. A gimmick so effective that, 1950 years later, my dad was still getting called ‘Christ killer’ while growing up in the Bronx. There are plenty of other socio-economic factors that likely also contribute, but the result is that Qanon, ‘the Great Replacement’, and ‘the Great Reset’ are all just reboots of blood libel and other antisemitic conspiracy theories. Even conspiracy theorists that seem entirely apolitical, like flat or hollow earthers will, when pressed, frequently reveal that they believe it’s Jews at the center of the hollow disk or whatever. In the case of flat earthers, one confounding variable is the surprisingly high influence of Christianity within the flat earth community, which creates an opening for implicating the Jews in hiding the truth. Still, it continues to be the case that all internet conspiracy roads lead to the Jews.

Once again, I’ve left you with more problems than solutions. I can’t say with confidence that The Family is the only shadowy cabal with esoteric goals out there fiddling with things, or that they all are likely to have little to no influence. We’re stuck, for the foreseeable future, having to pick through these conspiracies by hand, which means we’ll always be far behind those spinning the theories, as they face no such research constraints. I realise that’s an unsettling epistemic reality to live in, but I’d have to invent a conspiracy theory to make it easier, and that’s how “they” get you.

Why we should have listened to Flat Earth believers (even though they were completely wrong)

Michael Marshall
-
0
Why we should have listened to Flat Earth believers (even though they were completely wrong)

This article was first published in May 2018, for Gizmodo UK. Since then, the Flat Earth movement has largely dissipated, but many of its proponents have shifted to become COVID-deniers and QAnon conspiracy theorists. I believe this is no coincidence, and that the technological drivers and social isolation that fuelled the rise of the Flat Earth movement are the same pressures growing the QAnon and anti-mask conspiracy movements. As Gizmodo UK has shut down, The Skeptic has chosen to republish this piece.

It’s easy to attribute the recent resurgence in belief that the world is flat to stupidity or gullibility – indeed, physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson writes Flat Earthers off as proof that the educational system has failed. But while it might be rightly labelled ridiculous, belief in the Flat Earth does not exist in a vacuum. People who believe that the is Earth flat almost universally accept other conspiracy theories too, and while Flat Earth belief can be harmless, its bedfellows may not be quite so benign. 

To understand what brings people to reject what has, for centuries, been one of the most uncontroversial facts about the world we live in, I attended the Flat Earth UK Convention, the first meeting in the UK to bring together disbelievers in the globe Earth model. 

Iru Landucci, one of the conference’s headline speakers, has researched the Flat Earth since 2014 and found no problems marrying his rejection of the spherical Earth with his other areas of interest: researching the New World Order, 9/11 truth, exposing the supposed perils of GMOs and vaccines, and promoting the wonders of Germanic New Medicine. 

“99% of all disease is psychological”, he explains to the audience. “Even cancer is caused by emotional factors”. 

As it turns out, Landucci flew in from his native Argentina for the conference, arriving a day earlier than anyone expected – arguably exposing just one of the pitfalls of a world view which struggles to explain the International Date Line. 

Time was clearly a struggle for Landucci: he had prepared a two-hour presentation for his 90-minute speaking slot. After some negotiation with the organiser (who spent the weekend fighting an uphill battle – albeit on a strictly-flat plane – to keep things on schedule), he agreed to give his presentation in two halves. The first half lasted for 90 minutes, with another 45 minutes after lunch. The third half, the following day, lasted just over an hour. 

Satanism, NASA and the One World Order

Landucci’s talk was a perfect illustration of the role Flat Earth belief has in attracting and unifying dozens of disparate conspiracy theories: we are told climate change and evolution are fake; the moon landing was a hoax because Satanism is at the heart of NASA’s agenda (as proven by how many astronauts do the “devil horns” finger gesture in photos); dinosaurs were invented by an artist who simply drew a rhino crossed with a giraffe and then painted it green; atheists actually worship the Greek mountain giant “Athos”; and the Freemasons and the Jesuits control everything, as explained in the (well-known anti-Semitic hoax) book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. 

All of this is supported by with Landucci’s “evidence”, largely consisting of clips of scientists making seemingly damning admissions (sharply cut to avoid anything that might give their words context) and bafflingly intricate attempts to ‘decode’ signs of the grand plan hidden in plain sight. For instance, Landucci points out that if we take the Spanish initials for the United Nations, ‘ONU’, and read it backwards, we get ‘Uno’ – which is Spanish for ‘One’. This, he explains, is proof that the UN is a tool of the One World Order. I found myself wishing Landucci spoke French, so at the very least his paranoia might get to the point in a marginally less convoluted way. 

Noah’s Medieval Flood

Satanic symbolism was a concern for other speakers, too. Welsh YouTuber Martin Liedtke believes the globe model is the work of Satan, “put in place to lead people into oblivion and away from The Creator”. He explains that Noah’s flood took place just 1,000 years ago, as is proven by the presence of Middle Age architecture in some Middle Age drawings of Biblical events. He also believes the ageing process is optional: you can choose not to age. Liedtke is in his fifties, at least.

Despite his on-stage confidence, Liedtke’s journey to Flat Earth belief in 2015 was not an easy one. 

“I’ve experienced the people who run the Matrix, they’re not nice”, he tells the audience. “What you are living in is not what you think. I could give you proof but I won’t, because it’s traumatic as hell… I’ve been put to the test like you would not believe. The Creator has put me to the test to put me here in front of you, for a reason.” 

Having seen Liedtke’s YouTube channel, to which he’s posted more than 230 videos in the last six months, I don’t doubt him when he alludes having faced serious personal struggles. 

Another of the speakers, Dave “Allegedly Dave” Murphy, also rejected the spherical Earth model following traumatic events. Murphy served as a volunteer firefighter in New Jersey and witnessed 9/11 at close range, leading him in 2005 to become a believer in Truther conspiracy theories. According to Murphy’s website, that same year he had a mid-life crisis which convinced him to start living off-grid. Alongside his Flat Earth beliefs, Dave advises on how and why to drink and wash with your own urine, highlighting that urine “reverses aging” and “is helpful” with AIDS, cancer, smallpox and more. 

The Cosmic Egg

When it comes to constructing a grand narrative around Flat Earth belief, nobody at the conference came close to Martin Kenny, who presented his “Cosmic Egg” model on Saturday evening. Summarising his theory hardly does justice to its spiralling complexity, but his starting point is the (mistaken) assertion that in the foundational myths of almost every culture in history, the universe was hatched out of a giant egg. With that in mind, reasons Kenny, the universe itself must be egg-shaped, with the Earth at the centre. This is the smallest leap in logic Kenny will make all evening. 

Once we know where the Earth is, we can start to look at its shape. The Earth, Kenny explains, is a circle, with the North Pole at the centre. So far, so standard Flat Earth. However, beyond the ring of ice that most of us know as Antarctica, there is actually another realm, and another beyond that, forming concentric rings, separated by ice. Each realm was once adjacent to the North Pole, but were pushed out when a new realm was formed. Every realm is densely populated, and the people who live there are what we have mistaken throughout history to be angels or aliens. 

What exactly are those realms, you may wonder? Kenny explains that the outer realm is Hyperborea, of Greek legend. The next realm, surrounding our own, is Lemuria. That leaves our own realm, which Kenny has decided must be Atlantis, for reasons he does not go into. Living at the North Pole is the race of Polarians, who live on Mount Maru (which is apparently situated under a dense cloud, which is why nobody has ever seen it). 

Kenny's model of the Cosmic Egg as described in the text

It was at this point in the evening that Kenny unveiled an actual model of his Cosmic Egg – a four-foot tall mass of papier-mâché and plastic that puts Anthea Turner’s Tracy Island to shame. Each of his four realms were carefully drawn, with white walls representing the ice that keeps them apart. Transparent strips of plastic represented the concentric domes Kenny believes cover each realm, with the planets held in place (or at least they would have been, but the heat of the lights had caused Mercury to fall off land in North America). 

A close up of the model of Mercury sitting atop the water just North of South America in Kenny's model.

Each of the four realms, Kenny explains, has their own race of people living there, and they would seem familiar to us if we were to meet them: 

“I’m willing to bet if we went to one of the realms and saw the Hyperboreans”, Kenny said, “we’d say ‘Oh, I see where the Chinese get their looks from, they look awfully Chinese-ish’. And if we met the Lemurians, we’d see them and say, ‘I see, I think that’s where black people get their looks from or their traits from’”.

If that weren’t problematic enough, the Polarians – who oversee the four realms – have created the next race of people to populate the new realm they’re making: 

“There is a fifth race that was seeded about 6,000 years ago, when the last deluge happened. They are the Aryan race,” Kenny explained, to an audience that seemed to take this worryingly in their stride. “I’m sure you all know about the Aryan topic. The Aryans are the white race, and I’m willing to bet if we went to the centre right now and we saw the Aryans, we’d go: ‘Oh, I see where white people get their traits from’”.

The Cosmic Calendar

If the unexpected introduction of Aryan ideology somehow wasn’t surprising enough, Kenny still had a little more left in the tank. 

“I’m going to ask you to put your seatbelts on for this one”, he warned, two hours into this extraordinary three-hour talk, “because the things I’m about to say are pretty outlandish to say the least.”

Kenny's Cosmic Calendar as described in the text.

Kenny then unveiled his final prop – the Cosmic Calendar, a series of concentric circles on a large blackboard, each separated into multiple parts and labelled with the names of seasons, constellations, months and gold stars. It began to feel like Kenny was explaining the rules of an immensely complicated board game: “Now, you play the Atlantians, and your aim is to overtake the Lemurians before the Polonians send the Aryans down from Mount Maru…”

The Calendar, he explained, was his attempt to use astrology and numerology (plus more than a heavy dash of wild speculation) to figure out when each realm was created, when each 24,000-year epoch ended, and when the next realm would be pushed into the world, pushing our realm away from the North Pole. When this happens, Kenny speculated, the domes above would open and we would be free to move into another realm. 

According to Kenny, because the Doomsday clock was set to two minutes to midnight at the start of 2018, we must logically be two years away from this alignment. At that point, NASA will finally be able fly to Mars (which the dome prevented them from doing, as Mars is actually the Sun of the Hyperborean realm), and Flat Earth believers will be able to travel to the North Pole and into the heavens. 

“Some who are ahead of their time will time travel into the future, to the central realm, 3000 years into the future” Kenny told the audience. “Those who have done their time and are ready to move on, will physically be able to walk into the centre. They won’t have to die, there’s no death” 

Kenny explained that when the alignment comes, people should set aside their fear and anxiety, and embrace the experience. Kenny doesn’t fear death, he explained: “Death doesn’t exist, because we are all energy, and that can never die”. 

Kenny left the audience with his hope for the future:

“I really, really, really want to go to the centre,” he explained. “I had a journey planned with a few friends a few months ago, we were setting about doing it, but the universe said it’s not the right time to go North yet. There’s a time, a season and a place for everything. Wait for the right time. So that’s what I’m doing.”

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but in retrospect his final sentiments – his comfort with death and his thwarted plans to move on – feel ominous. Perhaps a weekend with conspiracy theorists led me to see significance where there is none, but it’s hard not to view it in the context of his personal situation when he first came to Flat Earth belief:

“A time came when things were a bit rough in my life,” he explained, “I got to a stage where I was asking questions, and I was sure that something was definitely not right. Then one day I came across a video of Dave Murphy talking about the Flat Earth, alarm bells rang inside me, and something told me to pay attention, so I did”. 

Looking back at my weekend with Flat Earthers, it is striking how many people who doubt the global model of the Earth also subscribe to all manner of other beliefs, from Biblical literalism to occultist paranoia, from anti-vaccination to quack cancer cues, from antisemitism to Aryanism. But it was also just as striking how many people whose journey into believing the Earth is flat included traumatic events or personal crises. 

This, perhaps, is why it is so important for us to listen to and talk to Flat Earthers, and to approach them as much with understanding as ridicule: if they can see no light in mainstream society, their rabbit hole may only get deeper and darker. 

When predictions fail: UFO cults, QAnon and cognitive dissonance

Chris French
-
0
When predictions fail: UFO cults, QAnon and cognitive dissonance

Over recent months, as the world has watched in grim fascination the events leading up to and following the US presidential election, the pronouncements from supporters of the unfounded far-right QAnon conspiracy have been of particular interest to many of us. Quite a few psychologists and other social scientists have, I suspect, also been reflecting upon a classic study of a UFO cult from the 1950s. What’s the connection, I hear you ask? I’ll tell you soon. First, in case you have been living under a rock without any access to news media for the last couple of years, I had better briefly summarise the beliefs of QAnon supporters. If you are already up to speed on the basics of QAnon, just skip the next paragraph.

The conspiracy is called “QAnon” because many of the wild speculations of its followers are based upon their interpretations of the vague and ambiguous messages appearing on the internet from an anonymous source referred to as “Q Clearance Patriot” – or simply as “Q” for those on first-name terms. Q, who first posted in October 2017 (but has been noticeably quiet of late), is said to be someone working at the heart of the US government. Essentially, up until very recently, QAnon supporters were all convinced that then-President Donald Trump was engaged in a covert operation to expose a hidden Satanic cabal of powerful individuals who were engaged in evil acts of paedophilia, child-trafficking, cannibalism and so on. This group, including the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros, were said to be plotting a coup d’état against Trump, but Trump, whom they viewed as almost God-like, was said to be always one step ahead of them. Indeed, they confidently predicted that the “Storm” was coming. This was to be a day of reckoning when literally thousands of left-wing Satanists would be arrested and get their just desserts for their diabolical actions.

So what has all this to do with UFO cults? The connection, to my mind, is the concept of cognitive dissonance and its relevance to failed predictions. Cognitive dissonance is the idea, first put forward by social psychologist Leon Festinger back in the 1950s, that when we hold two dissonant cognitions – in other words, beliefs, attitudes, or actions – that contradict each other, this is psychologically uncomfortable and we will be motivated to resolve this dissonance. A classic example is someone who enjoys smoking but knows that experts claim that it causes serious medical problems. There are two ways that the dissonance can be resolved. One is the route that I took. You can just give up smoking. But that is easier said than done. If it proves too difficult, you might opt for the other route: come up with reasons why the advice can be ignored, for the time being at least, e.g., “I’ll give up after I’ve got X out the way” (where X = forthcoming stressful event) or the classic, “Well, I might get run over by a bus tomorrow”, and so on.

Paradoxically, Festinger’s theory predicts that, in certain circumstances, disconfirming evidence can actually increase belief in a claim. The conditions required are described on Wikipedia as follows:

  • A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves.
  • The person holding the belief must have committed themselves to it; that is, for the sake of their belief, they must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
  • The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
  • Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognised by the individual holding the belief.
  • The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytise or persuade non-members that the belief is correct.
Two UFOs alongside a full moon in a dark woodland

This is where the UFO cult comes in (and thank you for your patience). As Festinger describes in his book When Prophecy Fails, co-authored with Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schachter, the theory was put to the test by way of a rather unusual investigation. In 1954, a Chicago-based housewife named Dorothy Martin (name and location changed in the book) had built up a small following who accepted that she was receiving messages from superior beings on the planet “Clarion” via automatic writing. Festinger became aware of this when the local paper ran a story on its back page with the headline, “PROPHECY FROM PLANET CLARION CALL TO CITY: FLEE THAT FLOOD. IT’LL SWAMP US ON DEC. 21. OUTER SPACE TELLS SUBURBANITE.” Apparently, the true believers were to be saved from this looming disaster by flying saucers. Acting upon this information, some of the followers had given up work and given away all of their possessions on the assumption they would not need them after the designated date.

On the assumption that the flood would not actually happen, Festinger and his colleagues, along with some hired helpers, infiltrated the group in order to observe how the cult members would deal with the ensuing cognitive dissonance when, as they expected, the flood failed to materialise. They were present at the home of Mrs Martin, along with eleven true believers, as the designated hour approached. They had been told that an alien would show up at midnight and escort them to a waiting spaceship. A further eleven cult members were unable to join those at Mrs Martin’s home but had been informed by her that they need not worry as the flying saucers would pick them up from wherever they happened to be.

As midnight came and went, Mrs Martin reported that she had received a message that there would be a slight delay. Nerves frayed over the following hours, with ET still failing to put in an appearance. At 4 am, Mrs Martin began to cry. But then – hallelujah! – at 4:45 am, she received another message telling her that the disaster had been averted directly as a result of the faith that the group had shown!

In light of the clear evidence that the original prediction had failed, the followers could resolve the cognitive dissonance in one of two ways. They could either abandon their belief in Mrs Martin’s claims altogether or they could accept the rationalisation presented by Mrs Martin and thus end up believing even more strongly in her claims. After all, the strength of their faith had already prevented a flood, hadn’t it?

Festinger had predicted that individual believers would need to have social support in order to maintain and even strengthen belief in the light of clear disconfirming evidence. Those who were together at Mrs Martin’s residence did indeed demonstrate such increased belief. Whereas, prior to the disconfirmation, members had been reluctant to talk about their beliefs to the media, they now were only too willing to spread the good news. As for those who were not part of that group on the fateful night, they resolved their cognitive dissonance by quietly and painfully accepting that they had been mistaken to believe in Mrs Martin at all and leaving the cult.

When it comes to failed predictions, QAnon’s record is pretty impressive. Their Wikipedia entry lists no less than 17 failed predictions – and six of those are marked as “multiple predictions”. These include predicting that the Trump military parade “would never be forgotten” (it was cancelled), that John McCain would resign from the US Senate, that Mark Zuckerberg would leave Facebook, that Jack Dorsey would be forced to resign from his role as CEO of Twitter, and that Pope Francis would be arrested on felony charges. Some of the events were predicted to take place on or around a specific date. A “smoking gun” video of the hated Hillary would be made public in March 2018.There was to be a car bomb in London around 16 February 2018 following mass suicides of Trump’s enemies on 10 February 2018.

Maybe those particular failed predictions could be explained away as understandable misinterpretations of Q’s vague messages. But as the date of the election drew nearer many QAnon supporters became increasingly confident that the “Storm” was imminent (this was despite a previous failed prediction that it would occur on 3 November 2017). There were many other predictions made around this time. Trump would win the election in every state. He didn’t. Okay, but trust the Plan, he will win overall. He didn’t. Don’t worry, this is all part of the Plan. He wanted to lose so that he can prove in court that the Democrats won through fraudulent means. The courts, with one single exception, rejected Trump’s legal challenges against the election results. With each failed prediction, greater faith in the conspiracy was required to accept the increasingly outlandish explanations offered for that failure.

On 6 January 2021, Trump addressed his followers and encouraged an insurrection, resulting in the storming of the Capitol building. To many true believers, it really must have looked like the “Storm” was becoming a reality. But after a few hours, the building was cleared, martial law had not been declared, and President Trump had distanced himself from the actions of his supporters. Reactions varied amongst QAnon supporters. By now, some of them were beginning to question the whole conspiracy. Many others though still believed that this was all part of Trump’s cunning Plan.

Time was running out. Trump would cease to be President on 20 January 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration. Clearly then, that must be the real day of the “Storm”. Of course, as we all now know, the event passed off peacefully. Joe Biden is now the President of the USA. The “Storm” did not break.

A QAnon poster on a fence with the letters "WWG1WGA" which stands for where we go one, we go all. [CC 2.0]

So, where now for QAnon supporters? These days, only the most foolish would make confident predictions about future events but, for what it is worth, this is what I think is most likely to happen: Those supporters for whom QAnon became central to their very identity will most likely double down and become even more committed to the cause. This would include those who have attended Trump rallies in the past, carrying QAnon flags and banners, and of course many of those who were directly involved in the invasion of the Capitol building on 6 January, as well as those whose support for QAnon has resulted in broken relationships with friends and family. By now, faith in the conspiracy can only be maintained by accepting the most twisted logic. In the words of a recent Washington Post article:

QAnon promoters have in the past day held up an incoherent set of new theories to explain away Trump’s anticlimactic exit from Washington: that the military is in control of the country, not Biden; that Biden and Trump have switched faces; that Biden’s inauguration was illegitimate, and that the real one (for Trump) would take place in March; or that Biden has been in on the QAnon plan all along.

Others, those who were less committed to begin with, will realise that the QAnon conspiracy theory was an illusion and will turn away from it altogether. If we’re lucky, they may abandon belief in unfounded conspiracy theories altogether. If we’re not, they may simply latch on to a different unfounded conspiracy that aligns nicely with their far-right attitudes.

Health food stores, a danger to public health?

Edzard Ernst
-
0
Health food stores, a danger to public health?

Let me tell you about a small study which we published all of 18 years ago. It was conducted in Canada, and I merely assisted in designing the protocol, interpreting the findings and writing up the paper.

For this investigation, we trained 8 helpers to pretend to be customers of health food stores. They would enter individually into assigned stores; the helpers had been instructed to browse in the store until approached by an employee. At this moment, they would explain that their mother has breast cancer and disclose information on their mother’s condition, use of chemotherapy (Tamoxifen) and physician visits, only if asked. The helpers would then inquire what the employees recommend for their mother’s condition. They followed a structured, memorised, pre-tested questionnaire that asked about product usage, dosage, cost, employee education and product safety or potential for drug interactions.

The helpers recorded which products were recommended by the health food store employees, along with the recommended dose and price per product as well as price per month. Additionally, they inquired about where the employee had obtained information on the recommended products. They also noted whether the employees referred them on to practitioners of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) or recommended consulting a physician. Full notes on the encounters were written immediately after leaving the store.

The findings were impressive, I thought: of the 34 stores that met our inclusion criteria, 27 recommended SCAMs, and a total of 33 different products were recommended. Here are some further findings:

  • Essiac was recommended most frequently.
  • The mean cost of the recommended products per month was $58.09 (CAD) (minimum $5.28, median $32.99, maximum $600).
  • Twenty-three employees (68%) did not ask whether the patient took prescription medications.
  • Fifteen (44%) employees recommended visiting a healthcare professional; these included: naturopaths (9), physicians (5) and nutritionists (1).

Health food store employees relied on a variety of sources of information:

  • 12 (35%) of them said they had received their information from books,
  • 5 (15%) from a supplier of the product,
  • 3 (9%) had formal education in SCAM,
  • 2 (6%) had been through in-store training,
  • 12 (35%) did not disclose their sources of information.

Since our paper has been published, several other investigations have addressed similar issues. Here are a few quotes:

And why do I mention all this today? The answer is that firstly, it is obviously important to warn consumers of the often-dangerous advice they might receive in health food stores. Secondly, I feel it would be worthwhile to do further research in this area, check whether the situation has now changed, and repeat a similar study today. Ideally, a new investigation should be conducted in several different locations, perhaps even compare several countries. My impression is that things have gone from bad to worse in health food stores – possibly related to the pandemic?

If you have the possibility to plan and conduct such an experiment, please let me know, perhaps I can be of assistance.

Nesta Helen Webster: the far-right author who popularised the antisemitic Illuminati conspiracy

Mark Horne
-
0
Nesta Helen Webster: the far-right author who popularised the antisemitic Illuminati conspiracy

Watching the rioters at the Capitol in Washington DC in early January, viewers may have seen rioters wearing jackets and insignia that expressed coded antisemitic messages, such as 6MWE – which horrifically stands for 6 Million Wasn’t Enough, in reference to the Holocaust – or rather less coded messages, such as the now-infamous “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie.

While the participation of openly far-right groups such as the Proud Boys is well-known, many of those attending will have been adherents primarily of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which gathers together and overlaps with a number of other conspiracy theories, including one of the oldest and best-known: the Illuminati.

QAnon posits that Trump is working to bring down evil-doers of the worst imaginable kind – child abusers and murderers – whose crimes were either perpetrated or protected by the deep state, including the supposed Illuminati, which secretly controls the world.

Despite the popular conception of the Illuminati as some shadowy all-powerful organisation that for some inexplicable reason uses rappers to send coded messages to the world via lyrics and hand-signals during music videos and live performances, the actual Illuminati was an 18th Century Bavarian secret society, designed in the mould of the Freemasons. It was founded in 1776 by philosopher Adam Weishaupt, and by 1784, at the height of its membership, it had between 650 and 2,500 members.

It was outlawed by edict shortly thereafter, but Augustin Barruel and John Robison wrote in 1797 and 1798 respectively that the Illuminati were responsible for the French Revolution as part of a wider international conspiracy. Paranoia that the Illuminati had secretly continued spread to the USA through the sermons of Jedediah Morse, and contributed to concerns about Freemasonry in general, influencing congressional elections into the 1830s. Worries about the anti-absolutist principles of the actual Illuminati were taken seriously by European monarchies of the 19th Century, with half a wary eye to the idea that the secret society had somehow survived.

Nesta Helen Webster - a black and white photograph of her looking slightly off centre.

The Illuminati conspiracy theory seems to have acquired its specific antisemitic flavour in the early 20th Century, with the intervention of far-right author Nesta Helen Webster, who was involved with organisations such as the British Union of Fascists in the pre-war period. Webster was born Nesta Helen Bevan in 1876, and began a career publishing novels, before turning her hand to histories of the French Revolution, seeing secret conspiracies in every corner. She believed the widely-circulated antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or at least subscribed to the idea that it represented a deeper truth, even if the document itself was a hoax, leading her to believe that wealthy Jews were behind many wars and revolutions throughout history.

Like many antisemitic conspiracists, Webster claimed in her 1924 book Secret Societies and Subversive Movements that she was not accusing all Jews of all possible crimes, and in any case that she merely used Jewish people’s own words against them. As the book continues, she weaves a narrative during which she is “just asking questions” (full of innuendo) and repeating uncritically various medieval stereotypes of Jews. Webster launches into full-throated antisemitism of her own by Chapter 14 on “Pan-Germanism”:

“Without in any way absolving Germany from the crime of the war, it is necessary to take this secondary factor into consideration if peace between the nations is to be established. For as long as the lust of war lingers in the hearts of the Germans and the lust of gain at the price of human suffering lingers in the hearts of the Jews, both races will remain necessary to each other and the hideous nightmare of war will continue to brood over the world.” (emphasis mine)

This is not an isolated passage – the next chapter is called “The Real Jewish Peril” and begins:

“In considering the immense problem of the Jewish Power, perhaps the most important problem with which the modern world is confronted, it is necessary to divest oneself of all prejudices and to enquire in a spirit of scientific detachment whether any definite proof exists that a concerted attempt is being made by Jewry to achieve world-domination and to obliterate the Christian faith.”

On shaky ground at the best of times, one of Webster’s conclusions is based on some truly startling leaps of logic. She says that no historical or extant subversive movements were actively antisemitic, so all such movements must be controlled by Jews, presumably because in Webster’s worldview, if you’re not actively hating or persecuting Jews then you must be Jewish. The single worldwide conspiracy (Illuminism / the Illuminati) that she claims is in control of all the other revolutionary subversions must therefore also be controlled by Jews.

To give an idea of how this was received in the 1920s, Secret Societies was reprinted twice, and other aspects of Webster’s work – including her writing relating to Jews and the French Revolution – was praised by no less than Winston Churchill. Little wonder, then, that despite being on the wrong side of history regarding fascism, polite British society nonetheless saw fit to offer her a warm obituary in The Times upon her death in 1960. It is depressingly easy to see how her ideas, which the events of the 1930s and 1940s should have so thoroughly repudiated, slithered their way on into the consciousness of the decades beyond.

David Icke holding a microphone and speaking. Photo by Tyler Merbler [CC-by-2.0]

Her malign influence is still very much felt today, with historian Dr Steven Woodbridge drawing a direct line from her “academic” works to NWO conspiracists, far-right militias, and of course David Icke. It is worth noting that Icke says he is not antisemitic, but genuinely is referring to lizards in his Illuminati conspiracy theories – although he does use the term Zionist, and references the antisemitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

As for how we get from Webster to the present day popular conception of the celebrity-embracing, world-controlling Illuminati, it’s a wild tale, told in a BBC article which explores the 1960s resurgence of the myth, in an account featuring a Playboy writer, a stage play with Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy, and even a card game. I think the article misses the point about the darker origins of the conspiracy theory, but it is worth reading nonetheless.

To summarise the article: the Illuminati as a modern conception was a joke, a hoax, with journalists sending in fake letters alleging all sorts of nonsensical conspiracy theories with the Illuminati at the core, all stemming from the principles of Discordianism – a parody religion that suggests social change can be created from causing chaos, through activities like hoaxes.

It is therefore a fitting parallel that QAnon – a fiction perpetrated from message boards that revel in such hoaxes – arose in a way that partly parallels the rebirth of the Illuminati as a modern conspiracy theory fifty years earlier.

And it is no surprise at all that both conspiracy theories espouse vile and violent myths about Jews.

Putting Some Skeptical Mantras to Bed

Jonathan Jarry
-
0
Putting Some Skeptical Mantras to Bed

I was introduced to skepticism a decade ago and with it came a rich trove of sayings and comebacks that sounded quite smart at the time. With experience, I began to revisit these quips and question whether they were really true or useful after all. I want to explain why I’m choosing to clear my vocabulary of these skeptical witticisms.

“The plural of anecdote is not data”… no more

There is of course truth behind this saying when viewed under the right light. So many testimonials for this herbal product or that energy therapy are compiled and served to us as evidence of their effectiveness. The more aunts and uncles and neighbours and coworkers report feeling a little bit better after ingesting sugar pills, the more our brain is willing to accept this as proof of efficacy. What skeptics like to remind the purveyors of these anecdotes is that whispers, rumours and subjective reports are not enough. The bar to be cleared is higher.

But the problem with the expression, often used as a mic drop moment, is that anecdotes are data. They are not rigorous data, nor are they definitive or overwhelmingly convincing, but they are data points. If a medical doctor begins prescribing a new medication, and patient after patient returns complaining of a bizarre skin rash, it would be foolish for the doctor to kick them out of the office by citing that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” There may very well be something there that requires an investigation.

It would be more accurate to say that anecdotes are not a reliable form of evidence because they don’t control for so many variables that can obscure what is really going on. That’s why we do scientific experiments like clinical trials: to remove as many of these variables as we can and to figure out the best answer to the question we are asking. This longer explanation requires me to hold on to the mic instead of dropping it to the floor and walking away, but I think it’s more conducive to a constructive conversation.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings”… no more

I remember hearing strong echoes of this in the early years of my journey into skepticism: facts don’t care about your feelings, a slogan promoted by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro. This adolescent form of skepticism seems to delight in drawing a line in the sand between people into “woo-woo” who trust their “fee-fees” and the rational freethinkers who put their emotions aside, in admirable Vulcan fashion, and simply follow the cold, hard evidence. In a debate with someone whose beliefs we think arise from emotions, it became fashionable to put them down with this skeptical mantra. A variant that I probably used in the past is that science is true whether or not you believe in it.

Again, it is true that facts are impervious to feelings of anxiety, and it is also true that the spheroidal shape of the Earth remains unaltered by the beliefs of Flat Earthers. But this self-serving slogan is not very useful if our goal is to convince people that they hold inaccurate beliefs. Because if we are going to use pithy rejoinders, let me offer one I prefer: when was the last time you changed your mind after being called an idiot? If someone’s ideology is wrapped up in dense emotional layers, simply stating that facts don’t care about feelings is unlikely to move them in your direction. As the editor of this magazine has written before, feelings don’t care about facts. By addressing people’s values, social investments and anxieties, we stand a better chance of opening them up to the realisation they might be wrong than if we simply dismiss their emotional reality as evidence of weakness in the face of the almighty facts.

“Question everything”… no more

One of the core principles of modern skepticism is to question everything. We can use the lens of skepticism to question alternative medicine, to criticise bad scientific studies, even to denounce fallacious statements made by politicians. This phrase, “question everything” (sometimes “doubt everything”), is certainly appealing and I’ve used it in the past… but I am realising more and more that it cannot stand alone.

A type-writer and paper - the words on the paper read "Fake News!"

Questioning everything without having in place a system of media literacy and information vetting to draw from is a recipe for conspiracy thinking. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a clear example of where the mindless questioning of everything can lead people. Questioning the cycle threshold values obtained by molecular tests for the coronavirus led many to believe these tests were useless and simply churning out false positive results. Then, of course, we can visit hospital parking lots and question the narrative that intensive care units are nearing capacity. We can question the speed at which vaccines were developed, the safety of wearing a mask, even the true purpose of these lockdown measures and what the government may really be planning with all of this. Asking a million questions without subscribing to a framework for evaluating evidence—what good skepticism helps provide—can easily lead people down the conspiracy rabbit hole, which is why I don’t think simply inviting people to question and doubt everything is particularly useful… or harmless.

“What a great example of the Dunning-Kruger effect”… maybe no more

As a skeptic, I love a good moment where a phenomenon baffles people and I can come in and slap a scientific name on it. That weird brain fart over here? Yeah, that’s been studied and this is its name! Skepticism done! But these skeptical incantations can easily escape scrutiny and simply be taken as fact even when the evidence behind them is not as robust as it could be. The Dunning-Kruger effect, for example, was first described in a 1999 paper as an interesting discrepancy. When data was graphed a certain way, researchers could see that people who did very poorly on a test tended to think they did much better, and people who did really well slightly underestimated their true score.

This observation was replicated by other scientists and it soon took on a life of its own, getting twisted by journalists and skeptics in a pop-cultural game of telephone. Soon, the Dunning-Kruger effect became the reason why dumb people didn’t know they were dumb, and also why ignorant folks were so arrogant and doubled down all the time. Of course, that’s not what the effect was ever about… but even in its original form, there are reasons to be skeptical of the very existence of this alleged bias in our thinking.

I recently spent many weeks looking into this effect, collaborating with academics who understand statistics far better than I do, and becoming more and more convinced that the Dunning-Kruger effect, as originally described, might simply have been a statistical artefact. This is still controversial, both in the academic literature and in the feedback I received for my article, but in and of itself it should open our eyes. Even in skeptical circles, we easily adopt these science-based mantras but we don’t always check back to see if these ideas still hold up after they were initially published. Another example is the backfire effect, the claim that pushing back against misinformation backfires and reinforces belief in the falsehood, which I still see being quoted even though it seems to have been more or less debunked.

Being an evidence-based skeptic is hard because it asks of us to not only examine the claims made by fringe communities but also to examine our own. The skeptical movement is unfortunately not immune to the promotion of unquestioned comebacks and slogans. Since we like to use them to convince other people to be more skeptically minded, I think it behooves us to examine these witticisms once in a while and make sure they really are as true and valuable as we’d like them to be.

A doomscrollers guide to climate hyperbole: countering the doomism of Deep Adaptation

Ted Lefroy
-
0
A doomscrollers guide to climate hyperbole: countering the doomism of Deep Adaptation

In his recent book The New Climate War, Michael Mann, who led the research team that gave us the global temperature hockey stick, identifies three types of opposition in the battle for climate action: deniers, doomsayers and inactivists. Climate doomism he suggests is as dangerous as denial and equally unscientific.

The unrelentingly pessimistic academic paper Deep Adaptation provides a good example of how similar methods are employed by doomsayers and denialists to tilt reality in their favour. Downloaded over one hundred thousand times, Deep Adaptation has gone on to spawn a global movement. The claim in Deep Adaptation is that humanity faces ‘inevitable near-term societal collapse’ due to ‘…uncontrollable levels of climate change bringing starvation, destruction, migration, disease, and war’. This conclusion rests on four abuses of source material: misusing terminology, treating speculation as fact, cherry picking, and taking data out of context.

Misusing terminology

The term ‘non-linear’ is used throughout Deep Adaptation to imply unstoppable, runaway climate change.  Non-linear simply means a change in the output of a system that is disproportional to change in the inputs. It implies nothing about the direction or speed of change or the feasibility of human intervention.  When Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was asked to comment he replied ‘This is nonsense. Non-linearity (which is ubiquitous) is not synonymous with ‘runaway’ climate change’.

Treating speculation as fact

At one point Deep Adaptation claims that we ‘have tipped into self-reinforcing and irreversible change’ citing a paper in the journal Nature. What those authors actually said was ‘If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization’. The qualifier ‘if’ is important. Tipping cascades, while possible, remain hypothetical – which is why Nature published this as a comment not a research report.

On global tipping points, others have argued ‘The global human enterprise is driving large-scale changes in most components of the Earth system, but in a haphazard fashion, with responses often being weakly connected or transmitted slowly at a cross-continental scale’ making it ‘…implausible that the planet, or indeed most of its component systems, are primed to tip irreversibly to a radically different state that is inhospitable’.  

Cherry picking

Deep Adaptation claims there is scientific evidence for inevitable near-term societal collapse. This claim rests heavily on two phenomena: Arctic ice melt and methane release. Both rely on a few selected sources. In the case of the loss of Arctic ice, the source is the work of one scientist whose outlying predictions have not eventuated; in the case of methane release, the paper relies on the clathrate gun hypothesis first proposed in 2003 and since challenged in multiple reviews.  

Taking data out of context

A wheat field against a blue sky

On food supply, Deep Adaptation notes IPCC estimates that climate change has reduced growth in crop yields by 1–2% per decade over the past century. What it doesn’t point out is that there have been yield increases in the major crops of 3 to 8% per decade over the same period. In the UK ~3% for oats and barley, ~4% for wheat and potatoes and ~8% for sugar beet; in the USA, ~5% for corn. Climate change is having an impact on agriculture, but the major challenge right now is not the amount produced but equity of access. The major future challenge is declining investment in adaptation.

There is also the claim that ‘About half of all plant and animal species in the world’s most biodiverse places are at risk of extinction due to climate change’. The source is a modelling study of a limited selection of plants and animals in the World Wildlife Foundation’s 35 biodiversity hotpots, which represent 3% of the Earth’s surface. The study predicted that if there was a 4.5 °C rise in global mean temperature by 2100 (the IPCC’s worst case scenario) and none of these species were able to disperse to more favourable locations, 50% ‘could potentially become locally extinct’. 

To highlight this abuse of source material is not to down play the seriousness of climate change. Climate change is serious and demands we bend the emissions curve and invest in adaptation through renewable energy, carbon sequestration, food production, healthcare, and all the other millennium development goals. The conclusion that collapse is inevitable has its roots not in science but a long intellectual fascination with social decline.

Collapsology

Historian Joseph Tainter’s systematic study of societal collapse examined explanations offered for the fall of 17 societies from Rome to Mesoamerica. After assessing evidence for causes including environmental catastrophe, resource depletion, invasion, class conflict and disease, the common principle that emerged was decreasing marginal returns on investment in social and economic complexity. Tainter also noted that the process of collapse in those societies was usually slow, often rational, and occasionally resulted in improved circumstances. The collapse predicted in Deep Adaptation is ‘sudden, unavoidable starvation, and in our life time’.

When the Deep Adaptation movement banned debate on the inevitability of near-term human extinction, it became a doomsday cult and lost all scientific credibility. To claim that there is scientific evidence for inevitable near-term societal collapse is an abuse of science. Ever since the caravan of Western history pulled out of the Eastern Mediterranean over 2000 years ago it has been trailed by camp followers warning it would all end in tears. And while collapse has been the fate of many societies, science cannot tell us where and when that will happen. Every society that has ever existed has either transformed or collapsed. Which of those occurs, where that happens and how long it takes depends on people and what they chose to do. Contrary to the certainty in Deep Adaptation, the paths to the future are made, not found.

References

  1. Mann, Michael (2021) The New Climate War: The fight to take back our planet. Public Affairs (accessed 14 January 2021)
  2. Mann, Michael E, Bradley, Raymond S. Hughes, Malcolm K. (1999) Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: Inferences, uncertainties, and limitations Geophysical Research Letters, 26 (6): 759–762, doi:10.1029/1999GL900070.
  3. Bendell, J (2020a) Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Occasional Paper 2, Institute for Leadership and Sustainability, University of Cumbria (accessed 2 December 2020)
  4. Tsing, Z (2019) The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy (accessed 2 December 2020)
  5. Deep Adaptation Deep Adaptation – Wikipedia (accessed 14 January 2021)
  6. Bendell (2020b) The worst argument to try to win: response to criticism of the climate science in deep adaptation. (accessed 2 December 2020)
  7. Lenton T, Rockström J, Gaffney O, Rahmstorf S, Richardson K, Steffen W & Schellnhuber HJ (2019) Climate tipping points: too risky to bet against. Nature (575): 582-85
  8. Brook BW, Ellis EC and Buettel JC (2018) What is the evidence for planetary tipping points? In: Effective Conservation Science: Data Not Dogma. Edited by Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, and Brian Silliman: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198808978.003.0008 (accessed 2 December 2020)
  9. Wadhams P (2016) A Farewell to Ice. Penguin Press ISBN: 9780241009437
  10. Nicholas T, Hall G and Schmidt C (2020) Is Deep Adaptation Flawed Science? The Ecologist (accessed 2 December 2020)
  11. Ritchie H and Roser M (2013) Crop Yields. Our World In Data (accessed 2 December 2020)
  12. Warren R, Price J, VanDerWal J, Cornelius S and Sohl H (2018) The implications of the United Nations Paris Agreement on climate change for globally significant biodiversity areas. Climatic Change 147:395–409 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2158-6 (accessed 2 December 2020)
  13. Tainter, J (1990) The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  14. Deep Adaptation Forum (2020) (accessed 2 December 2020)

How the Society of Homeopaths had their accredited status suspended

Michael Marshall
-
0
How the Society of Homeopaths had their accredited status suspended

Earlier this month, the Professional Standards Authority (PSA) announced it had suspended the accreditation of the Society of Homeopaths (SoH), finding that the SoH “did not appear to have prioritised public protection over professional interests in its handling of complaints or governance processes.”

According to the PSA, the SoH’s failings in this regard “led to risks to the public from homeopathy being offered as an alternative for serious conditions such as depression, arthritis and autoimmune conditions that require medical supervision.” As such, their accreditation has been suspended for at least 12 months.

The decision from the PSA comes after years of controversy over the SoH’s position as an accredited register, and to understand it fully it’s important to understand that history. The PSA are the government watchdog responsible for regulating healthcare regulators and registers, including statutory regulators such as the General Medical Council, the General Dental Council and the General Chiropractic Council. This means that if a medical doctor, dentist, or even chiropractor does something wrong – like acting unprofessionally towards a patient, or misleading them about their care – they could be subject to a complaint to their relevant regulator; if that regulator doesn’t take that complaint seriously, they themselves are subject to a complaint to the PSA. If they’re found wanting, the PSA has the power to issue sanctions upon that regulator.

The Professional Standards Authority - Accredited Register logo
The logo used to proclaim Accredited Register status

In 2012, the PSA announced a new Accredited Voluntary Register scheme for organisations where regulation wasn’t mandatory or statutory, but who might feel they benefit from the oversight of a government watchdog. Inevitably, this voluntary accreditation comes with a bit of kudos – registrants get to use the logo of the PSA’s scheme on all their marketing materials, and get to tell prospective patients they’re part of an official accredited register. To stay on the scheme, and to keep the kudos, registers have to undergo annual reviews, in which they prove they’re keeping their registrants in line, preventing anything undesirable, and handling complaints in a timely and responsible manner. In theory, that’s all great, and most of the registers who were granted Accredited Register status have been reasonable and uncontroversial.

However, in 2014, the Society of Homeopaths applied for and were granted Accredited Register status. Since then, all of their registrants have been free to use the logo of the Professional Standard Authority on all of their marketing materials and websites… including on websites that were, unsurprisingly, filled with wildly misleading claims – like that autism can be cured with homeopathy, that vaccines can’t be trusted, or that homeopathy can treat depression and anxiety.

Since 2014, people have been making complaints to the Society of Homeopaths to point out misleading claims spread by accredited homeopaths… with limited success. Despite being shown on occasions too numerous to count all of the ways in which homeopaths were misleading and even endangering the public, the Society of Homeopaths arguably took no meaningful action.

As a result, in 2019 the Good Thinking Society (of which I am Project Director) brought a legal challenge to the Society’s accreditation, specifically after we demonstrated SoH registrants were promoting anti-vaccine misinformation and claiming that they could cure autism via CEASE therapy. That legal case was withdrawn in early 2020, after the PSA imposed strict conditions upon the SoH, mandating that they ensure their members do not claim to be able to cure autism, or spread vaccine misinformation.

Sadly, those conditions appeared to have little impact on what homeopaths felt comfortable claiming. In April 2020, in the early weeks of the pandemic, I published an exposé in association with The Times showing registrants of the Society of Homeopaths selling homeopathic remedies aimed at treating COVID-19. Just a few months later, in July, we reported in The Telegraph that the Society had appointed a new ‘Professional Standards and Safeguarding Lead’: Sue Pilkington, a homeopath who had repeatedly shared anti-vaccine misinformation. This appointment was made despite conditions imposed upon the SoH just five months earlier, explicitly concerning their failure to tackle anti-vaccine propaganda among their membership.

The appointment prompted an emergency review by the PSA, leading to Ms Pilkington’s immediate dismissal. That review also resulted in conditions being placed upon the SoH’s accreditation, including that they adequately vet new appointees and that they prioritise public safety – and it’s really their failure to meet those most recent conditions that has led to their suspension.

The PSA’s decision is available in full on their website, and in it they outline the reasons for the PSA’s suspension. On the subject of vetting new appointees, the SoH said they had carried out checks to assure itself of previous applicants’ compliance with its Code of Ethics and position statements. But the PSA found that it those checks mostly focused on the appointee’s social media, and failed to clarify how the SoH intended to ensure compliance by staff and Board members on an ongoing basis. In fact, the PSA raised a particular weakness there: because the SoH appoints practicing homeopaths to key roles, the PSA was unconvinced homeopaths could judge what is and isn’t appropriate for a homeopath to say – a point that was underscored by the appointment of Ms Pilkington.

The PSA’s review also looked at the SoH’s handling of complaints regarding their registrants, finding that the SoH did not recognise the risk to patients and the public from misinformation on their registrants’ websites. While some steps had been taken to contact registrants over their claims, and references to the bogus CEASE therapy had been removed, the SoH’s response indicated that they found no issues with homeopaths claiming that homeopathy could treat autism – even when those references were being made by the homeopaths who had previously claimed to be able to cure autism via CEASE therapy. In a particularly damning line, the PSA found that they were not confident that complaints would be handled in a way that prioritised protecting the public over protecting the professional interests of the homeopaths.

The SoH had been charged with actively monitoring their registrants’ websites to find and correct any misleading claims. In the evidence they submitted of their monitoring effectiveness, the PSA found examples where homeopaths continued to promote homeopathy to treat depression, autism, hyperthyroidism, and arthritis, even after the SoH’s intervention. The SoH had checked these websites, and had determined these claims were compliant, even though they breached Advertising Standards Authority guidance – guidance the SoH’s own Code of Ethics makes clear must be followed. Either the SoH were incapable of recognising claims that were in breach of advertising rules, or they were incapable of getting their registrants to correct them.

The SoH’s suspension by the PSA will be reviewed again in 12 months’ time. If they want to regain their accredited status – something it seems like their registrants value – they must demonstrate that they have tried “as far as is reasonably possible” to ensure homeopaths comply with the SoH Code of Ethics, including the ASA’s rules on advertising and websites, taking action against anything that is non-compliant. They will also need to demonstrate that they are capable of separating the protection of the public from their work supporting the homeopathy profession, and they have to prove that whenever there is tension, they prioritise protecting the public. Given the issues with the SoH in the past, each of those looks like a mountain to climb.

As of 11 January 2021, the SoH and its registrants are not permitted to use the Authority’s Accredited Registers quality mark on any of their materials or websites – though, a quick check earlier this week shows more than 50 registrants continue to do so.

Society of Homeopaths logo

The suspension of the SoH may go on to have wider effects: the PSA is currently reviewing the voluntary scheme entirely, to ensure it is fit for purpose. The SoH are not the only concerning register to be part of the voluntary scheme – the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, for example, seem to equally struggle with registrants who make misleading health claims to the public.

Hopefully, the SoH’s suspension, along with their consistent failure to properly grasp their role as register, will go on to set a precedent, as the PSA scrutinises other accredited registers whose members promote therapies that are not supported by evidence.

The public understandably interpret PSA accreditation as a sign of credibility; where that credibility is being lent to practices that do not work and in some cases are actively harmful, it erodes public confidence in the PSA as a whole, and potentially puts the health and wellbeing of vulnerable members of the public at risk. Suspending the Society of Homeopaths is a solid first step towards repairing that erosion.

1...848586...151Page 85 of 151

Expert skeptical analysis of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory and claims of the paranormal.

[email protected]

About

Categories

Shop