The Last Conspiracy
On believing the right kinds of silly things.
Enjoy this MISCellaneous article as we take a break from our main series this week. In late 2016, after a near brush with death in the cold, harsh lands of the South Pole, Buzz Aldrin, astronaut and American hero, tweeted this ominous warning, “We are all in danger. It is evil itself.”
Attached to the warning was a single image: a pyramid-shaped mountain from the inner terrain of the South Pole.
Sixty years before this incident, Admiral Richard E. Byrd led the largest expedition into the secret land the world had ever seen.1 Operation Highjump, as it was called, consisted of more than a dozen ships, two dozen aircraft, and 4,700 soldiers.
Rumors swirled around what these men encountered in Antarctica. But what we do know is that James Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense at the time, the person responsible for approving the mission, and one of the few men with access to all of the data discovered during that trip, was found on the pavement in front of the Bethesda Naval Hospital after having jumped from the 16th story.
It was exactly the two-year anniversary of Operation Highjump.
Okay, admit it, this story pulled you in. You probably haven’t thought about the continent of Antarctica since grade school, but after this little tease of information, it’s going to be bouncing around your mind all day!
Except that most of what I told you isn’t true. 😏
That Buzz tweet was fake. Operation Highjump did happen, but it largely went off without a hitch. Of the 4,700 men who went, 4,696 returned home safely. Forrestal had a history of depression. Combine that with the psychiatric treatment of the time, which was essentially controlled insulin poisoning, and you get a tragic conclusion.2
Now, I love a good conspiracy theory. They’re fun, wild rides into the what if.
But they can trick us into believing silly things. About the world, about ourselves. And that’s when they become dangerous.
Today, I’m less concerned with what you believe about Antarctica or lizard people or if Stevie Wonder can actually see (I’m 50/50 on this one).3
What we need to talk about are self-conspiracies.
Why We Want to Believe
Before we get into what I call self-conspiracies, we have to address the elephant in the room (which may or may not have been put there by aliens).
Why are conspiracies so believable in the first place?
In doing research for this piece, I found a whole mess of studies working to answer this question.4 A few of the most compelling reasons include:
Social belonging: believing the same as others keeps us included.
Existential safety: the more we know (or believe we know) about the world, the safer and more in control we feel.
Epistemic meaning: a disordered world is scary, so we try to make it make sense (thereby giving ourselves a purpose), even with “fictional organizing principles.”5
All those big words aside, the heart of our attraction to conspiracies, which above all are just stories, is pain.
When we are in pain, we’re biologically programmed to stop that pain as quickly as possible. It’s why our reflex is to pull away or run or fight back. Stories are a reflex too. They help us make sense of our pain; give it order and a place in our world.
The greater, more persistent pain a person, or society, feels, the greater the pull will be to adopt stories that address this pain.
When you think about the most atrocious conspiracy theories that gained momentum (COVID was planned, the Holocaust never happened, the Sandy Hook incident was just actors), they're all centered around some of the most painful invents in history. Things that broke our understanding of the world. That stripped away our feelings of control and safety and order.
Conspiracies are so believable because they arrive in times of desperation. They offer us a rope to hold onto, and in our haste, we miss the fact they aren’t tied to anything.
Glimpsing Through a Keyhole
Conspiracies show up with one goal in mind: to fill a gap in your knowledge.
They want to slide in, like a missing puzzle piece, and soothe some current pain with information. But they themselves are always incomplete.
Every conspiracy itself is a patchwork of imperfect information. A mashup of he-said, she-saids, dotted across a landscape of coincidences and misunderstandings. Conspiracies are so dangerous because they fill you with wrong information and then get you to act on it.
In 2017, Edgar Maddison Welch stormed a pizza parlor in North Carolina, convinced he was about to rescue dozens of children from an underground trafficking ring led by political elites. Much to his dismay, the restaurant in question didn’t even have a basement. He spent several minutes flailing around his AR-15, looking for a hidden entrance before realizing the truth.
During his sentencing, where he got 4 years in jail, Welch said, “I’m truly sorry…I was misinformed.”
Unraveling Our Self-Conspiracies
Self-conspiracies are the stories we tell ourselves, often with no merit, that negatively shape our lives, our beliefs, and our actions.
They’re the silly things we believe because of pain. And they can destroy us from the inside out if we’re not careful.
Thinking that you are not worthy of love is a self-conspiracy.
Thinking that you will never be successful is a self-conspiracy.
Thinking that your life has no value to others is a self-conspiracy.
These stories exist because, at some point, they helped us. They sat like ointment on a pain we were not yet ready to deal with, and by mistaking them as helpful, we gave them a place to stay. So, they did.
The crazy thing about stories is that they tend to be self-fulfilling. Once a narrative, true or not, has sat down in your soul, it begins to pull whatever strings are necessary to make it so. It teaches your brain to look for evidence, manipulates your emotions, and guides your actions – all in support of its own validation.
So, what do we do?
The Silly Things You Choose
There is no getting around believing silly things in this life. The trick is to choose the helpful ones.
Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped onto his first competition stage in 1965. He was a poor farm boy, scurrying off to the gym in between work and family responsibilities. He was 19 years old. No one thought he belonged there. No one except Arnold.
Arnold had no reason to be that confident except for his internal story. …Most impartial observers would have seen his dream as a bad bet. But you can’t train 5 hours a day on a bad bet.6
You, my friend, have to stop treating yourself like a bad bet.
Conspiracies are fictional stories that shape our place in the world, so why not use them for good? Why not spin tales that puff you up. That color the world as a kind place. That convince you others are good and generous and for you. That you are enough. That your dreams have a place. That you are the way you are for all the right reasons, even if you don’t know what those are yet.
It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
― Patrick Rothfuss
Regardless of the story you believe, it will prove itself right. Whether it tells you that you can’t trust the government. Or that you’re a lucky dude who things always seem to work out for.
Every story we believe, we believe by choice. Self-conspiracy or otherwise. So, believe better. Tell yourself the kinds of stories you want to live in. As imperfect and incomplete as they may be.
Because what a story gets you to do is all that matters in the end.
Wow, has our medicine come a long way. Here’s more on what actually happened to James.
Only click this link if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Quote from Rubin’s The Creative Act. The book ends with a great argument for why we need to let go of stories that aren’t working for us.
From Why the Stories We Tell Ourselves Shape Us by Coffee Break.