Conspiracy

Abstract

Abstract This chapter seeks to make sense of online conspiracy theory. The opening case study concerns COVID-19 conspiracy theories and the trolling of healthcare workers and scientists. COVID-19 conspiracy theories pose a twofold problem for public health: combatting disinformation and understanding its underlying motivation. One common view holds that science communication is the answer. Against this view, the chapter argues that the popularity of conspiracy theory reflects not public ignorance but rather mass distrust. The loss of trust is one of the symptoms of a culture of widespread alienation, atomization, loneliness, cynicism, and paranoia. Drawing from Karl Marx, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Hannah Arendt, this chapter explores the relationship between the political emotion of loneliness and the fragmentation of the self. The power of conspiracy theory, it argues, is that it enables the alienated and fragmented subject to achieve a sense of wholeness once again, but only by severing the subject’s relationship to reality.