Originally published 11 June 2002
Here’s something that will ruin your day, if you haven’t heard it already.
The best-selling book in France this spring is Thierry Meyssan’s L’Effroyable Imposture, or “The Horrifying Fraud,” which suggests that the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were planned and executed by US government officials as part of a plot to justify military intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
According to Meyssan, the planes that crashed into the twin towers were directed from the ground by remote control, and no plane at all crashed into the Pentagon (the explosion was detonated inside the building).
This comes on top of the widely-held belief in Muslim countries that the murderous highjackings were planned and executed by Israel’s Mossad secret service, and that thousands of Jews were pre-warned not to go to work in the towers on the day of the attacks.
That Meyssan’s book was published is no surprise; someone, somewhere will propose a conspiracy theory to account for every major news event — the assassination of JFK, the Apollo moon landings, the death of Princess Diana.
What’s surprising is that so many people are willing to entertain such nonsense.
Why? Why do people believe crackpot conspiracy theories, and even the hundreds of urban myths that make their way through the Internet?
A few years ago, Michael Shermer, who writes the Skeptic column for Scientific American magazine, published a book called Why People Believe Weird Things. Some of the “weird things” he considers are psychics who claim to communicate with the dead, alien abductions, creationism, and holocaust denial.
The funniest and saddest part of the book is Shermer’s account of his appearance on television’s Unsolved Mysteries to present the skeptical opposition to popular psychic James Van Praagh.
The most dramatic moment of the show, according to Shermer, occurred when Van Praagh got the name of a couple’s son who had been killed in a drive-by shooting. “I’m seeing the letter K,” the psychic proclaimed.
“Is it Kevin or Ken?” Even Shermer was astonished when the mother responded tearfully, “Yes, Kevin.”
Then Shermer noticed around the mother’s neck a large, heavy ring with the letter “K” inscribed in diamonds on a black background. Praagh denied having seen the ring when Shermer pointed it out on camera. “I [saw it],” Shermer wrote, “and he’s the professional.”
Did this sort of debunking satisfy the audience that Van Praagh was a fraud? Not at all. Shermer was chastised for destroying people’s hopes during their time of grief. The psychic triumphed.
The reason is clear: People believe what they want to believe. If a psychic appears to bring reassuring messages from beyond the grave, why doubt? If Muslims feel better believing that Israelis planned the attacks on America, then it must be true. If French people like seeing Americans cast into an arrogant and diabolic light, then bring on Meyssan.
In his book, Shermer lists problems common to most conspiracy theories and superstitions, including: 1) anecdotes are accepted as evidence, 2) coincidence is mistaken for causality, 3) heresy is assumed to imply correctness (“They laughed at Copernicus, too.”), and 4) the unexplained is taken as inexplicable.
Science, too, is not immune to these fallacies, which is why organized doubt is built into the scientific process. Scientific method is a highly evolved b‑s detector, that relies on double-blind experiments, quantitative observations, reproducibility, and rigorous citation of all other relevant work, pro or con. In science, it is as important to show something is wrong — even a favored theory — as to show it is right.
Is the b‑s detector perfect? Of course not. But it’s the best tool the human race has yet evolved for choosing between various weird theories. (What could be more weird than the Big Bang, say, or the four-letter code of the DNA?) Behind all scientific skepticism is the assumption that what makes us feel good is not necessarily true.
Shermer’s book will never sell as many copies as Meyssan’s L’Effroyable Imposture. We love to have our most irrational hopes and direst illusions apparently confirmed. The question is: Will tough-minded skepticism or hopeful delusion best ensure a happy future for the human race?
Stephen Jay Gould wrote the introduction to Shermer’s book. What he said there is worth quoting: “Only two possible escapes can save us from the organized mayhem of our dark potentialities — the side that has given us crusades, witch hunts, enslavements, and holocausts. Moral decency provides one necessary ingredient, but not nearly enough. The second foundation must come from the rational side of our mentality. For, unless we rigorously use human reason to discover and acknowledge nature’s factuality…we will lose out to the frightening forces of irrationality, romanticism, uncompromising ‘true’ belief, and the the apparent resulting inevitability of mob action.”
