Initial Beliefs; the introduction
The year is 2011. A young girl is cuddled on the couch. As her eyes begin to droop she smoothly reaches down and pulls a blanket up until it rests just under her eyes. From the next seat over, her father turns his head and gazes down at his daughter. His lips curl up into a slight smile, then he compassionately pats her back. Still smiling, he turns his head back to the television where Ancient Aliens streams for what must be the 50th night in a row. As the girl drifts off to sleep she listens to the narrator. His question lingers; “Have aliens visited the earth before?”
The young girl is me. Watching conspiratorial shows and fictional crime shows has always been my dad and my go to bonding activity. Undoubtedly, at night one of use looks at the other one and says “Crime?” To which the other one will enthusiastically respond with “of course.” 10 years ago, I didn’t have much of an opinion on whether the theories behind shows like “Ancient Aliens” or “Hunting Hitler” spoke to my beliefs and definitely didn’t consider the implications of such shows existing. However, like most people, I eventually started to develop my own perspective of the world. This led to an evaluation of my motives for watching conspiratorial shows and an exploration of whether I believed in the theories that were presented to me. Eventually I came to the conclusion that, as a trusting and evidence chasing scientist in the making, conspiracy theories weren’t to be trusted. This meant that aliens have not visited the earth before, Hitler did not survive at the end of World War II, and the moon landing was not faked.
As everyone I surrounded myself with was fairly similar to me in terms of education and beliefs I had assumed that most people came to the same conclusion as me. However, the year 2020 came and threw stones at the peaceful pond I had come to accept as my world view. These stones came in the form of emerging conspiracy theories. 12 months ago I would have never considered people believing that a deadly virus and world wide pandemic would be engineered or planned. I had never heard of QAnon and their far right wing conspiracy beliefs. Hearing about these prompted me to explore the concept of conspiracy theories in more detail. Through this I expected to find what I thought I knew; conspiracy theories were created by powerful people to intentionally manipulate and spread misinformation, and those who believe in any conspiracy theory are missing compelling reasons to do so. This was not the case.
Join me on my exploration to find that in the world of conspiracy theories everything is not as it seems.