Will People Believe Anything?

In the US in recent weeks, one of the main political news stories has been something that, if everybody (except for a few mental hospital patients) was rational, would be completely unworthy of attention. I am talking of course of the lunatic fringe inspired "controversy" over President Barack Obama's birthplace. Actually, there have been two things in American political news recently that are unworthy of attention, the other being a certain loud-mouthed businessman. I refer to the guy Joe Klein calls "Trumpet" (and who he also says he generally makes a point of refusing to dignify with a mention). Even before he came out with all his wacky criticisms of Obama, he struck me as an obnoxious and somewhat sleazy character, almost an archetype of the unscrupulous businessperson, with his frequent declarations of bankruptcy, his tacky sense of style, his self-righteous moralizing about beauty show contestants, and his attempt to trademark the phrase "you're fired". How could anyone take him seriously as a candidate for president? Actually, some speculate it's all just a publicity stunt; in other words, all he wants is to get even more attention. In any case, if we all ignore him, maybe he'll go away.

But back to the question of Obama's birthplace. In polls taken before Obama obtained a waiver from Hawaii (where he was, in fact, born) to release his long-form birth certificate, close to half of Republicans, a fair number of independents, and even some Democrats expressed doubt or uncertainty as to whether Obama was born in the US. Not only had the documentation that the state of Hawaii normally provides been released publicly long ago (and it is worth repeating that Obama himself had to get a special waiver from Hawaii to get and release his long-form birth certificate -- it's not as if he could have released it whenever he wanted), but there were announcements of Obama's birth in two Honolulu newspapers at the time. There's as much or more evidence for where Obama was born than there is for a lot of Americans, including many who claimed to believe he wasn't born in the US (not everyone's birth is announced in a newspaper, for one thing). Believing that Obama was born in Kenya or some such place is the intellectual equivalent of believing that humans didn't land on the Moon, the Holocaust didn't happen, or the Earth is only 6000 years old. It's even worse (if possible) than believing that the Earth isn't getting warmer or that William Shakespeare the actor didn't write the plays that bear his name. So how is that so many Americans believe this kind of fantastic nonsense, and in some cases will even continue to believe it after Obama released his long-form birth certificate?

One simple answer might be that people are just plain stupid. In many cases, that probably is the reason, but while I doubt there are many so-called birthers who are intellectual powerhouses, they can't all be below average in intelligence, and some of the similarly nonsensical ideas mentioned above have been adopted by people who are clearly intelligent (for example, the anti-Stradfordians, as those who question Shakespeare's authorship are called, in the past included such people as Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Wells). In part it is simply people's fondness for conspiracy theories. While clearly delusional belief in conspiracies is often a sign of schizophrenia, even people without any form of mental illness will often believe some type of pattern exists where there clearly isn't one, whether it's a conspiracy theory, a face on Mars (it's just a geological formation), or a curse like the one claimed to be on the tomb of Tutankhamen (Howard Carter, the leader of the team that discovered the tomb, lived for almost two decades afterward, dying at a respectable 64).

However, other factors can predispose people to believe in conspiracy theories, especially those having to do with politics. For instance, in Taiwan, there is a significant portion of the population who believes that the assassination attempt against former President Chen Shuibian the day before his narrow reelection victory was staged, but almost all of those people are supporters of the KMT or other parties on that end of the Taiwanese political spectrum. Likewise, most if not all of the diehard "birthers" are people who are strongly opposed to President Obama and his policies (or what they imagine to be his policies). What's more, I suspect that those who say questioning Obama's citizenship (or his academic credentials -- this being a more recent game for the conspiracy theorists) is ultimately motivated by racism are right in at least some cases. A similar motivation, though less commonly cited, is xenophobia. Many of these same people are rabidly anti-immigrant, and the idea that someone with a foreign background -- and though Obama was clearly born in America, his father really was a foreigner, and he himself did spend part of his childhood in Asia -- could be president drives them insane (even though virtually all of them are descended from relatively recent immigrants themselves). Unfortunately xenophobia is a common cancer worldwide (just look at how every country facing public protests in the past few months has tried to place some or all the blame on foreign enemies), when in truth it would do everyone in the world good to be exposed more to foreign peoples and their cultures. But just as xenophobia remains strong in many countries around the world, there are many in the US who will continue to view anyone whose background is not "all-American" as suspicious, even to the point of believing obviously nutty theories about them.

[Update (2011/05/08): The death of Osama bin Laden, as mentioned in my latest post, has given rise to a new crop of conspiracy theories. Here is an article on the topic of conspiracy theories in general from the NY Times (which mentions one I left off, the "Paul is dead" nonsense, though it also includes a link to a rather incoherent rant from conspiracy buff Alex Jones -- yes, many of the conspiracies he cites were real, but a number of them are dubious at best, and his rambling and poorly copy edited arguments don't help) and another from CNN.]