Conspiracy theories and the fear of Science

These days, since the lockdown in Italy due to the COVID-19 pandemy, I noticed more and more conspiracy theories on social networks. Why such an increment and how can we face it?

The need of conspiracy

I think that conspiracy theories have, more or less, always existed. They are a way to fight the anxiety.
For our ancestors anxiety was a way to save their life. It was something that made them see a predator behind the trees, even if it wasn’t there. Without the anxiety in the worst case you were dead. But with it you could run away, saving your life. Evolution decided that it is better running away even if 9 times of 10 there’s no predator hidden behind the trees.

Since the birth of civilization and cities, anxiety lost its primary purpose. There were no more predators. But anxiety still exists, and we have to deal with it.

Everybody has anxiety, and every single person try to deal with it in a different way. Conspiracy theories are a peculiar way to do it.

Conspiracy theories, no matter how odd they are, have the purpose to convince that life is something much easier and controllable than what it actually is.

During COVID-19 lockdown I saw it at its climax. Conspiracy theories about the virus made in laboratory, or that Japan had a cure but wasn’t sharing it, or, even worse, that COVID-19 and SARS-COV-2 don’t exist at all! Everything had the purpose to relieve theirselves from the terrible truth that, from time to time, there are viruses that pass from animal to human, and since for the human they are completely new, they have serious effects.
It is history. And it’s something we are not able to control.
You can understand that conspiracy theories, like the ones I wrote, are far easier to accept, even if they are completely nonsense (and proven wrong).

Who is a conspiracy theorist?

Anybody can be a conspiracy theorist. It is true, for my personal experience, that many people with a low educational level tend to embrace the philosophy of conspiracy theories. After all the more you don’t know a thing, the more you can deceive yourself with a more pleasant “truth”.
But it’s not always like that. I found different people with a high educational level, agreeing with some of the worst theories. Maybe they are not able to understand that specific field, or maybe they have difficulties acknowledging some facts due to specific resistances. Finding the causes of the need of conspiracy theorism in a person is not so easy, and reading a few psychology books does not make me a psychologist. Nevertheless I think that we all have to find a way to defeat conspiracy theorism and the echoing of it through social networks. At least avoiding them to spread by sharing.

How can we fight conspiracy theories?

This is the million dollar question. I honestly don’t know. I find that generally speaking there is a lot of fear of Science. Why?

First of all Science works in a way that does not belong to the human perspective. Do you remember what I wrote about anxiety? Science works in the opposite way. There are no opinions, there are facts. There are theories but they must be proven. For our ancestors that was not possible. They didn’t wait to see if the predator was actually behind the trees, they just ran away. Moreover Science is everyday getting more complex and far from the common people knowledge. And with common people I mean people that are not working in that specific field or in a close one. I am a common person when talking about virology or microbiology. I read a couple of books about those but they were at beginner level.
This morning I read a long post that was explaining a lot of things about the SARS-COV-2 virus, I understood more or less the 50% of the post. I would say that the post was written partially for common people and partially for people who have some knowledge about virology, nevertheless I have a master’s degree in Astrophysics and I am a passionate Science reader.
Science is very complex nowadays and human knowledge is already practically infinite.

Fear of Science is often a contributory cause of conspiracy theories and I think that we should at least work on that.
There is need of many scientific popularizer, to let the people understand complex arguments with ease (even if there are some approximations).
But the most important way to fight the fear of Science is the one that has to be done in school. There is need to explain how Science works, and, even more, to let students develop their critical thinking, to let their creativity work side by side with their logic. They need to know how their mind works, the cognitive biases we all have.

School is not for just learning some notions.

All of this is maybe easy to write, and very difficult to make it concretely. But I’m an optimist and everything starts from talking, reading, writing about.