Bonus Sample: Talking to Children About Conspirituality
An audio essay loosely based on conversations Matthew has while parenting. Content is possibly appropriate for ages 7 to 11 — although who really knows. The main point is to deflate the media persona and cut back on the cynicism and hot-takery to discuss these things in a way that leaves the door open for growth and hope. Rules: use simple sentences, many examples, frame bad news within good news, and never call anyone stupid. Don’t give a kid a story that has no way out. Don’t people their world with hopeless cases.Questions include:
What is a conspiracy?
What’s the difference between a good and bad conspiracy?
So what are conspiracy theories?
Are all conspiracy theories bad?
How can people can believe COVID isn’t real when they can see how many people are getting sick and dying?
Why do conspiracy theorists make things worse than they actually are?
Why would the government cover up aliens?
What is spirituality?
What do conspiracy theories have to do with spirituality?
So if you grew up believing in Jesus, did you used to believe in conspirituality?
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
You can support our work and have full access to bonus episodes and other premium content by subscribing for as little as $5 a month at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
Thanks for listening and your support, which keeps us ad-free and editorially independent.
So what are conspiracy theories?
Okay, so we know that conspiracies are real.
Real people plan them and they really carry them out.
And if they are bad conspiracies, they can hurt a lot of people.
So remember that the tobacco bosses kept their businesses going for decades after they learned that many smokers died of lung cancer.
And people aren't stupid.
They are understandably suspicious when they start learning about stories like this.
They know that conspiracies happen.
And they don't like it.
Remember, too, that real conspiracies are usually only discovered long after they've ended.
And that's really, really frustrating.
One thing that can make some people feel better about that frustration is beginning to imagine what conspiracies might be going on right now.
Because if they are right about what they imagine, they might have the chance to be a hero, to save the world from some terrible thing.
They might feel less helpless about bad things happening.
Because if you can discover what the bad thing is before it's really fully happened, you might be able to stop it.
Okay, so imagine that you become aware of something, a circumstance that feels bad or dangerous.
Maybe you pour a glass of water from the tap in your house, and it tastes funny one day.
Or you think it tastes funny.
And the funny taste, or your imagination of the funny taste, it makes you feel uneasy.
You might wonder, is someone tampering with the water?
What might they be putting in the water?
And maybe another example would be that you hear a news report about bee populations, like, just collapsing.
That there are no more bees anymore.
We don't know where the bees are.
And the scientists on the radio might say that it's climate change.
They might say it's pesticides.
But it occurs to you, what if someone is capturing the bees to hold them ransom?
Or they're capturing the bees to make sure that only their crops are being pollinated, or that only they are going to get all of the honey.
So people start imagining things?
Well, they do.
We all do it.
And we often start with the same questions that scientists and journalists begin with.
The question would be, what's really going on here?
I don't have the full story here.
What's really going on?
The problem is that usually very smart and creative questions that you ask because you have a very strong feeling that something is going wrong, they can't really be answered sufficiently.
In most cases, especially when it's about something complex.
So in order to test the funny-tasting water and come up with the truth about it, you'd have to be like a hydrologist or a chemistry person.
And in order to discover an enormous secret hidden beehive, you'd have to be some kind of nature detective who had an ATV and you could go everywhere that you needed to go and check in a million different places.
And a regular person sitting at home with a different kind of job, they just won't have the time or the tools to get that kind of evidence.
And, you know, journalists are kind of like regular people who are skilled at talking to real experts to try and discover the best answers to hard questions like this.
But even for them, that process takes a long time.
Sometimes accurately answering even a single question about what a single person said or did on one particular day can take a whole year of work.
You know what's a lot easier than that is making up stories.
And it's also more fun.
So your brain has a choice when bad things are happening.
Does it feel better to wait until experts come up with an accurate picture?
Does it feel okay to not imagine things that you can't really prove, and in the meantime you're going to have this uncertain and unsettled feeling about what's happening?
Or does it feel better to imagine an answer that gives you the sense that you understand the world?
It actually takes a lot of effort to be okay with the feeling of not knowing what's going on or what's going to happen.
So, some people make a kind of trade-off in their brains, and they might not know that they're doing it.
They might say, it's more important for me to feel like I know what is going on than for me to have evidence.
And this makes sense, especially if they have been hurt by real conspiracies and they don't want to be hurt again.
But I was asking about theories.
Oh, wow.
Oh right.
So the conspiracy theory is something that happens when there are a lot of thoughts and feelings about something bad that is obviously happening.
You don't quite know what it is, but you have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it.
And when you want to make sense of those thoughts and feelings, but you're not a scientist, or a historian, or a doctor, and so you don't have great evidence, and time is ticking, and you really want an answer so that you can feel a little bit better, what might you turn to?
You might turn to stories.
We all love stories.
They take us on a journey.
They help us make sense of things that happen.
They help us pass the time.
And thinking up stories is something that most children do as they're imagining how the world is and how it might make sense.
And it can be a private thing that the child does, but stories can also like really develop and explode when they are shared.
Also, if you think about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Star Trek, if the stories are interesting, interconnected, if they're complex, if they go on for a long time, if they're full of secrets and mysteries and they promise a good future, even if the present is not looking so good, many, many people will enjoy just losing themselves in them.
Okay, so back to your question.
The conspiracy theory is a story about something that feels like it could be a conspiracy, but we're not sure yet.
And as people tell and share and add to the story, they feel like they know something, and like they can do something about the bad thing that might be happening, or at least have some idea about how it might turn out.
