A man named Michael Protzman was in the news this week after he died from injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident, but also because he was a leader in the Q-Anon movement who in late 2021 managed to convince thousands of people to gather in Dallas to witness the return (reincarnation?) of JFK and his son, JFK Jr.
Online you can find dozens of video clips in which Q-Anon followers at the Dallas gathering express all kinds of wild beliefs, such as the contention that both JFK and Trump are descendants of Jesus Christ (along with Elvis Presley and an eclectic list of other celebrities who seem like they were ad-libbed on the spot into the same bloodline). People converged on Dallas specifically because the two J.F. Kennedys were supposed to emerge in the place where the elder of the two had been (pretend?) assassinated. Then, I guess, the idea was that they would link up with Trump and save the world from Satan and the deep state? One news clip I remember featured a mother who abandoned her family months earlier and changed her name to “Nonnie Codes” out of devotion to the Q-Anon cause. It’s funny stuff until you think about those kinds of costs, and the fact that our fellow Americans who believe crazy shit actually do impact public policy in harmful ways.
Q-Anon in particular isn’t much of a movement anymore as far as I can tell, but I am fascinated with these kinds of stories about misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and cults. I have spent countless hours wondering why some people subscribe to beliefs that seem insane or ridiculous. I have read obsessively about what pundits and academics refer to as the epistemic crisis or the sense-making crisis or the death of consensus reality. I have written about it here and here (and also here, here, here, and here). That’s not even an exhaustive list.
This obsession of mine is part of a transparent attempt to understand my three siblings, all of whom lately inhabit other realities from the one I travel in. My younger brother refers to me as a “vax supremacist” and a “not-see” (sound that out… get it?). He has shared posts, for example, claiming that Barack Obama is a blood descendant of Hitler, and that Michelle Obama is secretly a man. He and my youngest (half-)brother are both 9/11 “truthers” (a problematic label to say the least) who also of course don’t believe that the moon landing happened. My youngest brother seems to be deep into the “manosphere” these days, and he believes climate change is a hoax. My sister, whom I haven’t spoken to in some years for a variety of reasons, is probably on board with most of these beliefs, but my brothers don’t have a relationship with her either for some of the same reasons as me, so I can’t say for sure. Recently though I did learn she is an avowed flat-earther. Somehow she is not embarrassed to believe the earth is flat. I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point.
I am obsessed with this stuff because the shifts in my siblings’ worldviews and the collapse of my relationships with them felt shockingly sudden. A part of me wants to “solve” them, as arrogant as that sounds, and bring things back to some semblance of shared reality. Or maybe I just want to feel like my estrangement from them is sensible and justified. This state of things is painful, but attempting to coexist with them and their understanding of reality—incomprehensible to me and irreconcilable with mine—was not something we were able to manage. And so my quest to understand what’s happening in the larger culture around epistemology and sense-making, and inside the minds and hearts of people who inhabit drastically different realities, might be largely an attempt find peace of mind and relieve my own pain.
A useful insight about all this came from a good friend a year or two ago. He said something like: Most people don’t have much interest in objective reality or any reason to care about it. This struck me as both radical and obviously true. I have been obsessed with trying to understand why our shared subjective reality, aka consensus reality, is crumbling, but lately I wonder if I might be thinking about it backwards. A better question might be, how did consensus reality develop in the first place?
The pursuit of a universal (or at least global) consensus around objective reality is a relatively new human enterprise. Fundamental to that pursuit has been the establishment of formal scientific methods, with principles around evidence and replicability. That made possible the development of countless interconnected institutions devoted to science, education, public policy, commerce and economic growth, media and information, and more, which in turn led to unprecedented global human thriving. Consensus reality on a global scale is mostly a product of these institutions.
For most people, consensus reality is not concerned with objectivity. Rather, consensus reality means shared subjective reality. If you are not a scientist or otherwise one of the people who sifts through actual evidence and helps push forward the frontiers of knowledge, then you as a layperson simply decide whether or not to trust what those people and their institutions produce. At best, most of us are constantly engaged in this act of deciding.
Think about some things people disagree about these days: Are humans causing climate change? Did we put astronauts on the moon? Even, insanely, is the earth flat? How do you know the answer to those questions? In every case, you are probably trusting what some number of institutions have told you. You aren’t looking at the data first hand or doing the calculations. You weren’t at NASA in the 1960s.
Over the last few hundred years, enough people placed enough trust in institutions, and the institutions delivered tangible returns, thereby garnering more trust. It was a virtuous cycle. But this state of institutional trust is by no means a natural human capacity, and it’s eroding now (or eroding once again perhaps, if you consider other modern periods of mass disruption and conflict, like Europe in 1848, WWI, WWII…)
Shared subjective reality is arguably the quality that has most enabled humans to thrive. We are the apex species because of our ability to cooperate and collaborate, especially across time and distance. For most of human history though, this has existed at the tribal or village level. In that sense, shared subjective reality is a natural human tendency. The notion, however, of a global consensus reality is something new, and its concrete benefits are abstract and hard for any single individual to discern. We lean on trust.
In that light, it’s fairly easy to view Q-Anon as a shared subjective reality that’s just very niche (which is probably part of its appeal). This is true of any cult, and we can point to more widely shared beliefs as well. Christians of course believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God but also somehow is God, that he was born on earth to a virgin, and that he saved future people by being tortured and killed by the Romans. The only reason we don’t think this sounds nuts is because it’s so familiar.
I’m not saying that Q-Anon makes sense or that Christianity is nuts. I’m just pointing out that the essence of their power and their appeal might have to do with the sharedness rather than the beliefs themselves. It’s not hard to see how a conflicting global consensus reality, or objective reality, fails to compete with that for some people.
I think we’re at an inflection point right now with respect to consensus reality because modernity feels more and more insane, to continue a theme I’ve been on.
The everyday experience of being a customer for example has become a personal degradation. The cardinal imperative of business has always been to make a profit, but actually caring about customers or at least seeming to care was once treated as a means to that end. This is self-evidently still true for small, local businesses, but it used to be an operating principle for big business as well. As a best guess, treating your customers well as a path to profitability made sense. But then in the short span of my adult life, a massive data and analytics industry rose up and revealed to executives that the optimal paths to profit very often make things worse for customers. Business leaders jumped right onto that bandwagon, even while they pretend to care about customers more aggressively than ever. We are tracked and optimized for maximum dollar extraction. Pretty soon, certain features of your own car will require a monthly subscription, and this will be presented to you as something new and cool.
Meanwhile, the news delivers reports on problems caused by the system that’s being advertised between news stories (and also paying for the news). It’s like a person on antidepressants who also takes an anti-psychotic to mitigate certain side effects of the antidepressants. But then the anti-psychotic triggers anxiety, so they take Xanax… which causes insomnia, so they take Ambien.
A common tableaux in my city is a driverless car cruising past a backdrop of squalor. It feels like a perfect encapsulation of the era. The insanity of it all is hard to escape because of algorithms that are purpose-built to grab and keep our attention. We’re observers and participants in all of it to an unprecedented degree.
These kinds of things make it feel like institutions that expect our trust are victimizing us for their own benefit, and I can imagine how this could drive people to project sinister motives onto elites and institutions more broadly. I can see how accepting consensus reality could feel like an endorsement of the status quo. People treat it like a political choice and they reason their way to almost any other set of beliefs, or choose oblivion, as a refuge from the insanity.
Beside the point
My first thought when I heard about Walter Isaacson’s doorstop of a biography of Elon Musk was that I am done with Elon Musk. The man has hogged the world’s attention more than anyone other than Donald Trump, and I cannot imagine actually choosing to spend a single second thinking about him. I had that thought, and then I saw this post about Musk in my inbox. I read it despite myself, and it is full of the absolute most perfect takes on Elon Musk. The final word.