"They" and "Them": Understanding Conspiracies and the Need to Believe (re-release from 2024)

As we approach the holidays, When We Disagree is re-releasing episodes about tough conversations with friends and family. This week's episodes are both about arguing with friends about conspiracy theories. When communication professor Bill Keith found himself unable to reason with a close friend consumed by conspiracy theories, he faced a humbling question: what happens when dialogue fails? In this episode of When We Disagree, Keith examines the limits of civility, the psychology of self-sealing arguments, and the heartbreak of watching reason collapse into paranoia. Together they explore how systems, not secret cabals, shape our world—and why boundaries, not just empathy, are sometimes the most civil choice.

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Transcript

Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. What's the opposite of a contrarian? Many of us have experiences with this person. Let's call them yes, Queens or. Kings, these are people who agree with you all of the time.

I had a bad experience at some burger joint and I tell 'em about it and they say, yeah, that place is awful. I don't really like superhero movies. And they say, same, me too. It can come across as supportive. I'm feeling shame about something or I'm considering making a decision that might ruffle some feathers, and they say, live your truth.

Trust yourself. You gotta look out for number one, Shakespearean two th own self be true. Or if you think it or feel it, it can't possibly be wrong because you should trust your gut. Yes, Queens and guest kings can be really useful and validating and friendly. And some of us, especially [00:01:00] those of us who want to be told that we're the fairest of them all surround ourselves with yes people.

But contention, conflict and antagonism are not just necessary to arrive at good decisions and get all the facts out and see decisions from every different angle. They're also essential component of deep relationships, of fun relationships. Sometimes the best way to enhance a relationship is to have and survive conflict.

Sometimes the best way to support someone is to tell them they're wrong. I'm Michael Lee. Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Today's guest is Bill Keith, professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He's from Cleveland and he's the author of Radically Civil How to Save Democracy, one Conversation at a Time, written also with Rob Danish.

Bill, tell us an argument story. 

Bill Keith : Hi Mike. Good to see you again. Yeah. So obviously I have some [00:02:00] commitments to the idea of having good arguments and maintaining them and stuff. So I have some frustration around this particular episode. So, as somebody that I knew for around nine years and we were friends, and this is a really nice, good person, I, I want people to realize that this is not a, a maniac and it's the person who, you know, helped create a organization to house and feed the homeless and stuff like that, but.

As I got to know them better, it came out that they believed many. Conspiracy theories, and it started kind of slow and then it became more and more, and it took me a while to realize that actually they believed all the conspiracy theories, even ones that I would regard as fundamentally inconsistent with each other, not a feature of how they thought about things.

And it came in all sorts of areas, right? So at one point her husband and I were talking about the NBA finals, and she's like, well, why do you care? That's all they've already decided. Who's gonna win? That's all completely rigged, right? And I've [00:03:00] since found out there are other people who think that even though I don't think there's really any evidence except your critique of the refereeing, and then like, you know, you get into areas.

So is modern medicine unfortunately bound up with a bunch of economic issues so that, you know, pharmacy companies and insurance companies and the structures of hospitals and medical care as huge institutions of those impact your care? Yes, and I'm, I'm perfectly willing to admit that and think about that, but on the other hand, you know, at one point she's like, yeah, yeah, I totally agree.

Every time your doctor prescribes you something, they get paid. And, and this is where it sort of struck me at a certain point that whatever I'm doing is not working. 'cause I'm like, okay, I, I, I, the way in which money influences doctors is kind of different. You know, they take them to Bahamas for a, a scholarly meeting and they give them speaker fees and stuff like that.

No, no. They pay them for each one of 'em. Where are the accountants that keep track of that? Like who writes the checks? How do they [00:04:00] account for their taxes? If somebody who's nameless is writing the check for all this money every year, like just like sort of ordinary things that like this would not be workable.

Oh, no, no. They have their ways, see, because they get around the taxes because they let them, and so, right. And in typical sort of conspiracy theory, fashion. And then at a certain point, you know, the COVID comes around and the RNA vaccine and this causes a complete freakout because they're injecting things that will change the DNA of my body forever.

Because Messenger, RNA, I said, well, okay, I happen to have read a whole bunch about this and, you know. Your body is full of Messenger, RNA right now because it's essential to you being alive. And also the vaccine, the M mRNA that they put in dissolves in about a day, so Right. It's just to train your immune system to recognize invaders and attack them.

It is not changing your fundamental DNA, not having it at all. No, no, no. I've watched YouTube videos. I'm an [00:05:00] expert on this. You are wrong. She says to me, and then we get to the part about demons. So a lot of the conspiracy theories end up refracted through an idiosyncratic reading of Revelations, or maybe there are no non idiosyncratic readings of Revelations.

I don't know. It admits of a lot of interesting stuff, but it turns out that people who are bad actors are, have demons in them. So Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, many, many other people are possessed by demons and. It's also true that people unbridled sexuality is taken for granted so that there's White House orgies.

All movie stars have orgies all the time. Most of these orgies involve children that have been stolen. So I'm like this, so I'm, I'm, I'm not trying to make fun exactly of how extreme the police are, but just that I thought, okay, so my idea of argument is you create a relationship with the person where there's a certain level of trust.

And obviously there was, because the person was communicating these things to me, [00:06:00] knowing that they were kind of disfavored ideas. Then I thought, well, you know, the application of questioning, pointing out some evidence, pointing out where you could look and see evidence that this would somehow make a difference to the whole thing did not really pan out for me.

It seemed like, you know just asking questions and providing information made things worse. Right. Because the thing is, it got fed into the idea that, well see, you're one of the people that has been fooled by them. Like I, I don't, actually don't think I've been fooled by that. And part of it also was like, I think I do approach medical care in the US with what I consider to be a healthy skepticism, which I know other people would think would be too skeptical.

That's okay. So we kind of bonded on that. And then we got to the, all the doctors are getting paid for prescribing you whatever, which is just not, not really plausible, even though money is a serious problem. [00:07:00] So there's a teacherly. Part of me is like, oh, I can fix this and set this straight. Not really working.

And also I think there's a point at which I realized this person, I wouldn't say we're not friends anymore, but we don't really talk that it became clear to me that I was in the middle of someone else's mental illness in a certain way. Like it used to be that like one of the. Triggers to thinking that somebody had a certain kind of schizophrenia as they thought that there were messages for them in the newspaper.

When they read the newspaper, they suddenly saw reference to their lives. It was clearly getting to that point with this person, and it progressed over time and they became sort of more isolated because. People in their church wouldn't talk to them. And then they had a study group and they wouldn't talk to them, so it was getting worse.

So I felt really bad about that and maybe I misjudged in the beginning that this was actually an argument problem. But I really, really thought that, you know, there's a wide swath or a wide space here, which we can be there to disagree and that I could find that space and be [00:08:00] happy with it. I, I kind of failed.

Michael Lee: There's so much to talk about here. I want to ask about, I mean, you've spent your life, you've dedicated your life to teaching students how to analyze arguments. You've dedicated your writing life to writing for the public about how to have better arguments. You're ideologically dedicated to being more civil and encouraging civil encounters with different disagreement.

And here you find yourself. Kind of throwing your hands up and saying, I'm not really sure what to do. What's that experience like? 

Bill Keith : Well, obviously there's some ego in there that, you know, I think somehow I'm better at this, and it's like. Then again, you know, is there a tendency for all of us, even to overestimate our ability to do this, to overestimate?

I mean, I think it's a failure of academics in some ways to say, well, there's this kind of space of rational discourse and we kind of know what it is and whether people are in or out. [00:09:00] And there's a lot of people talking nowadays about, well, you know, the right, the left, live in different worlds. And this person was even in a third or fourth or fifth world, but like, if people are truly ooh, right, their assumptions are so completely different.

And plus, so, you know, I wrote a, a dissertation on some of these kinds of issues, and I wanted to have, and this is 40 years ago, but I had a very expansive notion of rationality. I wanted to have something that wasn't just. A certain kind of debate or a certain kind of logic or something like that. But so how do you decide what's irrational?

And so I, I said there, it's, it's self-sealing arguments, right? So when evidence for your position is for it, evidence against it is also for it. Then you have a problem because then, right. It's completely sealed and there's no way that anybody can argue against you, right? So you have the people who say, oh, Jews run America.

They're, they're on all the boards of everything. They control everything. When you point out that [00:10:00] actually there's. Not that many Jews in all sorts of areas of, you know, financial life and other kinds of things, you see how good they are at hiding. That's just evidence that they're controlling it so well, they're keeping it from you.

And it's like, oh, okay. So that move, if you can't get the person off of it, then we have to kind of stop dialoging. 

Michael Lee: A similar issue, and I, I believe, I think Carl Popper talked about this as a lack of falsifiability these kinds of self-sealing arguments. And the same definitional question I was having as you were going through the conspiracy theories that this person believed in, which was how do you decide what is a conspiratorial belief and what is just a regular old belief?

Bill Keith : Conspiracy supposedly have a couple of features, right? Everything means something. Everything is connected. Nothing happens by accident and when. So people invoke those as primary premises or warrants, we might say in the kinds of arguments that they make, then you start to [00:11:00] think, okay, right, there's something else, right?

There's a big set of interconnected beliefs and arguments here, which are impervious. And to be fair, and Popper Popper was talking about. Un false viability means like you don't in principle know what would make this untrue. I do know what makes some of these things untrue. Here is the evidence for it and the person's like, but that evidence just proves my point, right?

It's like the worst version of the debate turnaround 

Michael Lee: where I get really struck, stuck with these issues, especially some of the examples you gave. Let's take the first two, the NBA example. I've had that same argument with friends since College of the NBA's rigged and then the Tim Mc Donaghy refereeing scandal.

I mean, it's calling inordinate numbers of fouls. He's absolutely on the take. He probably single handedly swung the Kings v Lakers series with. Kobe and Shaq and Chris Weber and them, and then you find some evidence like that. And then of course, we don't have to look very far with the pharmaceutical industry payouts, incentives, et cetera, to kind of color in a larger [00:12:00] conspiratorial claim.

So it seems like there's yet another thing, in addition to the qualities you mentioned of conspiratorial arguments, which is. Dichotomous thinking. It is a kind of them and an us, a good and an evil, and Tim Donnay just proves that the whole lot is, is dirty. You know, the Sacklers just prove that the whole lot of the pharmaceutical industry is dirty as opposed to thinking, you know, there's a ton of weird gray areas.

It can be very confusing. It's hard to kind of muddle through and figure out what's what. Yes, there was a referee. Fixing scandal. Yes, there's some dirtiness in the pharmaceutical industry and some of these drugs really work and not all doctors are on the take, and there's honest referees all at the same time.

Bill Keith : Other thing that I've thought about this along those lines is that there's a lot of things we want to talk about nowadays as systemic problems isn't the problem of individual actors. And that's kind of like where it's a little bit weird that just individual doctors are getting paid off. That's a systemic problem.

Companies, the Sacklers represent a giant company. You [00:13:00] know, and, and like the referee scandal, you could also take that to be evidence. Look, he got caught. Anybody else who did it would get caught. So that's not so scary. But when people look at big systemic problems, a lot of which had to do with capitalism, right?

So people who want to profit a system is designed to make profit for people, whether they like it or not, and it's gonna, you know, warp things in a particular direction. When you look at that. The conspiracy theory comes out of thinking it must be somebody doing something right, as opposed to the system controlling people.

Right? Because I realize now when I go to the doctor, they have this computer in front of 'em. There's the electronic medical records, the. A hospital system that I go to has already decided what makes me sick and what makes me, well, they need to prescribe me certain drugs. This is true actually. Not only are they dinged in their evaluation, if they don't prescribe me, they're dinged.

If I don't actually fill the prescription, and I'm like, A doctor told me this. I'm like, you know, he goes, of course we know. [00:14:00] Oh, that's like, he just made it worse. But like he didn't choose that system. And I've talked to other physicians and they're like, yeah, everybody's gotta kind of decide how they're gonna resist that and when they're gonna resist that.

And that's a personal, ethical choice you make, how you push back and what you deal with. Okay. But you can see somebody from the outside not knowing any of this, looking at it and saying it's just. All of these things is just a they, there is a they that is doing this thing when the they is actually the system.

Michael Lee: Anytime I talk to somebody who is talking about the frustrations of arguing with a conspiracy theorist, I always have to ask whether you have beliefs that you could characterize as conspiratorial. In other words, do you believe in any conspiracy theories? 

Bill Keith : Well, to be fair, we now use conspiracy to dismiss people, but some conspiracies are absolutely real.

You know, Watergate, Iran contrast scandal, like the Sacklers, right? There's tons of real live conspiracy theories. They're almost never totalizing [00:15:00] conspiracies, right? So the idea I had some relatives from another country they sent me. So there are these guys in Hollywood who make like the title credits animated, title credits for movies.

Very, very slick. And so there, ever since its inception, the Federal Reserve has attracted conspiracy thinking because it's quasi-governmental, it both is and isn't. And that ambiguity seems to set off the theorizing, right? Since there's multiple roles that could play. And so these people in the European country, I will not name, sent me this, this video, and I get about a minute into it.

It's like. I would bet a hundred dollars that the Jews show up before minute 12. That's about halfway through. And sure enough, the Rothschilds came in at minute 10 and I wrote back, the person said, I don't like this kind of antisemitic stuff. It's like, what? That's not true. I don't hate anybody. This is not, this is a fact.

Like, oh, okay. Yeah. So. I, I'm sure there are things that I like [00:16:00] critiques the medical system that there are people who would look at, I had a friend once, she said no, all that stuff for the pharmacy industry. She was a doctor. She knew about this. She's like, but we are pure of heart. We're not moved by this.

Nobody's influenced by this. If they pay for me to go to a conference in Vail, Colorado, that's not gonna change my view of their drugs. Well, I'm sorry. The evidence is that it does not, not a hundred percent, but they can, they can change their sales by doing this stuff. 

Michael Lee: So the, the difference for you is a, I mean, whether you can sort of check out the facts on the conspiracy.

In other words, is it true or not? And that's your assessment of the evidence. And then, and then two or B is whether it links up with a, a, a grand totalizing narrative about us and them, good and evil, black and white, et cetera. 

Bill Keith : And I think the, the one to, you know, so we used to disagree about this because she would talk about certain things, I'd say.

This is actually way easier than that. This is just [00:17:00] people trying to make money. This is people like power and they like money. Some people in the Senate end up being very wealthy. Others, Instagram end up being very powerful, if not insanely wealthy. Right? And those are the two things. And I don't think you have to go deeper into demonic purposes or a cabal that rules the world and determines everything in advance.

And like a person who won't vote in elections because they assumed. This was true in 16 and 20 for her that she didn't vote because it's like they've already chosen who's gonna win. So I just like, if somebody showed me evidence of that, okay, fine. But I respond to the evidence. 

Michael Lee: Let's talk about what's frustrating about this case for you, and then I want to conclude by talking about the diagnosis where you said, you know, I, I don't think it's even worth having these arguments with somebody who may or may not be paranoid, but when you were experiencing in this frustration, did the frustration with arguing, with this conspiracy theorist arise because.

Somehow [00:18:00] her ignorance on these questions was offputting. Because you saw it as a threat, was it irritating because she was actually trying to persuade you and you found something really irritating about that? Or is it that you thought that perhaps she was, she's better than this and you wanted her to see that potential or realize that potential?

Bill Keith : Oh, I like that. I think it's a, a lot of it was. You're better than this and, and also these things tormented her, right? Because she thought constantly about, you know, the presence of evil forces and conspiracies and this stuff just tortured her. And it's like the world's a sad place in a lot of ways, but not, that's sad.

Yeah. Right. You thought you were actually 

Michael Lee: saving her on some level. If you could be persuasive, 

Bill Keith : you could also save or help. Yeah, I would say that I think that that is a helpful thing. And you know, and the thing is, I've definitely had people who've opened my eyes to things where I resisted it first and they sort of stay on me.

And it's like, yeah, actually [00:19:00] you're kind of, you're right about that. And I've come around to your way of thinking about it. But I also like having a space. I like a space of disagreement. I'm completely okay with that. This became a weirder and weirder space that didn't seem like disagreement. And I, I started to realize that whatever I was saying was just bouncing off the outside that what seemed like a dialogue was not.

And maybe that's the deep conspiracy thing. 

Michael Lee: And talk a little bit about the, the experience of that frustration than leading to your conclusion about this person's potential paranoia. 

Bill Keith : Well. I just wondered if I, like, am I making things worse? Do we actually have anything to say to each other? You know, there's a, her Christianity was unique to herself, but I've had this conversation with fundamentalist Christians before where it's like, because I'm not a Christian.

You think I'm going to hell? And sometimes it's a good conversation where a person's like, yeah, most people are, so that's okay. Probably me too. Right? [00:20:00] And it becomes a kind of honest thing that clears out space where you can talk to each other. Other times it's much less comfortable. Well, if you would just, just, you know, convert or, or whatever.

Convert to my denomination. Which is less, less good. And so I just, you know, feeling that this is not a space where there's any kind of change or anything real going on and feeling like suddenly like. I'm actually not talking to a rational person here, am I? This is getting worse and worse for her. And it is true that people can get tighter and tighter into their paranoid beliefs.

I believe there's some movies about this. 

Michael Lee: Yeah. What's the, as we close. What's the lesson here in terms of how we should go about having civil conversations? The show is dedicated to exploring the role and variety of conflict in our lives, the way we avoid it, suppress it, and engage it. You have written s Voluminously about the need for civility in a polarized [00:21:00] world, and we continue to run up in situations like this where there doesn't seem to be an easy answer.

So what's a lesson 

Bill Keith : for you? I think the hard part is people who don't agree with you aren't necessarily evil. They're not necessarily mentally ill either. Some people jump to that, right? Disagreement is okay, but also it is okay for people to have boundaries about how much disagreement that they're willing to have with you.

So, for example, people who go to the same church are gonna have really different disagreements with each other than they would have. They don't need to draw me into the details of their theology or a political movement or whatever it is. And so it's okay to maintain those boundaries and realize that maybe the sort of totally great, wonderful, and this was a long set of conversations over many years.

And so maybe it just like I should have, I should have created a few more boundaries a little bit early on. Been stuck with things that were not so sensitive. 

Michael Lee: Bill, [00:22:00] thank you so much for being on when we disagree. 

Bill Keith : Mike, thank you so much for doing this work. I truly appreciate it. 

Michael Lee: When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host.

Michael Lee Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance LayLaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.