Conspiracy’s Cold Comfort

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Lewis Hamilton has been outqualified 8 of 9 times this season by his Mercedes teammate George Russell. Not usually by very much, but so far this year George has been faster. Lewis, an aging superstar who’s leaving the team at the end of the year, losing to a teammate who should be entering the prime of his career shouldn’t be a shock. Father Time is undefeated, and even if it’s not, George is really fucking good. And yet, the conspiracies run rampant. It’s impossible Lewis could lose to George, so this success is fake, artificial, created, as far as the conspiracies go. That it is in nobody’s interest for this to be true goes unsolved, because it’s not a particularly robust conspiracy, but it’s popular.

It’s popular in the same way that allegations against Han Dong were last year, alleged to have worked to stop the release of the Two Michaels from Chinese detention to help the political position of the Canadian Liberals. Dong had a good day in Court yesterday, beating back an attempt by Global to have his defamation suit tossed. I’m not interested in breaking down the legal implications, or to do a chorus and verse of why Sam Cooper’s a hack that ran a bad story. I wrote three articles at the time laying out why the story didn’t hold. Yesterday served as something of an endorsement of that work, which is nice.

But what’s much more fascinating is why people find so much comfort in conspiracy. The theory that Lewis Hamilton is being sabotaged by Mercedes is obviously a low level conspiracy, fundamentally about a (at least for this season) midfield team allegedly preferencing the driver staying over the one leaving. If Merc were doing it, the world won’t (and shouldn’t) end. If Han Dong did what he was accused of, the world would have been justified in crashing down on his head. But as differently important as these stories are, they both point to that lingering comfort in conspiracy.

And that’s a far greater threat to our democracy.

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The week of the attack on Parliament Hill in 2014 there was an attack on an armed forces base in Quebec. Two service members were attacked, one died, and I walked into a Tuesday Grade 12 World Issues class where the teacher decided to use this attack as an object lesson. In what? The ways governments conspire to hype up terror threats to get citizens to accept limits on their civil liberties, from a man who called Stephen Harper an Emperor. Within 24 hours Nathan Cirillo was dead. (Unsurprisingly, I skipped his class the day of the Hill shooting - I had no interest in listening to him attempt to square the circle of his illogic.)

We’ve been conditioned to believe that cynicism is an elevated level of intellect, that if you’re not willing to engage in it you’re less of an intellectual but more so less legitimate. Cynicism and conspiracy has become less about reading between the lines and more about inventing subtext that’s not there. If you think I’m removing myself from this, of course I’m not. I’ve read government press releases and stories planted in exactly this cynical of a way for the last decade, and sometimes I’m right and sometimes it’s wrong. But at some point it became the way we operate all the time, and it’s not good. 

It’s made us eager to find conspiracy in the mundane, and to reach for the most incendiary reasons. I’ve written this before (and told him this myself), but my cynicism caused me to despise Nate Erskine-Smith back in the day. In the early days of the Majority Parliament I hated NES, because I could only imagine him acting and voting the way he was out of strategic consideration, and not genuine belief. Was he a principled person who believed what he said? Nah, just a troublemaker who figured out his path to advancement ran through making himself different to the other 100 new MPs. That view was obviously wrong.

The eagerness to look for traitors in the Parliament, whether in Dong or anyone else, suffers from the same problem. Think about what Dong did that we can all agree on - a relatively young backbench MP with aspirations took a meeting to try and advance the government’s political interests. That is pretty much agreed by all, be it Dong himself, his defenders, and Sam Cooper. What’s disagreed about is what was said in that meeting.

What's more likely, that Dong took that meeting to undermine what the Liberals wanted, or that a backbench MP with good personal connections with the consulate thought he had more juice than he did? One of those is treason, and the other is a typical Wednesday. I don’t know how anyone who knows politics can miss the obvious answer, which is that backbench MPs often tend to overstate their actual influence. It’s also true that staffers do the same thing, and that journalists and commentators overstate their influence too.

It’s been obvious to me since this happened 15 months ago now that the much more likely explanation for all of this is that Dong overstated his influence and had an ill-advised but not illegal or treasonous call to try and solve a problem for Justin Trudeau in hopes of earning brownie points. But that explanation is a lot less comforting to those that hate Justin Trudeau and this government than that a Liberal MP - or many Liberal MPs - committed treason. Hell, a UOttawa prof tweeted last night that the only reason Trudeau hasn’t named the names in Parliament is he’s named as a conspirator against this country. The brain rot is real.

And it’s not just a right wing brain rot - the Harper years led to considerable conspiracist nonsense, as does Pierre Poilievre’s general existence. Anti-Poilievre lies go semi-viral on the daily, including lies that Poilievre won’t be leader at the next election, that pollsters are conspiring to show Poilievre ahead, and that Poilievre cannot (as opposed to is choosing not to) get a security clearance. The number of supposedly smart people who show their whole ass when Poilievre shows up in the news is remarkable. (I would also like to use this opportunity to make the point that if Abacus is actually a Conservative plant organization run by a secret Tory I don’t think the CEO of the company would twice willingly give me proprietary polling data to use in a column for free. Thanks again, David.)

I get the appeal - a conspiracy allows us to believe that some external force is responsible for our present discontent. It’s almost never that simple. Lewis Hamilton being sabotaged by Mercedes allows Hamilton’s cult of fans to live in a delusion where he’ll walk into Ferrari in 2025 and wipe the floor with the competition. It’s nonsense, idiocy on stilts (plainly, if Lewis can’t beat George he’s not beating Charles, who is better), but it’s comforting idiocy. Han Dong allows us to believe that there are traitors in Parliament, and the idea that our present discontents aren’t our own faults. We want to believe that the only reason people do things we don’t like is either stupidity or illegality, because it’s much harder to reckon with losing because the public isn’t interested in what you’re selling than it is to blame someone else.

If we all become conditioned to accept nonsense stories about people we don’t like, we might as well just give up. We cannot have a country, we cannot have a democracy, if we allow obvious lies to carry weight just because the people accused are people we dislike. Whether it’s about Mercedes sabotage or Han Dong’s treason, we cannot allow ourselves to allow our cynicism to become so great that our commitment to parties outweighs our belief in our country. Conspiracist thinking won’t elect a better government or build more hospitals or fix the housing crisis. Lying to ourselves won’t fix our issues. We are the masters of our domain and the authors of our futures. Instead of looking for enemies abroad to blame for our present discontents, we must look inward. We are to blame for our current failures. Blaming everyone else makes us no better than the people we claim to hate.