Thursday
A great literary tweet comes to us from one David Baddiel, who shares a Middlemarch passage that explains how conspiracy theories take hold. Author George Eliot, he says, nails it in the following passage:
But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
It so happens that, unlike many QAnon conspiracy theories, the one in Middlemarch has some basis in fact. The wealthy man Bulstrode has an actual scandal in his past and has found a way to do away with a man who has been blackmailing him over it. Nevertheless, fact soon morphs into something more fantastical:
Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode’s earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.
The innocent victim of this conspiracy theory is Lydgate, an idealistic and accomplished doctor who is trying to reform the medical profession. How he becomes linked with the wealthy Bulstrode is complicated, but all you need to know here is that he is an unknowing accomplice to Bulstrode murdering the blackmailer. When Bulstrode goes down, so does Lydgate, along with his lofty dreams. He dwindles into a conventional doctor ministering to rich people with gout in seaside resorts.
While today’s conspiracy theories take hold via the internet, in Victorian England they are spread through tavern gossip. Mrs. Dollop, “the spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane,” is one of those pouring lively metal into dialogue so that they take fantastic shapes. Time and again, she must correct those who want to stick to facts. As Eliot puts it, she
had often to resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that their reports from the outer world were of equal force with what had “come up” in her mind. How it had been brought to her she didn’t know, but it was there before her as if it had been “scored with the chalk on the chimney-board—”
When someone points out to her that she’s attributing a quotation she read in a newspaper to Bulstrode, she’s not deterred. Just as QAnon believers have a way around every difficulty, Mrs. Dollop says, “If one raskill said it, it’s more reason why another should.”
With such reasoning, what chance does truth have? As Mark Twain once wrote, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” The problem with our current lies is that they are killing people, leading them to reject healing vaccines and instead ingest livestock dewormers.