We're All Idiots on this Ship of Fools
On conspiracy theories, false beliefs, and my upcoming novel
This is it! The last week of Ada’s Children, which wraps up on Sunday. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check out the beginning for free. Or, if you want to binge the whole thing for free, you can use the “7-Day Free Trial” option. But if you do, I hope you’ll support me with a tip, or one-time payment:
Now we pivot to my next novel, Ship of Fools. Unlike Ada, it will be free-to-read upon release. The ship leaves port on May 17. For more on that, and a little preview of the novel, check out last week’s post.
Since this new novel is all about conspiracy theories and false beliefs, I thought it would be a good idea to explain how I became intrigued with flat-earthers and then by conspiracy theories in general, and how that, plus a lot of other stuff, got turned into a novel.
The flat-earth movement caught my attention when I watched the Netflix documentary Behind the Curve.
Up to then, I didn’t have much patience for conspiracists or their theories (even the ones that might have something to them, like whatever happened with the assassination of JFK). My eyes would always glaze over at the depth of the rabbit holes, the number of dots that needed connecting, the long tracts required to elucidate the links between those dots, or the insistent tone and rushed cadence of a conspiracist’s speech. In short, I was a normie (and still am, though my wife doesn’t always think so).
I’d also been somewhat inoculated against conspiracist thinking by Thomas Pynchon’s short novel, The Crying of Lot 49. The protagonist, Oedipa Maas, comes across a centuries-old conspiracy involving rival mail delivery services. The key question is whether the conspiracy is real or simply an array of disconnected and coincidental events, which Oedipa’s mind forces into a pattern. Is someone out to get her, or is she just paranoid? And to get all meta, since this is a post-modern novel: does the reader, by following the thread of the narrative and piecing together its clues, engage in the same type of conspiratorial thinking as the protagonist?
But when I watched Behind the Curve, I saw something different than my stereotype of the obsessed conspiracist. These flat-earthers, at least some of them, were just regular people, relatable even. Some of them seemed pretty smart in some areas. As funny as it was to watch them conduct experiments and then immediately deny their own evidence when it proved the spheroidal shape of the Earth, I couldn’t deny the flat-earthers’ essential humanity. Like Oedipa Maas, they were just utilizing that key function of the human mind, pattern recognition.
They were also trusting their senses — which seems to make a lot of sense! But it’s hard to sense the roundness of the planet directly, just as it’s hard to sense that the sun doesn’t actually move across the sky. Often as not, our senses lead us astray. It’s the same with pattern recognition, as that famous “selective attention test” video showed.
Also around this time, 2018 or 2019, I became enamored with the many videos of space flight available on YouTube. Rocket launches or shots from the International Space Station gave me a sort of unreasoning joy, and even hope, making me feel like I did when I was a kid watching the Apollo launches. (Although I seem to remember that when my mother called me inside to watch Neil Armstrong take his famous small step/giant leap, I just wanted to keep playing outside.)
And then came 2020 and COVID. I spent my many indoor hours reading a different Pynchon novel, Against the Day, a comical anarchist historical sci-fi (with a bit of fantasy) novel of the US and Europe before and after World War I. As November and National Novel Writing Month approached, I knew I wanted to write something like that: trying for the same sweep, to capture some important strands of American culture, involving a good bit of actual science, and also including a lot of humor (which one of Pynchon’s other big novels, Gravity’s Rainbow, is more known for).
The most salient thing you can say about American society from 2020 up to now is that we’re a culture obsessed with conspiracy theories. This was true before the 2020 presidential election, and it became even more true afterward, when actual conspiracies and wild conspiracy theories blended in a kaleidoscopic bad acid trip. Reality itself seemed up for grabs, and it still does.
For my novel, I decided to stick to the more outlandish — and least political — false beliefs and conspiracy theories because a) they’re funnier, and b) I’ll probably get fewer death threats. As Sarah Kendzior, a writer familiar with death threats, reminds us, behind some conspiracy theories lie actual conspiracies. And then there are what she calls “weaponized conspiracy theories” — fabricated plots so far-out that anyone pointing to an actual conspiracy is tarred with the same brush. “Careful, you’re starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist” is a phrase the powerful use to shut down critical inquiry. The challenge is to keep in mind that conspiracies do happen and that they’re happening right now, but not to fall for anyone’s basement-incubated fever dream.
What’s the solution to the prevalence of false beliefs? Some sort of government Ministry of Disinformation? Certainly not! That kind of thing is not only counter-productive because it’s so laughable, but also prone to its own distortions of truth in service of government propaganda. (This is not to say that NASA shouldn’t keep putting out information based on the heliocentric model of the solar system, even if the flat-earthers and moon-landing-hoaxers view the agency as its own very expensive Ministry of Disinformation.)
Or how about the “truth statements” YouTube pastes on videos dealing with flat-earth and other fringe topics? I suppose the streaming channel is trying to fix the problem it helped create when it constantly served ever more far-out ideas on auto-play, but these statements probably create a backlash effect. “What do they have to hide if they’re constantly telling us what to think? Maybe there’s something to this flat-earth idea!”
No, as strange as it is to find myself in agreement with Roger Pielke Jr., the only solution to propaganda is better propaganda. For every YouTube video promoting the flat-earth fallacy, a video debunking it. For every tinfoil-hat Substack (of which there are many popular ones), a stack devoted to skeptical inquiry. Does this sound a bit like the Tower of Babel? Maybe so. At some point you simply have to laugh at human folly (when it doesn’t make you cry). And thus, my satirical novel.
Now, it might be a bit much to mention Ship of Fools in the same breath with Pynchon’s work. I’m no polymath, in the first place. But I’d already tried writing the most commercial sci-fi novel I could manage (Ada’s Children). With this one I decided to let things rip and write exactly what I wanted. If a new character came to mind, I threw them in. Another trope? I threw it in. Silly dad humor? Into the mix it went. (I describe my humor as “subtle, yet cheesy.”) My newfound irrational fascination with space travel? I threw that in too. A moon landing hoax? I think I’ve come up with the most batshit implausible version of that hoax imaginable. An alternate universe? Heck, add it to the mix.
To say something about American society, I chose two cowboys, because why not? Revisionist cowboys, to be sure, but at least one of them represents the rugged individualism for which America is known (whether accurately or not). Speaking up for science is Liz Dare, a New York Times science writer who specializes in debunking myths. (I recently thought for half a second about making her an ex-NYT writer who’s moved to Substack; but no, she needs to represent the dominant paradigm, even if it’s not so dominant anymore. There’s still nowhere better to do that than at the paper of record.)
Liz treats the interview subjects whose myths she busts with gentle irony rather than outright derision, something I tried to do with my characters who hold various false beliefs: two flat-earthers, a young-earth creationist, and an anti-vaxxer. I hope I’ve made them believable and not mere stereotypes. I’ve probably gone easy on Penny by making her only about half an anti-vaxxer. My mother was a school nurse who devoted her career to vaccinating children, while my uncle’s intended career path was sabotaged by a bout of polio. With that in my background, my rage against anti-vaxxers burns white-hot. Not a good recipe when it comes to giving characters a fair shake.
One group of characters in Ship of Fools who don’t get a fair shake are the Nazis, with whom several of my characters come into conflict. This is because Nazis in no way deserve a fair shake. In my novel, they’re stereotypical buffoons, which describes them pretty accurately in real life — at least until they gain power.
And finally, I included a couple of cracks in the scientific hegemon with two characters of a more mystical stripe, a Nepali Buddhist monk and an Irish Druid priest. These two seem to know more than they’re letting on, and their actions are essential in bringing the various strands of the narrative together. Like Shorty, my anarcho-socialist cowboy, I believe that science, despite its flaws, is one of the best tools we have for accessing reality. It’s great at answering four of the five Ws plus an H: What, Where, When, and How, but not Why or Who (if there is a Who).
As a final nod to Pynchon and The Crying of Lot 49, the novel wraps up at the Universal Postal Union in Berne, Switzerland. (Why is it the Universal Postal Union and not International, as with other UN agencies? Is someone trying to tell us something?)
I hope that the big takeaway from Ship of Fools is not that science is an infallible repository of knowledge, but that we’re all subject to self-delusion and confirmation bias. No matter how much we think we know, there’s always something that will come along and challenge both our knowledge and our beliefs. (That’s also the attitude of the best scientists, by the way.)
Earth is the ship, and we’re all the fools. If you can’t laugh while the ship is sinking, what can you do?
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Come back on Friday when Chapter 29, “The Goddess Speaks” begins the wrap-up of Ada’s Children, followed by “New Plans” and the Epilogue on Sunday.