What Comedy Has to Teach Us About QAnon
Three interesting insights sprang to mind as I read Astral Codex Ten's article on QAnon:
Of all the social sciences, politics and psychology are the most personal.
These happen to be the realms in which Qanon delves the most. Psychology deals with what's going on in the human mind, a topic we can all feel we are experts on by virtue of the fact that we've spent every waking moment with one. Political theories, meanwhile, deal with what is frequently the psychology of the individual projected onto society at large. It happens on both sides at both extremes.
For example, you may think that your desire to transform the world into a fairer place during your college years is the result of some profound individual realizations arrived at through reading "Das Kapital" and other logical thought processes, but it's also highly likely that you are undergoing a psychological process common to the development of many young adults in their late teens/early twenties, one that causes them to feel like they need to “save the world from the older generation”.
If QAnon-adjacent intellectual thinker, Jordan Peterson, was right about one thing, it's that many of those who want to save the world rarely seem to have their own lives together. The anger and frustration felt towards their parents and other authority figures, the lies, and hypocrisy that lead to paranoia and blame, all of it then gets projected onto society at large. With QAnon it's, "the Satanists", with the radical left it's, "the rich". Note that QAnon is a political and psychological (occasionally supernatural) explanation of the world, it plays fast and loose with the hard numbers because numbers are more abstract and impersonal and thus less relatable. Everyone can check their gut to see if something feels right, much harder to check the math to see if, say, the claim that 100,000 children get abducted every year is a viable figure.
While I have no doubt that there are QAnon theorists out there who use a lot of math in their jobs, be they engineers or accountants, they likely aren’t “math people”. At least, not in the sense that they would try to find out if something was true or not by breaking it down into numbers, creating a model with them, and using math to find the answer. This is also why you won’t find too many funny math jokes, most people just can’t relate.
You can get a better understanding of QAnon theories by understanding standup comedy.
It is probably no coincidence that many stand-up comedians I know are also into (or at least more open to) conspiracy theories and outside-the-box thinking. Something about having to observe people and bring to attention what they wouldn’t otherwise notice as a profession makes them more open to exploring out-there thinking of another kind. Comedians often tell stories or make jokes that didn’t literally happen, but reveal things to us on a more profound level than stories that stick strictly to the facts.
I’ve written about looking at conspiracy theories as dreams or allegories before, but I recently learned that Norm Macdonald (RIP), was fascinated by how things appear and how they actually are. He was obsessed with stories that may or may not have been literally true, but were true in a deeper sense. His favorite jokes were ones that took on deeper, hilarious meanings simply by repeating the setup as the punchline. For example, "Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are getting a divorce and people close to the couple say the reason is because he’s Lyle Lovett and she’s Julia Roberts."
Treating conspiracy theories in a similar way, plumbing their depths to see how they might be true on one level even if they are false on the material one, can reveal insights about the darker corners of our collective consciousness. For example, the world may not literally be run but shape-shifting reptile people, but most people would agree that it is run by cold-blooded sociopaths, or at least well-meaning people who form corporations which behave like how Mike Tyson once described Don King, "a reptilian motherfucker".
While the world may not truly be run by reptiles, if you believe the people in power use reptilian thinking, have reptilian emotions, regard humans as an exploitable resource, and generally behave more like reptiles than the rest of us, “the world is run by reptiles” becomes a heuristic for understanding how a good deal of people today actually feel. While I don’t believe conspiracy theories are all that useful taken literally (what are you going to do about it if it’s all true?), they’re a good way to grasp the zeitgeist. On a meta-level, addiction seems to be one of our society’s greatest problems. The conspiracy theorists know that the “sheeple” are addicted, but what they might not recognize is that the theories themselves are a way to keep us addicted to technology.
You can better understand Conspiracy Theories by understanding addiction.
I'm willing to bet 99% of us looking at the QAnon belief system are doing so from the outside in. What we see is the equivalent of intellectual black tar heroin addicts. But if you had started from the beginning, back when this was just an interesting story among stories on Reddit or 4Chan, then you'd have found something that at least checks out as much as the pseudo-science we get fed unironically every day.
Some Local News stations actually covered Pizzagate, coincidences involving missing children mysterious deaths, weird Instagram posts, and questionable code words being used in Hillary's emails... the stuff from which nightmares are made. Like the face on Mars which turned out to be some rock formations and a trick of the light, there was just enough there to point at something, but not enough to really explain what’s going on. Most of us moved on, but others couldn’t help filling those blank spaces with their imagination. That's how gateway drugs are: most people do them and then go do other things, but for some, there's just enough there to keep going...
Just like any addiction, what lays at the bottom of it all is a refusal to take personal responsibility. Blame your mom or the lizard pope or white men all you want, but unless you take steps to better yourself you're just giving them more of your power. While your life is missing many of the things that you need for it to be satisfying and meaningful, there are adjustments you could probably start making to at least progress towards what you want.
Comedian Bill Burr famously got heavy into conspiracy theories at one point in his life. I don't think he's fully out of them, either. Last I checked, he still thinks the bankers own us and are running everything and the game is totally rigged. But he realized that wasting hours of his day hating on them made zero difference to the system and was only hurting his own chances of success. Instead, he got into therapy and is working through anger issues stemming from a chaotic childhood and parents who let him down. He also quit drinking. You could say the psychological issues have nothing to do with his belief that the system is fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy, but it took setting both aside--whether they're true or not--for real personal progress to happen.
Now he has a successful Netflix show, has hosted SNL and his standup specials are funnier than ever. Is it because he signed a contract in blood promising these things in exchange for shutting up about "what's really going on", or could it be because he finally stopped wasting his potential, got clear about what he wanted from life, and focused on pursuing that instead? You may never know for sure which theory is true, but only one of them will actually make your life better.