Dr. Abdullah bin Musa Al Tayer
Our ability to define consciousness is limited, and consciousness also has limits, and what we see and judge the consciousness of another party is other than one of us understanding and appreciating his own. Each of us tends to purify his consciousness, and that it is infinitely high. The stereotype of industrial societies is that they are more conscious, and that they got rid of the remnants of the past and became more realistic. It is difficult to believe what is not proven by scientific experience, that is, they are free from trading myths and no one can manipulate them based on fantasies that have nothing to do with reality.
Those who call themselves intellectuals from the generation that preceded us used to carry, in addition to the pens with which they passed their convictions, suppressions to annihilate any idea that excluded what they sought to promote, and one of the suppressors was the stigma of the conspiracy to neutralize every dissenting voice. Even the practice of criticizing the culture that was intended to prevail was treated as a kind of conspiracy theories nested in the brains of underdevelopment. Some of us surrendered with conviction, fear, or hypocrisy, and swimming against the current became one of the prohibited taboos. Those who wanted to write and deal with public affairs took the path of the great intellectuals without objecting to their agendas.
Today, it is difficult for any of those “enlightened” to single out our Arab and Islamic societies for embracing and promoting conspiracy theory. The opportunities for communication that do not pass through the gates of elites have shown that there are limits to awareness, in which human societies share in different proportions, whether in industrialized or developing countries.
One of the serious threats to stability in the industrialized, civilized West is the spread of conspiracy theory that promotes among people the danger of the deep state, the plans of the far left to change the identity of Western societies, the Christianity of the continent, and the threat of Islam to Christian identity. Read the best-selling book entitled “The War on the West,” and compare it with those Arab and Islamic books that warn us of the West. The two sides argue the same arguments, and in every human society the far right and the far left resort to pushing a conspiratorial threat to its existence and generalize it as targeting all spectrums of society.
Some time ago, I wrote about myth and conspiracy that is not heard loudly in the United States of America, and this week I heard a number of European researchers warn of the danger of the conspiracy theory that invades them from beyond the ocean, and considers it one of the engines of extremism and then terrorism.
The Covid-19 pandemic is considered one of the controversial phenomena, and people have resorted to a conspiratorial interpretation of it, regardless of the nature of societies, whether they are industrial or backward. A recent study conducted by a Swiss university revealed that a third of German speakers in Switzerland and the German border regions surveyed believe at least partly in some rumor or conspiracy theory related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Just as we refuse to link terrorism to a religion, culture, or race, the same applies to conspiracy theory, as it transcends cultures, religions, and races, and at the same time reveals to us the limits of awareness that cannot be complete in any society, whether industrial or developing.
Social psychologist Pascal Wagner distinguishes between three factors behind the popularity of conspiracy theory. The first is: “The socio-political factor, where opponents of institutions and the existing system, such as political extremists, tend to find justifications for themselves by spreading rumors and promoting conspiracy theories. Taking advantage of injustice and social inequality, many researches have shown that the greater the social inequality in a country, the more fertile its soil will be due to the popularity of conspiracy theories, which are often the result of discourses of resentment among the disadvantaged groups. Naive and unscientific, especially in worrisome situations such as a terrorist attack or a health pandemic,” he added, according to an interview with SWI: “Many studies show that character distortion, such as this type of survival thinking, fuels negative belief, not only in conspiracy but also Also with the supernatural, such as delusions of ghosts and human intentions, all of this we inherited from our past as humans.” As for the third factor, it is: “The Internet, where these theories can not only be spread at breakneck speeds, but where nothing is forgotten. When searching for information about a particular conspiracy theory or rumor, one can easily find other similar theories and sayings that were circulating in the past, which are discovered and return to circulation, and had it not been for the Internet, they would have been forgotten.
In my opinion, the Internet and social networks in particular have done justice to developing societies that were described as underdeveloped because they over-interpret the conspiracy of events and are fertile places for rumors to spread. The human mind is one, but the inputs of information and experiences differentiate between levels of human consciousness.
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