The first time I ever encountered a conspiracy theorist I was 16 years old and out in the door to door ministry with some fellow teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was mid-summer, a really hot one, and I was paired up with Bobby Norbohm. We went to a door and knocked and a little old man answered the door. He was short, slim, rosy skin tone, a halo of white hair, and oddly enthusiastic about our visit. He invited us in to his air conditioned living room and offered us beverages. Witnesses face a lot of rejection in the door-to-door game, quite a lot, so a cool room on a hot day with a friendly face is rather welcome. Also, Bobby’s green 1970-something GM Behemoth didn’t have air conditioning, you just had to roll the windows down and sweat all over the pleather.

I got no hint of threat, no sense of anything inappropriate, he just seemed like somebody who wanted to talk, and so I plowed into my presentation of the magazines or books or whatever it was I was presenting that day. I can’t recall but that’s mainly because of what happened next. He brushed aside everything I was trying to sell him to hit me with a counter-offer. He wanted to tell us the score. He took out a well used and clearly loved Bible and started countering my scriptures with scriptures of his own and in mere minutes we were deep into dueling interpretations of the book of Daniel. Now, I don’t know that I can adequately describe how spectacularly unsettling it was to have a householder who was a) even more Biblically literate than I was and b) equipped with an equally intricate net of theology. Witnesses treat the Bible like it’s a giant puzzle that explains itself through tens of thousands of cross-references between the different pieces and they have the only key to correctly understanding it. Rarely if ever do they encounter other people out in the wild who have the same basic approach but reach different conclusions. I was at a loss and so was Bobby, but the visit hadn’t yet gotten supremely weird. It was just uncomfortable to feel, for the first time I could remember, like there was a chance the householder actually knew the Bible better than I did. How could I preach to a person like that?

As it turned out, that was just the warm up. The little man was vigorously surfing scripture upon scripture to illuminate his interpretation of a prophecy about the tribes of Israel, connecting current events and the world situation to his scriptures as I struggled to find the scriptures in my own Bible fast enough to keep pace when he suddenly started talking about Maitreya. Who or what was Maitreya? Good question. Apparently, Maitreya was/is a guru/teacher/leader who has taken over the United Nations and all the major world governments, presenting himself as a benevolent and wise entity, but who is actually (surprise!) Satan. According to our host, Maitreya appears and disappears at will at gatherings of the rich and powerful, and they do whatever he asks them to do. Maitreya is charismatic. Maitreya is devious. He’s the devil and you cannot take his picture, for some reason.

I asked why, if all of this is true, I have never heard the name Maitreya in my life. Also, much of his supporting material for these claims involved the Illuminati and Freemasons and “history” I had never heard of. I asked him how he could possibly know all of this when it wasn’t in history books or the library or encyclopedias. This was the late 1980’s and the internet wasn’t a thing outside of universities and government agencies. He said that the real truth was never published because the government controls the libraries, the television, the radio, the newspapers, but he knew the truth because he had connected, via computer, to other people who knew the truth. He even had a picture of Maitreya printed out that he could show us.

That was his first major slip up. He said he had a photo of the devil who he just said could not be photographed and seemed not to notice the inherent contradiction. What was going on here?

I had never before heard the term “conspiracy theorist”. The X-Files wouldn’t make it’s debut for about another 4 years. I didn’t even have a term in my vocabulary for a person like this. I was creeped out and kinda fascinated and he just kept spinning more weirdness. Pretty soon there were alien lizard people and god knows what else involved in the alternate universe he was describing. Bobby and I started giving each other nervous glances and seeking a graceful escape. This man was as deep down the alternate reality conspiracy rabbit hole as anybody I’ve since met and he was apparently doing this, erm… research(?) entirely via pre-internet dial-up bulletin board systems.

By the time Bobby and I did manage to extricate ourselves and return to our sweltering, partially melted, compatriots, my eyes had been opened not to the lizard people, Maitreya, the lost tribes of Israel or the Illuminati but rather, to the idea that there were people who were trading and consuming underground “knowledge”. Off the books, unauthorized, unofficial. Claims and theories and speculations, oh my. Had the story ended there it would have been sufficiently strange to my teenage brain but there is a slightly disconcerting coda. A couple of days after that visit with the old man, a book appeared on the doorstep of our house. It was just sitting on the front step, no note, no explanation. It was a book about everything the guy had been talking about, his entire spiel of weirdness, all the conspiracy kook stuff, in a paperback, sitting on my goddamn front step.

To this day I have no idea how he found out where I lived but he obviously did. I was so freaked out by the book that I destroyed it. Tore it to pieces, threw it away. I thought about burning it.

A few years later there was the X-Files and the internet and I started to become more and more aware of the world of conspiracy theories. The JFK assassination, the moon landing, subliminal Disney porn, the secret leaders of the world, Area 51, etc, etc, etc. We all did, as a society. We collectively became acquainted with and absorbed the fact that there are people who believe all this alternate history and alternate reality stuff and, collectively, we considered it to be great entertainment and mostly harmless but I have never forgotten the passion in that man’s voice, the fervor of a true believer preaching The Truth About Everything, and he would know, because he had the photos. Did I want to see them?

I write all of this because here we are, 30+ years later, and instead of a rare, fascinating, troubled soul tilting at windmills from his dial-up modem, connecting with the handful of people like him who Know It’s All A Lie, we have a president and millions of people in the country who believe some set or subset or parallel to the same wildly fantastic nonsense that man believed. They don’t have to work for it, don’t have to plumb the depths of BBS systems and trace teenage Jehovah’s Witnesses to their homes, they just have to take their phones out of their pockets, open a social media app, and pretty soon QAnon shoots straight into their eyeballs from the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I can barely fathom how weird it is, that in my lifetime, the entire concept of objective reality, trusted news sources (Walter Kronkite! Dan Rather!), and a shared understanding of the world has come under such threat, such assault, that I think back to Maitreya Man as the earliest canary in the coal mine of modern life.

Maitreya Man is probably no longer with us, he would likely be pushing 100 by now, but the way he thought, the ways he conducting “research”, the fascinating combination of high intelligence with an out-of-control pattern recognition function in his brain that caused him to see connections literally everywhere, the paranoia and delusion that must have fed him, and the fledgling underground community of which he was a part, this stuff became a business model and a poison that has penetrated into every nook and cranny of our society. Technology has enabled and accelerated it and allowed all the various conspiracy theories to mutate, adapt, flourish, grow, and draw eyeballs and mindshare. The Left-leaning fringe is prone to this type of “thinking”, and generally always have been, but the heart of the Right, the absolute MAGA core of one of the two major political parties in this country, has completely embraced the insanity, which is frankly even more surprising. I mean, the conservatives of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, these were not the people who believed in alien lizard people, these were the salt of the earth types, they vaccinated their livestock and their kids, they were proud that America beat the Russkies to the moon and in the Cold War, they didn’t go in for any of that crazy talk, and now they can’t even agree the earth is round and a shocking percentage of them believe Hollywood actors drink baby blood or something batshit insane like that.

How on earth did the most normal of normal people get turned into raving Maitreya Men and Maitreya Women?

Sure, the answers are there. Alex Jones, Fox News, Trump, Facebook, blah blah blah, they are clearly being exposed to more outlets of disinformation that is divorced from reality than they are chemtrails, but my god, what can be done about it? Anything? Are we just all doomed to live in a world now in which a huge number of people aren’t really sure whether or not reality is… reality? Where evidence against the things they say is either ignored or converted into evidence for what they say? Because let’s be honest here, none of this would be happening if there wasn’t money being made on peddling disinformation, conspiracy, and crackpot bullshit. As long as a market exists there will be sellers. The only possible solution is to reduce the number of people who are vulnerable to falling for this stuff. Every insane conspiracy theory has a website somewhere debunking all of it’s claims. Sometimes I read these things just for fun, keep an eye on the state of the state and all that. The theory sites have certain things in common. They tend to make grandiose statements without evidence, they usually make a lot of claims that all fail, on their own merits, to stand up to critical scrutiny but together are considered “a pattern”, they commit logical fallacies, they contradict their own logic, etc. The debunking sites usually take on the “evidence” with actual evidence, point by point, and demolish the theory and it makes no difference whatsoever. The Sandy Hook Massacre was a False Flag. NASA never landed on the moon. Fluoride is for mind control. Hillary Clinton is a lizard person. Michelle Obama is a man. On and on and on, evidence be damned.

The debunking approach, satisfying as it may be, doesn’t work for the simple reason that believers never visit debunking sites. If they are directed to them by a loved one, they may grudgingly look at the site for two seconds but they immediately reject the debunker as somebody who doesn’t get it or a tool of the masterminds behind the conspiracy. Of course the Freemasons have a website demonstrating that the moon landing was real! That site is part of the wool being pulled over your eyes sheeple!

So, if we can’t debunk our way out of this, what do we do? How do we get through to somebody who is in the grip of an induced delusion/psychosis, in the sway of a maniac cult leader like Donald Trump who is retweeting QAnon lunacy? This is no longer one isolated old man in a basement, this is tens of millions of citizens of this country. This is terrifying. What can possibly be done? I am sad to say, I offer no solutions, no hope. I have never won an argument with a conspiracy theorist, never seen a case where they turn around and come back to consensus reality. I’ve never heard of anything that works to right this wrong when it occurs in a human mind. I’d love a glimmer of hope, if you have any to offer. Please.

Failing that, can I please just suggest, humbly, that we all do our best to make critical thought respected and valued again and look for ways to fight this collective mental virus? We can’t be a functioning society if 30-40% of us believe an alien cabal of lizard people is eating babies and one of them is George Soros and he faked the death of Hugo Chavez as part of a plot to steal the 2020 election by reprogramming all the voting machines so that nobody will uncover the secret that NASA faked the space program by building cellular towers that caused coronavirus and the earth is actually flat and somehow the LGBTQ+ are in on it too but I’m not sure why or how yet but also Starbucks coffee cups hate Christians. Or something. This is not sustainable and it’s not something we can argue and debunk away.