9/10/2023 0 Comments Conspiracy theory iceberg original![]() Behind this dystopia, the argument goes, is a shadowy elite determined to deprive people of their freedoms in the name of fighting climate change. The 15-minute city conspiracy says that a decades-old urban planning concept meant to make our cities more liveable and less polluted is in fact an international socialist plot run by a capitalist cabal to create a surveillance society that will make George Orwell’s 1984 look like a fairytale. “(Conspiracy theorists) are holding 16 random beliefs and eight are in complete contradiction to the other eight… It’s almost impossible to have a rational argument with people who are deep down the rabbit hole… the only thing that holds everything together is this deep resentment and distrust.” Stephan Lewandowsky, professor of cognitive science at the University of Bristol, says contradictions are key characteristics of conspiratorial rhetoric and cognition. Any presentation of contradictory facts is dismissed as part of the plot. The thing about conspiracy theories is that by their very nature they are almost impossible to knock down. We don’t have a figure like Donald Trump, but it doesn’t mean a figure like Donald Trump could never emerge,” Ward says. “You can’t hand on heart say that what happened in the United States could never happen here because many of the elements are present. The QAnon story from the United States offers a sobering reminder of the power of false narratives: the theory that a group of Satanic paedophiles was operating a global child sexual abuse trafficking ring from the basement of a pizza parlour had no basis in fact, and yet you can draw a line from the first messages appearing from the alleged deep-throat insider, Q, on 4chan in 2017 and the 2021 attack on the Capitol after former president Donald Trump claimed the election had been “stolen”. “The fact that (the 15-minute city conspiracy theory) is rising shows we are not doing a good enough job of engaging that fringe and they are now open to this kind of cynical manipulation… We have to be very careful not to ignore this because it can escalate and it can become very dangerous, and we should be tackling it.” “We’ve seen a combination of people who have deliberately manipulated the situation and misrepresented the facts and have caused outrage among people… who have probably not realised that they have been manipulated,” says Bob Ward of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics. Some supported Brexit because they did not like to be told what to do by Brussels some opposed Covid lockdowns and vaccinations because they did not want to be told what to do by Westminster. If you scratch beneath the surface of the 15-minute city fearmongering, you will find similar motives, similar moves and some of the same players.Īnd beneath the players, the played – a group of ordinary people who bristle at what they see, or are told by social media to see, as attempts to curb their personal freedoms. But inconvenience for residents in the name of a greater good is being twisted into something much more dangerous by those who want to undermine efforts to tackle the climate emergency. What happened in Oxford is the tip of an ever-growing, ever more hazardous iceberg.Ībandoning the UK’s commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 might seem ridiculous, but then the idea of Britain leaving the European Union was also once a fringe obsession. Many of those who gathered in Oxford were locals worried not about secretive elites seeking to control their movements, but about the city’s plans intended to protect its historic centre from traffic, ease congestion and parking problems and, in the era of net-zero, to help the environment.
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