Cordula Schnuer: From QAnon and 5G to covid-19, we seem to be living in an age of conspiracy theories. What makes them so appealing?
Christian Meyers: We are in a new era of conspiracy theories because we are in an era of multicrises. People want to find very simple answers or solutions to very complex questions. It’s also about believing and wanting to believe, to belong to a group of people and feeling strong in a network. In our hypermodern society, individualism is a big problem, being isolated. That’s also part of the success of these conspiracy theories and the groups behind them.
You’ve studied the anti-vaccination movement in Luxembourg. What have you found?
I looked at the Facebook pages of a lot of people and what they were posting. At the beginning, it was anti-system thinking--‘they’re taking our freedoms’--and then it started changing, becoming more radical, antisemitic, anti-Masonic, homophobic.
At the beginning, it was a big movement with people from all sorts of horizons. But then there was a core with some very strong leaders who created a more radicalised group.
There was perhaps a sense that Luxembourg is immune to this kind of thing…
It was the first time that we saw people in the streets and violence, the antisemitic yellow star linked to vaccinations, these nationalistic symbols. And then building up a network is very new. We have people from the extreme left and the extreme right getting together over this anti-system, anti-government thought.
To what extent are we talking about a fringe phenomenon versus something that is in the mainstream?
That’s a difficult question. Some fringe elements become mainstream. We have a crisis, also for the middle classes, and these extreme thoughts enter the middle classes. I cannot say if it’s one or the other, because it’s moving. And that’s very dangerous.
Christian Meyers is a senior lecturer at the University of Luxembourg and has studied the pandemic protests Photo: Guy Wolff/Maison Moderne
What potential do the cost of living and the energy crisis have for conspiracy theories to emerge that will have a political impact?
It was similar in the 1930s, pre-Second World War, the Weimar Republic. I don’t know what is coming. But crisis times are always times where people are searching for leaders, for solutions.
We saw what happened in the storming of the Bundestag in Germany, the Capitol in the US, in Brazil. We saw it here in Luxembourg. People were outside parliament in military dress, outside the doors of the private homes of prime minister Xavier Bettel and family minister Corinne Cahen, which is dramatic.
Is it a case of out of sight, out of mind?
We forget very fast. But on Facebook you saw videos of people gathering, having meetings, building up these groups, building up even political parties. People who don’t analyse the situation don’t see this. They don’t believe me even. But there is this network with, say, 10 to 15 leaders and maybe around 400 to 500 people, which is not nothing.
You spoke earlier of a search for leaders. Given that we have two elections coming up, what could be the ramifications?
The impact they can have is to join a political party and the democratic process, and that’s what they will do. It’s not so much an impact in the short-term but it will be an impact on political thought in the long-term getting more radicalised.
How do you break someone out of the conspiracy?
It’s like a cult. You’re a believer. As someone coming from the educational sciences, I would look at it this way: we have to make sure that our children, pupils and students get the instruments they need for critical thought, searching for proof, accepting complexity, also social media education. I don’t want to say that people who are in a conspiracy are lost. But it’s really difficult to get them out. We have to make sure that there are no others joining them.
An alternate version of this article first appeared in the of Delano magazine.