Among The Truthers by Jonathan Kay

From The Week of July 24, 2011

Though those of us who are rationalists wish it otherwise, our world is shaped by popular opinion. It does not matter if said opinion is based on logic or reason. What matters is the extent to which said opinion can issue forth from an individual and find traction in a broader world yearning for an easy explanation. When we garnered our news from journalistic sources, popular opinion was, to an extent, safely harbored from extremism because it was in the best interests of journalistic publications to get the story right. But as Mr. Kay argues in Among The Truthers, with the rise of the Internet, control over popular opinion has all-but-entirely slipped out of the hands of the moderating media and fallen into the newly empowered grasp of conspiracy theorists and grudge-mongers who use their expanded platforms to pedal their narrow ideologies. Exit Walter Cronkite; enter The Blaze, or any of a thousand sites of its conspiracist kind.

So just who are these conspiracists? Who are the new shapers of popular opinion? And just how much do we believe them?

From the 9/11 Truthers to the Obama Birthers, from false flaggers to anti-Zionists, Mr. Kay, a decorated journalist for the National Post, throws himself headlong into the modern conspiracy movement. From its leaders to its adherents, he vividly describes their belief systems and their pathologies and, in doing so, quickly generates a fairly consistent portrait of a modern conspiracist. He is invariably male, dogged in the pursuit of truth, distrustful of authority, and perfectly willing to devote his life to his cause. In fact, the cause is what lends meaning to his damaged life. Though the personalities of the men Mr. Kay meets are markedly different, these commonalities connect them across the new conspiracy market which Kay describes as a series of islanded fringe thinkers who have been networked into a community by the interconnectivity of the Internet, a system which has both homogenized and supersized conspiracism.

In Among The Truthers, Mr. Kay mounts a two pronged effort to enlighten the reader about the major conspiracies floating through the Western world and to explain the pathologies of their adherents. Though he is pleasingly successful with the former, it's the later, the fascinating profile he generates of those who worship at conspiracism's altar, that elevates his work from engaging to outstanding. The damaged survivor, the fail historian, the endurer of the midlife crisis... Their backgrounds can be wildly divergent, but in these highly intelligent and endlessly opportunistic few, the outcome seems depressingly similar. The essential aspect of reasonableness that most humans enjoy collapses under the weight of their pain, plunging them into a distorted reality in which they have been victimized, their potential guttered by omnipotent forces beyond their control. It becomes their destiny to spread this revelation to the world and now, with the Internet to fuel them, they've never had a bigger pulpit.

This is easily in my top five reads this year. Engrossing and enlightening in equal measure. This is not a polemic against conspiracism; there is no rancor here. There is only a need to understand and to explain, a desire Mr. Kay ironically shares with his captivating subjects. (5/5 Stars)