It is Easter of 1478, in the iconic church of the city of Florence the two Medici brothers are attending mass. They are to be assassinated that day. Chances are you have heard about or experienced this episode in the history of one of the most iconic families of Renaissance as you played Assassins Creed, or saw the many delightful series (such as Medici on Netflix) made about it.
Without giving too much away, this episode is called the Pazzi conspiracy - and without giving up on too many of the gory details, most of the assassins were later found and summarily executed. The surviving Medici brother went on to have a confrontation with one of the most important participants of the conspiracy, ThePope Sixtus IV. (We are not going into too many details for paucity of space, and in consideration of your Saturday - If you would like an extra feature this week with all the gory details, write to us!)
It took another five hundred years, and a letter discovered in the Simonetta family archives to unearth the real conspirator behind it all, Federico Da Montefeltro, the renowned humanist and one of the lights of early Renaissance Italy.
We are living during one of the most fertile times for the growth, as well as the spread of conspiracies - so why stretch a point with a far off settled conspiracy from almost 500 years ago? Is the constant information wave not enough to keep us busy? The dusty wars of Renaissance pale in comparison with the ones we have seen around us. But, the way the human mind works has not really changed that much. If anything, the events of Easter 1478 made a young Machiavelli, (who was just nine and saw the violence first hand, and thought long and hard about how best to use disinformation to the advantage of the ruling class) a shining beacon for conspiracy minded people everywhere.
Conspiracy Theories - A Harbinger of Change
Conspiracy theories often are a bellwether of societal crisis. Societal crises can range from natural events, to terrorist activities. To make sense of these societal crises, people tend to come up with sense-making narratives that become part of their history. The people with such shared history, are often ready to believe that multiple groups agree in secret to achieve a goal which is often malevolent, or illegal (Proojen & Douglas, 2014).
An interesting study (Uscinski and Parent, 2014) randomly selected 104,803 letters sent to the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010. They coded the letters for conspiratorial content. They found that there was a fluctuation in conspiracy theories but no substantial increase with technology, therefore ruling out the internet as the primordial source of conspiracy - though I reckon Reddit would beg to differ.
Interestingly they did record spikes in conspiracy content, twice. The first time was just before the beginning of 20th Century, when the second industrial revolution was spawning new technologies, companies, and rapidly changing socio-economic trends, taking away the comfort of traditional hierarchies. They argue that rapid social progress could have led to a feeling of alienation and insecurity, which pushed people to assert their powerlessness by being part of a larger anonymous group. The second spike that was registered was just after the end of the Second World War, alongside the emerging Cold War with its madness of McCarthyism. Most of the conspiracy theories at that point of time dealt with issues of loss of agency involved with the eventual takeover by the Red's, for example a total of 12,000 UFO sightings were reported between 1947 and 1969.

Conspiracies are the most effective way we have in dealing with rapidly changing situations. The internet has simply made conspiracy peddling more cost effective per unit. Do not believe me, head over to any underground conspiracy site yourself - one which I prefer has 1.6 Million people, and some interesting ideas.
A Terrifying Thought Experiment
The Emerging Neurobiology of Conspiracy
There have been multiple attempts at understanding conspiracism (!) from different forms of social sciences, however the neural mechanism of conspiracy theories is not widely understood, as neural research is often ethically edgy to conduct. In a recent interesting paper "Memetics and Neural Models of Conspiracy Theories”, Professor Wlodzislaw Duch uses the subtle changing patterns of neuronal activity to understand the implication of attractor landscapes in altering memory, and subtle changes in processing of brain activity to induce conspiracy beliefs through the rapid freezing of high neuroplasticity (RFHN).
Before we go further, please check out the jargon:
Professor Duch, explaining the implication of his research, states that struggling with conspiracy theories is very difficult. Those who believe in them (even if they hear an argument contradictory to what they think), memeplexes, i.e. complexes of memes related to a given topic, emerge. reinforcing the beliefs.
In the brain's neural network, each excitation of memory reinforces its pattern of activation, causing stronger associations of different, even the most distant, information. Such patterns create “basin of attraction” in our conceptual framework, and more and more thoughts and observations fall into this basin. It is a neural process. It is something that cannot be changed by simple persuasion. And the physical change of the brain's connections is difficult because the energy required for it is phenomenally high.
That is why we need to be persuaded to high evidence that the Pazzi's did not act alone on that fateful Easter morning, and why it is hard for us to rapidly change our thinking, but we must try! Or our pattern seeking brains will lead us astray.
If you want to Challenge Your Beliefs, try this..
This is an interesting tool for reflecting on how you see the world. Think with evidence, to think clearly. It is hard but worth doing. https://programs.clearerthinking.org/challenge_your_deepest_beliefs.html

