Monological Thinking: The New Virus Plaguing Society

Emily Baron

eb113717@ohio.edu 

 Image courtesy of Baltimore Sun

     Image courtesy of Baltimore Sun

 

While reading the Columbia Journal Review’s  article, “The Victims of Fake News,” a variety of personal narratives are displayed to explore the damaging effects of false information spreading online. Coverage of David Wheeler’s experience with fake news stuck out in particular as it described how conspiracy theorists are denouncing the Sandy Hook school shooting, and specifically, the death of his son, Benjamin Wheeler. 

Conspiracy theorists, most notably Alex Jones of Infowars, used the unrelated fact that Wheeler and his wife both had previously acted as a profession to support the ridiculous claim that they fabricated their son’s murder. This was then extended to a much larger claim that the entire shooting and massacre of 20 school children had never occurred. “The way this propaganda works is you take something insane and wrap it in a little bit of truth, and then all those people swallow it because it’s wrapped in a little bit of truth,” Wheeler explained. 

The idea of using one insignificant element of a story to fabricate an entire false narrative is related to monological thinking. Wheeler expressed, “It comes back to the question of brain pathology, of monological thinking. It comes back to why they have to feel this way, that they know something that you don’t know, that they feel like they have some power, like they matter in the world.”

Independent scholar Kurtis Hagen states in his article, “Conspiracy Theorists and Monological Belief Systems,” that monological thinking can be reduced to the simple idea of using one point of contention as evidence for another. However, Hagen points out, “Conspiracy theorists are thought to take this normal and unproblematic reasoning process—using one belief as evidence for another—too far. Indeed, allegedly, they take it to the point of self contradiction,” (Hagen 3). Jones and other conspiracy theorists targeting Wheeler and his family certainly fall into this category. 

Belief systems can be characterized as monological or dialogical. Hagen includes in his article, “‘Dialogical belief systems engage in a dialogue with their context, while monological systems speak only to themselves, ignoring their context in all but the shallowest respects’ (Goertzel 1994: 740),” (Hagen 15). Jones and others who were pushing the fallacious claim about the shooting being fake were only relaying the same unrelated pieces of information instead of observing the full context of the situation. Wheeler described how other parents of victims had a variety of jobs other than acting and how these facts were conveniently ignored in every conspiracists’ argument. 

Monological thinking on the internet is dangerous because it is easy for erroneous information to spread like wildfire, poisoning minds into accepting fictitious distortions of reality as truth. The consequences of such misinformation affects real lives, like Wheeler and his wife. Agility PR Solution stated in an article, “Belief in conspiracy theories and fake news has increased to a level that it has become a proper subculture.” Jones and Infowars has a massive outreach and audience, and combined with the endless space for conspiracy-related intercourse on the internet, it is not a stretch to say that a subculture indeed has been established and is continuing to expand. Although dabbling in conspiracies can be a hobby for some, it is important to consider the real-life impacts of perpetuating a narrative with little evidence that is as false as it is damaging.