This is a more academic piece of writing than I usually post, but I want to help make a theory so central to my thinking more accessible. This is an except from a paper that I had published in The Journal of Responsible Innovation a few years ago. If you find this intriguing, Intelligent Trial and Error (ITE) also showed up in an article that I wrote for The New Atlantis last year. 

The Intelligent Steering of Technoscience
ITE is a framework for betting understanding and managing the risks of innovation, largely developed via detailed studies of cases of both technological error and instances when catastrophe had been fortuitously averted (see Morone and Woodhouse 1986; Collingridge 1992). Early ITE research focused on mistakes made in developing large-scale technologies like nuclear energy and the United States’ space shuttle program. More recently, scholars have extended the framework in order to explain partially man-made disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans (Woodhouse 2007), as well as more mundane and slow moving tragedies, like the seemingly inexorable momentum of sprawling suburban development (Dotson 2016).
            Although similar to high-reliability theory (Sagan 1993), an organizational model that tries to explain why accidents are so rare on aircraft carriers and among American air traffic controllers, ITE has a distinct lineage. The framework’s roots lie in political incrementalism (Lindblom 1959; Woodhouse and Collingridge 1993; Genus 2000). Incrementalism begins with a recognition of the limits of analytical rationality. Because analysts lack the necessary knowledge to predict the results of a policy change and are handicapped by biases, their own partisanship, and other cognitive shortcomings, incrementalism posits that they should—and very often do—proceed in a gradual and decentralized fashion. Policy therefore evolves via mutual adjustment between partisan groups, an evolutionary process that can be stymied when some groups’ desires—namely business’—dominate decision making. In short, pluralist democracy outperforms technocratic politics. Consider how elite decision makers in pre-Katrina New Orleans eschewed adequate precautions, having come to see flooding risks as acceptable or less important than supporting the construction industry; encouraging and enabling myriad constituent groups to advocate for their own interests in the matter would have provoked deliberations more likely to have led to preventative action (see Woodhouse 2007). In any case, later political scientists and decision theorists extended incrementalism to technological development (Collingridge 1980; Morone and Woodhouse 1986).
            ITE also differs from technology assessment, though both seek to avoid undesirable unintended consequences (see Genus 2000). Again, ITE is founded on a skepticism of analysis: the ramifications of complex technologies are highly unpredictable. Consequences often only become clear once a sociotechnical system has already become entrenched (Collingridge 1980). Hence, formal analytical risk assessments are insufficient. Lacking complete understanding, participants should not try to predict the future but instead strategize to lessen their ignorance. Of course, analysis still helps. Indeed, ITE research suggests that technologies and organizations with certain characteristics hinder the learning process necessary to minimize errors, characteristics that preliminary assessments can uncover.
            Expositions of ITE vary (cf. Woodhouse 2013; Collingridge 1992; Dotson 2017); nevertheless, all emphasize meeting the epistemological challenge of technological change: can learning happen quickly and without high costs? The failure to face up to this challenge not only leads to major mistakes for emerging technologies but can also stymie innovation in already established areas. The ills associated with suburban sprawl persists, for instance, because most learning happens far too late (Dotson 2016). Can developers be blamed for staying the course when innovation “errors” are learned about only after large swaths of houses have already been built? Regardless, meeting this central epistemological challenge requires employing three interrelated kinds of precautionary strategies. 

​The first set of precautions are cultural. Are participants and organizations and prepared to learn? Is feedback produced early enough and development appropriately paced so that participants can feasibly change course? Does adequate monitoring by the appropriate experts occur? Is that feedback effectively communicated to those affected and those who decide? Such ITE strategies were applied by early biotechnologists at the Asilomar Conference: They put a moratorium on the riskiest genetic engineering experiments until more testing could be done, proceeding gradually as risks became better understood, and communicating the results broadly (Morone and Woodhouse 1986). In contrast, large-scale technological mistakes—from nuclear energy to irrigation dams in developing nations—tend to occur because they are developed and deployed by a group of true believers who fail to fathom that they could be wrong (Collingridge 1992). 
            Another set of strategies entail technical precautions. Even if participants are disposed to emphasize and respond to learning, does the technology’s design enable precaution? Sociotechnical systems can be made forgiving of unanticipated occurrences by ensuring wide margins for error, including built-in redundancies and backup systems, and giving preference to designs that are flexible or easily altered. The designers of the 20th century nuclear industry pursued the first two strategies but not the third. Their single-minded pursuit of economies of scale combined with the technology’s capital intensiveness all but locked-in the light water reactor design prior to a full appreciation of its inherent safety limitations (Morone and Woodhouse 1989). No doubt the technical facet of ITE intersects with its cultural dimensions: a prevailing bias toward a rapid pace of innovation can create technological inflexibility just as well as overly capital-intensive or imprudently scaled technical designs (cf. Collingridge 1992; Woodhouse 2016).
            Finally, there are political precautions. Do existing regulations, incentives, deliberative forums, and other political creations push participants toward more precautionary dispositions and technologies? Innovators may not be aware of the full range of risks or their own ignorance if deliberation is insufficiently diverse. AIDs sufferers, for instance, understood their own communities’ needs and health practices far better than medical researchers (Epstein 1996). Their exclusion slowed the development of appropriate treatment options and research. Moreover, technologies are less likely to be flexibly designed if deliberation on potential risks occurs too late in the innovation process. Finally, do regulations protect against widely shared conflicts of interest, encourage error correction, and enforce a fair distribution of the burden of proof? Regulatory approaches that demand “sound science” prior to regulation put the least empowered participants (i.e., victims) in the position of having to convincingly demonstrate their case and fail to incentivize innovators to avoid mistakes. In contrast, making innovators pay into victim’s funds until harm is disproven would encourage precaution by introducing a monetary incentive to prevent errors (Woodhouse 2013, 79). Indeed, mining companies already have to post remediation bonds to ensure that funds exist to clean up after valuable minerals and metals have been unearthed.
            To these political precautions, I would add the need for deliberative activities to build social capital (see Fleck 2016). Indeed, those studying commons tragedies and environmental management have outlined how establishing trust and a vision of some kind of common future—often through more informal modes of communication—are essential for well-functioning forms of collective governance (Ostrom 1990; Temby et al. 2017). Deliberations are unlikely to lead to precautionary action and productively working through value disagreements if proceedings are overly antagonistic or polarized.
            The ITE framework has a lot of similarities to Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) but differs in a number of important ways. RRI’s four pillars of anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness (Stilgoe, Owen and Macnaghten 2013) are reflected in ITE’s focus on learning. Innovators must be pushed to anticipate that mistakes will happen, encouraged to reflect upon appropriate ameliorative action, and made to include and be accountable to potential victims. ITE can also be seen as sharing RRI’s connection to deliberative democratic traditions and the precautionary principle (see Reber 2018). ITE differs, however, in terms of scope and approach. Indeed, others have pointed out that the RRI framework could better account for the material barriers and costs and prevailing power structures that can prevent well-meaning innovators from innovating responsibly (De Hoop, Pols and Romijn 2016). ITE’s focus on ensuring technological flexibility, countering conflicts of interest, and fostering diversity in decision-making power and fairness in the burden of proof exactly addresses those limitations. Finally, ITE emphasizes political pluralism, in contrast to RRI’s foregrounding of ethical reflexivity. Innovators need not be ethically circumspect about their innovations provided that they are incentivized or otherwise encouraged by political opponents to act as if they were.   

An op-ed that I wrote with Nicholas Tampio was published in the Washington Post on Saturday. The reaction was much stronger than I anticipated it would be. I was ready for the run-of-the-mill social media negativity that I see on Twitter everyday, but the vitriol in the article's comments and in Twitter replies was really something else. One person came to my wall to write that I had "blood on my hands", and no shortage of people questioned my intelligence and moral compass. In our article, Nick and I don't exactly come out against mandates writ large (though some have interpreted it that way), but that pursuing vaccine mandates right now will not be worth the costs. The thing to remember is that we're living through two pandemics at the moment: COVID and rampant political polarization. Getting vaccine numbers up faster while only making our democracy even more pathological is not a wise move. 

Things weren't helped by Tom Nicholas retweeting it to his 500k followers with such authoritative pronouncements as "It [vaccine mandates] is *exactly* how things work in a democracy, which is why you didn't get polio." For a guy who pronounced the "Death of Expertise," you'd think Nichols would pause to consider that maybe he might want to learn from people who study vaccine hesitancy and resistance before claiming to know what's best, but he hasn't. Nichols, like many people today who decry the declining respect for truth or democracy, is really taking issue with the reality that people think differently than him rather than that they don't respect expertise or act democratically per se.  

And that's exactly the problem that, as I argue in my book The Divide, underlies contemporary democracies. It's not so much that people are "irrational," but that political opponents are absolutely convinced that they are on the right side of truth, whether they are pro-vaccine or anti-vaxx. This fanatical certitude produces demand for fanatical policy. Just look at Max Boot's now deleted tweet praising vaccine mandates in the notably undemocratic Saudi Arabia, or Matthew Yglesias's suggestion that vaccine resisters should be given the jab by force. 

A lot of leftists and centrists are just as anti-democratic in their thinking as reactionary conservatives. It's just that that attitude only comes out when there's a population of citizens that refuse to embrace a truth that is accepted by the political mainstream. It's in these moments that self-described liberals and centrists out themselves as technocrats and agitate against the fundamental features of democracy: dialogue, negotiation, and compromise. 

But they're not alone. As I demonstrate in my book, plenty of otherwise intelligent people have been confusing democracy with The Truth for quite some time, and that explains a lot of the political gridlock and intransigence in modern democracies. 

The question will be whether enough of us can rise to the challenge of democratic citizenship in the near term in order to avoid the "death spiral" of polarization that previously infected nations like Venezuela, pre-Pinochet Chile, and pre-Franco Spain. Using mandates as a stick to punish the unvaccinated, especially while also giving the appearance that it's motivated by partisanship, will make a polarization death spiral in this country a real possibility.

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But that's not the only thing that I've noticed in the reaction to the piece. First, many vaccine mandate advocates are unsurprisingly similar to the vaccine hesitant citizens in how they perceive risk. It's just in the opposite direction. One commenter described being worried everyday about her 3 year old ending up in the ICU with COVID. That's certainly a possibility, but the risk to children is actually not much more than it has been for other long-prevalent viruses like the flu and RSV. It's common to chide the vaccine hesitant for their "irrational fear" of vaccine side-effects, but plenty of vaccine supporters have a similarly outsized worries about COVID. Both should be considered "legitimate" concerns that we ought to take seriously, even if the goal is to eventually lessen the magnitude of those worries. 

The more annoying argument is the comparison between getting vaccinated and driving drunk: We don't let people onto public roads while drunk, why should we let the "reckless" unvaccinated into public spaces. This is a terrible metaphor. No one comes into the world drunk or driving the automobile, but we were all born without immunity to COVID. A person has to explicitly imbibe alcohol to become a drunk driver, while not being a COVID spreader (well, less of one) means permitting someone to inject a vaccine into your body. The metaphor completely blinds us to all of the important differences in these cases, making it easier to ignore the immense amount of trust in doctors, the FDA, and the pharmaceutical industry that it takes to get vaccinated. Plus, it reduces human beings to being disease-ridden virus vectors, which is somewhat dehumanizing.

I think it's better to think of herd immunity as like an airplane, except it's an enormous plane that some 80 percent of us have to board before it can take off. People fear flying. They have to give up control. They have to trust the pilot, the FAA, and that engineers at companies like Boeing are all doing their jobs diligently. Would we strap people into their seats in that case or talk to them to try to alleviate their fears? 

Other thing that I've learned from some of the emails that I've received is that there's a big overlap between "essential workers" and the vaccine hesitant. At my own college and others throughout the country, it is staff and not faculty who are shunning the vaccine. At hospitals, it is nurses and orderlies who more often refuse, not doctors. Those of us who have been relatively shielded from most of the harms of COVID are often the ones most ardent in calling for mandates. A reader who emailed me framed it as "The professional class took none of the risks during the pandemic and are now forcing an experimental vaccine on us." That's a perspective that I hadn't considered, and it's one that I'm still thinking about. I think it explains some of the class dynamics of vaccine mistrust.

One final realization that I've had concerns vaccines as technological fixes. Dan Sarewitz wrote that he thought they were the best example of using a technology to sidestep the social complexities and difficulties in solving a tenacious public problems. I now think that he's wrong. The techno-fix for disease like COVID-19 is treatment, not vaccine. This should be obvious, given how many of the vaccine hesitant have latched onto to uncertain treatments like Invermectin. Vaccines, like I noted above, require immense amounts of trust. They also ask that people who are not currently sick take a form of medicine. Treatments don't. People who are exceptionally sick see risks differently. They're looking to get better, not avoid getting sick. In light of the fact that pandemics aren't going to disappear anytime soon, we may want to put as much R&D into improving treatment options as into developing vaccines. We would be better off having a techno-fix that lets us temporarily sidestep the messy problem of vaccine hesitancy, giving us more time to engage with the vaccine hesitant, to hear their concerns, and build trust. 

It seems hard to square face-to-face education with pandemic prevention. In states like Colorado, increasing COVID transmissions are driven by college student cases. The New York Times tallies 178 thousand infections and counting at institutions of higher learning across the country. My own institution has just shut down in-person classes for the next two weeks after learning about several large parties happening over the weekend. The few colleges that so far seem to be successful at preventing outbreaks have expended immense resources, some going so far as to test students weekly or prohibit leaving campus except for an emergency. Are universities up to the task of preventing pandemics?
 
So-called hybrid and in-person classes have taken an immense about of planning and preparation. Hand sanitizer and face masks had to be bought in immense quantities, rooms needed reconfigured for distance education, and dorms and food service needed redesigned to support social distancing. Unfortunately, it seems like few, if any, college administrators gave as much consideration to the organizational and social facets of pandemic prevention, preferring to wag their finger at undergraduates and expect them to behave. No one appears to have stopped to ask, “What do students need in order to be able to comply?”
 
Just as abstinence-based sex education is ineffective at reducing teenage pregnancy, an abstinence-based approach to pandemic schooling won’t stop social intimacy among college students. And this should have been no mystery to college administrators, or at least it would not have been if they consulted social scientists rather than only epidemiologists and virologists. Safety has rarely been the technological accomplishment. Preventing outbreaks could have only be done through achieving the right kind of campus culture and a deep understanding of how to actually empower people to act safely.  
 
The reality that safety is socially accomplished is well-known to people who study risky technology. Decades of studies on operators of nuclear reactors, sailors on aircraft carriers, and air traffic controllers show that safety can be assured only by investing in a culture of high reliability. High reliability organizations invest considerable time and effort investing in people. Members need to have complete “buy in” regarding the organization’s performance. They not only receive considerable training but are also empowered to help make important collective decisions about the hazards they face. High reliability employees are more than just “rule followers.”
 
The question is, “Can university campuses become high reliability organizations when it comes to pandemic prevention?” There is good reason to believe the answer is “no.” The same kinds of organizational studies that uncovered the existence of organizations capable of averting disaster typically found college bureaucracies to be very much the opposite. Festering problems go unaddressed, “solutions” are developed to non-existent problems, and decisions get made without obvious efforts at careful problem solving.  
 
The organizational dysfunction of universities is well known to the people that work in them. We have just been lucky up until now that colleges haven’t had to actually handle anything hazardous, like nuclear fuel or supersonic jets. The consequences of chronic institutional incompetence are just a growing mental health crisis among students, poor graduation rates, and graduates who lack many of the fundamental skills that they will actually need in their later careers.
 
To the skeptic, the solution is dead simple: colleges should only offer online classes. That is the only inherently safe strategy. As a classic paper on the safety of petrochemical plants put it, “What you don’t have, can’t leak.” The easiest way to mitigate the harms of dangerous chemicals is to employ them in smaller amounts, move them shorter distances, introduce them into chemical reactions under more benign conditions, or simply replace them with safer alternatives. The same is true for colleges: What students you don’t have on campus, can’t get infected.
 
But perhaps that goes too far. Maybe there are lessons from the safe operation of nuclear plants and other potentially catastrophic technologies that could be applied to the college environment. Safety expert Sidney Dekker calls one version of the high reliability approach “Safety Differently,” and it works by seeing people not as problem to managed or to fixed but rather as essential parts of the solution. University administrators have mainly done the former by implementing mandatory testing and quarantine procedures, enforcing social distancing protocols, and employing threats of punishment and injunctions to “be responsible” to try to cajole the students into doing the right thing.
 
All those efforts seem commonsensical. The problem is that they backfire. Threats of punishment lead people to hide their mistakes, meaning that vital information is not shared with the people who need them. Students have a party, then lie about it.
 
An overemphasis on protocols reduces safety to rule following, undercutting people’s motivation to think about what the right thing to do might be for a given situation. People treat mask wearing and 6 ft. of distance as if it were magic. They enforce compliance in situations where transmission risk is likely already low, like when walking outside, which can eat away at the seriousness that people take mask requirements. And it remains an open question whether or not cloth masks are really good enough to last an hour of breathing and talking in the enclosed space of a classroom, especially if students don’t launder them enough or they become wet.
 
Making students part of the solution of pandemic prevention would mean including them in discussions about what kinds of protocols should be implemented and how. In the effort to prevent campus outbreaks, students are no longer universities’ “customers” and more like the operators of a nuclear reactor. It is their behavior that determines whether risks are contained. It is only students who can prevent a pandemic meltdown. Most importantly, they are the only ones with the expertise regarding how different demands and precautions can be made compatible with student life and their social and mental health needs. Without them, administrators are trying to manage a high-risk sociotechnical system that they can’t really understand.
 
But that sounds like a tall order. Cultivating a high reliability culture is one thing on an aircraft carrier, but quite another among college students. Even worse, students are already infantilized by our educational system in general: by the demeaning carrot and stick incentives of the grading system; by the lack of space for individual curiosity; and by the reluctance to let students take responsibility for their own learning. If we cannot even trust students with their own education, how can we rely on them to be responsible when it comes to COVID? Achieving outbreak-free in-person campuses may prove to be impossible without far more radical changes to the structure of higher education. 

Are Americans losing their grip on reality? It is difficult not to think so in light of the spread of QANON conspiracy theories, which posit that a deep-state ring of Satanic pedophiles is plotting against President Trump. A recent poll found that some 56% of Republican voters believe that at least some of the QANON conspiracy theory is true. But conspiratorial thinking has been on the rise for some time. One 2017 Atlantic article claimed that America had “lost its mind” in its growing acceptance of post-truth. Robert Harris has more recently argued that the world had moved into an “age of irrationality.” Legitimate politics is threatened by a rising tide of unreasonableness, or so we are told. But the urge to divide people in rational and irrational is the real threat to democracy. And the antidote is more inclusion, more democracy—no matter how outrageous the things our fellow citizens seem willing to believe.
 
Despite recent panic over the apparent upswing in political conspiracy thinking, salacious rumor and outright falsehoods has been an ever-present feature of politics. Today’s lurid and largely evidence-free theories about left-wing child abuse rings have plenty of historical analogues. Consider tales of Catherine the Great’s equestrian dalliances and claims that Marie Antoinette found lovers in both court servants and within her own family. Absurd stories about political elites seems to have been anything but rare. Some of my older relatives believed in the 1990s that the government was storing weapons and spare body parts underneath Denver International Airport in preparation for a war against common American citizens—and that was well before the Internet was a thing.
 
There seems to be little disagreement that conspiratorial thinking threatens democracy. Allusions to Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay on the “paranoid style of American politics” have become cliché. Hofstadter’s targets included 1950s conservatives that saw Communist treachery around every corner, 1890s populists railing against the growing power of the financial class, and widespread worries about the machinations of the Illuminati. He diagnosed their politics paranoid in light of their shared belief that the world was being persecuted by a vast cabal of morally corrupt elites.
 
Regardless of their specific claims, conspiracy theories’ harms come from their role in “disorienting” the public, leading citizens to have grossly divergent understandings of reality. And widespread conspiratorial thinking drives the delegitimation of traditional democratic institutions like the press and the electoral system. Journalists are seen as pushing “fake news.” The voting booths become “rigged.”
 
Such developments are no doubt concerning, but we should think carefully about how we react to conspiracism. Too often the response is to endlessly lament the apparent end of rational thought and wonder aloud if democracy can survive while being gripped by a form of collective madness. But focusing on citizens' perceived cognitive deficiencies presents its own risks. Historian Ted Steinberg called this the “diagnostic style” of American political discourse, which transforms “opposition to the cultural mainstream into a form of mental illness.” The diagnostic style leads us to view QANONers, and increasingly political opponents in general, as not merely wrong but cognitively broken. They become the anti-vaxxers of politics.
 
While QANON believers certainly seem to be deluding themselves, isn’t the tendency by leftists to blame Trump’s popular support on conservative’s faculty brains and an uneducated or uninformed populace equally delusional? The extent to which such cognitive deficiencies are actually at play is beside the point as far as democracy is concerned. You can’t fix stupid, as the well-worn saying has it. Diagnosing chronic mental lapses actually leaves us very few options for resolving conflicts. Even worse, it prevents an honest effort to understand and respond to the motivations of people with strange beliefs. Calling people idiots will only cause them to dig in further.
 
Responses to the anti-vaxxer movement show as much. Financial penalties and other compulsory measures tend to only anger vaccine hesitant parents, leading them to more often refuse voluntary vaccines and become more committed in their opposition. But it does not take a social scientific study to know this. Who has ever changed their mind in response to the charge of stupidity or ignorance?
 
Dismissing people with conspiratorial views blinds us to something important. While the claims themselves might be far-fetched, people often have legitimate reasons for believing them. African Americans, for instance, disproportionately believe conspiracy theories regarding the origin of HIV, such as that it was man-made in a laboratory or that the cure was being withheld, and are more hesitant of vaccines. But they also rate higher in distrust of medical institutions, often pointing to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ongoing racial disparities as evidence. And from British sheepfarmers’ suspicion of state nuclear regulators in the aftermath of Chernobyl to mask skeptics’ current jeremiads against the CDC, governmental mistrust has often developed after officials’ overconfident claims about the risks turned out to be inaccurate. What might appear to an “irrational” rejection of the facts is often a rational response to a power structure that feels distant, unresponsive, and untrustworthy.
 
The influence of psychologists has harmed more than it has helped in this regard. Carefully designed studies purport to show that believers in conspiracy theories lack the ability to think analytically or claim that they suffer from obscure cognitive biases like “hypersensitive agency detection.” Recent opinion pieces exaggerate the “illusory truth effect,” a phenomenon discovered in psych labs that repeated exposure to false messages leads to a relatively slight increase in the number subjects rating them as true or plausible. The smallness of this, albeit statistically significant, effect doesn’t stop commentators from presenting social media users as if they were passive dupes, who only need to be told about QANON so many times before they start believing it. Self-appointed champions of rationality have spared no effort to avoid thinking about the deeper explanations for conspiratorial thinking.
 
Banging the drum over losses in rationality will not get us out of our present situation. Underneath our seeming inability to find more productive political pastures is a profound misunderstanding of what makes democracy work. Hand Wringing over “post-truth” or conspiratorial beliefs is founded on the idea that the point of politics is to establish and legislate truths. Once that is your conception of politics, the trouble with democracy starts to look like citizens with dysfunctional brains.
 
When our fellow Americans are recast as cognitively broken, it becomes all too easy to believe that it would be best to exclude or diminish the influence of people who believe outrageous things. Increased gatekeeping within the media or by party elites and scientific experts begins to look really attractive. Some, like philosopher Jason Brennan, go even further. His 2016 book, Against Democracy, contends that the ability to rule should be limited to those capable of discerning and “correctly” reasoning about the facts, while largely sidestepping the question of who decides what the right facts are and how to know when we are correctly reasoning about them.
 
But it is misguided to think that making our democracy only more elitist will throttle the wildfire spread of conspiratorial thinking. If anything, doing so will only temporarily contain populist ferment, letting pressure build until it eventually explodes or (if we are lucky) economic growth leads it to fizzle out. Political gatekeeping, by mistaking supposed deficits in truth and rationality for the source of democratic discord, fails to address the underlying cause of our political dysfunction: the lack of trust.
 
Signs of our political system’s declining legitimacy are not difficult to find. A staggering 71 percent of the Americans believe that elected officials don’t care about the average citizen or what they think. Trust in our government has never been lower, with only 17 percent of citizens expressing confidence about Washington most or all the time. By diagnosing rather than understanding, we cannot see that conspiratorial thinking is the symptom rather than the disease.  
 
The spread of bizarre theories about COVID-19 being a “planned” epidemic or child-abuse rings is a response to real feelings of helplessness, isolation, and mistrust as numerous natural and manmade disasters unfold before our eyes—epochal crises that governments seem increasingly incapable of getting a handle on. Many of Hofstadter’s listed examples of conspiratorial thought came during similar moments: at the height of the Red Scare and Cold War nuclear brinkmanship, during the 1890s depression, or in the midst of pre-Civil War political fracturing. Conspiracy theories offer a simplified world of bad guys and heroes. A battle between good and evil is a more satisfying answer than the banality of ineffectual government and flawed electoral systems when one is facing wicked problems.
 
Perhaps social media adds fuel to the fire, accelerating the spread of outlandish proposals about what ails the nation. But it does so not because it short-circuits our neural pathways to crash our brains’ rational thinking modules. Conspiracy theories are passed by word of mouth (or Facebook likes) by people we already trust. It is no surprise that they gain traction in a world where satisfying solutions to our chronic, festering crises are hard to find, and where most citizens are neither afforded a legible glimpse into the workings of the vast political machinery that determines much of their lives nor the chance to actually substantially influence it.
 
Will we be able to reverse course before it is too late? If mistrust and unresponsiveness is the cause, the cure should be the effort to reacquaint Americans with the exercise of democracy on a broad-scale. Hofstadter himself noted that, because the political process generally affords more extreme sects little influence, public decisions only seemed to confirm conspiracy theorists’ belief that they are a persecuted minority. The urge to completely exclude “irrational” movements forgets that finding ways to partially accommodate their demands is often the more effective strategy. Allowing for conscientious objections to vaccination effectively ended the anti-vax movement in early 20th century Britain. Just as interpersonal conflicts are more easily resolved by acknowledging and responding to people’s feelings, our seemingly intractable political divides will only become productive by allowing opponents to have some influence on policy. That is not to say that we should give into all their demands. Rather it is only that we need to find small but important ways for them to feel heard and responded to, with policies that do not place unreasonable burdens on the rest of us.
 
While some might pooh-pooh this suggestion, pointing to conspiratorial thinking as evidence of how ill-suited Americans are for any degree of political influence, this gets the relationship backwards. Wisdom isn’t a prerequisite to practicing democracy, but an outcome of it. If our political opponents are to become more reasonable it will only be by being afforded more opportunities to sit down at the table with us to wrestle with just how complex our mutually shared problems are. They aren’t going anywhere, so we might as well learn how to coexist.