The Intoxicating Pleasure of Conspiratorial Thinking

Artificial Martian channels, depicted by Percival Lowell. (Wiki)

“THE SEEKING IS a never-ending circle until one is satisfied,” Justin reflected, runically, in an email to me. “For me, that satisfaction was never really present until the theories of QAnon started emerging.”

Yes, QAnon—the undead cosmology that still haunts the internet. Justin, a Brooklyn entrepreneur who once worked for TED, is best known for having been so jazzed about the QAnon-Trump conceit that he joined the Stop the Steal protest in Washington, DC, on January 6 last year. He now says he wouldn’t have gone if he’d known it was going to turn violent.

I had seen a news story about a penitent QAnon adherent called simply “Justin,” and I wanted to hear more; I thought I could find him. (After I did, he asked me to use only his first name.) In our exchanges, he sounded fully deradicalized—candid, earnest, thoughtful about his own choices.  “I dissociated so much from my reality,” he told me about the years leading up to January 6. He had lost friends. “I acted in a condescending manner to a lot of people, and it was wrong of me to do that.”