The power of suggestion | The Way Things Are

We use judgment to make sense of the world. Given that there are a variety of things in the world that need to be made sense of, the corresponding judgments we have at our disposal come in all shapes and sizes — and not all judgments are made equal. 

Of these, those produced in the court of public opinion occupy a significantly lower rung in the hierarchy of normative judgments than, say, their sophisticated counterparts in the legal arena. 

Regardless of the moral correctness of the parties involved, it is a fact that each legal judgment is reached only after extensive deliberation, owing to the judicial branch’s strict adherence to procedure, accuracy and universal access of representation and defense. 

The court of public opinion, on the other hand, is fundamentally untameable. With no arbiter to answer to and no strictly defined scope of facts to limit either side’s arguments, the tribunal of public opinion is a guerrilla courthouse, regulated by neither burden of proof nor formal procedure. 

It also exists on a much broader scale and may even be more accurately termed the “social court,” given how the interactive means of collective consensus are an essential part of producing any judgment in the public sphere. 

Despite this disparity between legal and social courts, the latter possess tacit advantages in terms of the power their judgments hold. This is because the social sphere is a fertile breeding ground for one of the most potent influences of collective perception and attitude: conspiracy theories. 

All conspiracy theories require in order to have the same effect as long-standing legal rulings is to blemish a core argument with a set of loosely strung facts that are attractive and internally coherent enough to incept an idea — the possibility that certain events transpired in a specific way. This is not unlike the “beyond-reasonable-doubt” clause invoked to juries in the courtroom, where the defense, in order to effectively counter the prosecution, has to only present a plausible alternative to the established claim. 

Eventually these ideas take root in half-formed, ephemeral and sticky frames of reference that all individuals inescapably resort to when they lack the capacity to come to a conclusion through wholly critical means. Thus, despite enforcing a formidable universal standard within a citizenry, judicial rulings do not come close to being as unamendable and cemented as social rulings. 

To better illustrate this phenomenon, we need only consider the comparative effects that certain legal and social rulings have had on the public perception towards some common issue. Let us

take, for instance, the Israeli government, which has been a prominent subject of adverse judgments in both of these courts.

Recently, various legal bodies around the world — separately, in many cases — found the Israeli government guilty of genocidal intent in the wave of military advancement it undertook in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7, 2023. This validation of Israel’s culpability by some national courts and international bodies indeed plays a significant role in forming public opinion, especially because these judgments were a culmination of what many activists and non-governmental organizations had been accusing the Israeli government of for decades. 

However, conspiracy theories are able to transcend the standard of absolute accuracy that judicial rulings are bound to. Recently, these are exemplified by theories such as the ongoing internet conspiracy that the Israeli government had a hand in the recent assasination of Charlie Kirk, a prominent far-right activist who was shot and killed in September last year.

The mere suggestion of this possibility — one that contradicts the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s conclusion of the assassin being an independent actor — is able to expand collective perceptions about both the intent and capabilities of the Israeli government. Not only does this idea continue to portray the Israeli government as an unpredictably violent actor but also introduces the notion that it can reach its arms into environments as seemingly distant as American soil. 

Often driven by a conscious motive, such conspiracy theories can radicalize imaginations by, at the very least, prompting people to entertain a novel idea. And at most, they go past eliciting a positive or negative reaction by articulating — accurately or not — a clearer image of certain events, people, organizations, systems and governments that have historically operated behind a veil of obscurity and secrecy. 

At the end of the day, it is these very images that individuals make decisions based on. The spark behind channeling both hatred and support requires having a fuller view of the enemy we are up against or the ally we are siding with. In this quest, verifiable reporting and conspiracy theories find themselves in the toolbox — while one corresponds to reality more closely, the other is often to ignite a bigger spark.