“The reason people do that is because it offers them in the moment a weird sense of comfort. And the reason this can be comforting is because you have then created a world that could have been different if only these bad people hadn't done it.”
Living Planet · October 2026
Context
After a clip of a podcast host saying he finds a government weather-control plot plausible, the psychologist explains why conspiracy theories appeal even though they are frightening: a villain is easier to bear than randomness.
Transcript
…random twist of fate. The same thinking applies to storms. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, dedicated an entire episode of his podcast to a storm manipulation conspiracy theory. When his guest said it was indisputable that Hurricane Helene was manipulated by the government, Carlson said,
…brain to accept a lie at this scale. Like, how could you do that? How could you hide something this big, this profound from an entire population? Except I just saw it five years ago with the COVID vaccine, which was like a total lie. So I know for a fact what you're describing is possible.
And the reason people do that is because it offers them in the moment a weird sense of comfort. And the reason this can be comforting is because you have then created a world that could have been different if only these bad people hadn't done it.
The alternative to a conspiracy theory is often
that's an uncontrollable world, right? If I'm saying, well, you know, some bat somewhere could cough on some guy who's collecting something in a cave and bang, two million people die. That's scary.
More than 400 years before Hurricane Helene, people in the small Arctic fishing settlement of Vardu confronted that same fear of something that was difficult to explain, let alone control. Back then, the explanation wasn't a secret government plot. It was witchcraft.