How Might QAnon End?

July 5, 2020 7:41 AM

I’ve been interested and disturbed watching QAnon continue to snowball online, including increasingly prominent people like candidates for Congress going public as QAnon believers. I have some questions (below the cut) about how cults/beliefs like this end.

I’ve seen a lot of writing about how individual people have broken away from cults or hate groups, but not as much about how these collectives end. What do we know about how cults and false belief systems fall apart or lose influence? For purposes of comparison, QAnon seems closer to a complicated false belief system like 9/11 Truthers than it is to a cult or collective where people are gathering in person or living together (but maybe that’s wrong?).

Is there a predictable peak or limit for how many people will subscribe to a belief system like QAnon, which is pretty obviously untrue? Are there markers for when a cult or belief system like this is losing influence or coming to an endpoint, based on past examples in history? Is there usually some kind of climax where it breaks and people abandon it quickly and en masse, or do people slowly drift away from it? Does it matter for this calculus that QAnon is based around something happening (huge mass arrests of famous people by the US military and led by Trump) that will never happen? Once it’s over, have people actually stopped believing in it, or is it more that it becomes embarrassing/unacceptable to openly admit to?

(I am not looking for “what bad things will QAnon do?” It’s obvious to me that it poses a real danger and people could be really harmed by it before it’s over.)

posted by sallybrown to Human Relations (9 answers total)

My guess is that it’ll probably end up like the John Birch Society, where it exists for half a century but members stop being involved in “real” politics.
posted by kevinbelt at 8:08 AM on July 5, 2020 [3 favorites]

Is there a predictable peak or limit for how many people will subscribe to a belief system like QAnon, which is pretty obviously untrue?

I don't believe so. It seems to me that the longevity of any belief system held largely in common by fairly large numbers of people has more to do with what those who believe it get out of doing so than how obvious the untruth of it is to non-believers.

People are, in general, made uncomfortable by things and processes we don't understand; the natural tendency is either to try to explain them or, in cases where that proves too difficult, to personify and attempt to curry favour with them.

If you're the kind of person who values feeling like you're one of a select few who knows what's really going on, even though you don't actually have the wherewithal to find out any such thing, then about the only thing that's going to persuade you to let go of something like QAnon is if it does become a mainstream belief (in which case gods help us all).
posted by flabdablet at 8:43 AM on July 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

The writer of this Atlantic article posits a potential comparison for the future of QAnon with other past apocalyptic cults that have morphed into a religion- e.g. the Seventh-Day Adventist Church morphing out of the Millerite movement in the 1840s. It might be a useful comparison in that Millerism was also predicated on an apocalyptic prediction that didn't come to pass. The Atlantic writer also references other apocalyptic cults that have survived despite the apocalypse failing to manifest as predicted.
posted by Balthamos at 8:54 AM on July 5, 2020 [8 favorites]

QAnon is just the "Satanic panic" wrapped in blog posts. I can imagine it mutating, chasing after chemtrails or 5G cancer or lizard people or whatever, but the conspiracy theory mindset never fades.
posted by SPrintF at 8:56 AM on July 5, 2020 [6 favorites]

Came to post same (great) article as Balthamos: the quick answer: it 'ends' with QAnon becoming a new religion.
posted by 0bvious at 9:15 AM on July 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

My guess is that it will reduce in size but stick around essentially forever. It's fairly similar to the David Icke politicians-are-lizards stuff and that hasn't completely died out yet. In previous generations conspiracy theories that didn't catch on enough to become a religion would die out because it was hard to transmit the ideas to strangers, but with the internet that's much easier so I suspect there will somehow be a small group of believers 50 years from now whose beliefs have mutated very strangely
posted by JZig at 9:26 AM on July 5, 2020

My guess is it will continue on like the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride. The title is passed along, or QAnon will stop posting and someone else will pick up the mantle and tell everyone that before QAnon left (my guess is they will claim the Deep State got to them) that they told them all the dirt.

I just don't think that conspiracy theories are equatable to cults, and that they never die out. The world is full of gullible people who need to be told their imaginations are real.
posted by terrapin at 9:57 AM on July 5, 2020

Another vote for lose vitality but not die. Another way to be crazy will come along all too soon.
posted by SemiSalt at 1:10 PM on July 5, 2020

Someone cracks the trip codes, dividing the followers into forks of infighting cliques leaving so many contradictory pronouncements (and too little boogaloo), so people drift away to other things.
posted by k3ninho at 3:03 PM on July 5, 2020 [3 favorites]