By Hikurangi Jackson, Te Ao with Moana
"Hine" stood under a bridge in Wellington one cold and rainy day and confessed she once believed her best friend was a reincarnation of both Thomas Jefferson and Mahatma Gandhi.
"I think they call them star seeds, where people born now have been important people in the past. And they're all originally aliens. Extraterrestrials."
This young mother was one of three viewers who bravely chose to share their experiences during a Te Ao with Moana special on conspiracy theories. Each explained how they first became attracted to, and then obsessed with, stories that helped them make sense of the world. And how those stories not only messed with their heads but their relationships with whānau.
"Probably about eight years ago, I started following some ideas and information that my friends would send to me, like 'Have a read of this'. The first couple of times, I'd just have a quick look through, not really get into it.
"And then when I'd see them in real life, we would discuss the stuff that was in these emails. They believe that there is this secret society kidnapping children and abusing them and turning them into super-spies."
Down the rabbit hole
Since Covid-19 unleashed itself on the world, it feels as though the virus had picked up a nasty wee bug itself, an ugly little shapeshifter whose head pokes out from time to time – just to make things worse in the middle of a global pandemic. Conspiracy theories run wild on social media. Who can't name at least two or three?
So, when we asked on our Te Ao with Moana Facebook page if anyone had been down the rabbit hole and popped back out again, the messages started to flood in. The questions too.
What exactly is "the rabbit hole?" asked one person. Fair enough. People were messaging us about beating their drug and alcohol addictions. All power to them, too, but we were talking about another kind of addiction.
According to one dictionary, the phrase can mean a "heather-covered hillside full of rabbit holes". It is also a metaphor for a "bizarre, confusing, or nonsensical situation or environment, typically one from which it is difficult to extricate oneself". It's apparently an allusion to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), which describes how Alice enters a land of magic and strange logic by falling down a rabbit hole.
Malevolent secrets
"What's a conspiracy theory?" another viewer asked.
University lecturer and psychologist Dr Matt Williams explained to journalist Cameron Bennett that, while people use the term conspiracy theory in different ways, it typically involves many actors plotting something malevolent - in secret.
Plenty on our Facebook page suggested we had "sold out to the government", while others asked if we wanted to discover the truth about "everything" – ranging from what really happened on 9/11 to what's really in the vaccines.
But then there were half a dozen private messages from people who confessed that their obsessions had torn up their relationships and messed up their lives. Their stories were tragic but insightful. And, given their recovery – hopeful.
When Hine told me she absolutely believed her friend was a reincarnation of Gandhi and Jefferson, I was shocked. And believe me, it is quite hard to be shocked given some of the messages that come through our inbox.
Hine has a theory about why too.
Isolated
"I was isolated. I was a stay-at-home mum, living on a farm, didn't have access to my friends and the few people I was talking to online are all into this and they're all sharing this. And it helped with the loneliness and the isolation."
Hine suggests that many who are attracted to these stories are genuinely vulnerable in some way – "they've lost their job. They've gone through a separation. They're a bit isolated, maybe the loss of a loved one?"
Izzy has always been attracted to things on the fringe. She had a massive platter of kai ready for us. Her whare in Nelson was stacked with books and she was happy to be on camera.
Izzy told me she didn't have the greatest upbringing and was estranged from most of her whānau. She described how much her obsession with conspiracies really affected her relationship with friends and family.
"It was an alternate theory of how civilisation had been created and had a bit to do with the pyramids and different levels of consciousness and freemasonry was a big one I followed at that time.
'Everyone else was wrong'
"Also, it really became the focus of all my attention to the point where the people that I had around me eventually after a few months said 'this has got to stop'. And they actually took my laptop and everything from me and said, 'You can't have them back until you realise that there are questions that you may never answer and that it can't consume you."
Izzy admits she was obsessed, and that it played havoc with her mental health too.
"I wouldn't talk about anything else. I stopped doing business with anyone who wouldn't talk to me about it and just drove everyone around me crazy. My mental state at the time was not good. And I remember there being a period where I did think it was everyone else who was wrong, not me."
While she was angry with them at the time, Izzy credits her friends for saving her life by pulling her out of the rabbit hole two years ago. Another lifeline was when she began a degree.
Estranged
"I realised how the world actually works. I had no idea. I dropped out of school at 15. I was quite estranged from most of my family, didn't have any real role models around who taught me the basics of life, how the government works. And I am grateful every day for that understanding and how that's helped me, especially when Covid hit and everything kind of kept spiralling. It's helped me stay above board and know what is worth kind of believing in, and what is also out of my scope."
Sakaio is a self-described "reformed" conspiracy theorist. Sakaio admitted he had long been into conspiracy theories, even before the arrival of the internet. And this Samoan-Māori has his own theory as to why some of our people might go down the rabbit hole.
"When you're growing up, you're on the marae, right? You might be 11 or 12, and you got your Māori cousins who are like teenagers and they tell you things like, 'Oh, you can't go down by the urupa at night.' And we are like, 'Oh well, why is that?' And they say, 'Oh because there's a headless horseman that rides around there, you know? And he likes to chase people that hang around the urupa.' So right there and then at that age, you buy into it. You believe it. And so, I guess being Māori we kind of take stories and things like conspiracies as truth - especially if it's any anti-colonisation thing."
When asked how far down the rabbit hole, he went, Sakaio admitted it got really bad.
'I was gullible'
"I actually at one point believed that some of these Illuminati were lizard people, you know? And I had mates who used to tell me to watch these certain interviews and they're like, 'Bro, did you see his eyes, bro? They, blink like a reptilian, bro' - and I kind of believed it and I was like, 'Yeah, I did.' But then as I started to pull away from that scene years later, I thought 'Man, gee I was gullible'."
Sakaio has learned he's susceptible to conspiracies, something Izzy admits to as well.
"There's no hard work for people falling down the hole, it's easy," Izzy says. "Well, recovery is not easy. I fight every day to not fall down that hole again."
*'Hine' is not her real name
Most mislabelled vapes had significantly less nicotine than promised.
