I’ve met Malcolm Roberts. Not him exactly, but one of the inevitabilities of being a lawyer is that you get to meet lots of people like Malcolm Roberts. The key to understanding them isn’t so much in the overtly insane counter-factuals they postulate without ever seeming to blink, entertaining as they are. There’s a more significant clue.
It’s hardly surprising that a One Nation Senator believes NASA is leading a worldwide conspiracy to falsify climate records. There was no reason for the ABC not to give Roberts a platform on Q&A, given that he will hold part of the balance of power for the next few years at least. We should all hear his theories in their full glory. It was, however, surprising to see someone as smart and savvy as the physicist Brian Cox fall so easily into the trap of arguing with a person like that on rational grounds.
Bad idea. You don’t follow the Mad Hatter down the rabbit hole unless you want to find yourself questioning your own sanity. We don’t debate with cancer, nor should we with delusion.
[Malcolm Roberts: the One Nation climate denier too out there for Andrew Bolt]
One interchange during Q&A in particular gave me some powerful deja vu. The question for the panel was about Bill Leak’s provocative/racist cartoon in The Australian in response to the Don Dale scandal. When his turn came, Roberts saw his opening for one of the things he’s been badly wanting to say on national television. After explaining how brave he considers Leak to be, the conversation went in this direction:
ROBERTS: Now, [there’s] something else that’s really important for me and that is that this kind of legislation, this kind of curbing of free speech leads to this. [Holds up a letter] This is one of my constituents in Queensland. He says “One LGBT activist in NSW has lodged at least 28 complaints against me because he disagrees with my views on marriage and morality, including one complaint that I have incited hatred by linking to an Andrew Bolt article on Facebook. I have moved my family after this activist offered to release my address to Islamic organisations. He also conspired with others to lodge complaints in order to seize my house. This abuse occurs because the New South Wales — New South Wales — Anti-Discrimination Board fails to investigate complaints. It is …”
TONY JONES: I’m going to have to get you to go to the last sentence, or something, because it could be a very long letter …
ROBERTS: The point I am getting to is that this man is being intimidated in Queensland by a NSW Anti-Discrimination Board that is working on an activist perpetrating 28 complaints that are basically nonsense.
AUDIENCE: [Silence]
JONES: O-kay. Umm…
I’ve had the same conversation literally scores of times. You’d be very surprised, trust me, by the reality of how many people in the community are living personal paranoiac nightmares like Roberts’ correspondent from Queensland. In the law, we call them “vexatious litigants” and other less flattering terms.
They can be difficult to detect at first glance. Like Roberts himself, they are consumed by the crucial importance of the stories they need to tell. This gravity clothes them with a superficial appearance of rationality. They are armed with extraordinary levels of detail: documents that “prove” their case; a seemingly perfect recall of every relevant event and circumstance. At the base of their story is usually a cause that engages an empathic response, some (at least sincerely imagined, if not real) trauma or invasion of rights.
Many years ago, I encountered a young man who had, by then, spent over a decade in the courts of NSW pursuing compensation for the back injury he had allegedly incurred when he slipped and fell on his first day of work at a petrol station. He’d sued the owner but recovered nothing when the defendant declared bankruptcy. He then sued his lawyers for negligence. When we got involved, our firm was the 35th he had engaged. He sued us too. When we lost sight of him another decade later, he was well past his 60th set of lawyers and still going strong. I knew of at least 20 separate cases to which he was a party, in every court possible, including the High Court, all arising from the original personal injury claim.
This man was intelligent, resourceful, encyclopaedically knowledgeable about his own case and, on first meeting, apparently sane — just a victim of injustice in a legal system that is so often an exceedingly blunt tool. In reality, he was entirely consumed by his legal cause, which became his single-minded obsession. He was paranoid, delusional, amoral and potentially dangerous. Apart from destroying his own life, he absorbed unbelievable volumes of public resources as he clogged up the court system with his ever-expanding litigation.
The tell-tale signs of the same detachment from rationality are present in Roberts’ Q&A detour. His constituent’s story is as impenetrably nonsensical to lawyers as it is to anyone else. One of the unintended consequences of a system of open justice is that it lends itself perfectly to people who have an axe to grind and an absence of perspective. Conspiracy, which almost never actually exists but is always a ready explanation for life’s habit of sometimes sucking, is in the law hypothetically real. Every obsessed litigant knows that the smoking gun that will win their case is out there, and they’re always just one tactical manoeuvre short of discovering its hiding place.
Roberts is, obviously, a conspiracy theorist. We’ll be hearing more from him about the UN’s black helicopters and how governments control us with grammar. But we’ll hear even more stories like that of the Queenslander who nearly lost his house to the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board (a body that does exist but which has no powers to do anything other than investigate and try to resolve complaints). Roberts likely has a garage full of them.
Paranoia is a debilitating condition. It causes a construction of the world like a building full of mirrors but no doors; everything reflects back onto a central, all-explaining but eternally elusive truth, the revelation of which is a desperate, endless itch.
Malcolm Roberts is a senator, for better or worse. Like his leader, he need not engage our sympathy or empathy; he placed himself and his peculiarities in the public eye. We’re entitled to assess and judge him on what he says and does. He’s going to say some crazy shit. He isn’t funny, any more than Pauline is funny, so don’t laugh. But, equally, don’t take the bait. We’ll never argue him down, because his world isn’t ours. The only appropriate response is “O-kay. Umm …”
Thanks Michael; but your tactic of ad hominem argument just falls into mad hatter game as well. One has to agressively but politely ask the looney antagonists to show the evidence for their case. When they provide said bunkum ‘data /evidence ‘then there is something to refute. That the whole debate was reduced to ‘proof’ is old style empericism; contemporary science works on probabilities and theories (the models) can only be refuted not proved. Since we no longer teach critical thinking in schools or universities (something which Cox argued for) it’s no wonder the looneys are taking over the asylum.
I’m afraid Michael is right. It reallydoesn’t matter how much proof you offer, how much evidence, they pull another white rabbit out of their bottomless tinfoil helmet.
There is no point in arguing with a loony. Just smile and move on. They will never change their minds, and you can take refuge in one inalienable fact: you and Brian Cox are right, and they are wrong.
I fancy myself as good at spotting the vexatious litigant client. Roberts fits the bill nicely. Every time he says “evidence” I oscillate from horror to laughter. He is his own worst enemy and the Senate will not tolerate his fantasy for a full 6 years (fortunately)
Thanks John and Theolorikeet; scientism is everywhere and a pernicious force in politics. The more you consider what Roberts had to say he obviously is not on the planet sanity; however, the danger we learn from Geobbles is that while no one will believe a little lie, everyone believes the big one. It is going to be a rough ride which ever way we play it. The other problem is that sound bite media is a perfect breeding ground for idiocy.
Roberts likes the reaction he gets – it’s what got him elected by the lost souls struggling to make sense of their own delusions, or the angry dispossessed who have given up hope on “normal” doing anything for them. His statements and “arguments” are not rational POV to be debated, but taglines telling his audience who he is. The only way to get rid of him is to offer his audience something that improves their lives, really, not like the shite he sprouts.
According to a New Scientist article, about half of US adults endorse at least one conspiracy theory.
Unfortunately, we are excited by hearing of conspiracy. Eloquent speakers can gather followers and stampede them off a cliff or onto the bayonets or wherever. Consider that at beerhall rants, Hitler was able to blame the Jews for the miseries of 1930s Germany.
Having elected loonies into power, we have the privilege of throwing them out again at the next election. Hopefully, that is.
In a one-to-one conversation you’re correct, it is entirely useless to argue or even engage conspiracy theory paranoiacs. However on a nationwide television program, I reckon it is absolutely vital that someone like Brian Cox immediately refutes and corrects Roberts. It will never convince Roberts, no amount of evidence ever will. But it will right away mark his talking points as wrong for the many people who watch the program and who are sitting on the fence and may be swayed by arguments that sound tempting enough (hell, I’d love for global warming to not be real too!) to believe otherwise.
Some time ago I went through a lengthy process of trying to refute an Anti-vaxxer’s. It was in a way quite a “fascinating” experience. Every problem with vaccination, and they do exist, was amplified thousandfold, while any benefit of vaccination was dismissed as either wrong, fabricated or irrelevant. I’d never thought it would be possible for anyone to just completely ignore even the most clear-cut and indisputable of facts, but I was wrong. What was especially startling was the extraordinary length that person went to, well, be wrong. Exactly like Malcolm Roberts, he spends an insane amount of time and resources on completely crackpot ideas. Imagine what they could achieve if they used that time for doing something good.
While I agree with your sentiment, Michael. ‘O-kay. Umm …’ is not going to cut it in forums like Q&A, it will make you look arrogant and dismissive which is grist for the mill for conspiracy theorists.
But, IMO, you’re right about one thing, don’t expect to ‘win’.
In a sense you have to speak to, or write to, the audience beyond the speaker (in this case, the good Senator). You have to scrupulously avoid ad hominem (it makes you look petulant and emotional) and calmly stick to the facts and coherently set out the counter argument.
Again, you’ll never convince people like Roberts — their walls are impenetrable with mere facts — but you may just convince someone who finds his sort of argument compelling, someone who is still open to a well delivered, reasoned argument.
(Sometimes ad hominem is so damn satisfying though!)
Great article Michael. Having worked in the Ombudsman’s office, your description of the vexatious litigant is spot on.
Kundera: “If you meet a madman who says that he is a fish and that we are all fishes, do you take off your clothes to show him that you do not have fins?”
Catbert (I think): “If you argue with nutters you’ll just get exhausted and they’ll still be nutters.”
Great comment, up there with “You must not try to teach a pig to sing…it wastes your time and it annoys the pig”