When philosopher Jürgen Habermas conceptualised the public sphere, he envisioned a space where citizens engage in rational discourse to reach consensus about social and political truths. This ideal rested on the assumption that participants would evaluate evidence, recognise logical arguments, and modify their positions accordingly. Today, that foundational premise lies in ruins. The rise of QAnon, a conspiracy theory claiming a secret war between Donald Trump and a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, represents not merely a fringe belief system, but the collapse of this shared epistemological framework.
The QAnon phenomenon reveals a profound truth: the rational citizen, the cornerstone of democratic theory, has always been more mythological than real. The discourse process isn’t simply a disagreement about facts, but constitutes competing realities operating with fundamentally incompatible methods for determining truth itself. The movement’s rapid growth from obscure 4chan posts in 2017 to a political force that helped fuel the Capitol insurrection demonstrates the fragility of the rational public sphere in an era where algorithmic media has replaced traditional information gatekeepers.
Within just three years, Q’s cryptic messages spread from anonymous message boards to mainstream platforms, finding receptive audiences among religious communities, suburban parents, and eventually elected officials. This wasn’t mere viral spread but a system-wide failure of our information ecosystem, where social media platforms optimised for engagement amplified the most emotionally resonant claims while fact-checking remained isolated in increasingly distrusted legacy media.
We comfort ourselves with the belief that humans are fundamentally rational creatures — that given the same evidence, reasonable people will reach similar conclusions. QAnon demolishes this comforting fiction. Most disturbing about QAnon isn’t that its adherents reject facts, but that they believe they are the true rational actors, the ones who’ve ‘done their research’. This self-perception as researchers is contradicted by their methodological approach, which relies heavily on confirmation bias rather than falsifiability, and their rejection of expert consensus in favour of anonymous, unverified sources.
They’ve developed elaborate methodologies to decode “Q drops”, the cryptic messages posted by the anonymous figure known as “Q” on platforms like 4chan and later 8chan/8kun. These drops, often written in an intentionally vague and ambiguous style, contain what followers believe are coded intelligence revelations about government operations and coming events. The very first Q post from 28 October 2017 on 4chan’s /pol/ board exemplifies this pattern. It alluded to an imminent extradition of Hillary Clinton, claimed her passport would be flagged, and predicted riots and people fleeing the country. Despite none of these events materialising, followers didn’t abandon their belief in Q. Instead, they reinterpreted the message in ways that preserved Q’s credibility, shifting timelines or claiming these actions were happening secretly. QAnon adherents spend countless hours analysing these posts, looking for patterns, timestamps, and connections to Trump’s tweets or public statements, creating complex systems of pattern recognition that mimic academic research. They call themselves ‘digital soldiers’ engaged in ‘information warfare’, assembling what they see as evidence into a cohesive worldview.
This isn’t mere ignorance. It’s an alternative epistemology, a competing framework for determining what counts as truth. The QAnon phenomenon shows how the very concept of rationality has become weaponised. Both sides of our political divide now claim the mantle of rationality while dismissing opponents as irrational, emotionally driven, or ‘triggered’. Mutual dismissal makes genuine dialogue impossible, instead pushing people deeper into informational echo chambers where their beliefs go unchallenged, further fragmenting the Habermasian public sphere.
For decades, trusted institutions like the media, academia, and science served as arbiters of shared reality. These gatekeepers are now crumbling under sustained attack from multiple directions: economic pressures that prioritise clicks over truth, political efforts to undermine institutional credibility, and technological platforms that flatten distinctions between experts and amateurs. The result is an epistemological vacuum where conspiracy theories can flourish.
‘Do your own research’, a QAnon rallying cry, sounds reasonable enough. In practice, it means rejecting traditional knowledge authorities in favour of YouTube videos, anonymous imageboards, and social media echo chambers. When institutional trust collapses, the vacuum is filled by those who speak with absolute certainty, offering simple explanations for complex problems.
QAnon flipped traditional epistemology on its head: rather than evidence leading to conclusions, followers start with the conclusion (the cabal exists, Trump is fighting it) and work backward to find supporting evidence. Any contradicting information is dismissed as disinformation, part of the conspiracy itself. As Q cryptically puts it: Disinformation is necessary. This self-sealing quality makes QAnon nearly impossible to refute for those already inside its reality tunnel.
Our information ecosystem further exacerbates these tendencies, designed not for truth but for engagement. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter don’t optimise for accuracy — they optimise for emotional response. The algorithms that govern these spaces don’t distinguish between true and false rather amplifying content that triggers strong reactions. Content that makes us feel righteous anger, moral superiority, or existential fear spreads faster than nuanced analysis or uncomfortable truths.
QAnon exploits this perfectly. Their narratives tap into: fear of child exploitation, distrust of elites, and hope for justice. Each new Q ‘drop’ functions as a cliffhanger, keeping followers perpetually engaged as they await the next revelation. By casting followers as heroes uncovering hidden truths, QAnon provides meaning and community to those who feel alienated by mainstream society.
The uncomfortable reality is that QAnon reveals the fundamental flaws in how we conceive of human rationality. We are not primarily logical creatures who occasionally succumb to emotion. We are emotional creatures who occasionally use logic to justify what we already believe.
Understanding this isn’t about excusing dangerous conspiracy thinking. It’s about recognising that addressing our post-truth crisis requires more than simply providing ‘facts’ to the ‘misinformed’. It requires rebuilding systems of shared reality and trusted information, a project that may define the coming decades of our democracy. The real question isn’t why some people believe in QAnon, but whether any of us can truly claim to be the rational citizens that we imagine ourselves to be.
