Conspiracy theories

It is difficult to argue against this kind of paranoia, which seems endemic to human psychology. Couldn’t those people really be communists or terrorists or witches in disguise? How can you be sure?

— Gary Lachman, The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus (quote added 2023-08-19)

I summarize the conclusions of a lovely conversation with my best friend, Kate Nelson, almost six months ago, about conspiracy theories.

0. Contents

1. The neutral sense
2. Insufficiency of the neutral sense
3. The negative sense
4. Notes

1. The neutral sense

First, we had some problems with the meaning of the term, conspiracy theory.

This was because, at first, I was understanding conspiracy theories in what I will now call the neutral sense:

• the neutral sense: a conspiracy theory is a theory that explains some facts by supposing that there was a secret agreement between some people; this secret agreement is called the conspiracy.

I did not even think twice about defining conspiracy theories in this way. This definition is merely an expansion of what the words seem to mean: “conspiracy theories are theories about conspiracies”. There is nothing mysterious about it.

I call this the neutral sense because it is not intrinsically good or evil. That is, there is nothing intrinsically bad about supposing that there was a secret agreement between some people at some time; it all depends upon how plausible the supposition is, and for what reasons it was made.

The neutral sense is, therefore, sometimes adopted by conspiracy theorists themselves; many have no shame in calling themselves conspiracy theorists, or claiming to believe conspiracy theories. I know some of them myself. As Olavo de Carvalho used to say, the alternative to the Conspiracy Theory of a strange event is the Pure Coincidence Theory, and sometimes the latter is much less reasonable. Murray Rothbard was also quite happy to speak of “conspiracy theory”, or “conspiracy analysis”, as only one among other kinds of theories and analyses, which may be varyingly acceptable depending on their aptness to the particular event explained.

The neutral sense certainly applies, of course, to many famous historical conspiracy theories, such as the various conspiracy theories about the Jews, the Jesuits, the Bilderbergers, the Rockefellers, and the Rothschilds. All of these theories were certainly about conspiracies within (or between) these groups; and no major conspiracy theories seem to have lacked conspiracies, so that the neutral sense at least correctly identifies a necessary condition of them.

2. Insufficiency of the neutral sense

Kate was talking about conspiracy theories. She said that there had been a rapid increase in the spread of conspiracy theories, and that this was a problem.

So I told her that, supposing that there has been such an increase – I often grant such empirical propositions as suppositions, because I don’t follow news – I was not sure that it was a problem. What’s wrong with people believing in more conspiracies? Did she perhaps mean false conspiracy theories? But then the problem would be with their falsehood – or was there something especially bad about the falsehood of claims about conspiracies? I did not know what she meant.

Then she told me her criticisms of conspiracy theories, and sure enough, they simply do not apply to the neutral sense of the term. She clearly meant something else. Her criticisms were as follows:

• First, conspiracy theories are false, at least in the way she meant it. (She actually only meant this as a clarification, since she thought that their being harmful was something quite apart from that.)

• Second, conspiracy theories always teach – by definition, she thought – that everyone else is “brainwashed”, or “out to get you”, which leads to various unhealthy behaviors, and so, in turn, to broken families and relationships.

• Third, if “political” conspiracy theories spread widely, they may lead significant percentages of the voting population to be completely out of touch with the reality of politics, and to instead believe in strange, unsubstantiated entities.

• Fourth, conspiracy theories typically postulate that particular, often vulnerable, groups, are involved in conspiracies – ethnic groups, religious groups, immigrants from a particular country, etc. – which is, of course, bad, for reasons that need not be said.

Kate’s criticisms clearly applied to various conspiracy theories that she had in mind. As examples, she mentioned the flat Earth, Pizzagate, QAnon, and certain anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. Her criticisms did seem to apply to the ones that she was thinking of, and it did seem to her that it was because of something they had in common, which she actually mentioned quite immediately, but I took a while to understand.

I took a while to understand because I clung to the neutral sense of the term, as I had explained it. As I told her, most conspiracy theories, in the neutral sense, are about select, secretive groups, such as could easily have conspired – the Freemasons, the Bilderbergers, and so on. They wouldn’t generally teach you to think that some average person is “brainwashed” or “in on it”, and even the anti-Semitic theories do not tend to include every single Jew in the world. As such, they change little about your view of reality and of other people you meet. Certainly, conspiracy theories, in the neutral sense, were not as harmful as she thought conspiracy theories were.

Kate had a lot of patience explaining her meaning to me, and despite my misgivings about her usage, I paid close attention. Her explanation is what gives me what I now define as the negative sense of the term.

3. The negative sense

I call it the negative sense, of course, because it means something intrinsically bad. It is as follows:

• the negative sense: a conspiracy theory is a theory that meets both of these conditions:

• (a) the conspiracy postulate: the theory explains some facts by supposing that there was a secret agreement between some people; this secret agreement is called the conspiracy. (i.e., it is a conspiracy theory in the neutral sense)

• (b) the widespread lies postulate: the theory discredits all reports that oppose it by supposing that there are many widespread lies about it; lies which were, at least initially, spread intentionally, as a means to further the interests of the conspiracy. This supposition may be called the widespread lies postulate.

As Kate had put it, all conspiracy theories, in the negative sense, posit that some group is intentionally manipulating people into believing something that is wrong for some particular nefarious purpose – and they are obviously insane.

As such, they push a cultish sort of logic. Anything that appears to be evidence against the theory is planted by “them,” and you’re a fool and a sheep if you believe it, whereas any tea-leaf of “evidence” in favor of the theory is proof, and you’re a fool and a sheep if you don’t accept it.[1]

This is all because of the widespread lies postulate, which they make in addition to conspiracy theories in the neutral sense. Since the widespread lies postulate leads to an irrational way to think, it intrinsically tends to making people “out of touch with reality”, justifying her third criticism, and to some extent the first – which she did not, at any rate, mean as a criticism, but as an additional part of the definition. The second criticism follows straightforwardly from the supposition that lies are widespread, and the fourth criticism is made possible by it.

We then discussed the possibility that some philosophical theories, without necessarily making the conspiracy postulate, might still make something like the widespread lies postulate – I was thinking about certain Marxist ideas, whereby opposing theories to the Marxist are thought to be mere apologia for the ruling class. Kate seemed to think that, even if they do make that postulate, they are not as dangerous, since their claims are generally not directly about empirically observable facts, and it is more dangerous to think irrationally about those. Such philosophical theories are, instead, about the more abstract explanations of those facts. So it is really the conjunction of the postulates that makes conspiracy theories, in the negative sense, so dangerous.

4. Notes

[1] Although, for editorial purposes, I think it works better to paraphrase than to directly quote, this paragraph, and the preceding one, retain much of Kate’s original wording in her text messages, out of respect for her style. Because of this, I have kept her usage of the word “evidence” as a concrete noun, although I have forbidden myself from using that word in that way.