The usual account of conspiracy theories treats them as a failure of intelligence. People believe absurd things, the argument goes, because they are ignorant, or gullible, or have spent too long in bad company. This is comforting to those who make it and explains almost nothing. Believers are often well informed, sometimes obsessively so. Many are clever. The theories themselves can be intricate, internally consistent and supported by a great weight of detail.
A better starting point is to ask what a conspiracy theory does for the person who holds it. The answer is that it does a good deal, and that most of it is what we want from any explanation. This essay sets out five things such theories provide, and then considers what follows for anyone trying to argue with one. The harmless specimens in our field guide illustrate each point.
It finds a pattern
Human beings are pattern-finders, and we are tuned to err on the side of finding too many. It is an old bargain. The ancestor who took a rustle in the grass for a predator and was wrong lost nothing. The one who took it for wind and was wrong did not become an ancestor. We are descended from the jumpy ones.
The result is a mind that sees faces in clouds, hears words in noise and cannot look at three events without wondering what connects them. This is not a defect. It is the faculty that makes science possible. But it has no off switch, and it does not come with a sense of its own error rate. A conspiracy theory is what the pattern-finding faculty produces when it is given a large amount of information and no way of testing what it finds. Trained on tape hiss, the same faculty hears the voices of the dead, as described in Voices in the Static; trained on paintings, it finds secret doctrines, as described in The Hidden Picture.
It keeps cause and effect in proportion
We have a strong intuition that big events must have big causes. When something enormous happens, a death that changes history or a disaster that kills thousands, the official explanation is frequently small: one unstable individual, a faulty component, a decision made in a hurry by somebody tired.
That disproportion is hard to bear. It means the world is the kind of place in which something of vast consequence can be brought about by almost nothing. The conspiracy theory restores the balance. It says that a great event was produced by a great plan. Whatever else may be wrong with that, it satisfies a sense of fitness that the truth often offends.
The conspiracy theory is, strangely, the optimistic view. It holds that someone is in control.
It replaces accident with intention
This is the heart of the matter. Much of what happens to us is the result of processes nobody designed: markets, institutions, the piling up of small decisions made by people who never met. These are real and powerful, and they are very difficult to picture. Our essay on the postmodern sublime describes the vertigo they induce.
A conspiracy theory takes the faceless process and gives it a face. Things are bad not because of a system but because of a group, who meant it. The explanation is false, but consider how much it offers. An intention can be understood in a way that a system cannot. A group can be opposed. And a world run by villains is, in an odd way, more reassuring than a world run by no one. The conspiracy theory is, strangely, the optimistic view. It holds that someone is in control.
It also relocates blame. Where the truth is that a misfortune had many causes and some of them were one's own, the theory supplies a single culprit elsewhere.
It rewards the believer
A conspiracy theory does not only explain the world. It gives the person who holds it a position in the world, and an enviable one.
The believer is no longer someone to whom things merely happen. He is one of the few who have seen through the surface. The rest, the people who accept what they are told, are asleep. This is the structure of initiation, and it is no accident that it mirrors the ancient myth discussed in Gnosticism and the Prison World: a counterfeit reality, hidden rulers and a saving knowledge reserved for the awakened.
With the knowledge comes a community. Fellow believers offer recognition, purpose and a shared project of research. For someone who is isolated or has lost standing, this may be the most valuable thing the theory provides, and it is one reason that attacking the theory so often fails. One is asking a person to give up not an opinion but a circle of friends and a sense of being somebody.
It cannot be refuted
The fifth feature is the one that separates a conspiracy theory from an ordinary mistaken belief, and it is what no honest explanation can offer.
A normal claim can be tested. Evidence against it counts against it. A conspiracy theory reverses this. If there is no evidence for the plot, that shows how well it has been hidden. If evidence is produced against it, that evidence was planted. If experts reject it, the experts are in on it or have been deceived. Every possible observation confirms the theory, including the observation that nothing confirms it.
This feels like strength. From the inside, a belief that survives every challenge seems unusually well founded. In fact it is the mark of a belief that has stopped making contact with the world. A theory that could not be shown wrong by anything says nothing about how things actually are.
What follows
Several practical conclusions can be drawn.
Real conspiracies exist, and that matters. People do plot. Companies have concealed dangers they knew about, and officials have lied. These things were exposed, by investigation, documents and testimony. The difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory is not that one is real and the other imaginary. It is that real conspiracies are limited, leak, and can be established by evidence. The theory describes a plot that is vast, flawless and beyond proof. Dismissing all suspicion of the powerful as paranoia is its own kind of credulity.
Ridicule does not work. Mockery confirms the believer's picture of a sneering establishment and raises the price of changing one's mind, which now includes admitting that the sneerers were right.
Facts alone do not work either. The theory is not held for want of facts. It is held because it supplies meaning, proportion, agency and belonging. An argument that removes the theory and puts nothing in the place of those goods is asking for a sacrifice with no return.
What sometimes works is company and a better map. People leave such beliefs the way they leave demanding groups, a process described in the library's Manual for the Unconvinced: slowly, when something inside is ready and somebody outside has stayed in touch. It helps to concede what is true in the suspicion, that institutions do fail and the powerful do protect themselves, and to offer an account of how that happens which is specific, checkable and does not require a hidden room.
Ask the test question. Of any theory, one's own included, ask what would count as evidence against it. If the honest answer is nothing, the theory is not knowledge, however much it knows.
A closing caution
It is tempting to end by placing conspiracy thinking safely in other people. The five features above describe tendencies that everyone has. We all find patterns, prefer proportion, look for intention, enjoy being in the know and defend what we already believe. The conspiracy theorist is not a different kind of person. He is doing, without restraint, what the rest of us do with it.
The restraint is the whole difference, and it consists of a single habit: being willing to find out that one is wrong. It is an uncomfortable habit and nobody keeps it up all the time. It is also the only thing that has ever distinguished seeing a pattern from discovering one.