Conspiracy Theories

1. Currently, the political establishment and its allies in the media and elsewhere are quick to dismiss views with which they disagree—or at least which they do not want propagated—as conspiracy theories. This is plainly intended as derisive. The implicit presupposition is that the mere fact that something is explained as a conspiracy, or the result of a conspiracy, is enough to render that explanation beyond the pale of rational belief. Thus, those who advance conspiracy theories are characterized as “conspiracy nuts.”

2. However, conspiracy explanations are not a priori unreasonable. This is obvious in light of well-known facts about human beings:

(a) When people cannot, or cannot easily or reliably, achieve their ends by permissible means, they sometimes seek to do so by impermissible means. This is not an extremely rare occurrence: there are hundreds of thousands of crimes committed in the United States every year.

(b) When it becomes commonly known that someone has achieved, or tried to achieve, his ends by impermissible means, he is vulnerable to blame and punishment, which he would prefer to avoid. Thus, when people try to achieve their ends by impermissible means, they seek to do so secretly and, after the fact, they seek to hide what they have done.

(c) People very often choose to work cooperatively with others to achieve their ends. Some ends cannot easily, or at all, be achieved by an individual acting alone.

(d) When people attempt to achieve their ends by impermissible means, most often they do so without the aid of others. Acting cooperatively puts them at greater risk of exposure, and thus blame and punishment. Thus, most crimes are committed by individuals acting on their own. However, a large number of crimes are committed by groups of conspirators. They cooperate in wrongdoing and later in maintaining secrecy about who committed the crime and, ideally, about there having been a crime. Thus, the phenomenon of crime committed by, e.g., corporations, street gangs, organized crime, and terrorist organizations. (The latter case is an exception since it wants the crime, and who perpetrated it, to be known. However, the planning of the terrorist attack is typically conspiratorial.)

All of this serves only to make explicit what we all already know: groups of people do evil and then try to hide the fact. We all believe that there are conspiracies and that conspiracy explanations are not necessarily irrational.

3. In practice, “conspiracy theory” is widely used to abbreviate “conspiracy theory which I do not accept.” Conspiracy theories everyone knows to be true are not called conspiracy theories. When, on the morning of September 11, 2001, four airliners were hijacked, this was not a coincidence. The four hijackings were the product of a conspiracy. Similarly, when in April 1865, President Lincoln was assassinated, there is no question but that John Wilkes Booth was part of a conspiracy that involved a plan to assassinate the Vice President and the Secretary of State as well. No one is derided as a “conspiracy nut” for believing in these conspiracies. Conspiracies sometimes occur and it is reasonable to believe that they have.

4. On occasion, what someone calls, or does not call, a conspiracy theory reveals their prejudices. For example, figures in the media and politics who spent years, on the basis of virtually no evidence, relentlessly promulgating that President Trump had conspired with the Russians to win the 2016 election, four years later deride the claim, based on a good deal of evidence, that the Democrats conspired to commit massive election fraud in 2020 as an absurd conspiracy theory. The Wikipedia article on Marjorie Taylor Greene in its first sentence describes her as a “conspiracy theorist,” principally with reference to beliefs she temporally entertained but then abandoned. In contrast, Wikipedia’s article on another member of Congress, Adam Schiff, uses the term “conspiracy” only in reference to his often repeated false charges—so far as I know never retracted—that Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election. and to what it describes as Trump’s conspiracy to blame Ukraine for interference in the election. The prolonged iteration of these conspiracy theories did not earn the congressman the label “conspiracy theorist.”

5. Sometimes, the evidence makes belief that a conspiracy has occurred reasonable to believe, and unreasonable not to believe. However, this does not mean that claims of conspiracy should be accepted at face value.

The neural circuity that embodies human cognition is the product of natural selection. Therefore, ways of reasoning and reaching conclusions can be entirely natural for us--intuitively plausible--not in virtue of careful consideration of evidence, but because of conditions prevailing in the ancestral environment where the genes that direct the growth of our cognitive architecture were selected. The relevant feature of natural selection in this context is that it favors false positives over false negatives. For example, in the ideal a human brain would be constructed with a predator detection mechanism that signals that there is a predator in the vicinity if, and only if, there is a predator in the vicinity. However, this kind of precision is not likely to be achieved by the blind mechanisms of natural selection. Its products are generally not perfect, but satisficing, “good enough” to enhance the reproductive fitness of those endowed with them. Given that the mental faculty that detects predators is imperfect, it can err systematically in either of two directions. It can be prone to false positives or to false negatives, i.e., it can tend to signal the presence of a predator when one is not really there, or it can tend not to signal the presence of a predator even though one is there. The two types of error have significantly different results. If there is no predator present but a false positive is signaled, this will likely cause some inconvenience, but no lasting harm. But if there is a predator present and a false negative is signaled, the individual goes on his merry way until he is eaten. We are descendants of those who were not eaten and whose genes we inherit. Also, we are evolved to seek explanations for what happens, particularly bad things that befall us. Explanations that label them as mere matter of chance, with no substantive explanation are unsatisfying, in contrast to the explanation that someone is secretly causing us harm. As with predator detection, it is far better to think people are plotting against you when they are not, then to think they are not when they are. Thus, we are innately hard-wired to tend to find conspiracy explanations appealing, whether or not they are true or reasonable. This does not imply that all conspiracy explanations are false, any more than all predator explanations are false. These innate alarm systems, inaccurate as they may be, did not evolve for no reason.

The conclusion we should draw is that we ought to acknowledge the natural pull of these explanations and, not try to extinguish it, but to constrain it by demanding more and better evidence for conspiracy explanations than we are often naturally inclined to. Skepticism is appropriate for conspiracy theories unless we have very good reasons to accept them. Following this strategy, we will reject most conspiracy theories but accept the few that are true.

6. Ironically, a society in which influential individuals and institutions reject and ridicule conspiracy explanations they find threatening, without deigning to discuss the evidence but censor and silence those who advance them, is one in which engaging in conspiracies becomes more attractive than it otherwise would be.

Further, this is the type of society in which many lose confidence in traditional authorities, regarding them as irredeemably corrupt. I believe that when many people become convinced that they are being manipulated and lied to by those in power, they become susceptible to believing wildly implausible conspiracy theories. I’ve had an interest in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy since the early 1980s and over the years have come across significant evidence that he was the victim of a conspiracy (see earlier post). At the same time, I have encountered any number of ill-conceived and implausible conspiracy theories about JFK devised by persons that seem to have been driven half-crazy by being lied to by their government for so long and so egregiously.

7. Finally, it is important to note that what looks like conspiracy may well be something else. A group of well-connected individuals with shared values, beliefs, and aims will, in certain circumstances, spontaneously act in concert. I doubt that there is much meta-conspiracy, conspiracies to discredit beliefs by labelling them conspiracies. For example, I don’t think the Democrats and their allied media conspired to describe those who pointed to the strong circumstantial evidence that the COVID-19 virus originated as an accident in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (It does appear,, though, that Dr. Fauci did conspire with others to hide this. Note that this, in itself, refers to no conspiracy: to call an event accidental is not to attribute it to a conspiracy, irrespective of how the CPC and others later conspired to hide the facts.) Instead, possessed by their totalitarian vision, many grasp the outline of the narrative that advances their cause and automatically, with no need for consultation with others, say whatever facilitates it. As some in the media have recently admitted, the lab-origin theory of COVID-19 was rejected and denounced as a “conspiracy theory” simply because Donald Trump favored it, and because it deflected to China blame they were eager to place on Trump.