Conspiracy theories. Created by few, spread by many, and loved by everyone. Especially, seemingly, nowadays. But why do even the skeptics love them and are the majority so gullible? I think there are a number of good reasons, which I will try to iterate through below, but the explanations I have come across neglect the most relevant of them, and that's what I start with.
We love a good story
We love stories about secret plots of evil machinators for the same reason we like mystery novels and adventure movies. They let us step out of the mundane into a world of thrill and suspense where we can identify with heroes who dare to peek behind the curtain. A world that has larger-than-life characters, clearly defined good and evil, and most of all, where things make sense.
Evolution has shaped us to like stories, because they are useful. The world is complicated and a good narrative has two major advantages over a precise perception of reality.
First, it fits in the head. Whatever situation or thing in nature one inspects, the details are recursively composed of further details. It is always possible to be more precise, way beyond the limit of usefulness or comprehensibility. A good story, model, or explanation stops at a reasonable depth. Second, despite its relative brevity, it sufficiently approximates reality. To summarize, a good narrative allows us to understand the world well enough to survive without exhausting our mental capacities (which are both finite and not evenly distributed among the population).
Let's take two examples. The first applies to our everyday life and is wholly fictional. It also demonstrates how far a story can be divorced from the real world and still be useful. Here it goes. Everyone understands that a car has a motor that consumes fuel and rotates the wheels. For all I care, there could be fairies under the bonnet who drink the potion we fill in at the petrol station and use their magic to propel the metal body forward. The explanation even enables me to make accurate predictions about the future. If I stop feeding them, the fairies will eventually refuse to do their job. My fairy delusion wouldn't stop me from achieving 99.9% of what I want with to do my car. Only occasionally we have problems that require us to look under the bonnet (figuratively and literally), and more and more often we just delegate those tasks to a mechanic (who might just be a fairy-whisperer, thus a part of the fiction).
The second example demonstrates the usefulness of narratives for more abstract events. If someone understands the first years of the Second World War as a story where the evil Nazi Empire wanted to conquer Europe and the heroic Brits stood up and held the tide, that's a pretty good approximation of reality. Most major events in the war make perfect sense in that framework. With that alone, someone in that era could make not very bad decisions about what to invest in, where to relocate, which people to avoid, or where to send the army if he happened to be a general. It's just a story, but it's a good enough one if you know that it has to be supplanted by more nuanced versions if you zoom into smaller events.
A simple, right framework can provide surprisingly good explanatory and predictive power. It's the Pareto rule. Take the fifth of the most relevant facts only, and you'll be able to explain eighty percent of what is happening.
If stories are useful, shared stories are even better. A generally accepted origin story and shared mythology strengthen group cohesion in tribes as well as in whole empires.
It pays off to be paranoid
In our stories, coincidences happen, but rarely are decisive. Replacing chance with an active agent behind the chain of events always makes a better plot, and this is what we tend to do in real life as well. And those events that cannot be explained by human agenda, we have historically tended to attribute to gods or other supernatural entities. The probable reason for this is that interpreting a world this way has its evolutional advantages. Psychologists differentiate between two types of typical errors. Type 1 error is when the wind rustles the bush but you think it's a lion. Type 2 is when the lion rustles the bush, but you think it's just the wind. The two types of errors incur very different costs. Type 1 makes you an object of ridicule, at worst. Type 2 makes you a dinner. Therefore, we have developed an instinctive bias for Type 1 and tend to suspect agency behind events, especially behind bad ones. For hundreds of thousands of years on the Savannas, those who believed that predators (human and animal) were out to get them had a longer life expectancy than their less paranoid peers.
The world is complicated
The third reason follows from the first two. We live in a very complicated world of myriad facets, every day filled with billions of interactions between billions of people. The details of those interactions and the intentions of the others are only partially known to us, if at all. We need to substitute exact knowledge with simplifications just to be able to get through the day. The more you dive into the details of a certain domain, the more you realize how little you know. And when facing our lack of knowledge is not a conscious choice but forced upon us, when we are thrown out of our comfort zone, we feel lost.
And relating to world events, where decisions are made by people we never met or don't even know about, we are all out of our comfort zone. The first stage of our defense mechanism is denial. There MUST be some order. If we are not in control, at least we want feel that we know how things work. And here is where conspiracy theories come to the picture. They explain real world events, but spare us from the messiness and uncertainty. They can be complicated, but not the way real life is. The overarching theme has an elegant structure, each subplot has a satisfying explanation, the actors clear motives. No lose ends, things fit neatly.
I have used the words "story", "narrative", and occasionally "model" interchangeably above, and not accidentally. I think "narrative" is exactly the same thing as "model", when it describes to a complex net of human interactions instead of natural phenomena. And "story" partially overlaps. If you describe the world of atoms as little balls interacting in certain ways, that's a physical model. If you summarize the Second World War through a handful of its most important actors, that is a historical narrative.
We want proportionality
Our intuitive worldview has some Newtonian characteristics. Force generates equal counterforce. There is a craving in us for proportionality. Myths around the death of Princess Diana involve Prince Charles, the MI5, and even the Queen herself. People just can't believe that celebrities can die of such mundane reason as a drunk driver and not-fastened seat belt. That's how ordinary folks die. The rich and famous are supposed to go out with a bang and not with a whimper.
Kennedy did go out with a bang, but not with the right one. The JFK assassination fascinates the world for sixty years now and will continue to do for decades to come. The official narrative that the leader of the free world was shot dead by a lone 24-year old nutjob just doesn't cut it. To kill the most powerful man on Earth, we need a some great opponent matching his stature. The KGB, the Mafia, or most nefariously, the CIA.
This is how we create our favourite fictions as well. Had the Emperor tripped over his robe accidentally and fallen into the pit instead of being thrown into it by Darth Vader, the ending of the original Star Wars trilogy wouldn't have felt quite right. Or to squeeze a bit more out of this example, had Vader simply bashed his skull, that would have not evoked the same satisfaction as watching the evil bastard screaming and flailing as he falls into his death.
The feeling of superiority
Some people, insecure ones especially, have a desperate need to feel superior to others. If they have not much else to show off, at least they want to have the smug feeling of having "insider" knowledge.
This category involves religious yokels with an inferiority complex towards the educated class waving their Bible or Q'uran as the answer for everything. Commies in the cold war who felt that a Marxist-Leninist course on top of 4 years of primary school made all those bourgeoisie universities obsolete. Or New Age idiots today who read a book about spiritual healing and then confidently diagnose diseases and disparage trained medical doctors. Or the man of the street thinking that all the other schmucks believe everything they see on TV. But I know better!
We need community
We are social animals and want to belong. If you find a community, you have to some extent share their major beliefs. The public expression of belief shows commitment to the cause and loyalty to your peers. The most absurd the belief is, the greater the commitment. I doubt that many QAnon activists actually think that satanist pedophiles are running the US government. They might say so, to elevate their standing among their fellow lunatics, but I doubt their would bet money on it. They do it because it's cheap. We live in a very safe world. Stupidity probably killed you a hundred thousand years ago, but not today.
Explaining why bad things happen
This is a very humane reason, and very easy to sympathize with. It's difficult to accept that sometimes bad things happen without good reason. If a death or a catastrophe is a deed of evil, then something can be done about it. Psychologically, living in a world with some evil people is easier to accept than living in a cold, indifferent universe.
The world of today is even more complicated
Being suspicious of clandestine plots was, within reason, useful not only in our hunter-gatherer past, but well into the feudalist era. Big events were indeed decided behind closed doors by tribal chiefs, popes, kings and barons. And thrones were usurped by very real conspiracies.
Those conspiracies were often lethal, but they weren't global-scale, they involved at most a handful of people who know all the other actors in the game, and didn't need to keep a thousand mouths shut afterwards.
The problem is that our brains run the same software as they did a hundred thousand years ago and project old patterns to a world that have immensely more complicated. How complicated? Let's see just a subset of topics one has to have at least a rudimentary understanding of to be able to resist batshit-crazy theories. The list is cherry-picked and arbitrary, but hopefully demonstrative. It touches the basics of economics, politics, finance, science, media, and history.
Science. How do researchers develop vaccines? What do the words hypothesis, test, verification, or peer review mean? What is a double-blind test? What stages has a new medicine go through to get to the public?
Economy. How does just the right amount of Angus beef end up on the tables of London restaurants Wednesday evening? Who tells English importers exactly how much to buy from Argentina, or the Argentinian exporters to sell to to the English? How do cattle breeders know how many cows will sate the hunger of British diners? Who assigns the right amount of ships to transfer the goods? In short, how do supply chains and the market economy work?
Finance. What would happen if tomorrow all banks disappeared? Why don't we simply tax the rich more?
Politics. What is the difference between democracy and liberalism? What are the three branches of government? What do "checks and balances" mean?
Judicial system. What does "rule of law" mean? Why does the obviously guilty have a right for a lawyer?
Media. What are the incentives for journalists and major news companies? What sells the papers?
History. How have life expectancy, prosperity, or homicide rates changed in the last hundred years?
And this is just the 20th century. In the 21st century, thanks to the internet and social media, we are flooded with an incredible amount of information we cannot process. Today, everything has become a conspiracy theory. Epidemics, elections, wars, all have a secret agenda behind them. To demonstrate the confusion this is causing, I list some sundry list of opinions from my personal sphere of acquaintances.
"If Trump becomes too dangerous, they will take care of it" (just after 2016 presidential election)
"North-Korea is not as bad, we are just mislead by or own propaganda"
"The Twin Tower collapse was an inside job. I have a friend, whose friend is an architect and he said it was an explosion in the buildings"
"The Great Powers want to keep Hungary down"
"The Second World War actually did not end, but the Great Powers made a secret agreement, so that the Germans can conquer the world financially. This is how the European Union was born"
"- Hitler actually came to power with help from the Great Powers because they wanted to destroy Germany.
- So they put a man in power that very nearly destroyed them?
- Well...ehm, they miscalculated...."
"You really don't believe that people like Putin or Trump were put there just by the voters?"
"The US started the war in Ukraine because it wants to exploit the country's natural resources" (go figure)
"- Argentina goes bankrupt all the time, because the US undermines it to eliminate an economic rival.
- So why doesn't the US do the same to Canada?
- Hm...that's a good question"
"Bin Laden was a CIA agent"
"The Elite plans to replace us with brown-skinned immigrants"
"Gorbachev was a CIA agent the US sent to destroy the Soviet Union"
"In the US, people are not more free than they were in the Soviet Union, the US government just does it smarter"
"The banks enslave us. This is not better than chattel slavery was, just more subtle"
"Global inflation is already 30% but governments falsified their reports to prevent panic" (said in 2021)
"Covid is a non-event invented by Big Pharma to control us"
"Governments want to get rid of cash so they can control us"
"The medical establishment and Big Pharma tells us we need less vitamin than we actually do, to keep us sick and dependent on them"
Every single one of these nonsense above was uttered by a friend, colleague, or family member either to me personally, or on social media for all the world to see. 90% of the people quoted have university degrees. Apart from maybe one, everyone has higher than average intelligence. These are not the people who struggled to graduate from high-school, let alone manual laborers from rural villages. This is a voter sample of above-average quality.
I've never heard any straight Holocaust-denials from them yet, but I'm not courageous enough to dig deeper.
Why conspiracy theories are overwhelmingly bullshit
How do I actually know that 9/11 wasn't an inside job, COVID just a huge money-grabbing plot of Big Pharma, and the Moon landing a giant hoax?
Because these events would require some extraordinary level of coordination between a large number of people who don't really have any shared reason to cooperate. In case on 9/11, firemen, the FBI, the CIA, government officials, witnesses, experts in demolition, architecture, etc. For COVID, every single government on Earth, the whole medical community, doctors, researchers, statisticians, etc. The moon landing project all in all employed around 4,000 persons. To keep them all mum for decades (no whistleblower, no disgruntled spouse spilling beans, no one lucky journalist) would be just a superhuman achievement.
That the towers were felled by airplanes we actually saw, people we knew died in COVID, and Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, are all stories that are much simpler, because they don't require incredibly sophisticated cover up operations and we have seen similar ones - that is, terrorist acts, epidemics, technological breakthroughs - play out countless times before.
We like to imbue our villains not just with cartoonish evil, but also with extraordinary cunning and planning abilities way beyond human possibilities. They make good fictional characters (if you are satisfied with one-dimensional ones), but they are just that. Fictional.
In a world some of us think we live, the Watergate scandal went down like this (penned by a historian over there):
"Nixon hadn't earned the moniker Tricky Dick for nothing. On his twisty path to the presidency the consumate politician had learnt to color outside the lines and collected his share of shady acquaintances. When the time came, he called an old favor and got the right men to do the job. Grizzled veterans of many black-op missions equipped with state-of-the art gadgettery who could sneak in and out of a building in broad daylight if needed. The most powerful man in the world wouldn't have had nothing less. Unfortunately for Nixon, the Democrats got wind of his plan from the spy they had already placed in the right place, and they set the trap. His men met their match in a team of ex-military operatives. Nixon in the end resigned, but the details of what transpired stayed hidden from the public for many, many decades."
In our more mundane world the men Nixon sent to the headquarter of the Democratic National Committee in Washington were not dead eyed assassins neutralized by the Democrats' Ethan Hunt, but were discovered by an ordinary security guard who got suspicious when saw some dangling duck tape on a door, and called the cops. Nixon resigned. End. Less glamorous? You are upset because you think you are entitled to a better story? You are not.
Bill Clinton, another man holding the office of the "most powerful man on Earth", couldn't even keep a blowjob secret.
The Manhattan Project was arguably the most guarded secret in history. The Soviets infiltrated it from the get-go.
The best way for a layman to disabuse himself of the belief in the powers of secret organizations is reading about them. There are many books about the screw-ups of the CIA. It's not that the CIA is full of morons, on the contrary, but because their job is to pull off secret operations, which although thousand times smaller than the fictional ones, are still extremely difficult.
I heard about a survey, according to which the most conspiracy theories involve the military and the government. According to another survey, the people least likely to believe them are in the military or the government. It rings true. Those people know exactly how often events go according to plan. Not very.
On the planning process, take one of the least crazy examples I ungraciously quoted above without asking consent. How would the respective government agencies and central banks all over the world agree on the details of deceiving the public on the level of inflation?
- Guten Tag, Hans, here is Claude from the French Central Bureau of Statistics. What do you guys officially say the inflation is in Germany?
- Bonjour, Claude. 12.8%
- Ok, then we will go with 13.4%
- No, Claude, I just talked to Stephen from the UK, they accidentally came up with the same number. Choose another, just to avoid being suspicious. What about 13.1%?
- Not good, Jerome from the FED already called dibs on 13.1%.
- Scheisse..
- Tres bien. We will go with 14%. Or rather 14.2%. No one believes round numbers.
- Sounds good. But give a call to Giuliano in Rome, just to be sure
- Will do. Au revoir Hans
- Until next time
Imagine similarly absurd conversations between Big Pharma executives and government leaders when they try to undermine their citizens' health, or between heads of rivaling newspapers when they are aligning their stories on world politics, economics, or technology.
How is, for example, an election decided? Once my former language teacher looked at me with something of a mix of incredulity and benevolent condescension and asked: who do you think put these people - Trump, Putin - where they are? Her suggestion was the "powers that be". Even more sophisticated people tend to reduce complicated events to single causes. Like "in politics, everything is decided by money" (to which point Michal Bloomberg provided a spectacular rebuttal by showing what you can achieve in politics with all the money in the world ($100 billion). You can get the 7% of the votes during the presidential primaries).
In reality, an election result, the decision between two candidates is a result of myriads of factors and actors. The politicians' adverts, tweets, messages on any forums on both sides. Media celebrities. Journalists. Authors of popular books. Zeitgeist. The level of unemployment. The level of inflation. Foreign influence. Surprise events (a scandal, a terrorist attack, the FBI director's public statement about reopening an investigation). Carefully refined borders of electoral constituencies (see gerrymandering). It's an infinite list.
People's instincts might be Newtonian to some extent, but not Newtonian enough to grasp the principle of superposition of forces. They tend to think the world is unfair because malevolent people are in control. The reality is simpler and scarier. No one is in control.
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