We are running out of conspiracy theories: they keep coming true.
A joke works because it displays a part of the truth. An off-the-cuff list of supposed conspiracy theories would have to include, in no particular order, the COVID lab leak theory, the World Economic Forum (or the power of the same), globalism, the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, the deep state, Q-Anon, questions about the fairness of the 2020 US election, critical race theory, cultural Marxism, the 15-minute city, and the idea that elites support immigration for partisan political reasons. Some of these (9/11; Q-Anon) are ridiculous; others are real or in some form arguable; the COVID lab leak theory seems to be increasingly accepted.
The idea that President Trump was put into office by Vladimir Putin, while certainly positing a conspiracy, is less frequently called a conspiracy theory, for reasons I shall come to.
Disliked or inconvenient ideas are too easily branded as “conspiracy theories.” This is particularly true of ideas once advanced by influential people, but now facing popular opposition. Examples would be Critical Race Theory, 15-minute cities, or the WEF’s “own nothing and be happy” slogan.
My purpose here is to take a step back, and to offer some analytical criteria by which to identify what is a conspiracy theory, and what is not. Secondly, this essay observes the social location of conspiracy theories, and of the corresponding charge of conspiracism: conspiracy theories normally come from below, while the charge of conspiracism, with its air of tin-foil hat insanity, is often the voice of power telling us to shut up.
The Elements of a Conspiracy Theory
A conspiracy theory must posit two things: a conspiracy, and a theory.
A conspiracy is a secret plot or plan to do something, for these purposes something with social or political effect. It implies secrecy and coordinated action, aiming toward a goal. A public conspiracy would be a best a paradox; a conspiracy without secrecy would be outside the normal use of the term. And secrecy implies a reason for secrecy: some element of illegality, immorality, or at a minimum unpopularity. Without at least some of these elements, secrecy and its costs would be unnecessary, and the goal sought could be pursued by a public movement or campaign of some kind, which would not be a conspiracy.
A conspiracy also implies a number of participants engaging in coordinated action of some complexity. A conspiracy of one or even two would not really be a conspiracy. And without complexity and coordination, we would lose the aspect of conspiratorialism.
A conspiracy also necessarily has an aim, normally a fairly ambitious or important aim of some social consequence. Coordination to do something simple, even if secret, and even involving many people, would not be a conspiracy in the normal sense. A flash mob, or the arrangements behind one, would not be a conspiracy in the sense in which the term is used. And a conspiracy without any wider social consequence would hardly be worth the trouble.
Given these three elements – secrecy, coordination, and an aim of some impact or importance – we have a conspiracy.
But a conspiracy theory must also be a theory: an explanatory account of the causes of some explanandum, which is to say of some phenomenon that it is desired to explain. This implies that the explanation of the explained phenomenon is not obvious, and likely that it was hidden or at any rate obscure, before the theorist explained it. This, of course, is one of the seductive pleasures of a conspiracy theory: we are undeceived, in the know, and have the power of esoteric truth. Or so we may believe.
What a Conspiracy Theory is Not
A mere contention, true or otherwise, is not a theory, and therefore cannot be a conspiracy theory. It cannot be a conspiracy theory to note that 43% of 2020 presidential election ballots were mailed in, nor that the WEF is a powerful organization, nor (pace Wikipedia) that there has been a cultural turn in Marxist theory, nor that the 15-minute city idea was implemented in Oxford. To call these statements conspiracy theories is to enter into a basic epistemological confusion: a fact or even alleged fact is not a theory, though of course it may be named in order to support a theory, or even to imply the need for a theory. But a statement alone, true or false, is not a conspiracy theory.
The idea that COVID leaked from a laboratory is now gaining considerable acceptance. It was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory by hegemonic opinion, as expressed in the august pages of the Lancet or The New York Times. I am not a virologist and have no idea what caused COVID, but the idea that it started in a laboratory rather than somewhere else (in the wild, in a market) cannot in and of itself be a conspiracy theory because, though it posits a very rudimentary kind of explanation, it involves no secret planning or coordination. There would of course have been the secrecy of a cover-up after the scandalous fact, but that is not an explanation of the primary fact of COVID.
In this case, it seems pretty clear that the talismanic phrase “conspiracy theory” was tossed out to silence unwanted opinions and to threaten dissenters with professional and reputational costs. To assert the existence of a deliberate plot — a conspiracy — to create the virus for some reason, perhaps to have some political effect, would be a conspiracy theory, but a mere assertion of its point of origin, true or false, is not, as it posits no conspiracy.
Conspiracy and Social Conditions
To recapitulate, in order to have a conspiracy theory, we need conspiratorial action, and causal explanation by means of such action. Without the first we do not have a conspiracy, and without the latter we are without a theory. We may have a fact or a falsehood, but without explanation there is no theory, and therefore no conspiracy theory.
There have been in history many real conspiracies. There was a conspiracy — a group of men acting together and in secret — to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. There was, more recently, a conspiracy to bug the Democrat headquarters in the Watergate hotel. As both of these of examples illustrate, conspiracies usually fail, or are discovered for some adventitious reason. Someone betrays the plot, or puts the tape the wrong way on the door lock. The problem with conspiracy theories is not that there are no conspiracies, but that they implicitly assume that a complex set of actions are carried off, free from the happenstance that afflicts most of the plans of mice and men.
Those two historical examples illustrate another, related if more subtle, problem with conspiracy theories. Even if a plot comes off, it is unlikely to have the desired effects. Guy Fawkes imagined that killing a Protestant elite would result in its replacement by a Catholic elite, thereby reducing history to personality, and ignoring the deep social roots of English Protestantism. The White House plumbers thought that elections would be won by trickery, when in fact Richard Nixon went on to win the largest victory in history, also for deeply rooted social reasons, and not because anyone had secret knowledge of the Democrats’ phone calls.
The Trump/Russia conspiracy theory illustrates this: if the election of 2016 was Putin’s fault, then the problem could be solved by cracking down on social media or by impeaching Trump, or some combination of such measures, and the need for any systemic examination of Trump’s support, let alone the unpleasantness of questioning the character and policies of the Clinton-supporting classes, would be avoided.
The Attractions of Conspiracy Theories
The most attractive aspect of conspiracism is also its central problem: conspiracy theories exaggerate the possibility of direct, purposive human control of complex events, and dismiss impersonal and by implication ineluctable social factors. A conspiracy theory holds that a small number of people control major events. They may be (usually are) in the conspiracist’s mind bad people, but at least someone is charge. Potentially, if exposed, the implicit assumption is that the right people could be put in charge. Complex and deeply rooted social forces, by contrast, are not easy for anyone to control, and are for that reason more unsettling. Conspiracism implies an easier fix.
A second seductive aspect of conspiracy theories flows from the emphasis on secrecy: the conspiracist joins the conspirator in possessing secret knowledge, knowledge denied to the rest of us. The conspiracist is undeceived, unlike the unknowing simpletons who naively believe what they are told, and do not see the truth. Self-regard is always tempting.
A third attraction is polemical: any lack of evidence for a favoured conspiracy theory itself becomes of the conspirators’ power. Any contrary evidence similarly demonstrates the skill and perfidy of the conspirators, who went to such great lengths to camouflage their true intentions. The polemical tactic is obvious, and reinforces the self-regarding pleasures of imagining oneself in possession of esoteric knowledge. The tactic also renders conspiracy theories unfalsifiable.
The Class Character of Conspiracism
There are real conspiracies, but they are usually not well hidden, or not for long. The Trump/Russia theory, though certainly positing secret and coordinated actions, and complex ones at that — intelligence agencies and servers and bots and strange code names and much technical jargon — as an explanation for a major political event, is rarely called a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are attributed to deplorable believers in Q-Anon or the deep state or election fraud, and not to the respectable classes. It is the other guy who believes in conspiracies. This reflects the fact that the charge of conspiracism is usually a weapon of de-legitimation wielded by elites. The barrel points downwards.
Conspiracy theories are normally used to explain some negative or disliked phenomenon, as indeed are most theories. After all, if one likes something — the results of an election, the power of an organization, the appeal of an idea — the human tendency is to attribute the approved phenomenon to democratic choice, to popular support, to self-evident common sense, or even to see it as perfectly normal, and not a problem requiring explanation at all.
We construct theories, including conspiracy theories, to explain deplored phenomena. It is therefore oppositional opinion that is most tempted by conspiracism; hegemonic opinion feels little need for it, hegemony accepting the legitimacy of the world as it is (until rudely interrupted by the voters). The Trump/Russia conspiracy theory is the rare example of a conspiracy theory favoured by the hegemonic class, and the explanation is of course to be found in their genuine consternation at the bad orange man’s victory. The fact that this real conspiracy theory was not often called a conspiracy theory, and was singularly resistant to falsification, points to its hegemonic location.
For this reason, the charge of conspiracism is usually laid by the left, the hegemonic party, against the deplorable right. From the examples in my second paragraph above, the only two exceptions would be 9/11 conspiracy theories, which can come from the left, and the 2016 Russia hoax, often not accounted a conspiracy theory at all. The rest of the ideas I began with come from the right, and meet charges of conspiracism from the left. There is thus an ideological and partisan dimension to the charge of conspiracism.
Emphasizing human agency, and disregarding abstract or complex social explanations, as conspiracy theories do, is in actual fact unsophisticated. This unsophistication reinforces the class character of the charge of conspiracism. It is easier to mock conspiracy theories if many of their advocates are in fact crude or even stupid. Those levelling the charge have advanced degrees, access to credentializing venues, and use vocabulary that communicates assent to the hegemonic ideology. These things take time and resources, which is to say class position, to acquire. The deplorables assume an opposite affect, throwing their ‘Q’s or “Stop the Steals” in the faces of the elite, reinforcing themselves in their conviction of straight-talking, plain-man truth-telling, while providing an equal and opposite validation to their cultured despisers.
The charge of conspiracism is a case of what Michel Foucault, not normally thought of as a rightist, called the discourse of knowledge or the discourse of reason. “Our values and beliefs are true and reasonable; yours are false and irrational. We are scientific and evidence-based; you are a tin-foil hat conspiracist.” The charge of irrationality, once applied to women or homosexuals or mental patients, is now levelled at critics of the bureaucratic state and its corporate compradors. Quite aside from the truth or coherence of any given conspiracy theory, the availability and the reflexive character of the accusation speaks of the hegemonic social location of the accusers: it is a tool, indeed a weapon, of power.
The charge of conspiracism, directed downwards, becomes an argument for state control of discourse, and more specifically for the regulation of social media and of the internet. This is intentional. It makes the charge of conspiracism a weapon of power with direct political consequences. The weapon is pointed at the most basic of civil liberties, the freedom of speech and thought.
My purpose here has been to lay out very briefly some criteria by which the charge of conspiracism may be evaluated. The purpose has been not so much to speak truth to power as to speak logical clarity to power. When told “that’s a conspiracy theory!”, we must first of all ask whether the deplored idea posits a conspiracy, and secondly whether it provides a theory. Without those two elements, we are just being told to shut up about something (that may turn out to be true.)