Benjamin Peters
Conspiracy theories are no joke. They ruin lives and poison public trust in legitimate inquiry. More destructive than conspiracy theory, however, are its two component parts—actual conspiracies, on the one hand, and the work of theory itself, on the other. I take the first point as well understood and uncontroversial: many modern institutions—ranging from the state investment in the intelligence community to the press in investigative journalism, public education in critical thinking, and knowledge industries in science—share a common commitment to rooting out real-life conspiracies. However, the second point—the sweeping power of theory itself—often goes less carefully considered. Perhaps the greatest danger of conspiracy theory is its significant cognitive appeal, which, upon closer reflection, reveals the end weakness of theory, namely, its separation from evidence. Using examples from ancient Greek science and modern U.S. politics, I argue that theory, especially when separated from evidence, permits humans to see beyond what is already there. Theory, which, at its best, limits its boldest claims with evidence, is discussed as both a telltale weakness in modern inquiry and part of the tall tales informing conspiracy theories.
Philolaus, a noted Pythagorean, saw a little further than his peers in ancient Greece. Unlike others, he set aside the then popular geocentric models of the cosmos and centered the earth’s orbit around what he called “Hestia,” the great fire. He also gave contour to the continuous flows of sound, discovering wave ratios in musical intervals such as the octave (2:1), the fifth (3:2), and the fourth (4:3). These empirically verifiable insights sped his theorizing about the whole of the cosmos, which he claimed consists of only two different classes of things: unlimited (continuums, flows) and limiters (structure, thresholds, breaks). Unlimited and limiters combined in ratios so completely that, for him, all nature revealed itself in the harmonies of numbers: “All things that are known have number,” he declared, “for without this nothing whatever could possibly be thought of or known.”1 Philolaus was no conspiracy theorist, but he was also dead wrong about most of these details. In other words, his theories let him, like all theorists, see beyond what was actually there. It is simply not true that “all things that are known have number” (nowhere does or must there exist a Durchmusterung of, say, all the lilies, the clouds, or the connections among lovers). Nor does the inverse hold that “all things with numbers are known” (consider the vast oceans of unprocessed data upon which the modern media environment floats). So, too, is his model of the solar system at odds with modern astronomical observation: there are not ten planets (a cosmic number for him) in the solar system, the moon is not inhabited by massive animals, and there is no counter-earth circulating on the other side of the sun. Still, Philolaus deserves credit for being wrong in ways that other Pythagoreans could later correct. His contributions lie in the fact that his theories were not true or false, but falsifiable by evidence. Today most theories are verifiable, some are even falsifiable; by contrast, most conspiracy theories are not. Still, they share something in common: all theorists, including the conspiracy theorist, use theory to see past the evidence. Theory, in short, is a way to see beyond what is there. The term theory—derived from the Greek θεωρία for the action of viewing, contemplation, and spectacle—is a way of seeing the world anew, even if the world itself (or Ding an Sich, as Kant called it) remains always partly hidden. While empiricism would ask that theorists check their vision against new fact patterns, theory itself has no necessary relationship to facts. To theorize is to see farther than the facts permit.
Now let us fast-forward to a puzzle recently circulating in U.S. politics: Which U.S. president, does the reader imagine, is most likely to have been variously accused online of being an antichrist, Kenyan-born, secret Muslim reptilian Martian who murdered his Pakistani husband in a gay orgy before marrying his transvestite wife—and why? All these details are obviously utter nonsense: a future historian will find no evidence to indicate any grounds for leveling these claims against any U.S. president, let alone former president Barack Obama, as they have been in various unnamed online forums. Nevertheless, a future theorist may be able to see that what remains unseen in this list of claims conspiring against this president’s actual religion (Christian), nationality (American), sexuality (straight), sex (male), morality (non-murderous), species (human), and planet of origin (terrestrial) is the very feature that publicly marks his minority status—namely, his race (African American). In other words, while future historians will find ample damning evidence of racism in the United States, it will take a future theorist to see what remains unstated in these outrageous claims: by deploying these theories, the opponents of Obama sidestep the taboo confession that they do not trust black people in power. Instead, they sound out claims for why they do not trust this particular person, who happens to be black, for any other reason they might theorize—and theory is endlessly creative in its self-justifications. The superpower of theory precipitates and reveals its core weakness: again, theory lets us see so far that we eventually see what is not there.
What can we learn from such ancient and modern overseeing? Conspiracy thinking does not need to be true or false in order to flourish—rather, it simply needs to motivate and confirm our favorite cognitive biases. Philolaus, a fan of ratios, found them littering the heavens, just as political contenders battle the very demons they identify in and promise to exorcise from their opponents: in Russia, for example, a common strategy among businesspeople seeking public office is to claim that all politicians are corrupt, thus making it easier for outsiders, like themselves, to wrest profitable seats from incumbent contenders.2 Such claims about conspiracies about hiding evidence often flourish best in the uncertainty they create: in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the #Pizzagate conspiracy held that the Democratic National Party supported child sex trafficking in the basement of a pizza parlor. While there is no evidence to support this claim, it is a morally motivating position precisely because it works in theory whether or not it is true:3 Who, after all, could ever elect to power a child trafficker? If true, it would be morally reprehensible to support a public official guilty of such charges. The danger of #Pizzagate is that its perverse charge is most persuasive in the hypothetical—no one could dare to oppose such an obvious position in theory, if true.
How much reasonable disbelief is suspended in that powder-keg phrase “if true”! A single “if” may pack enough explosive possibility to ruin the world. The hypotheticals spin themselves out: What if President Donald Trump, drunk on power and nursing his massive and fragile ego, were to reach for the nuclear football in his feverish dreams at night? What if the bulk of the blame for the corrupt secret heart of America could be shifted onto Russian meddling in the election? What if it were true? The extraordinary power of theory is that it blurs, for the motivated mind, the line between the thinkable and the desirable; and, of course, in politics (or what Richard Hofstadter calls “an arena of angry minds”4), as in identity construction, it remains troublingly desirable to oppose one’s opponents. Many scholars—in and beyond the media and communication field—have written about the troubled sorting of individuals into porous community sociopsychological orders and disorders. While conspiracy thinking is not necessarily pathological, it is often represented as paranoiac in its reasoning since the Enlightenment attempt to separate public reason and private madness. The most prominent case study is, of course, that of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the 1903 autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose reasoned madness appealed to Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and Friedrich Kittler. Still other (often mid-century) theorists—Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and, more recently, Amit Pinchevski—have shown how representations of mental illness, and the schizophrenic in particular, cannot help but reveal that normal standards for social behavior often contain and are subverted by the abnormal.5 This insight applies to the social sciences as well: Richard Hofstadter’s iconic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and Hadley Cantril’s famous study both normalize and criticize the panicked American public as paranoid.6 Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, however, convincingly argue that Cantril overstated the effect and degree of panic to the infamous radio broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds in 1938.7 The point, of course, is not whether certain subjects should or should not ever be called “crazy” or “paranoid” or “panicked” or “conspiratorial”: rather, the point, examined below, is that doing so, even justifiably, does not always have the effect it intends. The simple fact is that conspiracy theories are encountered only in public accusations, not private belief. Instead of separating legitimate and illegitimate claims, mass accusations of any kind—especially of psychosocial abnormality—often depreciate the role of counterintuitive theory-making so central to modern inquiry. The next section, in search of firmer ground on which to rest such public judgment, seeks a shortcut through the rocky waters that separate the limits of theory and limited theories.
Theory is only as good as the evidence that limits its boldest claims. Conversely, theories that prosper in the absence of evidence are cognitively so powerful precisely because the claim is structured to make it hard to convince otherwise. But this power is of course also its corrosive weakness, for theory alone cannot distinguish conspiracy theory from actual conspiracy. If acquaintances were to claim, for example, that they are so smart that no external test can measure it, so beautiful that only those with more refined senses can observe it, or so powerful that they can hide their influence from detection, their statement would amount to nonsense except as a preemptive protest against those who might deem them dumb, ugly, or impotent. Or, consider the circular assertion that the U.S. government popularized the phrase conspiracy theory to discredit those who seek to expose its many actual conspiracies: if this were true, there should be little or no evidence to support it. Like this very statement, no nonfalsifiable claim can mean what it says—it always means less and more. One is tempted to repeat the empiricist’s creed: do not believe that which cannot be tested.
Such hard-nosed empirical realism has a certain commonsensical appeal, but alas, it, too, is insufficient to chill the boiling brew that is the theory behind conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories do much more than pose untestable claims: rather, conspiracy theory functions as fashionable modern folklore, the linguistic cloth out of which one weaves the scientific-sounding garb for a group identity narrative based on opposing other groups. In this tapestry of talk, one group prizes its knowledge of its enemies’ secret knowledge that endlessly pits “us” versus “them” (the use of the universal “we” in this essay is both intentional and problematic). Groups that exist at the expense of other groups imagine in-group experts as knights of knowledge poised to battle against some foreign threat that can approach from any of the four directions that commentator Jesse Walker lists: the “Enemy Above” (e.g., King George taxing the colonies to death), the “Enemy Below” (e.g., paupers attempting to assassinate the king), the “Enemy Outside” (e.g., Soviet spies), and the “Enemy Within” (e.g., Communists in Joseph McCarthy’s U.S. government).8 The truth is that there really are enemies in the world, just not the ones Walker names. Indeed, false claims about opponents, not the opponents themselves, must be recognized as the common enemy to all modern inquiry.
So if the label “conspiracy theory” is a bit of modern folklore for constructing opposing scholarly group identities, then the theory of conspiracy theory marks a signal contradiction in the mythologies of modern inquiry: calling a claim a “conspiracy theory” often has the unintended effect of perpetuating conspiracy theorizing. If conspiracy theorists are synonymous with those who espouse nonfalsifiable theories, then trying to delegitimize claims by castigating members of the believing community as “conspiracy theorists” actually legitimatizes the in-group belief that it alone bears certain secret (hence permissibly nonfalsifiable) insights. Instead of heightening suspicion against conspiracy theorists, outside calls for strict empiricism justifies the group’s perception that its own beliefs are exceptional. Such insults poison the theory community’s well, supply the very opposition the community needs to vindicate its own narratives of victimhood, and question the legitimacy of any counterargument before it can be made. At best an unfair power move, the label “conspiracy theory” renders its object—a theory community—prescientifically unscientific.
The resolution to this contradiction lies not in the empiricist’s strict suspicion against theory, although falsifiability, verisimilitude, verification, and other standards remain necessary, if insufficient. Indeed, if falsifiability holds as the golden standard for distinguishing science from conspiracy theory, then scholars must hasten to shelve their favorite nonfalsifiable theoretical frameworks as well, no matter how much useful interpretive insight they bring. For example, much about Marxist false consciousness, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Lacanian deconstruction takes openly nonfalsifiable approaches to critical reading. The qualia that attend the experience of poetry, the arts, and other sources of vital inspiration fare no better against this strict standard. Discarding all nonfalsifiable sources is surely too high of a cost for scholars in the humanities and social sciences, among others committed to the flourishing and legitimation of the human sciences.
Instead, let us reflect on the slivers of light that sometimes sneak through critical cracks in the methods of modern inquiry. Many conspiracy theorists cannot easily be distinguished from the most devoted, even obsessive, scientific inquirers: scientific empiricists and conspiracy theorists alike gather and pore over highly complex and detailed records, explore and draw out unexpected causal relationships, and unearth potent meaning from seemingly innocent details. Neither group knows whether its favorite theory will experimentally fail for being too simple or too complex (conspiracy theories are often dismissed for proposing explanations in turn too parsimonious or too ornate). Both groups congratulate themselves for being, unlike the other group, open-minded: conspiracy theorists are convinced they are virtuously open only to the possibility that their pet theory is right; while falsifiable empiricists pride themselves on being open only to claims that evidence could challenge—and in so doing, both groups consider themselves open-minded and the other close-minded. Not only do conspiracy theorists label other groups as outside the truth, but the label “conspiracy theory” does that very thing itself as well. Like the other double-edged term fake news and much else in the distorting fun house mirrors of online trolling culture, a strange loop results: any group that ostracizes another group for ostracizing others will stumble in persuasively claiming either the methodological or moral high ground.
Of course, the call to set aside conspiracy theory accusations is no call to pass on the need for critical judgment. Indeed, if anything, it heightens the need to be able to call out nonsense where one sees it. To do so can be both justifiable and necessary. Setting aside accusations of conspiracy theory must not ease the burden of critical evaluation—rather, it simply instructs scholars and students to not mirror the very cardinal sin that it accuses conspiracy theorists of taking against a world of evidence. Theory communities that hurl conspiracy theory slings and arrows rehearse the brittle and reductive identity politics so often encountered around questions of gender and race in the echo chambers and filter bubbles online and off.9 Perhaps community identities, whatever else they may be, grow best in the soil of experience.
Instead of calling conspiracy theorists by that label, perhaps we may ask the theorists in question to recount their own best attempts to disprove their most potent theories. So, too, may we acknowledge that modern inquiry rests on the tautological belief that any other belief that can benefit from the absence of evidence is illegitimate—and yet it does so, as philosophers of science as different as Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend have clarified, without satisfactorily justifying the grounds of that same belief. It is precisely this fundamental limitation in modern inquiry—truth tends to follow evidence that limits theory, not theory that limits evidence—that gives grounds for hope: for this limitation also witnesses that the appetizing feast that is modern inquiry has many courses before it concludes. The antidote to conspiracy theory is not just hard-minded empiricism. It is rather, as Josiah Royce suggests, self-consciously limited theorists who acknowledge that, even as not every so-called conspiracy theorist is a tinfoil-hat nut job, the larger purpose of theory making remains the sustenance of communities of inquiry committed to shared standards of critical evaluation and judgment.10
In closing, the theory in conspiracy theory is any theory set apart from such a world of evidence—a world that must be larger than, and thus capable of limiting, its own worldview. If the extraordinary promise of theory is to let us see beyond what is there, then perhaps the sustainable practice of theory is to let us see, through its weakening and weighing with evidence, less, not more, than the theory lets us see at first. To let theory flow freely, from Philolaus to #Pizzagate, will surely steep us in the septic waters of our own unchecked biases. “Conspiracy theory” is not only the label modern humans use to insult someone else for taking theory too seriously—it is a vista onto the shipwrecked coast that bedevils any modern inquirers who orient their craft too closely to the siren song of theory. Beware the theory in conspiracy theories, for the astronomical summits of theory alone are vertiginous and dangerous, and it is precisely our modern tendency to believe our own theories, without acknowledging that we may already be on the wrong side of history, that renders such theory—in the full splendor of its immodest isolation from evidence, in folkloric bias confirmation dressed up in the garb of modern science—among the most dangerous and powerful tall tales the modern world tells itself.
This essay has benefited from the critical comments of Joli Jensen, Mark Brewin, Seth C. Lewis, Kembrew McLeod, Sebastian Vehlken, and two anonymous reviewers. I acknowledge and thank them all.
1. Carl Huffman, “Philolaus,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Summer 2016 Edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/philolaus/.
2. David Szakonyi, “Renting Elected Office: Why Businesspeople Become Politicians in Russia” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2016).
3. Cecilia Kang, “Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking,” New York Times, November 21, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html.
4. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1964.
5. A small selection of the literature on pathology and media includes Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” in J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XII (1911–1913) (London, England: The Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1958), 3–82; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason), trans. Jean Khalfa (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) (originally published as Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, 1961); Elias Canetti, The Conscience of Words, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (London: Andre E. Deutsch, 1986); Walter Benjamin, “Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Collection,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1 (1927–1930), ed. Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith and trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 123–130; Friedrich Kittler, “Flechsig—Schreber—Freud. Ein Nachrichtennetzwerk der Jahrhundertwende, ” Der Wunderblock. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse 11, no. 12 (1984): 56–68. See also Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 (Berlin: Wilhem Fink, 1985), 194–195; Gregory Bateson, “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia,” Behavioral Science 1, no. 4 (1956): 251–254; R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (New York: Penguin, 1960); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Amit Pinchevski, “Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability,” Cultural Critique 78 (Spring 2011): 27–59; Amit Pinchevski and John Durham Peters, “Autism and New Media: Disability between Technology and Society,” New Media and Society 18, no. 11 (2016): 2507–2523.
6. Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”; Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic (1940; repr., New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966).
7. Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate, October 28, 2013, https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html.
8. Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (New York: Harper, 2013), 14.
9. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Queerying Homophily: Muster der Netzwerkanalyse,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, no. 18 (2018): 131–148.
10. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (1913; repr., Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001).