[T]oday we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. . . . So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
—Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
The term “conspiracy theory” means many things—a technical definition might run something like “a hypothetical explanation of historical or ongoing news events comprised of secret plots, usually of a nefarious nature, whose existence may or may not be factual”—but in recent years, it also has become a kind of dismissive epithet.
Once a narrative takes on the taint of “conspiracy theory,” the common response nowadays is to dismiss it out of hand as useless, if amusing, misinformation. (Unless you have been “red-pilled.” Then, it’s a very different story. Much more about all that momentarily.)
The majority of us who live well inside the mainstream of American society don’t really have the time for conspiracist beliefs and the wild-eyed ranters who peddle them—shouters like Alex Jones and Michael Savage, the cartoonish scam peddlers whose mark on their true believers usually presages a kind of pathetic gullibility. (What’s in those expensive vitamin supplements anyway?) We may count their marks among our friends, but their credibility is always . . . suspect, you know?
There’s a problem, though. Real conspiracies do exist—and have through most of civilized history. In recent years, one need only point to an array of scandals—Watergate, which brought down an American president, or the COINTELPRO episode in which federal agents unleashed dirty tricks on American citizens for political reasons,1 or the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal in which a web of conspirators shuttled money and weapons between Central America and the Middle East2—to demonstrate that conspiracies continue to weave their way into the fabric of American history. And truth be told, conspiracies as well as wild-eyed beliefs about them are deeply wired into our history and our national psyche.
A belief in conspiracy theories, more deeply, is reflected in very real problems in modern corporate-controlled media. After the American public eventually became aware that it had been gulled into supporting a travesty of a war in Iraq—an invasion of a foreign nation under the false pretenses that it possessed weapons of mass destruction—and more acutely realized the role that major journalistic institutions, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, played in foisting that deception on them, at great cost to the families of the soldiers lost there, a widespread mistrust of previously authoritative sources of information became not just a normal response, but a perfectly logical one.
Simultaneously, there’s also become an increasing tendency to willingly consume and absorb conspiracy theories for generally partisan motivations. The so-called birther theories about Barack Obama’s birth certificate circulated—and enjoyed a peculiarly obdurate half-life long beyond the expiration of any trace of factual grounding for the claims—primarily among partisan conservative Republicans. Donald Trump’s defenders insist a Communist/globalist/far-left plot exists to remove him from the presidency for his multiple abuses of power with nothing but odd speculation about a “deep state” to support it.3
It’s easy to dismiss discussion of actual conspiratorial behavior as conspiracy theories, especially in this environment. Recall, for instance, how discussion of the Bush family’s dynastic wealth and its distant history of involvement with financing the war machinery of the Third Reich during the tenure of George W. Bush (2001–2008) was dismissed as “conspiracy theories” by mainstream conservatives, despite the factual grounding of the discussion4 and the reality that the underlying subject—namely, the growth of wealth inequality and the concentration of power that resulted5—has remained a significant and very real issue on the American political landscape. Likewise, attempts to confront the involvement of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with Russian intelligence’s interference in the 2016 election are still routinely dismissed as conspiracy theories and “fake news.”
Indeed, “fake news” has become the more recent variation of this hall-of-mirrors distortion of journalism and the stream of factual information, one in which some of the most potent misinformation being injected into that stream deliberately is the claim that factually accurate information is false. It’s a parlor trick that Donald Trump has mastered in his attempts to create chaos in the news coverage around his presidency, dismissing fact-checked New York Times investigative pieces as “fake” while embracing entirely false narratives about everything from immigrants at the border to Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The environment that is most conducive to conspiracy theories, at least initially, is one in which government operates with broad secrecy and in fact engages in deliberate deception and obfuscation, usually for short-term political motives rather than long-term nefarious intentions, but the latter instead becomes the preferred explanation. The government’s handling of the unidentified flying objects phenomenon in the 1950s and 1960s is a classic example of the dynamic at work, producing a whole mini-universe of conspiracy theories about alien visitors and spacecraft that became such widespread cultural lore that they created whole genres of science fiction and fiction as well as in movies and television shows that indeed remain with us today, more popular than ever.
From this environment can emerge something unique to twenty-first-century America: an inability to determine, let alone agree upon, what is factual and real and what is not. This kind of chaotic soup is a prime environment for conspiracy theories to blossom like kudzu.
This sea change—the unmooring of even conspiracy theories from any kind of factual grounding whatever—has its origins in the conspiracy theory cottage industry that sprang up around the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. There was no shortage of speculation, suspicion, and questioning in the weeks immediately following the attacks, but even as it became established that they were the work of militant Islamists led by Osama bin Laden, fresh conspiracy theories began suggesting that the attacks were the product of an “inside job,” perpetrated by the Bush administration, perhaps with the help of Israeli intelligence. The leader of this contingent, of course, was Alex Jones.
But these theories found an eager audience in no small part because the Bush administration attempted to stonewall efforts to investigate the disaster and, particularly, to form an official commission to examine its causes. From the outset, the White House put its thumb on the panel’s scales by limiting its purview to the preparedness and response to the attacks, and in the end, the commission’s report was completely lacking in any discussion of pre-attack warnings and the administration’s response to it or lack thereof.6
The Bush White House all along was hostile to the commission, controversially naming Henry Kissinger its chair before he stepped down,7 refusing to provide it with adequate funding and cooperation,8 and then finally refusing additional time for the commission to complete its report.9 Most of all, the report gave a truncated and, it soon emerged, entirely inaccurate accounting of the warnings the administration had received prior to the attacks. Some of this was because the White House refused to give key documents—especially the key presidential daily briefing of August 6, 2001, which included stark warnings of an imminent al-Qaeda attack—to the commission until late in its investigation.10
All of this led many millions of people to believe that the commission’s final report was less than a full accounting of what happened, with reasonable cause. Most likely the whole point of the White House’s secrecy was to cover what was later exposed (particularly by former National Security Director Richard Clarke, a few years after the fact) as its startling incompetence in responding to the clear and specific warnings it received before the attacks. But the coverup created a monster in which millions of people became susceptible to the broad menu of increasingly warped conspiracy theories about what really happened on 9/11.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
—Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Sorting out good information from bad has become seemingly an overwhelming task in the age of the Internet and social media. Some people have stopped trying. Others have embraced the abyss, as it were, by diving into the epistemologically malleable and manipulable world of conspiracy theories, a zone where normative rules of evidence and factuality need not apply.
Entering this zone can seem like wandering into a hall of mirrors designed by Philip Dick, in which it’s difficult to distinguish reality from a kind of upside-down alternative universe where the rules of gravity are suspended. Some people veer sharply away, instinctively recognizing its toxicity, and avoid it altogether. Some wander into the hall of mirrors and never come out. Or, using a more popular metaphor, they vanish down the White Rabbit’s gaping black hole.
This maze can be challenging enough for a person with balanced mental health and reasonable acuity. When persons dealing with mental illness enter into the conspiracy-theory alternative universe, there can be actual cognitive effects with extremely undesirable outcomes—making it difficult at times to ascertain what actions are fueled by conspiracy theories and which are products of mental illness.
What’s incontestable, however, is that conspiracy theories have a powerfully toxic effect on people’s sense of connectedness to others—to the point that many people drawn down those rabbit holes begin to cut off and fall away from all the friends and family with whom they once were close. Some of this is the logical product of the overarching narrative of conspiracy theories in general—namely, that ordinary people are up against forces so dark and nefarious and omnipotent that they have no real chance against them.
It convinces them that ordinary democratic participation—their votes, their caucusing, their phone-banking—is a joke. That you can’t know who you can trust. Even your neighbors, your family, your old pals might be part of the conspiracy, if not its “sheeple” dupes. Eventually the logic of the conspiracist universe would have its adherents disconnect from all human contact and retreat to a cabin in the Montana woods.
Yet as harrowing and confusing as it can be to enter the world of conspiracism, it’s actually easier than you’d think to distinguish between a real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, beyond recognizing that the former has a reasonable degree of being real, while the latter is almost certainly a falsehood intended to scapegoat other people.
Real conspiracies, by their very nature (including their dependence on secrecy), have three major limitations:
As the boundaries of all three of these limits increase, however, the likelihood of the conspiracy failing or being exposed rises exponentially. The broader the reach—if it attempts too much—the more likely it is to meet failure simply as a matter of raw odds and the nature of institutional inertia. The longer it takes, the greater the risk of exposure, not to mention the greater the risk of the conspiracy’s components going awry. Similar issues arise when increasing numbers of people are involved in the conspiracy: both the likelihood of failure to complete their part of the conspiracy as well as the growing chances of exposure. And exposure is fatal to every conspiracy: once the secret is out, it’s no longer a viable plan of action.
Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, almost universally feature qualities that contrast sharply with these limits.
Moreover, as Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum have explored in some depth, modern conspiracy theories have evolved sharply in the past two decades since 9/11 and are no longer what was once their central feature: evidence based.11 Whereas JFK and UFO conspiracy theories always revolved around differing interpretations of varying pieces of evidence, conspiracists in the post-militia era primarily build their work around pure conjecture, speculation connecting odd factual dots with secret nefarious plots operating behind the scenes.
This “new conspiracism” represents, as Muirhead and Rosenblum explain, “a new destructive impulse: to delegitimate democracy”:
The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying . . .” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.12
Conspiracy theories are a problem for healthy democracies not only because they encourage people to disengage from their communities and abjure their political franchise by discarding it all as useless, but also because they represent serious pollution of the information stream. Democracies rely on robust debate, but that “marketplace of ideas” cannot function if the debate is founded on falsehoods, smears, and the wild speculations that all combine to take the place of established facts in any discourse with conspiracy theorists.
“The new conspiracists seek not to correct those they accuse but to deny their standing in the political world to argue, explain, persuade, and decide,” write Muirhead and Rosenblum. “And from attacking malevolent individuals, conspiracists move on to assaulting institutions. Conspiracism corrodes the foundations of democracy.”
Even beyond these broad social harms, conspiracy theories also inflict a host of smaller wounds that eventually have deeper ramifications, as political researcher Chip Berlet has explained. Among the casualties is a shared reality and sense of what truth is. “All conspiracist theories start with a grain of truth, which is then transmogrified with hyperbole and filtered through pre-existing myth and prejudice,” Berlet writes.13
Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then.
—Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
In some ways, conspiracism is an understandable if not entirely rational response to conditions in the real world, particularly perfectly rational concerns about the quality and veracity of an information stream produced by a corporate-owned media apparatus. Moreover, those concerns are underscored when corporations and their figureheads are in fact caught conspiring to obtain political or profitable outcomes with some regularity.
“Conspiracist thinking and scapegoating are symptoms, not causes, of underlying societal frictions, and as such are perilous to ignore,” says Berlet.14 Indeed, one of the perils is that when legitimate grievances go unaddressed, the response of the aggrieved can be transformed to embrace illegitimate means, including violence.
Eventually, all conspiracism is a form of scapegoating, because all conspiracy theories construct narratives that blame specifically named targets (sometimes individuals, sometimes groups of people or even whole ethnicities and religions). And as Berlet observes: “Scapegoating and conspiracist allegations are tools that can be used by cynical leaders to mobilize a mass following. Supremacist and fascist organizers use conspiracist theories as a relatively less-threatening entry point in making contact with potential recruits.”15
The toxicity unleashed by conspiracy theories—even when they do not center on Jews, people of color, members of the LGBT community, Muslim refugees, or other scapegoated groups—can create an environment where a panoply of bigotry, including misogyny, gay bashing, and anti-Semitism can flourish within our communities, often expressed as inchoate hate crimes and terroristic violence.
This gets to perhaps the most toxic aspect of conspiracism: it has a uniquely unhinging quality. Regardless of the direction of the theories, right or left or utterly idiosyncratic, the absorption of such beliefs into their worldview has a singular ability to separate people from their contact with reality.
In the real world, this means that angry young white men having romantic difficulties can blame a feminist conspiracy for ruining the world (as well as their video games) before embarking on killing rampages. It means another white man who has succumbed to conspiracy theories about black crime in America can walk into a church and systematically kill black congregants. It means a gun fanatic can come to believe that mowing down country music fans at a Las Vegas festival would somehow awaken Americans to the threat of a government conspiracy to take away their guns. It means young men living in their parents’ homes can come to believe their own family members are participants in the conspiracies they loathe and fear and to strike out violently with swords and knives and guns.
As Berlet says: “People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, which has concrete consequences in the real world.”16
So what can we do about it?
The answer is complicated.