I could never explain how or why I became fascinated with conspiracy theories. It started at such a young age I can’t even work out a decent timeline of when I first encountered some of the books, films and TV shows I now regard as formative. I know I bought six books on a 2 for 3 deal when I was in primary school – four Dan Brown novels, a book about Atlantis I never actually read and The Rough Guide to Conspiracy Theories – and if I was interested before that purchase, I was obsessed soon after. It’s been a greater or lesser focus of mine at different times in my life, but it’s also been a gateway to other interests: cults, con artists, the occult, misinformation, pseudoscience, radicalisation, extremism. I am not an expert in anything, but I am a connoisseur of fringe, fanatical and false belief. I have spent thousands of hours across my entire life reading books, articles and documents, watching films, TV shows and YouTube videos, and especially in the last few years, listening to podcasts, because learning about strange beliefs and why people believe them is just one of the best ways I can imagine spending my time.
It is traditionally around this point I would stop to reassure you, in case it wasn’t clear, that I may be interested in conspiracy theories, but I am not myself a conspiracy theorist. And it is true that, whatever you imagine in your head when you think “conspiracy theorist”, I am not that. I am not a paranoid person who detects the hidden hand of some mysterious “Them” in current events. I do not believe in secret rulers and grand plans, or anything that breaks the laws of physics, denies the general historical record, defies sense or can’t be substantiated with credible evidence. I do not believe in the supernatural or paranormal and I despise all pseudoscience and medical quackery. I’m Catholic, and obviously believe in things beyond the material world, but they don’t affect how I view physical reality, because they are beyond the material world.
But I am, strictly speaking, a conspiracy theorist. I just don’t like to call myself one because it carries so much cultural baggage beyond its literal meaning. I want to disavow it because it’s radioactive, not because it’s unfair. Most people don’t use “conspiracy theorist” as a neutral descriptor for anyone who theorises conspiracy. If you call a cop or journalist investigating a criminal conspiracy a conspiracy theorist, you’re impugning their credibility and implying their allegations are fantasy. I do not believe in secret rulers and grand plans, but I do believe that conspiracy – people making secret plans to achieve goals through underhanded means – is a normal feature of human society. I also believe that conspiracy has played – and continues to play – a larger role in shaping the course of history than is commonly or officially acknowledged. The problem is that the concept of conspiracy itself has been tainted by the concept of conspiracy theories, to the extent the two terms are often used interchangeably (e.g. “that’s not true, that’s just a conspiracy!”). It turns the whole topic of conspiracy into a minefield and it doesn’t even help to reassure people you’re not crazy, because that’s exactly what crazy people say.
It also doesn’t help that I’ve lived my entire life within a historically unprecedented explosion of conspiratorial belief that has itself shaped the course of history more than we yet realise. Before the nineties, conspiracy theorists weren’t really part of the public zeitgeist outside pop culture, at least in the English-speaking world, but then 9/11 happened and now conspiracist belief is a fixture of global politics. Donald Trump alone is both the most famous, influential conspiracy theorist ever and possibly the subject of more conspiracy theories than anyone else in history. His most fanatical followers tried to overthrow the US government when he lost the 2020 election, and now he’s staffed his second, more openly fascist administration with multiple open conspiracy theorists.
It feels like reality is cracking apart from the inside, all of us stuck on one planet, but trapped in parallel worlds. Trying to find accurate information about a recent news event on the Internet is like wading through a hall of mirrors flooded with raw sewage. The danger of conspiratorial belief has never been more obvious and people’s wariness of it never more justified. I want to write about conspiracism in large part because I believe it is an immediate, growing threat to society and we must stop its spread or humanity is fucked. After all, there may be no conspiracy theory more widespread than denial of the climate crisis.
But we can’t accept the stigmatisation of belief in conspiracy as the cost of stopping its most destructive forms. We live in a profoundly corrupt world where a tiny elite hoard wealth and power for themselves and it only serves their interests to make claims of conspiracy taboo. It’s not just what they’ll do, either, it’s what they’ve already done. Every unacknowledged conspiracy is an unadmitted crime, every cover-up is a conspiracy itself. Countless people alive today are still fighting for the basic truth about atrocities committed before TVs had remote controls. Countless more are dead. They all deserve justice and they can’t get it when those who conspire against them can just slander them as conspiracy theorists. But it’s not just wrong, it wouldn’t even work. It hasn’t worked. It’s how we got here. Conspiracy theorists have only become more and more stigmatised in my lifetime and they’ve never been more numerous or influential. It’s the punchline at the end of history.
When you make conspiracy unspeakable, you make conspiracism inevitable.
Take the assassination of JFK. There is no contradiction between believing the official story – that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone and on his own initiative, shot and killed Kennedy – and believing there was a cover-up, because there was a cover-up. Regardless of the underlying truth of the assassination, any thorough investigation would have, at the very least, exposed adjacent and related CIA activities, including illegal domestic operations against pro-Cuba activists and multiple attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. It may also have revealed that Oswald was a former intelligence asset and that plans to assassinate the president existed within the CIA, even if he wasn’t working for them or carrying out one of those plans when he did it.
So they withheld information, impeded investigations and effectively controlled the Warren Commission – the first public inquiry into the assassination – from the inside through former CIA director Allen Dulles, a man I would describe as “the guy most likely to have ordered JFK’s assassination, if anyone did”. In doing so, they may have successfully concealed evidence of their own wrongdoing, for a time, but they also multiplied the evidence of a cover-up and guaranteed conspiracy theories about the assassination would flourish for years to come. Persistently denying a cover-up even as journalists, researchers, lawyers and activists constantly find more and more proof of the cover-up was always going to drive conspiratorial speculation about the assassination, and not only that, but obliterate public trust in the institutions and authorities propagating the cover-up.
It is often said, correctly, that no amount of disclosure of records from the US state will ever satisfy those who believe JFK’s assassination was the result of a sinister plot as long as those records do not prove them right. But we err seriously in understanding how and why people come to these beliefs when we attribute this primarily to quirks of human psychology like confirmation bias or the sunk cost fallacy before we attribute it to the fact there really was a cover-up of the CIA’s connections to the assassination that the US state has attempted to maintain and extend for as long as possible. Why would you trust them to release the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, when they have systematically deceived the public since literally day one?
As goes one cover-up, so goes them all. They may not all revolve around circumstances so spectacular as the assassination of a president, but they all leave their mark and make their impression. Hundreds and thousands of them, from the lowliest rungs of local government to high affairs of state, from the complicit silence of a town who knows what that man does to his children to the corporate poisoning of virtually every organism on earth. The erosion of public trust – not just in government or media, but in each other and, ultimately, information itself – is just that, an erosion, a process that has taken place over years and decades. To analyse it without grappling with the historical conditions in which it occurred is like trying to understand how coastal erosion happens without the sea and sky. To speak of conspiracy theories without speaking of real conspiracies is absurd.
And yet, this absurdity is the norm. I am so grateful for the work of all the journalists and researchers who have enriched and informed my understanding of these issues, but I have also been deeply frustrated by a reluctance by many to admit that the basic instinct of the conspiracy theorist about how the world works is not only rational, not only correct, but being constantly validated and reinforced by actual reality. It’s as if they think acknowledging that, or acknowledging it more than passingly, will lend credence to conspiracy theorists. But it’s the opposite.
The refusal to engage with that treacherous hinterland between what is clearly bullshit and what is clearly not leaves that space dominated by loud cranks, which is then used to justify dismissing anyone who theorises conspiracy as delusional. I have lost count of the times I’ve seen a misinformation researcher – or worse, a “debunker” – snidely dismiss “9/11 truthers” as if that category does not include families of survivors trying to expose a very real cover-up of Saudi involvement in the attacks. It would be nice to neatly separate those people from “the rest” of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists, but life isn’t neat that way, not with people and not with movements, and I find it hard to hold being wrong about something against people who are having the truth withheld from them. We’re all wrong about things, and we’re all having the truth withheld from us.
You may argue it was ever thus, but it wasn’t, not on this scale. The complexity of modern society has necessitated the creation of vast bureaucracies whose internal workings are largely impenetrable to the public. The proliferation of intelligence agencies since World War II has created an entire covert sphere of human activity that is unprecedented in history, literally countless millions of people employed for decades in jobs that carry little or no public accountability. The increasing interconnectedness of the world has created a global ruling class without creating a global citizenry, where everyone feels like wealthy and powerful people from other countries have too much influence in national politics and we’re all right. Most of all, the dawn of mass surveillance means that we genuinely are being spied on, all the time.
When we stigmatise conspiratorial belief while ignoring or downplaying this larger context, we align ourselves with the very structures most responsible for producing it. We fixate on the falsehoods that deviate from official reality over the ones that reinforce it and we validate the conspiracy theorist’s sense that it’s one rule for them and another for everyone else by making it literally true. In doing so, we give conspiracy theorists something much worse than credence. We give them confidence.
And make no mistake, the spread of categorically false conspiratorial belief is a real problem with real consequences. People have died and will continue to die because of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, especially now their patron saint is the US Secretary of Health. The rise of QAnon and its popularisation of child trafficking conspiracy theories has been extremely disruptive to the work of actual child welfare organisations. More than anything, denial of the climate crisis essentially guarantees the collapse of the global supply chains that underpin modern society in my lifetime. I think the fact that exponentially more people are coming to believe exponentially more bullshit is a world-historical crisis that’s only accelerating, and my sympathy for – or identification with – conspiracy theorists doesn’t make me any less terrified of its ramifications.
I have spent thousands of hours across my life learning about conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. I have also spent more hours than I care to fathom in the last year monitoring Ireland’s own conspiracy theorists and researching their histories. When I started writing this piece last year, I was already thoroughly disillusioned with how utterly the dominant approaches to addressing the spread of misinformation and false belief have failed.
As I finish it now, I feel like a backseat driver in a car that’s already crashed: rational, correct, and useless.
Still, as the man said, two out of three ain’t bad.
I may have no clue how we can dig our way out of this hole, but if I can help people better understand how we got here, I should. I’m just going to have to put my despair aside and hope that someone with a greater imagination than me can figure the rest out.
Until then, I will be a conspiracy theorist who fights conspiracy theorists and a debunker who debunks debunkers. Or something like that.
This essay is the first in an ongoing series called The Conspiracist Papers.
Left in the Lurch 