Some Thoughts on Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories

Since we're barreling headlong into a national election season, all of us are likely to hear a heightened number of conspiracy theories, often invoked to vilify political rivals or people who don't serve the interests of some party or politician. 

As such, some thoughts on conspiracies and conspiracy theories strike me as in order--to help us sort through when we should take conspiracy claims seriously, and when we should be skeptical.

Let's start with what we mean by a conspiracy. Generally, a conspiracy exists when a group of people collude (work together in secret) to impact events in the world while trying to make it look as if no such collusion is taking place.

Conspiracies happen. And if they are successful, no one knows that the conspiracy happened: the event is seen by the broader world as being readily accounted for by the publicly available facts. We'll think it's an accident, or the work of a known rogue actors, or the ordinary operation of familiar processes. The role of the conspirators in producing the event remains hidden.

But here's the thing about conspiracies: they work best when they involve small groups of people or, if they involve more than a few people, do so within an organization that has very powerful control over their members in terms of ensuring coordinated effort and secrecy. 

As soon as you get large numbers of people involved--especially if they come from a range of diverse groups or walks of life, and most especially if they include characteristically "unruly" groups of independently-minded people (such as, say, journalists)--the coordination required for success starts to break down along with the capacity to retain secrecy.

So, here's the thing with conspiracy theories. They often (not always) start out plausible enough. A highway accident, involving two cars and a bus, results in the deaths of two dozen people, including a prominent politician. The theory: it was no accident, but something deliberately brought about by a group of conspirators to kill the politician while making it look like an accident.

Often, the theory finds traction in some odd fact. Suppose the purported accident was triggered by the erratic driving of one the cars involved--but an autopsy of the driver found no evidence of drugs or alcohol that could explain the erratic driving, nor any evidence of mechanical problems with the car. Furthermore, the driver had no cell phone, being notoriously opposed to them--and so wouldn't have been distracted by that.

This oddity motivates the conspiracy theory, lending some initial plausibility to the hypothesis that the driver deliberately swerved so as to cause the accident. Other odd facts emerge. Maybe, before getting in the car that day, the driver was seen burning a stack of letters. What if he was destroying evidence that could link him to people with an interest in seeing the politician dead?

Of course, these facts can be explained in many ways, most of which don't involve the driver deliberately causing the accident as part of a larger plot to kill the politician. But someone "connects the dots" between an array of odd facts using the conspiracy theory as a unifying explanation for them all. 

In the real world, lots of things happen that aren't connected to each other at all. That a certain story connects a lot of things isn't really evidence for the story. But a story that unifies stray facts into a cohesive story is attractive to storytelling animals like us--and sometimes disconnected facts are the visible signs of some unified explanation hiding under the surface.

In any event, what we have at this point is an explanatory hypothesis that accounts for a set of facts in a particular way--making them part of a unified story instead of a bunch of coincidentally related things. And even if the way the story unifies stray facts isn't by itself proof that the story is true, there might be reason to investigate the hypothesis--to treat it as something that might be true.

But it is here--when investigation into a proposed conspiracy starts--that things start to get wonky. IF a conspiracy is going on, then the conspirators will presumably try to hide the real story. And that means they will be working at cross-purposes with those investigating the hypothesis that a conspiracy was at work. 

For this reason, those investigating a conspiracy have some grounds for not immediately dismissing the hypothesis the first time they encounter contrary evidence. Things that, with more ordinary hypotheses, we'd treat as a good reason to set the hypothesis aside, might not be enough to stop investigating a purported conspiracy.

But it can be easy to incrementally slide from being someone who hangs onto the hypothesis a bit longer than usual to becoming someone for whom the hypothesis of a conspiracy has become unfalsifiable. 

The conspiracy theorist is someone who slides into the latter territory. And as they do, something happens which should throw up red flags for the rest of us. First off, evidence against the theory is increasingly treated as evidence for the theory--as further proof of how well organized and determined and powerful the conspirators are. Secondly, not only do they explain away all the contrary evidence, but they do so by expanding the size of the conspiracy. 

Suppose a doctor comes forward to say that the man who drove erratically showed evidence of a health condition that could explain that behavior. The conspiracy theorist explains this away by making the doctor part of the conspiracy (maybe an unwilling one acting under threat from the conspirators). 

Suppose an investigative journalist reports that the erratic driver recently broke up with a long-time girlfriend, and that according to a friend the driver collected love letters from early in their courtship--a collection that is now gone, offering an explanation for his being seen burning letters earlier that day. 

What does the conspiracy theorist do with the fruits of this investigative journalism? Well, obviously, the journalist is part of the conspiracy, too.

And as other doctors corroborate the first doctor's claims, it becomes the medical establishment that is part of the conspiracy. And as other reporters and journalists claim to have seen the work and vetted the sources that the first journalist used to reach their conclusions, it becomes the mainstream media that is in on the conspiracy. When a vocal proponent of the conspiracy theory is found guilty of defamation of character against the doctor, the judicial system is now part of the conspiracy too.

More and more people, across increasingly varied group, have to be part of the conspiracy (or somehow under the control of the conspirators) for the conspiracy theory to remain standing in the face of the mounting contrary evidence.

And the problem, of course, is that these are precisely the conditions under which conspiracies are unlikely to succeed.

So, when someone claims that some significant event is the product of a nefarious conspiracy, look for a pattern like this. If the conspirator has to bring in more and more groups and organizations and individuals into the conspiracy to make the conspiracy theory hold up in the light of the evidence, you have reason to be highly skeptical.