We’re All Conspiracy Theorists Now
I want to start this piece by just telling you a little about me. I am the perfect person. My intellectual reasoning is unfailingly balanced and nuanced. I believe in the right things — for good, moral, disinterested reasons — but am always open-minded and willing to be swayed. I defer to expertise, cite evidence, but also engage emotionall ywith the subject matter. As a result, in any conversation that goes on in the world, I end up being correct. This is just a disclaimer, but it’s important for you to know.
A good ice-breaker question, that I like to deploy at dinner parties and other mixers, is “what conspiracy theory do you think is most likely to be true?” The answer, of course, is that there was a second shooter at the JFK assassination, but whatever your audience comes back with will tell you a little about them. If they go for “moon landing”, they’re ambitious but illogical. If they go for “Elvis is alive”, they’re whimsical and boisterous. If they go for “Avril Lavigne was swapped out for a doppelgänger”, they’re terminally online. And if they go for “9/11 was an inside job”, they’ve spent far too much time on the wrong side of the internet.
But the truth is that part of the playful nature of the question is predicated on the fact that we don’t really believe conspiracy theories, once they’ve assumed that tag. There’s an old adage in science that everything was a theory until it was proven: well that applies, also, to conspiracy theories. Everything good and bad that has ever shocked the world, was, plausibly, just a theory once. Only a very select few gain the tag of “conspiracy theory”.
The thing that marks a conspiracy theory is not just the contents of the story. Ok, they tend to share some similarities: they tend to involve large scale subterfuge, powerful elites, and a refutation of various orthodoxies. But conspiracy theories are like religions: they’re nothing without their adherents. And that’s what binds together everything from the Gleiwitz incident to New Coke. A strange certainty amongst those inside the tent, and an intransigent belief that sceptics are missing the point. It is a hidden, arcane knowledge — once it becomes mainstream, it loses its mystique.
And you can see that with something like the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender. One of the most common — and pernicious — conspiracy theories has long been that elements of the establishment are engaging in paedophilic sex trafficking. The Epstein case, when it was blown open, proved that, to some extent, that was true: there was a bloke flying the rich and famous out to private islands for sex parties with, allegedly, underage women. And so the conspiracy theory became fact. Which, superficially, would seem like a victory for those who’d dedicated their scant brain power to the task of unearthing this child trafficking conspiracy amongst donors to the Democratic party. Except… once that theory stopped being fringe — stopped feeling iconoclastic — they had to move the goalposts. And now, when you see Epstein’s name cited in conspiracy theories, it’s rarely a case of someone citing the official record — the court cases and law suits — which involved him. It’s usually, in fact, to defame someone who is considered guilty by association. The theory, it seems, becomes boring when it becomes true.
Last week I found myself watching an Algerian boxer winning gold at the Paris Olympics. Her victory in the women’s welterweight event was marred by persistent slanders against her character, particularly from the braying online mob. The crux of the argument came down to the fact the boxer — Imane Khelif — had ‘failed’ a gender confirmation test, demonstrating that she had XY chromosomes. This suggests that she is ‘intersex’, a category that professional sports finds extremely hard to deal with. But, on the internet, rumours swirled. Many casual commentators believed that Khelif was trans — i.e. that she had been assigned ‘male’ at birth — something that was factually incorrect but suited the pitch of a debate that rages internationally. (I discussed the situation at the pub last weekend, and both the people I was chatting with had though Khelif was trans — so even if there is an attempt, now, to row back from that implication, it was clearly circulating at the time).
Now, I’m not going to say that people who insisted on misgendering Khelif are all conspiracy theorists. Nor am I going to say that the people who bloody-mindedly defended her (myself included), even if there are genuine concerns about sporting integrity, are conspiracy theorists. The truth is, as the title of this blog suggests, we’re all conspiracy theorists now.
It is typified by a mindset that repudiates expertise. On the one hand, you had a group claiming they knew better than the International Olympic Committee (the IOC); on the other, you had a group thinking they knew better that the disgraced, Russian-controlled¹ International Boxing Association (IBA). Expertise, instead, is Googleable and convenient. You can find a justification for calling her “biologically male”, just as you can find a justification for calling her a “biological woman”. In the absence of any assumed, external authority, the positions become more entrenched.
It is also typified by a belief that your position is the unorthodox one. On the one hand, people who insisted that Khelif was “a man punching a woman” tended to believe that, by opposing the IOC’s verdict, they were counter-cultural. Yet when a Presidential candidate, international politicians, the world’s richest man, and its most influential author, are all vociferous supporters of your position, how non-conformist can it really be? And conversely, those who believed that Khelif was a fair competitor in the event felt isolated in a sea of social media trolling and tabloid headlines. But how cut-off is that position, really, when the entire African and Arab worlds seemed to be 100% behind Khelif?
There is a widespread desire to believe that we are arriving at some hidden truth. Maybe that hidden truth is that the establishment is pushing gender ideology; maybe it’s that gender is a social ill that needs deconstructing. Maybe the hidden truth is that there is two-tier policing in Britain (however much all the data refutes that²) or that childless women can’t understand how to run a country, for some reason. Maybe the hidden truth is that the world’s richest man is trying to destabilise democracy, maybe the hidden truth is that our foreign adversaries are trying to destabilise democracy, maybe the hidden truth is that democracy was over-rated anyway³.
Maggie Jackson, an American writer, recently published a book called Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, spurred on by an increasing trend towards certainty. In it, she wrote that:
Most of thought and life itself is the pursuit of resolution. Yet along the way, it is uncertainty that equips us to envision the unimaginable, adjust to the unexpected, value a question as deeply as an answer, and find strength in difference and in difficulty. We need not fear the indefinite. For that is where we find the better solution and the path of hope. This is uncertainty’s edge.
And uncertainty is a powerful tool. It is a tool, in may ways, of the superior mind. Think of Donald Rumsfeld⁴ talking about the War on Terror. “There are things we know we know,” the former US Defence Secretary told reporters, as American went — witlessly — into Iraq. “We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” Even though it almost sounds like a spoof of Bush-era malapropisms, Rumsfeld’s point is an important one. All of the world’s knowledge is sorted into three silos: knowledge we know, knowledge we know of, and knowledge we neither know nor know of.
In the late 1990s, two psychologists — Justin Kruger and David Dunning — conducted research into the capacity of humans to reflect on their own skill level. Their results were stark: people with low actual competence tended to over-estimate their ability, and only people with the highest level of actual competence tended to under-estimate their ability.
Their experiment spawned a famous cognitive bias — the Dunning-Kruger effect — which, these days, is something of a meme. The truth of their observation is simple: people who know something about a subject area are much more likely to accurately predict their comparative place in that field. It’s why if you go to academic conference on Etruscan pottery, and an expert in vase painting gets asked a question about Bucchero ware, they’ll probably defer to the Bucchero expert on the panel, rather than hazard an answer of their own. The more you know, the more you know what you know — and the more that you come to appreciate what others know. But if you have recently gained the mote of knowledge that Bucchero is made from unglazed terracotta, you might assume that you are now in the top percentile for knowledge about Etruscan pottery, even though you know i) next to nothing and ii) only about a very limited sliver. If you can’t see the big picture, you can’t see what you’re missing.
Mixed with the internet, the Dunning-Kruger effect has become part of a toxic cocktail. I don’t want to be the bloke on Medium saying that studying for a PhD is different from reading a few Wikipedia pages — but it is. Disbelief of expertise, which was already in crisis, has given way to an active replacement of expertise. There is no subject you can post on, on the internet, where some anonymous accounts won’t confidently inform you of their subject matter expertise. Their credentials? It’s never clear. And while I don’t want to gate-keep expertise (because if Michael Gove, the British politician, was right about one thing, it was that people really have “had enough of experts”) I do think it’s important to gate-open the possibility that you are not an expert. On chromosomal development, on boxing, on policing, on electoral fraud, on democratic interference, on Jeffrey Epstein, on conspiracy theories, on dinner party small talk.
To understand all those things, to pass judgment on those things and to defend your position like you’re St Paul arrived in Syria, would require the intellect of a polymath. And let’s face it, nobody arguing on Twitter or the comments of a Substack or 4chan is a polymath. We’re all just normal people who have become conspiracy theorists — convinced that things we belief to be true are, in fact, true, and are, in fact, under threat.
Some truths, then, to end.
- More than one position can be orthodox, because there are more than one set of prescribed rules. If your opinion conforms with the law, it’s orthodox. If it conforms with the social opinions of your peer group, it’s orthodox. Those two positions may be completely antithetical, but both entirely mainstream.
- There’s no such thing as objectivity. Grow up. Kellyanne Conway was right⁵ when she talked about “alternative facts”. As a species, human data collection has accelerated so radically in the past couple of decades that you can now find data to support just about any position. Wooly sciences like “polling” and “market research” have abetted this conflation of the objective and subjective. But the truth is that your choice of which facts to deploy, as well as when and how to deploy them, is entirely subjective.
- The truth is almost always hidden, so don’t worry about finding it. Some things are hidden by a veil of secrecy (like a needle behind a locked door in Fort Knox, by the pool with laser-topped sharks) but most things are hidden simply by the density of information (like a needle in a haystack, duh). You will die having known about 0.000(several thousand more 0s)0001% of everything there is to ever possibly known. The truth is out there — or so The X-Files says — but you probably won’t find it.
- Quiet doesn’t mean boring, and boring doesn’t mean true. Nobody on Twitter is debating whether Jeffrey Epstein is a sex offender, because it’s now accepted that Jeffrey Epstein was a sex offender. Instead, they’re debating whether [REDACTED] went to a sex party in [REDACTED] with Epstein and [REDACTED]. Similarly, there is no debate about whether Mijaín López should be able to compete in Greco-Roman wrestling, when his presence is demonstrably unfair on other participants (when he competes, they lose). But what if there are interesting debates to be had that people are, simply, not having? What if the assumption that clamour equates to importance is fundamentally bogus? What if the debate about immigration, say, is inherently less important than the debate about economic growth, even though one creates the hugh splash of a Filipino 10m platform diver while the other creates the tiny ripples of his Chinese counterpart?
- And you’re probably wrong anyway. If 9/11 was an inside job, that would be a huge scoop (my DMs are open). But that speaks to our present morality: false flag operations have been used through history, from Shoguns burning their own castles to the US sinking its own ships. In a similar vein, the prevailing opinion about gender and race and capitalism and democracy today will probably be considered outmoded and ill-conceived tomorrow. If you are certain that there are far more things in the world that you are uncertain about than that you’re certain of (which should, certainly, be your position) then you also have to accept the logical derivative that you’re probably wrong more often than you’re right.
But we’re all conspiracy theorists now. We all feel infringed. We all feel like lone beacons of truth. We all feel surrounded by people who can’t see the wood for the trees. 30 years ago, if you believed that the moon landings had been faked or that the world was flat, you had to seek out your fellows in the classified ads of the local newsletter, meet up at the apartment of some un-showered loon (probably called Greg), and commit your social life to the enterprise of proving the unprovable. The complexity of that system filtered out all but the most diehard: the system now is less of a sieve and more of a hula hoop. We can all find people to reinforce our views, as well as people to proselytise and people to debate. Rational discussion — about economics, about crime, about family life, about sport — have assumed the timbre of the most frenzied of conspiratorial argumentation.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, so the Roman aphorism goes. Well, the cyclopic overlord can go and enjoy the spoils of his half-sighted majesty. Amongst the blind, the true question is who knows themselves to be blind? Who believes they live in true darkness, and who believes there is a light that they cannot see? Because, amongst the stumbling proletariat, the blind man who knows he’s blind has a power over the blind man who believes in a perpetual nighttime.
¹Ok, maybe I’m not perfect.
²Ok, really not perfect.
³Or so Messers Musk and Putin keep telling me…
⁴Possibly not the ultimate example of a ‘superior mind’.
⁵Kellyanne Conway, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Gove: I can hardly be accused of not having plural taste in my citations.
