On Conspiracy Theories

A post from Carl Trueman on conspiracy theories reminded me of several quotes I have collected through the years, all of which make similar statements.

Conspiracy theories have an aesthetic appeal: they make us feel more important in the grand scheme of things than we are. If someone is going to all this trouble to con us into believing in something, then we have to be worth conning; and the impotence we all feel in the face of massive impersonal bureaucracies and economies driven not by democratic institutions so much as multinational corporations is not really the result of our intrinsic smallness and insignificance so much of our potential power which needs to be smothered. Such views play to our vanity; and, to be brutally frank, the kind of virtual solitary vice which so much solipsistic internet activity represents.

Conspiracy theories don’t hold up, though. Nobody is that competent and powerful to pull them off. Even giant bureaucracies are made up of lots of small, incompetent units fighting petty turf wars, a fragmentation which undermine the possibility of the kind of co-ordinated efforts required to pull off, say, the fabrication of the Holocaust. History, humanly speaking, is a tale of incompetence and thoughtlessness, not of elaborate and sophisticated cabals. Evil, catastrophic evil, is not exceptional and brilliant; it is humdrum and banal; it does not involve thinking too much; it involves thinking too little.

-Carl Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

“Many issues are misconstrued, not because they are too complex for most people to understand, but because a mundane explanation is far less emotionally satisfying than an explanation which produces villains to hate and heroes to exalt. Indeed, the emotionally satisfying explanation may often be more complex than a mundane explanation that is more consonant with verifiable facts. This is especially true of conspiracy theories.” 

-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society 

"My boyfriend, Jim, has so many conspiracy theories. I think he gives people too much credit. I so rarely meet a single person who is very well organized, or with any direction. What are the chances a meeting a whole group?"

Esme Raji Codell, Educating Esme

"Liberal historians often assume that people are omnicompetent. Because they believe that humans can do anything, they routinely assume that outcomes are almost always the planned results of some human intentions. (An aside: this is why conspiracy theories abound. When you think that men control everything, you assume that every bad thing is the result of some intentional human plan.) Not true. Fallen humans are both capable and myopic, both powerful and unwise. The result is that human history is littered with unintended consequences. The Great War for Empire (a.k.a. the French and Indian War) shattered the colonists’ largely warm relationship with Great Britain in the 1760s, but this was accidental and unplanned. Historical events have causes, but they are often unexpected ones. Indeed, we should not be surprised when fallen humans misjudge situations and unleash dynamics that yield surprising results."

-Robert G. Spinney