Over the past decade, conspiracy theories have left their position on the fringes of public discourse to become a front-and-center presence in both American politics and the media ecosystem that surrounds it. Every major world event, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, now seems to spark a wave of speculation and mistrust, which then gets amplified by social media and ultimately reported as news by major media outlets. As conspiracy theories have entered mainstream American political life, what was once easy to dismiss as laughably irrational now seems indicative of a fundamental problem—either with a polarized society, an unhealthy media environment, or the mind itself, susceptible to all kinds of biased thinking.
It is often assumed that the conspiratorial mind is a negative mind. It imagines evil plots and malicious motives. It is likely paranoid, insecure, and antagonistic toward out-groups. Conspiracy theories have famously been linked to violent extremist attacks, such as the 2019 Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso shootings, whose perpetrators referenced the white nationalist “Great Replacement” theory in their respective manifestos. But although conspiracy culture feeds off and manufactures negative emotions like fear, hostility, and paranoia, the way it presents the world and human beings’ relationship to it is at times incredibly idealistic—even utopian. Underneath its ugliness lies a strange optimism about human agency and the nature of evil. It is this utopianism that explains the lure of conspiracy thinking.
One of the hallmarks of conspiracy thinking is the tendency to impute tragic events to the intentional workings of a behind-the-scenes agent. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, rumors circulated that the coronavirus was created by China as a biological weapon. Another theory speculated that the pandemic was funded and planned by Bill Gates, either to depopulate the world or to benefit from the development of a vaccine. Underlying such conspiracy thinking is a vision of the world that credits human beings with far more predictive power and control over the outcome of events than they really possess. Interpreting catastrophic events as the orchestration of an all-powerful agent, conspiracy theorists postulate a perfect continuity between intention, action, and outcome. A negative event, the reasoning goes, must be the workings of an agent who intended things to happen exactly the way they did. This linear sequence is neat, comforting. It admits little of the contingency and unpredictability that so often reroutes and frustrates even the most well-thought-out projects. Thus, even as conspiracy theorists present themselves as victims of a nefarious global plot, this perception of their individual powerlessness paradoxically coexists with a profound faith in human agency in the abstract. In interpreting all events as actions traceable to an agent, conspiracy theorists envision a world that falls within the exclusive jurisdiction of the human will.
This overestimation of the agentive power of human beings closely relates to a second tendency in conspiracy thinking: the belief that harm is primarily the result of malicious intent. The powerful, Machiavellian actors who feature prominently in conspiracy theories present a caricature of evil that, despite its troubling implications, is rather comforting. Consider, for instance, the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory that identifies a cabal of powerful elites working behind the scenes to implement a totalitarian world government or the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that fancies Hillary Clinton to be running a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria—the cause of a misguided rescue attempt by an armed man in 2016. In these stories, evil is concentrated in a few powerful bad actors—shadowy, deceptive, and clearly malicious. They have wicked motivations—to rule and enslave the world, to abuse children—unimaginable to the general populace and hatch nefarious plots that must be uncovered and brought to light.
This picture of evil exonerates the vast majority of us. But the greater part of the harms occurring in the world are not the result of malicious intent but of selfish negligence: an unthinking, often open pursuit of self-interest that violates the duty we have to care for others. Consider, for example, the harms that we actually know to be perpetrated by the wealthy elite: violation of wage and child labor laws, hazardous and unsanitary working conditions, and so on. The use of sweatshops is an exceedingly harmful practice that does not require ill will, nor is it a secret of the fashion industry. Instead, it has all the banality of a business decision, propped up by the pursuit of profit as a matter of course and the deflection of responsibility to other actors in the economic network. To adjudicate moral responsibility, we must first have an accurate understanding of what causes harm. Evil does not require evil intentions. Negligence—in the sense of a failure to care for others—is often enough.
This crucially reframes our current moral standard, often formulated in negative terms: the absence of malice rather than the duty of care. Herein lies the utopianism of conspiracy thinking. The understanding of evil in conspiracy culture absolves most of us from moral responsibility whereas the alternative—the recognition that harm does not require conscious intent—sets a more exacting moral standard and implicates us all. When we conceive of evil in terms of secret Machiavellian plans for world domination, we become blind to the everyday, routinized forms of violence and exploitation that take place out in the open. To be sure, evil is sometimes found in hidden depths. But more often than not it is all too visible—open, brazen, and unthinking.
Indeed, perhaps the most idealistic assumption underlying conspiracy thinking is that evil exists because it has not yet been exposed. There is something almost romantic about the search to uncover sinister plots as if we have to go looking for evil, as if its presence is not already ubiquitous. In conceptualizing the main problem of evil to be that of its concealment, conspiracy culture overlooks the fact that immorality does not require secrecy, nor is it defeated through exposure. The horrors of factory farming, for instance, have by now been widely publicized, yet it remains a prosperous industry with more animals being raised on factory farms now than ever before.
Or compare the conspiratorial moral panic over child sex trafficking to the actual cases of child sexual abuse by singer R. Kelly, who was found guilty of eight counts of sex trafficking and one of racketeering in 2021. In contrast to the internet sleuthing that created Pizzagate—claims that the pizzeria’s signage contained references to satanic symbols, speculation about a secret code language related to pedophilic activity in the Podesta emails—there was little that was hidden about R. Kelly’s predatory behavior. Allegations of sexual misconduct have followed him since 1996 when he was sued by Tiffany Hawkins, who said Kelly started having sexual relations with her when he was 24 and she was 15. Throughout his decades-long career, he was embroiled in constant controversy over his alleged sexual misconduct—controversy that was thoroughly public, playing out on the very surface of public discourse and popular culture. When R. Kelly was charged in 2002 with multiple counts of child pornography, the public reacted to his alleged predatory behavior primarily as a spectacle, as exemplified by comedian Dave Chappelle’s infamous parody video, “Piss on You.” The antithesis of the conspiratorial mode, this transformation of evil into spectacle seemed to strangely flatten it, creating a culture of indifference in which everything was known, yet tolerated all the same.
It is this “society of spectacle,” to use the language of French philosopher Guy Debord, that constitutes a greater threat than any secret plot. We would do well to remember that evil thrives just as much in hypervisibility as it does in secrecy. When world events appear to us primarily as spectacle, we encounter them as strangely unreal. Though this mode of unseeing might be characterized as the antithesis of conspiracy thinking, which perceives hidden threats, they are products of the same logic. The assumption that evil invisibly lurks beneath the surface of everyday life produces an implicit disbelief in the existence of the evils right in front of us. A powerful optimism underlies this thinking: that the world would not allow the existence of evil, and thus, that the suffering which openly exists must be illusory. It is telling that the two main types of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus asserted that the pandemic was either a hoax or the product of intentional design. The flip side of the logic that harm arises from the intentional actions of agents is that suffering that has no discernible agent behind it does not exist. The utopian promise of conspiracy thinking, then, though easily overshadowed by the ugliness of its paranoia, insecurity, and hate, is nevertheless a comforting, even beautiful picture of human agency and intolerance for evil. It is this desire for utopia that we must reroute and satisfy if we are to address the troubling rise of conspiracy culture in our present moment.