This paradox occurs because conspiracy theories are at their heart nonfalsifiable. No matter how much evidence their adherents accumulate, belief in a conspiracy theory ultimately becomes a matter of faith rather than proof.
Conspiracy theories resist traditional canons of proof because they reduce highly complex phenomena to simple causes. This is ordinarily a characteristic much admired in scientific theories, where it is referred to as “parsimony.” Conspiracy theories—particularly the systemic theories and the superconspiracy theories discussed above—are nothing if not parsimonious, for they attribute all of the world’s evil to the activities of a single plot, or set of plots.
Precisely because the claims are so sweeping, however, they ultimately defeat any attempt at testing. Conspiracists’ reasoning runs in the following way. Because the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all of the channels through which information is disseminated— universities, media, and so forth. Further, the conspiracy desires at all costs to conceal its activities, so it will use its control over knowledge production and dissemination to mislead those who seek to expose it. Hence information that appears to put a conspiracy theory in doubt must have been planted by the conspirators themselves in order to mislead.
The result is a closed system of ideas about a plot that is believed not only to be responsible for creating a wide range of evils but also to be so clever at covering its tracks that it can manufacture the evidence adduced by skeptics. In the end, the theory becomes nonfalsifiable, because every attempt at falsification is dismissed as a ruse.
The problem that remains for believers is to explain why they themselves have not succumbed to the deceptions, why they have detected a truth invisible to others. This they do through several stratagems. They may claim to have access to authentic pieces of evidence that have somehow slipped from the conspirators’ control and thus provide an inside view. Such documents have ranged from The Protocols to UFO documents that purport to be drawn from highly classified government files. Another stratagem is to distance themselves ostentatiously from mainstream institutions. By claiming to disbelieve mass media and other sources, believers can argue that they have avoided the mind control and brainwashing used to deceive the majority. This also accounts in part for their fondness for what in the following chapter I call stigmatized knowledge—that is, knowledge claims that run counter to generally accepted beliefs.
CONSPIRACY THEORY AND PARANOIA
The connection made between conspiracy and paranoia has two interrelated origins. The first, and more general, source is the similarity between the delusional systems of paranoids and the plots imagined by conspiracy theorists. The second source is Richard Hofstadter’s widely cited essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” first printed in the month of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and published in its final form in 1965. Hofstadter sought to make clear that his use of paranoid was metaphorical rather than literal and clinical. Indeed, he argued that, unlike the clinical paranoid, the political paranoid believes that the plot is directed not against himself or herself personally, but “against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not himself alone but millions of others.” Despite this caveat, Hofstadter, partly by the force of his writing and argument, introduced clinical terminology into the stream of discourse, where it could be employed more broadly by others.6
Unlike Hofstadter, some have argued that the clinical and the political may overlap. Robert Robins and Jerrold Post assert that the domain of political paranoia encompasses a range of exemplars, including such clinical paranoids as James Forrestal and Joseph Stalin; borderline paranoids whose “delusion is likely to involve exaggeration and distortion of genuine events and rational beliefs rather than pure psychotic invention”; and cultures in which, at least temporarily, conspiracy beliefs become a culturally defined norm. In this view, conspiracy beliefs become neither determinative of paranoia nor divorced from it. Instead, conspiracism straddles a blurred and shifting boundary between pathology and normalcy.7
The precise nature of the relation between conspiracism and paranoia is unlikely to be definitively determined, if only because the two concepts are subject to varying definitions, depending on theoretical orientation. The effect of introducing such terms as paranoid into the discussion of conspiracism is double-edged. On the one hand, the connection—whether metaphorical or literal—captures the belief that devotees of conspiracy theory have severed important ties with a realistic and accurate view of the world. They inhabit a world of the mind more orderly than the world that “is.” On the other, paranoid has an unmistakably pejorative connotation. Indeed, it seems clear that Hofstadter utilized it precisely because of its judgmental quality. Its overtones are such that its use, even in careful hands, runs the risk of merely labeling people whose ideas we disapprove of.
CONSPIRACY THEORY AND MILLENNIALISM
In addition to his ruminations about the suspicious tendency of political paranoids, Hofstadter also linked the paranoid style to millennialism. He noted that the millenarian figures described in such works as Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium manifested precisely the complex of plots and fears that Hofstadter called the “paranoid style.” Yet it turns out that while a relation exists between conspiracism and millennialism, it is not a simple one.8
Conspiracism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for millennialism. It is not a necessary condition, because some millenarian movements lack significant conspiracist components. For instance, Millerite Second Adventism in the 1840s, perhaps the most significant American millenarian movement of the nineteenth century, never constructed a major conspiracist structure. Millerism—named after its founder, Baptist preacher William Miller—coalesced around Miller’s interpretation of biblical prophecy. According to him, Christ would return to earth sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When the latter date passed without an end-time event, his followers persuaded Miller to accept a revised deadline of October 22, 1844. On that date, the “Great Disappointment” destroyed the movement, but not before it had attracted tens of thousands of supporters throughout the Northeast, including prominent abolitionists and evangelicals. The movement attempted to maintain a harmonious relationship with existing Protestant churches, and only in a late phase did adherents heed the call to “come out of Babylon” by withdrawing from their congregations.9
Likewise, conspiracism is not a sufficient condition for millennialism, for all conspiracism does is to impose a strongly dualistic vision on the world. It does not necessarily guarantee that good will triumph or predict that such a triumph will mean the perfection of the world. Indeed, conspiracism can sometimes lead to an antimillenarian conclusion, in which the evil cabal is depicted as virtually invincible. Fixation on a conspiracy the indestructible tentacles of which are alleged to extend everywhere can give rise to the belief that the forces of good are perilously close to defeat. Some conspiracy-minded survivalists have retreated into the wilderness, at least in part because they fear that if they do not, they risk being destroyed.10
Despite the absence of a systematic connection between conspiracy and millennialism, the two are in fact often linked. Many millenarian movements are strongly dualistic, and often ascribe to evil a power believed to operate conspiratorially. As Stephen O’Leary notes, “The discourses of conspiracy and apocalypse . . . are linked by a common function: each develops symbolic resources that enable societies to address and define the problem of evil.” Conspiracy theories locate and describe evil, while millennialism explains the mechanism for its ultimate defeat. Hence the two can exist in a symbiotic relationship, in which conspiracism predisposes believers to be millennialists and vice versa, though each can exist independently. They are thus best viewed as mutually reinforcing.11
There is reason to believe that conspiracy theories are now more common elements of millennialism than they were in the past. In chapter 2, I describe a shift in millenarian “style” that I believe accounts for their increasing prominence. The traditional religious and secular-ideological styles have now been joined by a third variety, which I call
