over a period of years or sometimes decades, and in some cases even over centuries. In such scenarios, the perceived plot thus involves several generations of conspirators.
One might object that this argument disqualifies systemic and superconspiracy theories, but not event conspiracy theories which mostly relate to assassinations or coups or other clearly definable events such as the moon landing. Admittedly, it is easier to imagine such conspiracy theories ultimately turning out to be true. But even leaving aside the fact that most event conspiracy theories soon escalate into bigger scenarios, this is still very, very unlikely, since even event conspiracy theories differ from real conspiracies in one important respect: that of size.
Real conspiracies are generally the work of ‘a small group of people’,9 whereas conspiracy theories construct scenarios in which at least dozens, but usually far more people would have to have been involved. A gigantic deception like the staging of the moon landing in a TV studio, or the 9/11 attacks, which unfolded live before the eyes of the world, would require hundreds, if not thousands of insiders and accessories. Against this, critics sometimes contend that, even in the case of an event on the scale of 9/11, it only takes a small number of conspirators acting under false pretences to persuade all the other parties involved – the air defence pilots who failed to intervene, the agents who quickly leapt on the trail of al-Qaida, and many others besides – to do their bidding. But this argument is not conclusive because the involuntary accomplices would discover after the event, if not before, what they had unwittingly helped to engineer, in which case they too would become accessories to the conspiracy.
As the philosopher Brian Keeley argued some twenty years ago, the large number of insiders required by such scenarios militates against the existence of these plots due to the virtual impossibility of keeping them secret.10 Indeed, the mathematician David Grimes recently went as far as to develop a model to calculate the point at which a given conspiracy would logically become public on grounds of size alone. According to his calculation, the staging of the moon landing could only have been concealed for a maximum of four years.11 This may be more of a mathematical exercise than an adequate description of reality, but the fact remains that no one has so far come forward to confess their role in the faking of the moon landing, the assassination of Kennedy or the 9/11 attacks, or to accuse others of making them an unwitting accomplice in those acts. Journalists who have defected from what conspiracy theorists call the ‘mainstream media’ to the conspiracist camp sometimes complain of having been instrumentalized in order to spread lies, but they invariably fail to provide any evidence for this, or for any specific plot – a further indication that such conspiracy theories belong to the realms of fantasy.
Another argument against the existence of such large-scale conspiracy scenarios is likewise mentioned by Keeley: ‘The world as we understand it today is made up of an extremely large number of interacting agents, each with … its own set of goals.’12 For a conspiracy to be successful, all parties would have to set aside their own interests and devote themselves entirely to the service of the conspiracy, something which is very unlikely, if not impossible. In his excellent introduction to the logic of conspiracy theories, the social psychologist Jovan Byford develops this idea a little further. According to him, a strong argument against the existence of conspiracies as claimed by conspiracy theorists is that there is in reality not one huge conspiracy but many competing smaller conspiracies. Different groups do not, as conspiracy theorists maintain, act in concert, but pursue different and often contradictory aims. Consequently, there is no single group quietly orchestrating events over a long period of time, but a variety of factions – camps within a government, rival intelligence services within a country, mutually hostile departments within the same intelligence service, and so on – which are all bent on implementing their own agenda, if necessary by conspiratorial means, and which regularly get in each other’s way. For this reason, Byford concludes, it is nonsensical to assume that one group could seriously control the destiny of an institution, country or indeed the entire world over many years.13
Perhaps the strongest argument against conspiracy theories, however, is that they are rooted in a view of human agency and history that has been radically challenged by the modern social sciences. Conspiracy theories are based on the assumption that human beings can direct the course of history according to their own intentions – in other words, that history is plannable. They credit conspirators with the ability to control the destiny of a country or even the world for years or decades at a time. Indeed, they often understand history as a series of plots by one or various groups. Consequently, they have a fundamentally different view of the world from that of psychology, sociology or political science. According to psychology, the ego is not master in its own house, as Sigmund Freud famously put it; in many cases, we don’t know exactly what we do or don’t want, and find it accordingly difficult to act on our intentions. But even if we did always know our own desires, we still couldn’t achieve them, since social systems – as sociology and political science have shown – have a life of their own and generate effects that no one intended.
Few people have articulated this insight as clearly as Karl Popper. In the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, he begins the chapter ‘Marx’s Method’ with a general discussion of why human beings ‘are, if anything, the product of life in society rather than its creators’. He does not of course deny that ‘the structure of our social environment is man-made in a certain sense’, but stresses that this is only part of the story: ‘even those [institutions and traditions] which arise as the result of conscious and intentional human actions are, as a rule, the indirect, the unintended and often the unwanted by-products of such actions’. The task of the social sciences, he therefore concludes, is to investigate these unintended consequences and, ideally, predict them.14
This interpretation of history and society is clearly diametrically opposed to that of conspiracy theorists. Significantly, Popper illustrates his general statements with the example of what he calls ‘the conspiracy theory of society’, in order to show that conspiracist thinking rests on a false understanding of social processes:
Conspiracies occur, it must be admitted. But the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful. Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy. Why is this so? Why do achievements differ so widely from aspirations? Because this is usually the case in social life, conspiracy or no conspiracy. Social life is not only a trial of strength between opposing groups – it is action within a more or less resilient or brittle framework of institutions and traditions and it creates – apart from any conscious counter-action – many unforeseen reactions in this framework, some of them perhaps even unforeseeable.15
Popper’s theoretical deliberations are borne out by history. Wherever a conspiracy enjoyed initial success, it invariably also had consequences that were in no way intended by the conspirators. For instance, the murder of Julius Caesar did not secure the continuation of the Roman Republic, but led instead to the Empire. The same could be said of ‘Operation Ajax’, in which the CIA and the British foreign intelligence service MI6 overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 after he nationalized the country’s oil production. The coup immediately led to an Islamization of Iranian society, which eventually resulted in the revolution of 1979. The emergence of an anti-American religious regime was probably the last thing the Western conspirators had in mind. Thus, the experience of actual conspiracies shows that history is often impossible to plan even in the short term, let alone beyond.
For all the above reasons, no conspiracy theory has ever turned out in retrospect to be correct. However much this is claimed, it has never actually happened in the sense that a theory initially believed by many to belong to the realm of fantasy has subsequently been proven true. The assumptions of conspiracy theorists in terms of size and scope alone make this impossible. Thus, while it is perfectly conceivable that it will one day be proven beyond all doubt that a second gunman and others were involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, such a straightforward scenario will never be enough to satisfy the conspiracy theorists. Instead, they postulate
