Conspiracy Theories Are Normal: The Science of Real vs. Bad Ones

How Human Nature and Power Dynamics Drive Real Conspiracies—and How to Spot the Bad Ones

Somewhere within a few hundred yards of wherever you’re reading this sentence, two or more human beings are, at this exact moment, conspiring. Not metaphorically. Not in the loose, eye-rolling sense your uncle means when he says the word at Thanksgiving. Actually conspiring: coordinating in secret, deliberately withholding information from a third party, working together toward an outcome that benefits them and screws somebody else. Maybe it’s two coworkers building the paper trail to get a third one fired. Maybe it’s a couple planning a surprise party, which is conspiracy’s harmless cousin, or a couple planning a divorce settlement designed to hide assets from the other, which is not harmless at all. Maybe it’s happening in the break room at your own office right now, two people quietly agreeing on which version of events they’re going to tell the boss. Check your Slack DMs. I’ll wait.

This is not a cynical claim. It’s a demographic one. Conspiring — coordinating secretly with at least one other person to benefit yourselves at someone else’s expense — sits comfortably alongside eating, mating, gathering resources, and beating the tribe over the hill into submission as one of the oldest, most reliable, most thoroughly documented behaviors of the human animal. We didn’t invent it in a smoke-filled room in 1963. We’ve been doing it since the first two hominids figured out that three of them splitting a mammoth carcass evenly was worse than two of them splitting it and letting the third guy starve quietly. Conspiracy theories get treated in polite company like a fringe pathology, a symptom of tinfoil and bad hygiene. Meanwhile the actual behavior they describe is running in the background of literally every human institution on Earth, all the time, without exception, because it has never once stopped.

The World You Live In Runs on Conspiracy

The study of human history is, in no small part, the study of secret wars waged between powerful families and secret societies — dynasties plotting against dynasties, guilds against guilds, cabals against cabals, boardrooms against boardrooms, the names and stationery changing century to century while the underlying animal behavior stays remarkably consistent. The Medicis conspired and were conspired against. The Borgias conspired and were conspired against, with a flair for poison that made the conspiring itself into a kind of family brand. Robber barons conspired to crush unions and fix rail rates behind closed doors while newspapers they owned told the public a different story. None of this is a fringe reading of history. It’s the mainstream one, taught in universities, documented in court records and diplomatic cables and private correspondence unearthed decades after the fact — history simply prefers to file it under “politics” or “statecraft” once enough time has passed to make the secrecy retroactively palatable.

Let’s be precise about what a conspiracy actually is, because precision is exactly what gets abandoned the moment this conversation starts. A conspiracy is two or more people agreeing, in secret, to do something — often illegal, always self-interested. That’s it. That’s the entire definition. It requires no lizard people. It requires no hollow earth. It requires two humans and a shared incentive to keep their mouths shut.

Under that definition, the powerful do not merely participate in conspiracies occasionally, under duress, as a last resort. Conspiring is a core operating procedure of power itself. Executives conspire to fix prices. Politicians conspire to bury unfavorable reports until after election day. Pharmaceutical companies conspire to keep a drug’s addiction profile quiet long enough to hit a sales target. This isn’t a hot take; it’s a filing cabinet. Archer Daniels Midland executives were caught on FBI wiretap literally coordinating a global lysine price-fixing scheme with their competitors, laughing about it, comparing it to a cartel, on tape. Volkswagen engineers didn’t accidentally install software that detected emissions testing and cheated it — they conspired to build it, conspired to hide it, and several of them pled guilty to federal conspiracy charges when the scheme collapsed. A jury in the United States v. Philip Morris racketeering case found, after examining fifty years of internal tobacco industry memos, that the major cigarette manufacturers had conspired for decades to deceive the public about the addictiveness and lethality of their product — a conspiracy so well-documented that a federal judge wrote an eighteen-hundred-page ruling laying it out like a crime scene photo. The bankers who rigged LIBOR, the benchmark interest rate underlying trillions of dollars in global contracts, didn’t do it alone in a basement. They did it in group chats. With nicknames for each other. Coordinating.

Here’s a thought experiment that should end this argument on its own: try to imagine the alternate universe in which conspiracies were rare. Picture a petrochemical company holding a press conference to announce that its executives have decided, as a group, to start illegally dumping toxic sludge into the regional water table, and that they’d like the public’s input before proceeding. Picture an automaker calling a press conference to disclose a lethal design flaw in one of its vehicles and announcing, on the record, that they’ve weighed the cost of a recall against the cost of the resulting wrongful-death lawsuits and decided the lawsuits are cheaper, so they’ll be doing nothing further, thanks for coming. You cannot picture it. Nobody can picture it. It reads like satire because it is satire — a fictional universe where the powerful behave with a transparency they have never once, in the recorded history of the species, chosen voluntarily. The real Ford Pinto memo did exactly this math, in private, with a dollar figure attached to a human life. It just had the decency, or the cowardice, to stay a memo instead of a press release.

There’s a particular flavor of skeptic who will concede every example above and then retreat to one final, supposedly unassailable position: fine, small conspiracies happen, but something as large as an entire government bureaucracy — multiple ministries, thousands of participants, sustained coordination over years — is simply too big to stay secret, too leaky, too logistically impossible. Dell on that claim for one second, because it has a name, and the name is Holocaust denial. The Holocaust was not one rogue unit or a single deranged official acting alone. It was a bureaucratic, multi-ministry, cross-continental government conspiracy, planned in writing at the Wannsee Conference, executed through railway requisitions and chains of command running through the Wehrmacht, the SS, and the civil service, sustained for years, and kept quiet enough, long enough, by a genuinely enormous number of people who knew exactly what they were participating in. Anyone who insists that large-scale, bureaucratically coordinated government conspiracies are structurally impossible has — whether they intend to or not — adopted the foundational premise of Holocaust denial, because the Holocaust is the single most thoroughly documented counterexample in existence. You don’t get to believe both that governments can’t pull off conspiracies at that scale and that the Holocaust happened. The historical record forecloses that particular luxury.

And this is the part where the “people can literally be charged with this” objection stops being rhetorical. Conspiracy is a criminal charge. Prosecutors bring it under statutes on the books in every developed legal system on the planet. Watergate wasn’t a metaphor — G. Gordon Liddy, John Mitchell, and a rotating cast of Nixon loyalists were convicted of actual conspiracy charges, tried before actual juries, and sent to actual federal prison. People do time for this. Right now, today, somewhere in America, a grand jury is hearing evidence in a conspiracy case that will never make the news, because conspiracy prosecutions are so routine they don’t even qualify as noteworthy anymore.

So let’s tally the bottom line, because it deserves to be said plainly rather than danced around: conspiracies are real. Everyone knows this. They are happening constantly, at every scale, from the break room to the boardroom to the federal courthouse, and the only people who claim otherwise are either unbelievably naive or lying to you for a reason worth investigating.

The Lazy Math of “Powerful People Don’t Do That”

Here’s where the hand-wave usually shows up, and it’s worth naming because it’s doing an enormous amount of dishonest work. Everyone, without exception, has personally conspired with someone at some point in their life — coordinated privately, kept a secret, gained an advantage at someone else’s expense. Ask a room of a hundred people if they’ve ever done this and watch a hundred hands stay down out of embarrassment while a hundred consciences do the math correctly. This is understood, universally, at the interpersonal level. Nobody disputes it.

And yet, somehow, the exact same crowd that will cheerfully admit to conspiring with a coworker over a scheduling swap will insist, with a straight face, that a senator, a CEO, or a cabinet secretary — a person with vastly more to gain, vastly more resources to coordinate with, and vastly more insulation from consequence — becomes constitutionally incapable of the same behavior the moment their bank balance clears seven figures. There is no mechanism by which this would be true. There is no neurological switch that flips off the capacity for coordinated self-interest once a person acquires a private jet. If anything, the math runs backward: low-stakes people run low-stakes conspiracies over parking spots and promotions, and high-stakes people run high-stakes conspiracies over regulatory capture and market share, because the underlying behavior scales with the size of what’s on the table, not the moral character of the person sitting at it.

Believing power makes people less likely to conspire requires believing that wealth functions as a kind of ethical vaccine — that the more a person stands to gain from secrecy, the less tempted they become to use it. Say that sentence out loud sometime and listen to how it sounds.

Where This Actually Goes Off the Rails

None of the above is a permission slip. This is the part where the piece turns and aims its teeth at the other side of the room, because the room genuinely deserves it.

Acknowledging that conspiracies are common does not mean every claim wearing a conspiracy costume deserves your belief. None of this happens in a vacuum, and it’s worth understanding why so many otherwise reasonable people end up chasing lizard people instead of lobbyists. Three forces are doing the pulling, and exactly zero of them are stupidity.

The first is exculpatory. Believing that unseen, coordinated, powerful forces are working against you is, psychologically, a great deal more comfortable than believing your stalled career, your empty bank account, or your unfulfilled potential might have something to do with choices you made, or simply with bad luck nobody orchestrated. Blame a shadowy cabal and the failure stops being yours. It becomes something that happened to you, engineered by parties malicious enough to make your losses look inevitable rather than incidental. That’s not a character flaw unique to conspiracy theorists. It’s a universal human relief valve, and the theory is just the specific shape the relief happens to take that week.

The second is evolutionary, and older than language itself. A nervous system that assumes the rustling bush contains a predator survives more often than one that assumes it contains nothing, because the false positive costs you nothing and the false negative costs you your life. Assuming danger where none exists is annoying. Assuming safety where danger actually lurks gets you eaten. Humans still carry that asymmetry in the wiring, and it doesn’t switch off just because the predator moved from the savanna into a boardroom nobody outside the org chart is allowed to sit in. Most people, reasonably, have no clear picture of how monetary policy actually gets set, how a multinational’s tax structure actually gets built, how a piece of legislation actually gets drafted by three lobbyists in a back room before a single elected official ever lays eyes on it. Fill that vacuum with genuine incomprehension of how power really operates at the highest levels, add a nervous system built to assume the worst about whatever it can’t see clearly, and suspicion stops looking like paranoia. It starts looking like the factory default setting.

The third reason is the least psychologically interesting and the most factually damning: there is, in point of fact, a hell of a lot of actual conspiring going on. People aren’t inventing the underlying pattern out of nothing. They’re pattern-matching against a base rate that’s genuinely elevated, and then, frequently, mismatching the specific case. The instinct whispering that the powerful conspire against everyone else is empirically correct, demonstrated correct in courtroom after courtroom, wiretap after wiretap. What goes wrong from there is aim. Not instinct.

The philosopher Brian Keeley spent an entire career on exactly this demarcation problem — distinguishing what he called warranted conspiracy theories, grounded in evidence and vulnerable to being proven wrong, from unwarranted ones, built on unfalsifiable premises that treat every piece of contradicting evidence as further proof of the cover-up. That second category isn’t investigation. It’s a closed epistemological loop wearing investigation’s clothing, and the people running around inside it are doing something genuinely toxic to public discourse — not because they’re asking questions, but because they’ve rigged the game so no answer could ever satisfy them.

The moon landing wasn’t faked. The earth is not flat, hollow, or secretly run by reptilian aristocrats. Vaccines do not contain microchips. These aren’t controversial claims sitting on some contested epistemic frontier; they’re claims that collapse instantly under the weight of independently verifiable, cross-checked, replicated evidence from thousands of unrelated sources across dozens of countries and professions who would all have to be simultaneously lying, or simultaneously wrong, in perfect coordinated unison, for the theory to hold. That’s not skepticism. Skepticism interrogates a claim and follows the evidence wherever it leads, including toward conclusions the skeptic finds boring or inconvenient. What gets called skepticism in these circles is usually its opposite: a predetermined conclusion wrapped in the aesthetic of inquiry, immune by design to anything that might dislodge it.

Here’s the actual distinguishing test, and it isn’t complicated. Does the theory generate predictions that could, in principle, turn out false? Does new evidence have any power to change the theorist’s mind, or does every new fact simply get absorbed as further proof of a cover-up so vast it can never be falsified by definition? Are the sources independently verifiable, or does the chain of evidence terminate in a single anonymous forum post that everyone downstream is simply trusting on faith? Does the theory require a genuinely plausible number of people to keep a secret for a genuinely plausible length of time, or does it require several thousand scientists, engineers, and government employees across forty years to maintain a lie without a single one of them cashing in on a deathbed confession, a whistleblower payday, or a book deal? Tuskegee got exposed. MKUltra got exposed, through FOIA requests and congressional hearings, decades after the fact but exposed nonetheless. Watergate got exposed. Real conspiracies leak, because human beings are constitutionally bad at keeping secrets at scale, and the theories that survive contact with that fact are the ones actually worth your time.

The Actual Argument, Stated Plainly

Conceptual artwork showing a desk split between organized verified evidence on the left and a chaotic, unraveling red web on the right. — The line between uncovering a real conspiracy and falling for fan fiction comes down to one thing: rigorous, verifiable method.

Dismissing every conspiracy theory reflexively, as a category, is intellectual cowardice dressed up as sophistication — a way of never having to do the work of separating the Watergates from the lizard people, because doing that work is harder than a blanket eye-roll and a New York Times subscription. Believing every conspiracy theory reflexively, as a category, is intellectual laziness dressed up as courage — a way of never having to do the work either, just from the opposite and equally comfortable direction. Both postures excuse the believer from the only task that actually matters: looking at the specific evidence for the specific claim and following it, rigorously, wherever it goes, even when the destination is uncomfortable, even when the destination is “nothing here, move along.”

Conspiracy theorizing done with sufficient rigor is called investigative journalism or historiography, and it has taken down presidents, corporations, and entire industries. Conspiracy theorizing done without rigor is called fan fiction with a body count, and it has radicalized uncles, fractured families, and gotten a man to fire a rifle inside a Washington pizza restaurant over a child-trafficking ring that existed nowhere except in the fevered corners of an anonymous message board. Same starting premise — powerful people sometimes conspire in secret to their own benefit, which is true — wildly different destinations, and the entire difference between them is method.

So the next time somebody hands you a claim and prefaces it with “conspiracy theory,” resist both reflexes waiting on either side of you. Don’t laugh it off because the label showed up first. Don’t swallow it whole because it flatters your suspicion of the people in charge. Ask who benefits, follow the money, check whether the claim could survive being wrong, and find out whether anyone independent of the original source has managed to verify a single piece of it. Do that, every time, without exception, and you’ll find yourself in the company of every investigative reporter, whistleblower-protection attorney, and federal prosecutor who ever built a case that actually held up in court.

The powerful have been counting on you not to do that math for a very long time. Every conspiracy that’s ever been buried successfully was buried by an audience that decided the whole category wasn’t worth its attention. Don’t be that audience.

A Confession, Entirely Unrelated (pretty much) to Anything Above

One last thing, offered purely in the interest of full disclosure. I maintain a conspiracy theory of my own. I do not believe it. I have never believed it, not for one second, not even in the privacy of my own skull at four in the morning. I keep it in circulation strictly because watching a group of friends rearrange its face in real time remains one of the last genuinely free entertainments I have left in this economy.

Here it is, free of charge. Forget the globe, and forget flat earth too — both are embarrassingly pedestrian at this point, yesterday’s cosmology. The Earth is, in fact, a quintic threefold manifold: a three-dimensional hypersurface of degree five, embedded in four-dimensional projective space. The reason you’ve never heard this from an official government source is not some vast cover-up requiring coordination, discipline, or competence. It’s simpler and considerably more humorous than that. Virtually nobody currently employed by any government on Earth has the faintest idea what a quintic threefold manifold actually is — myself very much included, and I’m the one who made up the theory. Algebraic geometry doing what algebraic geometry has always done best: rendering concealment redundant by rendering itself incomprehensible first.

Try it at your next dinner party. Say it with total conviction. Watch the room.

— D.