Generally speaking, I hate the expression “conspiracy theory.”
It’s an overused and unhelpful descriptor for what often amounts to a minority or controversial view. I’ve begged writers to stop calling everything they don’t like a conspiracy theory, and I’ve written regularly about my open-mindedness to all manner of ideas that have at some point been called conspiracy theories.
But it’s also an expression with a definition. The Merriam-Webster dictionary offers two: “A theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators,” or “a theory asserting that a secret of great importance is being kept from the public.”
These are both good, workable definitions. They both aptly describe a lot of the ideas I encounter on social media on a regular basis. And neither suggests judgment on whether the theory itself is true, which I think is important.
Conspiracy theories, obviously, are not new. Examples go back centuries, not decades, to the Illuminati panic of the 1700s, or the Salem Witch trials, or blood libels targeting Jews in medieval Europe. I assume there were prehistoric conspiracy theories, too. Contemporary ideas, like “Covid came from a lab,” were once labeled conspiracy theories, but have become more mainstream and gained credibility with new evidence — though they’re still unproven.
What has changed recently, though, is that these theories spread more easily, society seems more gullible, and the theories themselves are just getting — well — a whole lot dumber. The end result is that a lot of people seem to believe easily disprovable things (or, conversely, they latch onto ideas for which there is almost zero evidence, and insist others subscribe to those ideas, too).
Just this week, we got fresh examples of all of the above:
