Can Conspiracy Theories be Useful? Some Personal Reflections

I never know what to make of conspiracy theories. I don’t mean specific conspiracy theories, which usually seem silly and sometimes a little dumb. I mean conspiracy theories in general.

For that reason, I read Joseph Uscinski’s article “The Study of Conspiracy Theories” with much interest. Uscinski is a political scientist who specializes in the study of conspiracy theories, and he sees them as playing a valuable social role. He’s not thinking of any particular conspiracy theory or ideology, and he thus works with a suitably broad definition: a conspiracy theory is an account of events that cites a group of powerful conspirators acting in secret for their own benefit and against the interests of the general public.

With that definition in mind, he then asks what that style of thought does or doesn’t do in a society. What is its utility (if any)? Part of his answer is that conspiracy theories are akin to a skilled defense attorney who rigorously scrutinizes claims put forward by institutions or people who can sway public opinion due to status or wealth. On that basis, he makes the case that conspiracy theories are a useful weapon for ordinary or oppressed people to challenge concentrations of social power.

This value isn’t just because conspiracy theories might be correct (though sometimes they might be). Rather, the process of questioning that conspiracy thinking encourages provides an opportunity to vet common narratives or interpretations that may otherwise be taken for granted. Seen from this perspective, conspiracy theories are socially useful insofar as they provide a means for the rigorous cross-examination of the dominant social order. On this account, this scrutiny is productive because it can encourage widespread societal skepticism as well as unearth important insights that might otherwise go unrecognized (regardless of the accuracy of the theory’s central thrust).

It's an interesting perspective, but I’m still not sure where I land on it. I do think that Uscinski’s approach to conspiracy theories hits on something of my own experience with them.

Truth be told, I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist—I tend to be literal and positivistic. I had a copy of Behold a Pale Horse in high school, but that was for entertainment purposes (I like hearing ideas that are a little out there even if I’m rarely convinced by them). Of course, I recognize that history has evidence of actual conspiracies, but in general I’m inclined to roll my eyes when I hear about the Illuminati’s blood ritual for controlling Biden, or whatever.

However, conspiracy theories make up part of the fabric of my hometown milieu. As I advanced into my later teenage years, conspiracy theories increasingly came to shape the worldview of my previously politically apathetic childhood friends. The conspiracy theory hits of the ‘00s are as familiar to my ear as the pop songs of the era: secret societies, extraterrestrials, Satan worship, etc.

I remember going home one winter break in college and being impressed to see my friend, who’d dropped out of high school a year or two before, had a copy of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon in his hippy-squat apartment. As he explained, studying Bacon might help him to master the occult powers of Freemasonry. I’m not sure how it turned out for him, but I’m still waiting for my superpowers to kick in.

Did I agree with those perspectives? Very rarely if ever. But I wasn’t particularly assertive in my disagreement, and neither was I particularly alarmed by the absurd but sometimes entertaining explanations bandied about. As in Uscinski’s account, conspiracy theories seemed to be about a certain perspective or attitude—almost a style of life. The details were always a little fuzzy and the positions a little fluid, which seemed to be the idea. Hammering people on those inconsistencies would have seemed rude and missed the point.

Right, the point. What was that again? Well, as I understood it, it was about critical thinking, but it was also about the social ritual of confirming that you were someone willing to question social convention. Conspiracy theories were a sort of conversational marker to indicate one held at least some form of a broadly critical perspective. It was a ritual that reinforced a shared attitude and worldview that was about a lot of things, but literal accuracy wasn’t one of them. Conspiracy theories were sort of like metaphors for diagnosing oppressive and misguided social conditions.

At the time, I would have said this was meaningful for me on a personal level in that it provided something of a shared drinking pool when I was struggling with being an upwardly mobile person. Beyond that, I would have been willing to push the point further and land somewhere in Uscinski’s territory. Even if I wasn’t always on board with the details, I thought there was something meaningful about a critical social consciousness, and anything that fostered skepticism towards a rather grim sociopolitical landscape seemed at least vaguely promising.

I guess I saw conspiracy theories as sort of the complement to utopian theories—both to me were less about practical feasibility than temperament and aspiration. I wouldn’t support a candidate or movement that was only utopian, but I’m inclined to think a society without a utopian element is missing something.

That was my take on it until, well, it wasn’t. For me, I would mark the change to some point during Barack Obama’s presidency, though it wasn’t until Trump’s presidential candidacy that things seemed to hit a fever pitch. That was when conspiracy theories started to seem a lot less like a flashy vehicle for relaxed social critique than the work of overgrown adolescents like the characters in Bottle Rocket who rob their own houses just to have something to do.

This new crop of conspiracy theories seemed angrier and more urgent. No one seemed to be treating them as metaphors, and they lacked the open-ended criticality I’d seen before. Conspiracy thinking started to seem a lot less like a defense attorney posing hard questions than a particularly shrill form of dogmatism.

Of course, conspiracy theories have no essence that dictates that they always and inevitably have a certain social function—they can open or shut down discussion, challenge or support the dominant social order, defend or demonize oppressed populations, or anything else. Their core claim is just that powerful social actors collaborate to achieve dubious ends, and that basic viewpoint can have many cultural resonances and be put in service of many aims. Still, I did start to wonder if conspiracy thinking’s nonchalance with the facts might not encourage unfortunate thinking habits, a troubling disconnect with reality, and a lack of open discussion.

I can’t speak to what degree the changes I detected can be generalized, but at least for me they were pronounced. I took it hard. Absurdly, I felt a personal responsibility for having not reined in some of those flawed excesses earlier. I wondered if I’d made a mistake in not subjecting conspiracy theories to my own defense attorney questioning. It wasn’t that I’d never voiced a concern, but I started to wonder if I should have been more assertive.

In hindsight, that was obviously my way of grieving a particularly disheartening period in both American history and my personal relationships. If anything should have been clear, it was that factual accuracy and logical consistency had never been the point, and challenging conspiracy thinking on that basis obviously wouldn’t have worked. That is to say nothing of the self-importance my grief and disappointment had led me to.

I’d like an order of anthropological acuity—hold the grandiosity, please.

That much is clear, I guess, but not much else is. I haven’t fully disentangled the knot of these strange relations. If it’s true that the study of modern contemporary conspiracy theories can only be traced back to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), then it’s not shocking that we have a ways to go in making sense of what conspiracy theories can do for and to us. Was it that the theories changed, or did I change (or both)? When is the issue something basic to conspiracy thinking, and when is the issue the use to which conspiracy thinking is being put? Is a “critical consciousness” too empty of an analytic category to be meaningful?

These questions are of the moment. It seems increasingly unlikely that we will be exiting the paranoia of our zeitgeist anytime soon, which appropriately seems to be a cause for both lamentation and celebration. The question is which at what time and in what ratio.