The Evolution of Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories are shared factually incorrect beliefs that survive and evolve for long periods of time. Conspiracy theories only differ from fiction in one important aspect: the followers of such theories believe that their ideas are real, as opposed to fans of fictions who know that the stories are just fantasy.

Photo: Lower Beskids, Poland by Joanna Swiercz

Birth

Conspiracies are typically born around black swan events — highly unpredictable and unexpected incidents, when publicly available information is scarce, or not yet widely known.

Examples:

• John F. Kennedy Assassination: The murder of a highly popular US president during the cold war, when there was lots of secrecy on all levels of society;
• False flag 9/11 Attacks: An unprecedented terrorist attack with high casualty and visibility, that people didn’t prepare for in any way;
• Anti GMO: The ability to genetically modify biological organisms is a radically new technology that can change life forms in a very short amount of time, in an environment where people in general have no foundation in biology and agricultural sciences to understand the risks and implications;
• Anti Nuclear Energy: Tapping into the nucleus of an atom is a radically new technology that unleashes previously unimaginable amount of energy from matter, but people have no training in physics and engineering to have a grasp on this natural phenomena that is genuinely strange and beyond our normal experience;
• Vaccination Hesitancy: Vaccination is a radically new technology that changed medicine to be more effective in unprecedented and saved hundreds of millions of lives, but understanding the risks and benefits of it requires the understanding of many scientific principles, which most people don’t have training for.

Conspiracy theories almost always have a germ of truth to them, which can be verified independently to an extent. This allows the audience to latch on to the theory thinking it checks out from the beginning, and become open to further untrue ideas that are part of the package.

For example, in case of vaccination hesitancy, in the history of medicine many vaccines caused horrible side effects, because of insufficient long term and wide enough testing. Even in the modern world vaccines still cause harm to a very small amount of people. These are documented and real cases that the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory can build on.

Conspiracy theories at the beginning are very rudimentary, and not very believable. But they manage to tap into several human needs of the time all at once.

Most ideas can be traced back to a single individual who comes up with an alternative insight to explain current events. This individual is usually educated, charismatic, and fully convinced by his idea. However, they usually also have many unanswered questions. As a first step towards the idea’s potential world domination, the founder of the conspiracy theory invites the community to help solve the remaining mysteries.

Growth

Once a new conspiracy idea is born, it spreads like a mental virus to other individuals.

Conspiracy theories are attractive, because they can fulfil many human needs:

• Supporting biases. We all have our fears and desires, but we struggle to consolidate them with rational thinking. For example, people are naturally afraid of needles and medical procedures, which is a perfectly normal human reaction against any foreign objects entering our body. This reaction served us well throughout our evolution. And due to genetic variation, some of us have much stronger fear of needles than others. Thus, finding a plausible reason why it’s rational to reject a vaccination is beneficial to the person who has already emotionally decided to reject a vaccination.
• Fulfilling a psychological human need for stress. Throughout our evolution from the very beginning going back millions of generations, we lived under constant stress from our environment. However, in the last 100 years human development reached a state where many of us are able to live in relative safety and enjoy life without much stress. We all still experience occasional tragedies throughout our lives, and millions still live in constant danger, but generally most people in the world don’t have to constantly look out for bears outside their cave, or be afraid of freezing to death during the night. We don’t have to watch out for our coworkers grabbing a sharp tool after a small disagreement, or worry about being accused a witch and burned to death on the main square. Yet, our brains evolved in such environments. Our brains need environmental stress to stay motivated and healthy. You probably noticed that you’re more collected and efficient when you’re under manageable stress. When the stress level goes down, we only enjoy it for a short while. On the long term we feel like we are missing something that is lurking behind the shadows, and we get triggered by the smallest hint of danger.
• Desire to control your own destiny and environment. Even though people live comfortably, many in the modern world struggle to keep up with the fast changing world, and high expectations our social circles project on us. Folks feel helpless when facing powerful governments, and corporations. Examples of wealth and success presented in media are beyond reach. Many feel they are not in control of their lives. Conspiracy theories offer an explanation that puts the blame on some entity other than themselves for any perceived shortcomings. The theories can also point to possible paths out of the constraints people perceive to be holding them back.
• Entertain. We love great works of fiction. We live by stories, and the more bizarre, more layered, more sinister they are the more we like them. We love the heightened emotions and discussions such tales generate. Now, if you turn fiction into a possible reality that we are part of, it becomes even more exhilarating for our minds. This is especially true if our normal lives lack dramatic events.
• Serve as a creative output. People love thinking and creating. Conspiracy theories provide a fertile ground for our imagination to take root and then grow wild flowers of creativity. This is especially gratifying if you have an audience that applauds your ideas.
• Serving an economic need. We all want to protect our rational self interests, but they often clash with ethical considerations. Conspiracies can sometimes justify our actions and answer our moral questions. For example, in case of anti-nuclear activism, the movement is supported by organisations (competing energy sources) that are financially invested in making nuclear energy fail.
• Serve unrelated agendas. Many people ‘abuse’ conspiracy theories to promote their own agendas by spinning the story their way. The authors of these side stories prey on the gullible folks who are already in a state of extreme open mindedness, and introduce a mental trojan horse into the discussion to sell their own unrelated ideas.

The effect of such attractions are not small. They are very powerful and tap into our most basic needs and desires. They rule us. And consequently conspiracy theories can take over and rule us if we let them.

In early 2021, the conspiracies around the COVID-19 pandemic are still in this initial phase. There is no coherent and consistent storyline yet. But the different ideas are starting to converge and mature.

Maturity

Once the conspiracy theory garnered some following, a collective effort begins to take shape to create a comprehensive body of work around the original idea.

Some people create new additions to the core story, and side stories are integrated into the core story. News on the subject come out regularly. This helps believers to cement their trust in the core idea more and more.

Pending outstanding inconsistencies within the core story or unanswered questions are covered by people who derive pleasure from connecting the dots and coming up with creative solutions to difficult problems.

Other members of the cult will cherry pick the immense amount of information that is generated by global culture. The supporting data will be presented without context to the audience.

The more people believe the core myth the more believable it becomes to others. This creates a self reinforcing effect attracting ever more believers until a saturation point is reached, where everyone in the world has been reached and no more new believers can join the community.

At one point the initially small core idea becomes an entire new field with experts, books, seminars, and millions of followers. While it may seem like the idea is finally becoming generally accepted and stepping out of the fringes, in reality this is the beginning of the end.

The above mentioned examples of conspiracy theories, except for the Kennedy Assassination are currently in this phase. Vaccine hesitancy is growing despite growing evidence that it’s based on bad science. The anti vaxxer groups are creating ever more convincing films, books, and articles to cover every aspect of the story. There are entire magazines, conferences, and marches dedicated to keeping the myth alive across both ends of the political spectrum.

Branching

Once maturity is reached an even more creative process begins. The branching of ideas.

Various schools of thoughts develop explaining various areas of the core tenants in different ways. They all serve different groups.

Branches will inevitably will have differing opinions on certain aspects of the conspiracy idea. Many live by these conspiracies, and have businesses built on top of them, and thus have an emotional and financial interest to discredit any opposing fraction.

The fights between branches will eventually intensify. The founders’ credibility will be questioned and their abuses of power will be brought to the public. The frauds behind the creators of the stories will be revealed: manipulation of data, cherry picking, and even straight up lies, planting of evidence, etc. While these attacks may help fractions with short term gains over another branch, on the whole the revelations discredit the entire conspiracy theory in the eyes of believers, and keep new members from joining in.

Best current example of a conspiracy theory for this phase is organised religion (not religion itself), the mother of conspiracy theories, which originally started as a conspiracy to discredit the rulers of the time. Hundreds of branches of Christianity were created in the last decades, and some hate on each other intensely. Frauds of fake healers, and abuses of power of mega church leaders are now in the open. This resulted in the decline of believers overall globally, and even the gradual fall in trust in the legitimacy of papacy and the Vatican, which were the ultimate symbols of moral superiority for centuries.

Death

The death of conspiracies is not sudden. It is slow, painful, and destructive to its environment.

Once the number of believers start to go down, the fight for the remaining resources by the leaders of fractions will intensify to never before seen levels. At this point, it’s typical to see physical destruction of property and aggression towards humans. These events eventually lead to criminal investigations and government level legislation against the organisations, and sometimes their followers.

Once the conspiracy theory is publicly discredited and outlawed, the myth finally goes into long term hibernation. Since it’s an idea, not a biological organism it never actually dies.

For example, the idea around witches luckily managed to die for now, but it’s forever part of human culture.

Afterlife

Usually a small reservoir of believers may survive for centuries that can feed a rebirth at any time. Even without active believers, old books and other media detailing the myths can resurface many years after the death of a conspiracy theory.

If we’re lucky the ideas resurface in form of books, movies or games that are firmly framed as fiction, but in some cases they can come alive as zombie conspiracy theories with a new set of believers who shape the ideas to fit current times.

For example, this happened with the Illuminati, which gained public attention and a fresh group of believers in the last decade.

What do we do about conspiracy theories?

The obvious questions that we all want an answer to is whether conspiracy theories are harmful and what can we do about them?

Conspiracy theories are most definitely are overall harmful. Making life decisions based on false ideas is dangerous and usually unfair to others. Some conspiracy theories are more dangerous than others. For example, the chemtrail conspiracy theory may not cause serious harm to others, but anti vaxxers can literally cause the avoidable death of babies.

There are some small positive effects of conspiracy theories. They can activate a collective investigative effort, which in some cases uncovers real problems. For example, the discovery of COVID-19 started as a story that was labelled as conspiracy theory originally.

Also, as any creative endeavour, conspiracies can provide entertainment, especially in the afterlife phases. For example, people love the outgrowth of vampire and related stories, that originally started as conspiracy theories in the distant past born out of real historical events.

But these positives are dwarfed by the potential harm they can cause. So, what can we do about them?

While censoring conspiracy theories off at very early stages can be mildly effective to slow the spread, once they took hold blocks are impossible and even dangerous.

Censorship can easily backfire, due to the Streisand effect. The more you try to hide information (even if it’s false), the more it will blow up in popular culture, due to the perception that great powers are trying to cover up something. For example, YouTube blocking COVID-19 related videos that are not in line with their guidelines outlined by the WHO, created an industry of hosting and sharing such videos on dozens of alternative platforms, including distributed systems that can’t technically be censored.

At initial stages, it is also dangerous to aggressively disprove conspiracy theories because it brings more attention to them by creating more media cycles around them. In result, part of the audience previously unaware of the conspiracy theory will side with the ideas accelerating their spread. It’s better to not talk about them at all.

However, in later stages when the conspiracy theory already reached saturation, serious fact finding and dissemination of good information becomes increasingly important to help bring balance to the claims made by the conspiracy theorist, and help people distance themselves from the attractive conspiracies.

History will tell us how effectictive shutting down Trump’s social media accounts and the Parlor social media site will play out on the long term. Many believe we didn’t have a choice. Others think we should’ve continued fighting incorrect ideas in the open, which would have been more effective on the long run.

Finally, during the branching phase it’s critical to actively fight the phenomena, because this is where most destruction happens without much positive outcome, other than the fall of the conspiracy theory itself.

On a personal level, you should be highly sceptical of any new information. It’s a good idea to practice a kind of mental hygiene quarantine for any ideas before accepting them to your own model of the world. For example, if you were to read that COVID-19 originated from a zoo in Thailand (I just made it up), don’t run with the idea. Give yourself two weeks before committing either way. If after two weeks, you’re still considering the idea, you should do careful unbiased research. Be your own devil’s advocate and argue against any direction you’re leaning towards. Seek verifiable and factual information and not opinions (especially celebrities). Even if you decide to accept a new piece of information keep your confidence level at a reasonable level based on your research, don’t commit to it emotionally. Stay open to change your opinion based on new information.

If you come across a conspiracy theory, don’t get involved in actively arguing against it. Don’t give it attention. If it’s actively harmful, at best indicate that it’s a conspiracy without verifiable foundation, and leave it at that.

If you fall for a conspiracy and later you recognise this fact, don’t be hard on yourself and be compassionate towards others. Remember how attractive they are and how strong of a grip they can have on our minds. Train yourself to be more award and thus protected against them in the future.

Good luck navigating the information landscape.