Why Are Conspiracy Theories So Attractive?
Conspiracy theories propagate through culture because the human mind is hardwired to seek patterns that conform to the stories we tell ourselves about the world.
By the late 90s, the World Wide Web which is so indispensable to life today was rapidly making its way into the homes and lives of millions of people throughout the world.
What was originally envisioned as a military computer network capable of withstanding a direct nuclear strike had given rise to a Cambrian explosion of independently owned and operated public websites accessible to anyone with a web browser and internet connection.
Some of the most interesting websites I found were the ones that covered topics like UFOs and aliens, ancient civilizations and their supposed connections to extraterrestrial life, cryptozoology, Atlantis and Bimini Road, the Bermuda Triangle, Terence McKenna’s DMT machine elves…
You get the idea.
I’d heard about some of these topics previously, but seeing them presented in this new technological format was captivating in a way that is difficult to describe. And although the hard, analytic part of my mind dismissed these stories as fantasy, I realize now that concepts such as truth or plausibility weren’t really the point.
I wanted some of these outlandish things to be real, plausibility be damned.
We Want To Believe
Another cultural phenomenon was in full swing at the turn of the millennium, in what may have been a kind of strange feedback loop with the woo-woo websites sprouting up all over the net at the time.
For nearly a decade, millions of Americans tuned in on Sunday nights to watch two strapping young FBI agents track down the weird and unexplained, when they weren’t too busy trying to unravel what may still be the longest running government conspiracy in television history.
The 1980s had seen a series of high profile cases regarding alleged UFO visitations and cover-ups, so by the time the X-Files first aired in 1993 there was a feeling among an increasingly large subset of the American public that the government knew more than it was letting on about extraterrestrial life.
With its series-long story arc replete with alien colonists, shadowy forces at the highest levels of government working to keep the public in the dark, and a pair of protagonists intent on finding and exposing the truth, the X-Files captured the imagination of the woo-woo crowd (including yours truly) in a way that went beyond simple entertainment.
The truth was out there, somewhere. And one day someone was gonna have real proof and blow the whole fucking thing wide open.
The X-Files also tapped into something fundamental about human experience, in the same way that the most successful true crime or fictional investigative series do.
Like Mulder and Scully, or some true crime detective running around from scene to scene trying to make sense of things without ever having all the information they need, our lives are full of our own personal mysteries, puzzles with missing pieces, waiting to be solved.
Since the pieces to the endless puzzles in our lives are rarely laid out exactly where and when we need them, our minds conjure up scenarios in which the pieces are all in place. This happens automatically, and these self-generated narratives help us figure out which pieces might be missing, putting us that much closer to solving the puzzle.
Our lives play out against the backdrop of these stories we tell ourselves, and each other, and the stories people tell us in turn. We tell stories to entertain, inform, influence, and understand.
We tell stories to help us figure things out.
We’re All Bored Apes
As anyone who has resorted to the use of productivity software can surely attest, one of the things we spend an awful lot of time trying to figure out is what to do with our time, and when to do it.
The reason we spend so much time trying to organize and prioritize in this manner is because even in the modern world, with all its comfort and convenience, there are quite literally an endless number of things we could be doing at any particular moment.
Many of these things are mundane, to say the least.
Whether at home or at work, these tasks tend to fill up a large part of our day, meaning we spend a significant fraction of our waking life doing things other than whatever we would like to be doing at any given moment.
Life, for most of us, most of the time, is pretty fucking boring.
When we’re bored, we daydream. We let our minds wander in flights of fantasy. We doodle in the margins of notebooks instead of taking notes in that university lecture that we’re not really paying attention to anyway. We keep the television on as “background noise” when we’re not watching it, or listen to music or podcasts while cooking or doing laundry or some other household chore.
We feed our minds distractions, because something as powerful as the human mind seems to crave the constant input of some narrative story, in any form, otherwise it will simply begin creating its own.
The Mind Creates Reality
Because it generates narratives more or less continuously, the human mind is an excellent tool for running simulations of events which could occur within our observable environment.
For example, having previously observed how a drinking glass will shatter when dropped on a concrete floor, and understanding that windows are made of glass and that concrete and rocks are basically the same stuff, we can deduce that throwing a rock through a window will likely cause the window to shatter.
Critically, we can do this without incurring the cost of actually conducting the experiment in the real world.
The ability to simulate reality in this manner was a major development in evolution, because it allowed early humans to imagine a different reality from the one they inhabited. It allows us to imagine a different story than the one that happens to be unfolding at any given moment.
With it’s built-in capacity for imagining any number of distinct possibilities for a given scenario, the narrative human mind will also try to fill in the gaps when we’re faced with an event or phenomenon which defies our current understanding.
Our visual system is a good example of this.
At the point where the optic nerve bundle enters the eyeball there are no photoreceptors to collect light from the environment, which creates a blind spot in our visual field.
Yet under normal circumstances we don’t experience any gaps in our vision because the blind spot in one eye is within the visual field of the other, and within each eye the brain will actually fill in the spot with information from nearby photoreceptors.
Our minds are always trying to fill in the gaps, whether in our vision or in our lives.
It’s Like, All Connected Bro
So what do boredom, missing puzzle pieces, and endless mental chatter have to do with the human propensity for engaging in conspiratorial thinking?
Well, everything.
In much the same way that our brain fills in visual gaps using information from nearby light sources, it also tries to patch gaps in understanding by integrating available information with our existing worldview. Our worldviews are the complex stories comprised of the sum total of our conscious lives, including the events we’ve witnessed and taken part in, the stories we’ve told and heard, our fears and insecurities, our conscience, our deepest desires, and wildest dreams.
But what happens when your worldview includes stories which are outdated, inaccurate, or just plain false, as most of ours undoubtedly do to some degree?
What happens when you don’t get that promotion you wanted, or you feel you’re being treated unfairly at work or school, or for whatever reason the puzzle pieces just don’t fit together the right way, and life fails to measure up to your expectations?
What happens when you look back at your life and draw the conclusion that too much of your time has been defined, even circumscribed, by little more than unsatisfying drudgery, and so you step outside one night, turn your eyes up to the endless sky above, and ask the universe:
Is this it? Is this all there is?
At that point, your mind may be willing to accept any answer regardless of plausibility, so long as that answer is a compelling one.
A Story Unfolds
Sometimes we just want something to be true, simple as that.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. The desire to will things into existence is what drives human innovation as people successfully act out their own wishful thinking in the world.
Realizing that a critical puzzle piece seems to be missing in the world has the effect of causing your mind to call that piece into existence, the same way that experiencing boredom results in it conjuring up a list of things you would rather be doing. Until that missing puzzle piece or alternative to boredom is actualized in the world, however, they aren’t true in any real sense. Yet we believe them to be true, and may begin behaving as though they are, regardless of how improbable they may be.
Since we are readily able and willing to believe untruths which originate within our own minds so long as we want them to be true, is it really any surprise that we can also readily accept untruths originating in the minds of others?
After all, the possibilities presented in a given conspiracy theory can often seem more exciting than our everyday reality, or can appear to provide an easy-to-swallow answer to some nagging question. And even the most outlandish conspiracy theories can stubbornly endure due to the difficulty of proving a negative vis-à-vis the agency exhibited by conscious beings, human or otherwise.
It’s easy to imagine ancient Egyptians with nothing but time on their hands using brute force to construct the pyramids of Giza. But it’s far more exciting, intellectually, to consider the possibility that otherworldly intelligence may have played a part. On one hand is a story that speaks to the ingenuity and determination of ancient humans. On the other, a fantastic tale that makes us look up at the stars at night and wonder who else might be out there.
Which is honestly more compelling? Human grit and backbreaking labor under the harsh desert sun, or saviors from the stars come to share a bit of their knowledge and technology with us primitives Earthlings?
Final Thoughts
In this post I focus on the particular flavor of conspiracy theories which were most interesting to me in high school and early college, but there was another narrative unfolding for me at the time: a story of a young man balancing a heavy college course load with a full-time job while trying to maintain something resembling a social life.
Underpinning that story was another one, more abstract but no less real, about the pursuit of economic success and its accoutrements, and how that story of success was somehow tied to the story of achieving a college degree. In the end, there were only so many hours in a given day and so the college story won out. I eventually got that degree and, much later, achieved a quite different version of the economic success I had imagined back then.
It turned out that the stories about college, my job, and my friends were the ones that helped me fill in the gaps of my world, but in their absence it could have very easily been the other stories I found fascinating: UFO coverups, ancient alien visitations, hidden technology from lost civilizations, reptilians in government, whatever.
Narrative matters, and while I chose to believe in and follow the story of self-determination as opposed to the one about hidden forces beyond my control, it needn’t have been that way.
Self-determination was just the better story. It was the one I could realistically participate in, with an outcome I could influence directly.
From time to time I still look up at a clear night sky and wonder what else is out there, and with the recent declassification of U.S. Navy aerial footage, it is fascinating to see a version of these stories of my formative years echo into modern times.
I still want to believe.
But for me the UFO story is now embedded somewhere in my layman’s understanding of the structure and scale of the universe, light horizons and speed limits, and the inherent hazard and impracticality of biological space travel.
If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, then perhaps we exist in their imaginations, in their myths and conspiracies.
Maybe we exist in the stories they tell each other, as they seek to understand their place in the universe.
Thanks for reading!
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Until next time,
Rob
