Conspiracy Theorists and Coincidence Cultists

What Do you Believe?

As is well-known today, the very term “conspiracy theory” was created by the CIA in order to ridicule critics of the Warren Commission’s conclusion about John F. Kennedy’s death by “magic bullet.”

For many years, being considered a “conspiracy theorist” was quite disreputable, and even after Watergate most Americans rejected the label. Indeed, until the early 1990s very few respectable Americans would admit to such beliefs. That attitude changed due to the impact of two pop culture events: The 1991 release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK and the 1993 premier of the X-Files. These dramas, combined with the rise of internet culture, made conspiracy theorizing an amusing avocation for millions of Americans and a serious hobby for a small but growing handful. Certainly I can trace my own interest in conspiracy theories to that era! By 2014, a study by the University of Chicago found that 50% of Americans believed in at least one conspiracy theory.

The number is probably higher today. Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, Americans can be split into two camps. On the one hand, there are conspiracy theorists, dietrologists who are firmly convinced that the surface explanation is rarely the correct one, who see the hidden hand of cabalistic action in most, if not every, major event. On the other hand, there are the normies, the coincidence cultists, whose unshakable certainty in the narrative simply cannot be overcome no matter how tight the inferential pattern presented. They view the conspiracy theories as maladjusted apopheniacs who see meaningful connections between unconnected events.

More than a few of my closest friends have accused me of apophenia. Perhaps the most amusing such accusation came in a friendly debate about UFOs I held with a friend about 5 years ago. After laying out my case for the reality of UFOs, including reports by various astronauts, defense ministers, and fighter pilots, my friend sighed in utter frustration. “If there were really UFOs, people would be talking about it!” “But we’re talking about it,” I said. “Sane people!” he retorted.

What does one say to that?

As with the convictions of materialists, the convictions of coincidence cultists cannot be overturned by evidence, because they deny the evidentiary basis of anything that might overturn their worldview. Since the paranormal cannot exist, any “evidence” of the paranormal is obviously false and must have an alternate explanation.

But the intransigence of the normies is not the true challenge facing the committed conspiracy theorist. The true challenge is picking which conspiracy theories to believe!

One of the necessary, albeit amusing, abilities of any conspiracy theorists (and I count myself in this faction) is the ability to simultaneously maintain as credible two positions that cannot possibly both be true. For instance, consider these two popular conspiracy theories:

• The United States faked the moon landing with Kubrickian cinematography.

• The United States stopped landing on the moon because of the presence of extraterrestrials thereupon.

Both cannot actually be true. (Variations might, but not as written.) Even so, I guarantee that more than a few conspiracy theorists entertain both hypotheses as credible, e.g. possibly true. “I’m not sure whether we faked the moon landing or stopped going because of the aliens, but the one thing I know for sure is that it didn’t just halt mankind’s greatest achievement because of NASA budget cuts!”

This dietrological approach to the possibilities is quite accepted among attorneys, who regularly plead in the alternative in litigation practice: “My client never visited the Bahamas. If he did visit the Bahamas, he never made any financial transactions there. And if he did make financial transactions there, they were legal!” Unfortunately, it makes lawyers sound deceitful to juries, and conspiracy theorists sound crazy to normies.

Since “theorizing in the alternative” leads to the appearance of schizophrenia, it begs the question whether it’s possible to develop a “unified fields conspiracy theory” of that can explain all of the bizarre and protean evidence that various theorists have assembled. Various pundits have tried in the past, selecting for whatever theories they thought held the most truth and trying to make sense of it all: Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope is probably the most respectable such work; Graham Hancock and David Ickes, probably the best-selling. But nowadays there’s just so much new conspiracy being generated that the task seems harder than ever.

Fortunately, when the going gets tough, the tough get Substacking. Josh Mitteldorf at Unauthorized Science recently penned an article entitled “Anomalies, Mysteries, Conspiracies.” Mitteldorf notes:

There are four major areas that I’m aware of, for which glaring truths are being suppressed.

• UFOs and an extraterrestrial presence and the misleading reports on all sides of this question.

• Political forces that seem to be tearing apart our traditions of freedom and imposing a police state, with secrecy for the elite and surveillance of the majority.

• Relics from the ancient past that point to a lost technological civilization

• Powers of the mind that are inconsistent with our understanding of brains and nervous systems. 

I speculate that these four mysteries are related. As we expand from reductionist materialism to a more complete and robust basis for 21st century science, we will knit together current events and ancient history into a coherent narrative.

These four tenets are broad enough to encompass the majority of the most credible conspiracy theories - at least the ones I find credible!

It seems to me that Mitteldorf’s effort is a worthy one. Providing a new narrative that can help us understand our world is absolutely essential to combating the Black Iron Prison of the contemporary consensus. Doing so will mean coming to grips with the “anomalies, mysteries, and conspiracies” that befuddle us.

My own writing on managerialism, petrodollar politics, and segmented polycephalous ideological networks, for instance, all hang squarely under Mitteldorf’s second tenet. My writing about ancient orcs fits into the third tenet. My writing on magic and post-physicalist physiocracy, and consciousness-based theories of quantum mechanics hang under the fourth tenet. The only tenet I haven’t written about extensively is UFOs - ironic, perhaps, because my grandfather, Frank Manning, was one of the early ufologists quoted in the book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy; I should probably rectify that.

What of you, fellow contemplators on the Tree of Woe: Are you conspiracy theorists or coincidence cultists? If theorists, which conspiracies do you think are true? What grand narrative — if any — do you subscribe to?