The Temptation of Conspiracy Theory, or: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Part I: Preliminary Draft of a Theory of Conspiracy Theories

Abstract

Human beings are continually getting into situations wherein they can no longer understand the world around them. Something happens to them that they feel they did not deserve. Their suffering is described as an injustice, a wrong, an evil, bad luck, a catastrophe. Because they themselves live correctly, act in an upright, just manner, go to the right church, belong to a superior culture, they feel that this suffering is undeserved. In the search for a reason why such evil things happen to them, they soon come upon another group, an opponent group to which they then attribute certain characteristics: This group obviously causes them to suffer by effecting dark, evil, and secretly worked out plans against them. Thus the world around them is no longer as it should be. It becomes more and more an illusion, a semblance, while at the same time the evil that has occurred, or is occurring and is becoming more and more essential, takes place behind reality. Their world becomes unhinged, is turned upside down, in order to prevent damage to or destruction of their own group (religion, culture, nation, race) they must drive out, render harmless, or even destroy those—called “conspirators”—carrying out their evil plans in secret. Such orgies of persecution and annihilation against imagined or imaginary enemies accompany the history of Europe from, at the latest, the era of the persecution of the Jews and the Inquisition of the High Middle Ages up through the genocides of the recent past. In comparison to the belief in conspiracies—which is called the theory of conspiracy—belief in magic and witches associated with the so-called primitive cultures and with the European folk-culture seems harmless, especially in regard to the consequences for the conspirators.