Introduction
Conspiracy theories seem to be almost a permanent feature of our world. Along with doomsday cults, conspiracy theories about public figures and groups saturate the information space, filling in the gaps in information with wild speculation and history-spanning conspiracies, be it lizardmen, aliens, or flat earth. You would think that they would be evaluated as claims of truth and summarily thrown out, but they are instead mocked and ridiculed, never truly given a fair hearing. Despite this, they have only continued to increase in frequency and detail – for proof, one need look no further than QAnon.
We’re not diving into that, though. Today, we are figuring out what conspiracy theorizing really is, and why it has such broad appeal.
The Verbal Algebra Portion
Before anything else, we need to dissect the definition of conspiracy theory From Wikipedia, we take each word individually.
Conspiracy – A conspiracy is a secret plan between people for an unlawful or harmful purpose, especially while keeping an agreement secret from the public or other people affected by it.
Theory – A rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking.
Conspiracy Theory – An explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a conspiracy by powerful and sinister groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.
We see here that the conspiracy theory has the following key elements:
The existence of the conspiracy is arrived at through abstract thought, not direct observation.
The conspiracy theory explains observed events.
The conspiracy must be a secret.
The conspiracy must have an unlawful or harmful purpose.
The conspiracy is theorized to have a larger motivation, usually political.
Simple enough, but I have some issues with this. While we have a word for the whole package – a conspiracy theory – the first three elements of a conspiracy strike me as, just, well, regular old speculation.
Consider the example of this sequence of events:
You’re driving in your car down a toll road with RFID stickers for the windshield of your car. Said RFID stickers you got from the toll company, after registering your vehicle with them by submitting your vehicle registration. As such, they know your name, your plate number, your Vehicle Identification Number, and so on.
There’s a line at the toll gate and you wonder what the hold up is. After a few minutes of waiting, tapping your finger on the steering wheel while trying not to get pissed off, you finally make it to the toll gate and stop at the usual distance.
Nothing. Dammit!
You inch your car forward, hoping that it’ll work, and it waits for a few, agonizing moments until the light goes green and the gate goes up. You drive off, wondering why the hell it didn’t just read your sticker! That’s what technology is for!
Let’s imagine you came up with a few potential reasons:
The RFID reader at the toll gate has issues.
The boom gate is being rate-limited to avoid overheating the gate motors due to overuse.
The toll company has reduced the maximum distance on the RFID reader to force people to slow down and reduce their chances of hitting the boom.
The toll company is intentionally taking photos of your plate number to send to the local police department so they can keep track of the cars of political opponents or members of the political party not currently in power. One day, the gate just won’t open and they’ll black-bag or shoot someone right then and there.
Reasons 1 and 2 are clearly just inferences, guesses at what might be occurring. While #2 is more detailed than #1, the details only supply explanations or reasons for the behavior – saying “they’re trying not to wear out the boom gate” is less detailed but articulates the same idea. Most importantly, they definitively do not have element #3 (The conspiracy must be a secret). It’s no secret that if you run a motor hard, it overheats – your own car has a heat gauge for this exact purpose.
Reason 4 is clearly a conspiracy theory, and not even a good one. The elements are there – you just thought it up (#1), it explains why the cars are being held up (#2), nobody would confirm it if you asked (#3), you surmise the slow opening could be a dry run for an apprehension or assassination (#4) in order to maintain the incumbent’s political power (#5). However, if they really wanted to do this, they would just assign a charge to you that empties your account after you enter the toll road, so that they can legally pull you over when you roll up to the exit and come up empty.
Gonna have to conspire a lot harder than that to get ol’ Argo excited[1].
Reason 3, however, is intriguing. It appears to have some elements of a conspiracy theory – it’s a theory (#1), it explains observed events (#2), it’s not quite a secret since you could find out, but it’s neither common knowledge nor easy to ask since you’d have to get a hold of someone at the toll company (#3ish?). Most importantly, there is both no unlawful or harmful element (no #4 – in fact you could call it benign!), and there is no political motivation (no #5 – though one could consider the legal motivation to avoid causing damage to cars a larger legal motivation). It is larger than an inference (or it could just be a really detailed inference), but there is an element of security by obscurity, or information that is difficult to obtain, but not really secret, that makes it look like a conspiracy theory.
Let’s try another example, but with just the word “conspiracy” this time. As we see, most of our problems come from elements of the conspiracy theory that come from that word, so let’s zoom in.
The Lawful Conspiracy
Part of the definition of a conspiracy is that it occurs for an illegal and unlawful purpose. Otherwise, it’s just a secret plan you come up with someone else without telling anyone.
Starting a business with some colleagues? A “conspiracy” to commit profit. Throwing a surprise birthday party for your wife with the help of her friends? A “conspiracy” to commit celebration. That secret chili recipe you and your friend came up with together to bring to the next cookout? A “conspiracy” to commit chili.
When you get down to it, we all do a fair bit of legal and benign, even beneficial, “conspiracy”.
People will tell me that I should use “secret plan” here, which is true. However, I use conspiracy, in quotes, to show how undifferentiated the concept of “conspiracy” is without the unlawful or harmful element – meaning that without that element, the word is nearly indistinguishable from a mere secret plan.
To summarize, I have two key issues with the word conspiracy and how it is used. First, conspiracies and conspiracy theories require a secret – not something that is available but rarely asked, but something actually kept in confidence. Second, conspiracies are very heavily defined by their requirement for illegal or unlawful activity, which prevents us from seeing that planning, even secret plans (or “open secret” plans) is actually a pretty normal human activity.
After all, if you have a plan, it’s pretty natural to assume everyone else has a plan, right? My plan is to go down to the workshop and hammer out a word to cover these meanings of conspiracy.
Let’s call it the wordshop.
The Wordshop
I haven’t studied any etymology, linguistics, or Latin. Now, normally, an amateur like me shouldn’t be making words, but we’re professional amateurs here. We very logically, carefully, and professionally do whatever we want, leaving the real professionals to clean up after us. Any experts reading this, feel free to roast me in the comments! Lambast me at your leisure!
The word conspire comes to English from the Old French conspirer, itself from the Latin conspirare, being composed of two parts – the prefix “con-“, or “together with”, and the verb “spirare”, or to breathe. Conspire used to also be used neutrally, proving that people did in fact understand that not all plans made in secret were evil, though all plans for evil were likely made in secret, so better to be suspicious of all of them rather than fall to one of them.
In any case, there are four factors I am taking into consideration here for our new word, whose goal is to encompass all the things that look like conspiracies, but aren’t[2].
The word has to maintain the root –spiracy, in order for there to be obvious identification with the word “conspiracy”.
The word also has to also use Latin prefixes, because it would be consistent.
The word has to sound good to the ear and look good on paper.
The word has to emphasize the conspiracy-like nature of these things.
Taking a look at this (probably incomplete) list of Latin prefixes, and the imagery and meaning of the root word (to breathe together), two prefixes stand out to me – dis, and quasi. Dis- means “not”, more specifically, because they are apart. The best example of this would be “different”, meaning not the same (and therefore apart). Quasi- means “almost” or “as if it were”, and is bolted onto the front of words when you mean something that is almost something, can be treated almost like something, but is not that something. This essay, for example, is mere quasi-linguistics.
Quasi- seemed like the obvious choice, because a legal conspiracy looks like a conspiracy, and information that’s hard to get might as well be a secret for the sake of counting for conspiracy, but I think it is an important distinction. So, we need a new word for it – the Quaspiracy, defined below.
Quaspiracy – A plan between people where efforts are made to keep it private, but not entirely secret, for any purpose whatsoever.
Quaspiracy Theory – An explanation for an event or situation that asserts the existence of a quaspiracy, usually created due to a lack of sufficient or trustworthy explanation.
There is an important difference for us to make in the relationship of a quaspiracy to the quaspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory articulates the place of a specific conspiracy, while a quaspiracy theory can accept any quaspiracy that explains the event or situation. This is an important distinction – the quaspiracy grows from lack or mistrust of information, rather than the connecting of disparate bits of information to form a narrative. It is an admission of two things - that the current explanations are insufficient for the theorist’s taste, and that while the theorist is perfectly within their rights to come up with their own explanation, they do so without full information.
Food for Thought
This whole exercise has given me food for thought.
First, how the word “conspiracy” and the phrase “conspiracy theory” fence off the normal human activity of speculation, simply taken farther than most would want or agree with. As we saw with the section discussing “conspiracies” such as surprise parties for friends or chili recipes, it is a normal human activity for people to get together and plan something. As such, to assume that others are getting together and planning something is very reasonable. However, somehow, once you allege that others are getting together and planning something illegal or unlawful, suddenly that’s wrong and you’re paranoid and that’s a conspiracy theory. Despite this in most cases being a perfectly reasonable and even enjoyable activity - why is it that strange theories meet with, rather than criticism and rebuttal, derision? Surely, if they are so ridiculous, they should be easy to disprove, yes?
Perhaps we do not want to hear the answers, after all.
Second, not already having a concept for a quaspiracy concerns me. While in science, we have gradations of knowledge – laws as descriptions, hypotheses as falsifiable inferences, and theories as generally reliable inferences, the conspiracy offers no room to question. Going by the definition, it is assumed that if there is a secret plan, it is likely for nefarious ends. The quaspiracy creates space for speculation. Because we interact with complex systems without knowing how they work, any failure mode we do not understand can quickly spiral into conspiratorial thinking, even where it is possible that no ill intent was meant and nothing illegal is going on.
By the same token, however, it becomes easy to accuse any theory, even one that doesn’t propose illegaility or malice, as a conspiracy theory. This associates the commonplace activity of speculating or coming up with explanations based on limited knowledge with proposing something truly faracial. Not only that, this position ironically assumes that, despite the availablility of information and communication, some will choose to believe in these theories, rather than the ones endorsed by government or educational authorities - which could be taken as evidence of those ones not being entirely truthful.
It is somewhat paradoxical that this is the case.
Finally, that the idea of a quaspiracy really puts into perspective how little we know. Quaspiracies are, by nature, ad hoc explanations created based on surface-level knowledge of how things work, without really understanding the underlying mechanics. A common example would be something like this:
“This cable should work because it fits in the port!”
“How do you know?”
“The manufacturer wouldn’t make it fit if it wasn’t meant to go there!”
While this is largely true, USB cables in particular have both power-only and data versions, meaning that if you wanted to transfer data, and ended up with a power-only cable, it would fit. But it wouldn’t work. The simple inference would be that the cable is busted. The conspiratorial inference would be you got scammed at the shop. The quaspiratorial inference would be – there might be different kinds of data cable, and you can’t.
Acknowledgement of uncertainty in areas where you have insufficient knowledge is the true power of the Quaspiracy. It’s a different attitude, compared to the surrender of lack of inference or the conviction of knowledge of a conspiracy. The quaspiracy consists in admitting that you do not know, accepting that you may never find out, but acting on it regardless. Everyone their own expert.
In a world where both “current” events and entertainment are drawn out into long, seemingly endles sagas that go on without ever seeming to end, and we are always left on tenterhooks waiting for the next update, deciding where your involvement begins and where it ends is yet another burden placed on the individual. Else we fall into the trap so eloquently elucidated by John Carter - believing that Nothing Ever Happens, because nothing ever ends, creating an Eternal Now.
Don’t pay money or attention to things that do not concern you. Close the book and walk away, or it will consume you as you constantly look back to try and see where it ends.
Nothing ever ends anymore.
P.S. The Disspiracy
I did actually try out the formulation “disspiracy” and it was quite interesting. I left the draft in below.
For conspiracy without secrets, where the information is simply difficult to access or not widely known, but not actively kept secret, my word will be “Disspiracy”. The Latin roots of the word are the prefix Dis-, which means “not”, and spira, for breathe. Taken together, the image is one of a situation born of people having an implicit understanding of things and contributing to a single, overarching phenomenon – in Biblical terms, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Compared to conspiracies, which have a secret plan at their center, a disspiracy needs neither a secret nor a plan – only cooperation. The definition would likely be something like this:
Disspiracy – A disspiracy is an unspoken cooperation between people, each contributing to a certain situation or idea.
Disspiracy Theory – A disspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that is caused by a confluence of factors from disconnected actors acting in their own interest all contributing, intentionally or not, to a specific overarching phenomenon.
The definition is clearly not what was described in the essay, which is why Quaspiracy is the winner for explaining what I saw. I think there’s something there, though, so I am putting it out there for all to see. Maybe someone else will make good use of it.
By the way, keeping a plan to yourself could be called an intraspiracy, figuratively meaning to hold your breath. I find it quite funny.
[1] At least say something like the toll company keeps track so that the assassin can work with car companies to remotely assassinate people using the ability to remotely manage your car using the Internet-connected chips in the ECU that normally send back telemetry or receive updates to turn off your brakes while you’re going a hundred on the tollway. Now that’s a conspiracy.
[2] Originally, I wanted to attempt two different words to represent the two issues I have, but I’d rather leave that to the experts. First rule of a Professional Amateur is to know when to fold.
"In a world where both “current” events and entertainment are drawn out into long, seemingly endles sagas that go on without ever seeming to end, and we are always left on tenterhooks waiting for the next update, deciding where your involvement begins and where it ends is yet another burden placed on the individual. Else we fall into the trap so eloquently elucidated by John Carter - believing that Nothing Ever Happens, because nothing ever ends, creating an Eternal Now.
Don’t pay money or attention to things that do not concern you. Close the book and walk away, or it will consume you as you constantly look back to try and see where it ends.
Nothing ever ends anymore..."
For this observation alone, feel free to scribble me onto the roster at #2. A thorough unpacking of the intentionally abusive phrase that is CT, without even having to soil yourself intellectually rooting around in the bowels of its origin story. Bravo.