Five Things They Don’t Want You to Know About Conspiracy Theories

It might seem like we’re living at a uniquely rich moment for
conspiracy theories. Over the last few years, we’ve seen it claimed
that Osama bin Laden didn’t really die, that Barack Obama is
covering up the true circumstances of his birth, that Kanye West
and Kim Kardashian have encoded Illuminati symbolism in their
baby’s name, that the National Security Agency has been secretly
intercepting Americans’ phone calls and e-mails—oh, wait. That last
one’s true.

It’s easy to write off conspiracy theories as the delusions of
the political fringe, a minor nuisance fueled by the rise of the
Internet. Easy—and inaccurate. Conspiracy stories have been a major
part of American life since the colonial days. They are not just
found in the political extremes, and they are not invariably wrong.
And even when they are wrong, as is so often true, they still have
lessons to teach us. To understand why conspiracies matter, it
helps to clear away some myths that have attached themselves to the
subject.

Myth #1: People today are uniquely prone to believing
conspiracy theories

A 2011 article in the British newspaper The Independent
flatly declared that “there are more conspiracy theories and more
conspiracy theory believers than ever before.” This, the reporter
continued, was largely “because the internet has made it easy to
propagate rumour and supposition on a global scale.” As an example,
he cited a story that the Ku Klux Klan secretly owned KFC and was
lacing “the food with a drug that makes only black men
impotent.”

But there has never been an age when conspiracy theories were
not popular. From Puritan fears that Satan was commanding a
conspiracy of Indians to Thomas Jefferson’s concern that the
British had “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to
slavery,” from the assassination rumors that followed the death of
President Zachary Taylor to the tales of subversion told during the
Cold War, every significant event in American history has inspired
conspiracy theories. And a lot of insignificant events have,
too.

Some of those stories showed up in major media outlets, but
others we know about only because social scientists took the time
to collect them. Thanks to the sociologist Howard Odum, for
example, who studied the stories circulating among Southerners in
the 1940s, we know that there were people who believed, in one
white person’s words, that “Hitler has told the Negroes he will
give them the South for their help.” The chief difference the
Internet has made—other than allowing such stories, like any
stories, to spread more quickly—is to make them more visible.
Rumors that once were limited to a single subculture can spill out
into the open. The volume and intensity of conspiracy fears haven’t
necessarily increased; they’re just easier for outsiders to
hear.

It’s telling that The Independent‘s example of an
Internet-fueled rumor actually predates the Internet age. The
folklorist Patricia Turner first encountered the KFC story in the
1980s, though in the version she heard the villainous restaurant
was supposed to be Church’s Chicken. She eventually determined that
the rumor had been around since at least the ’70s. You can’t blame
the Web for that.

Myth #2: Conspiracy theories always involve
villains

It isn’t always scary to imagine a grand design. Sometimes it’s
a comfort. People say “Everything happens for a reason” or “It’s
all God’s plan” to soothe you, not to frighten you. And it’s just a
small step from there to a worldview where the grand design is
executed not by God but by a benevolent conspiracy. 

Conspiracy folklore is filled with this sort of story, starring
everyone from Rosicrucians to extraterrestrials to a hidden order
of adepts based beneath Mount Shasta. The California writer Manly
P. Hall, for example, believed the United States was being guided
to a special destiny by an Order of the Quest, which had intervened
in everything from Columbus’s voyage to the signing of the
Declaration of Independence.

Myth #3: Conspiracy theories are just a feature of the
fringe

In the most widely read—or at least widely namechecked—study of
political paranoia, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the
historian Richard Hofstadter called conspiracism “the preferred
style only of minority movements.” Yet the mainstream
regularly embraces conspiracy theories, some of which look deeply
bizarre in retrospect.

Consider the great Satanism scare. In the 1980s, older tales
about Satanic conspiracies collided with three secular fears: a
wave of stories about missing children, a heightened concern with
child abuse, and worries about religious cults. The result was a
period when mainstream reporters and officials embraced the idea
that a network of Satanists was kidnapping, molesting, and
murdering American children. Innocent people were sent to prison
for participating in the purported crimes. Respected shows such as
“20/20” uncritically repeated extremely dubious claims. An FBI
agent, writing in Police Chief magazine, complained about “a flood
of law enforcement seminars and conferences” where cops would hear
talks about “satanic groups involved in organized conspiracies,
such as taking over day care centers, infiltrating police
departments, and trafficking in human sacrifice victims.”

Moral panics have frequently come bundled with conspiracy yarns,
from the alleged white-slavery syndicates of a century ago
(described by one Chicago prosecutor as an “invisible government”)
to the gay subversion feared in the early years of the Cold War.
(In 1950, the director of the CIA warned that “perverts in key
positions” formed “a government within a government.”) There is
always a tendency, in the mainstream as much as the fringes, to
blame real or imagined social problems on a folk devil. And the
folk devil often takes the form of a conspiracy.

Myth #4: Conspiracy theories are never
true

Five Things They Don’t Want You to Know About Conspiracy Theories

It might seem like we’re living at a uniquely rich moment for
conspiracy theories. Over the last few years, we’ve seen it claimed
that Osama bin Laden didn’t really die, that Barack Obama is
covering up the true circumstances of his birth, that Kanye West
and Kim Kardashian have encoded Illuminati symbolism in their
baby’s name, that the National Security Agency has been secretly
intercepting Americans’ phone calls and e-mails—oh, wait. That last
one’s true.

It’s easy to write off conspiracy theories as the delusions of
the political fringe, a minor nuisance fueled by the rise of the
Internet. Easy—and inaccurate. Conspiracy stories have been a major
part of American life since the colonial days. They are not just
found in the political extremes, and they are not invariably wrong.
And even when they are wrong, as is so often true, they still have
lessons to teach us. To understand why conspiracies matter, it
helps to clear away some myths that have attached themselves to the
subject.

Myth #1: People today are uniquely prone to believing
conspiracy theories

A 2011 article in the British newspaper The Independent
flatly declared that “there are more conspiracy theories and more
conspiracy theory believers than ever before.” This, the reporter
continued, was largely “because the internet has made it easy to
propagate rumour and supposition on a global scale.” As an example,
he cited a story that the Ku Klux Klan secretly owned KFC and was
lacing “the food with a drug that makes only black men
impotent.”

But there has never been an age when conspiracy theories were
not popular. From Puritan fears that Satan was commanding a
conspiracy of Indians to Thomas Jefferson’s concern that the
British had “a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to
slavery,” from the assassination rumors that followed the death of
President Zachary Taylor to the tales of subversion told during the
Cold War, every significant event in American history has inspired
conspiracy theories. And a lot of insignificant events have,
too.

Some of those stories showed up in major media outlets, but
others we know about only because social scientists took the time
to collect them. Thanks to the sociologist Howard Odum, for
example, who studied the stories circulating among Southerners in
the 1940s, we know that there were people who believed, in one
white person’s words, that “Hitler has told the Negroes he will
give them the South for their help.” The chief difference the
Internet has made—other than allowing such stories, like any
stories, to spread more quickly—is to make them more visible.
Rumors that once were limited to a single subculture can spill out
into the open. The volume and intensity of conspiracy fears haven’t
necessarily increased; they’re just easier for outsiders to
hear.

It’s telling that The Independent‘s example of an
Internet-fueled rumor actually predates the Internet age. The
folklorist Patricia Turner first encountered the KFC story in the
1980s, though in the version she heard the villainous restaurant
was supposed to be Church’s Chicken. She eventually determined that
the rumor had been around since at least the ’70s. You can’t blame
the Web for that.

Myth #2: Conspiracy theories always involve
villains

It isn’t always scary to imagine a grand design. Sometimes it’s
a comfort. People say “Everything happens for a reason” or “It’s
all God’s plan” to soothe you, not to frighten you. And it’s just a
small step from there to a worldview where the grand design is
executed not by God but by a benevolent conspiracy. 

Conspiracy folklore is filled with this sort of story, starring
everyone from Rosicrucians to extraterrestrials to a hidden order
of adepts based beneath Mount Shasta. The California writer Manly
P. Hall, for example, believed the United States was being guided
to a special destiny by an Order of the Quest, which had intervened
in everything from Columbus’s voyage to the signing of the
Declaration of Independence.

Myth #3: Conspiracy theories are just a feature of the
fringe

In the most widely read—or at least widely namechecked—study of
political paranoia, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the
historian Richard Hofstadter called conspiracism “the preferred
style only of minority movements.” Yet the mainstream
regularly embraces conspiracy theories, some of which look deeply
bizarre in retrospect.

Consider the great Satanism scare. In the 1980s, older tales
about Satanic conspiracies collided with three secular fears: a
wave of stories about missing children, a heightened concern with
child abuse, and worries about religious cults. The result was a
period when mainstream reporters and officials embraced the idea
that a network of Satanists was kidnapping, molesting, and
murdering American children. Innocent people were sent to prison
for participating in the purported crimes. Respected shows such as
“20/20” uncritically repeated extremely dubious claims. An FBI
agent, writing in Police Chief magazine, complained about “a flood
of law enforcement seminars and conferences” where cops would hear
talks about “satanic groups involved in organized conspiracies,
such as taking over day care centers, infiltrating police
departments, and trafficking in human sacrifice victims.”

Moral panics have frequently come bundled with conspiracy yarns,
from the alleged white-slavery syndicates of a century ago
(described by one Chicago prosecutor as an “invisible government”)
to the gay subversion feared in the early years of the Cold War.
(In 1950, the director of the CIA warned that “perverts in key
positions” formed “a government within a government.”) There is
always a tendency, in the mainstream as much as the fringes, to
blame real or imagined social problems on a folk devil. And the
folk devil often takes the form of a conspiracy.

Myth #4: Conspiracy theories are never
true