I’ve been thinking about Conspiracy theories a lot. I mean as my regular readers I know I do that anyway, but as 2025 is the age Conspiracy Theories and reality collide at lightspeed, I’m thinking more. Mostly I’m asking how did we get here – not in the exact causal sense, but how the Conspiracy Theorist mind works.
Lately among my readings, viewings, and podcast-listening I realized that Conspiracy Theory Believing requires skill.
If you’ve ever listened to someone go on about Conspiracy Theories, you realize they are retaining a complex alternate world inside their head. They have a skill to retaining and organizing that information about things that are, let us be honest, not true, sometimes bonkers, and often very bigoted under the skin. Yet these folks can recall it.
More than that, they are constantly resolving conflicts in their theories. Conspiracy Theorists are having the world collide with their beliefs all the time. New facts come in, the apocalypse doesn’t come, the hated (often female and/or PoC) politician resigns, the space lasers don’t fire. Conspiracy Theorists have to re-spin their tales all the time or else they have to question them, and if they questioned them they wouldn’t be Conspiracy Theorists. They’re maintenance experts on believing an illusion.
But Conspiracy Theorists also collide, believers who believe vaguely different things come together – and they display a talent for taking new input and combining them. This is the infamous “yes, and” discussions you can see among True Believers, where a person states one belief, and a slightly different believer agrees, then adds onto it. If you’ve witnessed a Conspiracy Theorist get on a good rant going at an event or in a conversation, you can see this happen at amazing speed as people ask questions.
(The Knowledge Fight podcast focuses on Alex Jones, but has covered other subjects, and in almost all cases you can see their subjects build mythology in real time.)
Conspiracy Theory is a skill, skill is similar to if not exactly the same as the worldbuilding done by writers, gamers, game designers, and artists. They have an ability to create on the fly, to recall vast information, and to adsorb and polish information. The jaw-dropping connections of a Tonspiracy Theorist are all too close to the clever ideas of a good writer to act like they’re not two branches of the same tree.
Conspiracy Theorists are easier to understand if you realize they had a skill at such creations (that they misused) or that they have developed it. It also means the evil grifters are even worse because they have some skill here and use it to screw up the world.
This gives me pause to other ways we might use such an insight to help those lost in these conspiracy worlds to get out.
- We can recognize this “talent at fabulation” by asking “does this person sound like they’re worldbuilding?” It’s a key to detection. Also if the theorist in question is some evil grifter, we can help people avoid them.
- If we’re trying to help the Conspiracy Theorist, realizing a skill is being deployed will allow us to help them find their way back with the various oft-discussed techniques.
- This skill they developed might be channeled elsewhere. As facetious as it sounds, I wonder how many people who have developed this creative skill might find outlets elsewhere. I’m not saying they should write fiction, but who knows?
It’s strange as I think over this insight. I realize some people I’ve seen, some I despise, really do have a skill. It’s just been used or developed in ways making the world worse.
-Xenofact