conspiracy theorists tend to have a cartoon view of the world, one in which all people fall into one of three groups: the conspirators, the crusaders, and thedupes. The conspirators are portrayed as evil and powerful, seeking control for its own sake. They are often granted unimaginable cleverness and resources, andtheir reach knows no bounds. At the same time, they are ascribed unbelievable stupidity-for how else could their conspiracy be uncovered? The crusaders are thebelievers themselves. They feel they are a small band of freedom-fighters saving the world from incredible malfeasance. The dupes are everyone else.
But grand conspiracies (and that's what we're talking about here) require the cooperation of countless people over long periods of time and across manyinstitutions. This is the first major logical fault with grand conspiracy theories: They tend to collapse under their own weight. The problem is explaining howthe conspirators are able to maintain secrecy and control. If the U.S. were hiding UFOs and aliens over decades, the number of people that would need to beinvolved is huge. How do they keep them all silent? How do they get the funding and the space to run such an operation? Have all the presidentialadministrations since Roswell been involved? How do they prevent leaks-say, the kinds of leaks that recently outed the government's domestic spyingprogram? Wouldn't other governments have discovered the presence of aliens? Are they too involved? In order to answer these questions, more and more powerand scope must be ceded to the conspirators, until you have to believe that they run the world.
Second, conspiracy theorists tend to believe that everything happens for a reason - a logical fallacy known as the argument from final consequences. Forexample, Bush's power and popularity benefited from 9/11, therefore he must have perpetrated 9/11. The assassination of JFK had enormous consequences;therefore it could not have been the insane act of a lone nut. It must have had an equally enormous cause - a conspiracy. The more elegant view is that wesimply live in a wacky world and sometimes stuff happens.
Conspiracy theorists also make much was what we don't know. If the quirky details of a complex historical event cannot be explained and documented to anarbitrarily high degree, then there must be a reason for our ignorance. The dark hand of a conspiracy must be at work in the shadows. Again, Occam would remindus that complexity naturally leads to inexplicable chaos without the need for a purposeful conspiracy.
The final, and most insidious, problem with conspiracy theories is that they quickly become a closed belief system. Why is there no evidence for a conspiracy?Because the conspirators have hidden all the evidence. Why is there evidence that the conspiracy is wrong? Because the conspirators fabricated and planted thatevidence. How could they have done that? Because they have frightening power and reach (which brings us back to the first problem). Therefore, there is noamount or type of evidence that can convince a conspiracy theorist that he's wrong, which means that his (or her) beliefs are comfortably unhinged fromreality.
The alternative, alas, is to live in reality. Reality can be frightening and confusing, with questions that are difficult to answer and problems that are hardto solve. But in the real world, at least there are no all-powerful cabals, controlling us from behind the scenes.