A Science of Conspiracy
Imagine, if you will, a scientific community so convicted in the truth of their method that all other human endeavors—like for example, the humanities—amount to mere superstition and fantasy, if not pathological delusion. Richard Dawkins is the cartoon example of this conviction. This is the ride or die mode of science; science fact as absolute dogma; it is the Lord’s truth, even if, strictly speaking, there is no Lord. Now, given the dominance of this position, in parabolic ascendence for the last 400 years, I invite you to likewise imagine a (rather large) selection of the populace in our fragmenting world, predisposed to paranoid deviance, who, faced with an ultimatum: “accept science-fact as the ultimate truth or go to hell,” will gladly, even gleefully, go to hell.
I am not suggesting that science is wrong, mind you, but rather, to paraphrase The Big Lebowski, it’s just an asshole. Science can tend to have a PR problem.
What remains luridly fascinating to me is the development of alternative science. The flat-earth movement, ufologists and the anti-vax community have each concocted elaborate “scientific” arguments supporting their various claims. Take, for example, the alternative physics of the flat-earthers who imagine the earth as a flat disc, with the north pole at the center and the outward boundary a wall of ice in Antarctica, and who account for gravity by proposing that this disc of earth is flying upwards, continuously accelerating, through empty space, forever. These positions, though they present a pastiche of science, fall apart with any rigorous scrutiny. This little matters for their real intent is the fixation upon a common enemy—the big other: a conspiratorial authority, in the guise of the deep state, together with a scientific establishment lying about the known facts.
It’s like we’ve wound up in an episode of the X-Files; like if Richard Dawkins’ science dogma was backed up by a clandestine and well-armed state agency; which in fact it is, er… I mean, it was. The common trope of the haz-mat suit, warn by the nefarious scientists of science-fiction and political thriller, is a perfect example of specialized knowledge weaponized against an ignorant populace. That there have been real actual state-run conspiracies lead by scientists (Manhattan Project, MK Ultra, Tuskagee) engaging in the worst manner of psychological and physical abuse upon unknowing test subjects, only muddies these waters, if not roiling them to begin with.
Be-that-as-it-may, and as we have explored previously on this channel, it is likely that this paranoid skepticism towards science-fact, so popular today, is no bugbear of enlightenment science, but rather its very motor force. Alenka Zupančič makes this argument in her recent pamphlet Disavowal (2024), a trenchant analysis of the conspiracy theorist. From the cartesian view rational science was founded as a means to distinguish what is real from the deceptions of an evil genius, who might be God, or at least a powerful demon, but who has been deceiving us with the accepted body of received knowledge; Rene Descartes was our first conspiracy theorist.
Evil demons aside, it may well be true that all knowledge is the product of a conspiracy, but ideally the conspiracy would be eventually extracted by long hours and rigorous controls that form the basis of scientific inquiry. Once upon a time the goal of a certain kind of science, according to Karl Popper, was to disprove fact, to falsify what is known. In this mode of scientific falsification, the motor drive of paranoid skepticism would be converted into a rigorous science by rigor, peer review, research, laboratory controls and so on; that such rigor is usually funded by the state or large corporations, shows the degree to which science and power are entangled, if not indistinguishable from one another. From the paranoid world-view, the great deceiver is a now a scientist.
Paranoia leaks from the lab and infects society. When X-Files scientist Dana Scully dons a haz-mat suit, it is as if she were wearing it as protection against paranoia itself. The intractable problem, as we are seeing happen today in real time, is that any rigorous attempt to disprove the paranoid conspiracy merely fuels its growth. It little matters if science disproves anti-vaccine theory, for those people no longer believe in science. That science requires belief is something that scientists themselves can tend to overlook. In any case, the evil demon appears to be winning.
This metastatic growth of paranoid knowledges is like the invisible menace from the original science-procedural film The Magnetic Monster (1953), including one of the first cinematic representation of the hazmat suit, about an unstoppable isotope which absorbs energy and doubles in size every 11 hours, threatening to destroy the world.
Is it not too late to develop a rigorous science of conspiracy?
Dana Scully in search of hazardous paranormal material
The Magnetic Monster, 1953
