Bored & Confused: Where are conspiracy theories from?

This week, Mike Hughes, a California limousine driver, intends to launch himself 1,800 feet (549 meters) high on a homemade rocket. His goal is to photograph the earth, to show proof of the flat Earth on which we live. “It'll shut the door on this ball earth," Hughes said in an interview with a flat-Earth group for the flight. Hughes is a member of the Flat Earth Society, a group that affirms that the Earth is a flat disc, not a sphere. The group denies photographs of the Earth from space, which one would think would disprove such flat-Earth theories. They say that NASA is being controlled by round-Earth Freemasons and Elon Musk makes fake rockets from blimps. 

While entertaining for some of us, conspiracy theories are not always harmless. The notion that vaccines cause autism has led to a decrease in vaccinations in some areas, and climate change denial is putting our entire (round) planet at risk. But where do these theories come from? What makes people latch on to seemingly ridiculous ideas, rejecting what should be common consensus?

Conspiracy theories offer simple explanations for complex situations and often allow people to believe they know something that the elite and powerful wish to hide. For this reason, conspiracy theories are especially potent in dictatorships, where information, especially from the government, is often unreliable. Conspiracy theories are especially problematic because some are nearly impossible to refute. The U.S. government cannot prove that it didn’t fake the moon landing, nor can it prove that it does not have aliens in a lab in Nevada.

But how do conspiracy theories come to be? While conspiracy theories are popular under dictatorships, they also are prevalent in democratic states, such as the United States. This is because, says sociologist Stanley Cohen, it begins as a moral panic. “A condition, episode, person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media,” he says. A crucial feature of the moral panic is a “folk devil” which is typically a scapegoat who has nothing to do with the threat. Cohen says, “The folk devil often takes the form of a conspiracy.” For this reason, conspiracy theories are most common during economic downturns, but they also flourish during economic upturns. For example, the idea that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was building secret concentration camps was popular on the left during the 1980s and on the right in the 1990s, both of which were periods of high economic growth. However, the variable in this case was which political party was in power, which supports the notion that whatever party is out of power has worried that the party in power would turn fascist. 

Today, the United States seems to be again in the midst of a moral panic, which may be a significant cause in the rise of groups such as the Flat Earth Society. With Hughes’ launch expected on Tuesday of this week, maybe we’ll find out for certain if those wretched Freemasons have been lying to us all along.