Conspiracy Theories: Kwame Anthony Appiah

A lot of bigotry ends up with things like the protocols of the elders of Zion, which is a classic paranoid fantasy, a conspiracy theory. I think that conspiracy attracts the human mind because, essentially, a conspiracy is a way of fitting all kinds of things that really don't fit together, together. It's a way of making sense of the world by saying, well, that can't be an accident, and so I have to have a story about why it connects.

And so somebody offers me this preposterous story, but at least it connects these two things. And so I think, oh, well, that makes sense of it. And so in a way, our paranoid tendencies are a reflection of our need for explanation. And I actually think that one of the really important things to teach people is that there are things that just happen, and that there are things where there's no story about why these two things happened at the same time, and that that's just how the world is, because that's one of the ways of resisting the temptation, the paranoid temptation to fit everything into some grand story.

Look, one of the great conundrum that faces all of us all the time is the old why do bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen, we want an explanation. Unfortunately, in my view, the explanation for many bad things happening is it just happened. And there isn't a story about why. There isn't a deep explanation. But the sort of paranoid mindset can't accept that.

Evans-Pritchard, the great British anthropologist, has these stories about Zandeland-- that's a part of Sudan, southern Sudan-- where the Zande couldn't accept that if, say, a granary fell on somebody, there was no explanation. And so they invented this elaborate theory of witchcraft so that nobody, it turned out, in Zandeland died of anything except witchcraft. Every death had an explanation in terms of witchcraft. And once you've got that sort of mindset, you can see the evidence wherever you look.

Understanding the world-- this is a point from the philosophy of science-- is hard, and getting explanations is difficult. And making them up as opposed to finding the right ones is easier than finding the truth. And I think these paranoid stories, these conspiracy theories are part of our search for meaning.