The Ur-"Conspiracy": History of a Pseudoconcept(theparisreview.org)
theparisreview.org
The Ur-"Conspiracy": History of a Pseudoconcept
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2026/02/12/the-ur-conspiracy-history-of-a-pseudoconcept/
2 comments
Regarding "Conspiracy Theories" - they make a lot more sense to me if you call them "Low Information, High Satisfaction" Theories.
Regarding the rest of the article: it reminds me of how things like nursery rhymes or fairy tales or Shakespeare's plays used to mean something very different and very specific.
Regarding the rest of the article: it reminds me of how things like nursery rhymes or fairy tales or Shakespeare's plays used to mean something very different and very specific.
Mislabeling can happen, but that alone doesn't invalidate the usefulness of the term conspiracy theory. Science can be (and by default, often is) wrong. Some things might genuinely rely on weak or un-falsifiable reasoning. For now.
Every era creates its own intellectual blind spots. We don't know which of today’s dismissed ideas will later look more like actual history.
I don't argue that dismissed ideas are secretly correct. But labels do influence how seriously we investigate them.