So it is that more and more Americans are drawn to conspiracy theory, a term I do not use as a pejorative. After all, any incident of secret coordination is a conspiracy, and any story we tell about it is, at least implicitly, a theory. The trouble is that most conspiracy theories—at least of the sort that aren’t universally accepted—are wrong, simply because of the nature of odds. Every good investigator tries on and discards countless theories in the course of work, but all of them, save one, will be incorrect. Anyone could have disbelieved (although few of us did) claims by George W. Bush’s White House that Saddam Hussein was hiding a large cache of WMDs and that the U.S. government knew where they were. But few were the minds who could have come up with the notion that Saddam Hussein’s regime had destroyed its WMDs while pretending that it hadn’t in order to scare Tehran. It’s a conspiracy theory that makes very little sense yet happens to have been true. In most cases, our conspiracy theories are wrong.
The other problem with our new predilections toward self-directed detective work, the tragic one, is that conspiracy theories are the product of lost trust. When you have reason to doubt the official story, or even the basic decency of those telling it, you’ll be hard-pressed to avoid formulating alternative possibilities. Because the reputation of our press has been as much in decline as that of any other authority, it can do little to quell even the stupidest ideas. That’s why our news outlets have done better at disseminating bad notions rather than debunking them. That’s one reason Americans continue to believe that Trump had secret channels to Moscow in 2016 and worked with Russian intelligence to steal the election, no matter how long and deeply federal investigators worked, without success, at finding evidence of it. It’s also why a smaller but still troubling number of Americans continue to believe that Trump is on a calculated mission to uproot a corrupt and malevolent deep state, no matter how high up his bumbling and screwups manage to pile.preve
When you lose faith in your institutions, the world looks sinister. Sometimes this leads to political revolution and the rise of a strongman. Fortunately, Donald Trump has more in common with Rufus T. Firefly than with effective dictators, who tend to be disciplined fanatics. The more prevalent response is apathy or cynicism, and both are tempting, especially amid an abundance of laugh-or-cry-style news. It’s altogether perfect that lawyer David Boies, famous lately for having done his best to bully anyone who got in the way of sociopaths like Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Holmes, has now switched into the reputation-washing lane for a spell and begun to represent some of Epstein’s accusers, albeit not without some ethical hiccups. The players switch sides, white hat or black hat, and the game continues. What’s next for Boies? One half expects to learn he has been a lawyer for Ghislaine Maxwell. And then he’ll have to pick an even better cause as penance.
There isn’t much evidence to suggest that lost faith gets restored or that paranoia fades away, at least not for the individual. It looks more like a new generation comes along and, in blissful obliviousness, sets a happier mood, at least until it, too, gets walloped by some ugly reality. In China, one generation felt betrayed by Mao Zedong and another felt betrayed by Deng Xiaoping, but both are now old, and they were superseded by a nationalistic cohort that’s far less resentful. Here in the United States, the 1970s saw an upsurge of paranoia in the wake of disillusionment over Vietnam, Watergate, and our intelligence services, but those who came of age in 1980s and 1990s and saw the triumph (it seemed) of the liberal world order were more trusting, at least until the post-9/11 era. In a decade about 30 million of our adults will be dead and 40 million kids will be on their way up to replace them, so maybe the mood will shift once more back to trust, at least of a modest sort.