How to become a conspiracy theorist

In Iraq, weapons existed (they did not); Saddam was an international threat (he was not); and Baghdad was an international sponsor of terrorism in the same mould as Iran (questionable).

Conspiracy theories can be institutionalised and sanitised. Many citizens of the Muslim world shelter their own demons, refusing to acknowledge the Holocaust (crafted as the grandest “conspiracy”) while believing in the overarching ambitions of Zionism. Conferences and work shops held to expose such a conspiracy (witness the moves of the Iranian Government in December 2006 on that score) simply give obscurantism a green light. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad drives the vehicle of a conspiratorial world view: yet another warrior in the pursuit of vérité.

Our technological prowess only reveals the extent that a conspiracy theory holds sway. Rather than liberating us, technological feats (the camera, the Internet, the radio, the television) become means of insulating us. Conspiracies gestate in a realm where reportage is scanty, verification rare. Paradoxically, the more pictures and more “evidence” that is amassed, the less believable an event sometimes becomes. In our post-modern vacuum, evidence is hollow, a package of glitz that satiates consumption but not truth.

There is a small step between a doubting Thomas and a card-carrying conspiracy theorist. Moon-walking becomes just as implausible as a plane piloted with precision into the Pentagon. If there are no images, it must not have happened. But if there are images, they must have been doctored, fabricated in closed settings by sinister officials.

Such reasoning is crude but consistent. All else is tampered, so we must be free to assume that our version is correct. That naturally frees the conspiracy theorist from dealing with the evidence in a scrupulous way. Often, one fraud requires the response of another. We are none the wiser.

As André Gide, winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Literature noted immediately prior to his death, those seeking the truth had to be believed; while those claiming to have found it, could not.