My mother has a younger sister, who I will call my aunt, because she is, and who has been, for as long as I have known her, what the wider family politely refers to as “the eccentric one.” She is, by my honest description, a conspiracy theorist. The specific theories vary across the years. She has, at various points, been convinced that the moon landings were faked, that fluoride in the water is a deliberate program of population control, that the 2008 financial crisis was engineered by a small group of bankers for purposes the wider public has not been told about, that various pharmaceutical companies have actively suppressed effective treatments for various conditions in order to protect more profitable ones, and, in the last few years, that the geopolitical order is being reshaped by interests considerably less benign than the official narratives suggest.
I want to be honest about my aunt, because the honest description matters for what I want to write. She is, in any room she enters, the warmest person in it. She is funny. She remembers everyone’s birthdays. She is the relative who shows up when someone is sick. She has, for as long as I have known her, lived a life of considerable practical generosity that the more credentialed members of our family have not always matched. She is, by any honest accounting, a good person. She wants, in some real way, what the rest of us want, which is a world in which the people in power are operating with honesty and the systems we live inside are not actively working against the interests of the people inside them.
What separates her from the rest of the family is, more accurately, the specific cognitive style by which she engages with the question of whether the people in power are, in fact, operating with honesty. Her style is suspicious. The rest of the family’s style is, in most cases, trusting. The trusting style is the one the wider culture rewards. The suspicious style is the one the wider culture mocks. The mocking is, on close examination, sometimes deserved. The mocking is also, on the available evidence of the last fifty years, sometimes a sign of the wider culture’s own intellectual laziness rather than of the conspiracy theorist’s actual error.
What the last fifty years actually contain
I want to walk through some specific historical cases, because the cases are what changed my own relationship to the conspiracy-theorist members of my family. The cases are not, in themselves, an endorsement of conspiracy thinking as a general method. The cases are, more accurately, the structural evidence that the standard reflex of dismissing suspicious minorities is, on the historical record, considerably less reliable than the wider culture has been treating it as.
Tobacco. For decades, a minority of researchers and activists insisted that the tobacco industry was actively suppressing internal research about the health effects of smoking. The wider culture treated these claims as the paranoid overreach of a particular kind of anti-corporate crank. The internal documents that emerged from the tobacco litigation of the 1990s revealed that the suppression had, in fact, been ongoing for decades, more or less exactly as the cranks had been claiming. The cranks had been reading the situation more accurately than the experts. The cost of the misreading, in human lives, was very large.
Opioids. For most of the 2000s, a minority of doctors, journalists, and family members of patients were insisting that the pharmaceutical industry was actively misrepresenting the addictive potential of OxyContin and similar opioids. The wider medical establishment, the regulatory agencies, and most of the cultural register dismissed these claims as alarmist. The internal documents that emerged from the subsequent litigation showed that the misrepresentation had, in fact, been deliberate and longstanding. The minority had been right. The wider register had been wrong. The cost, again in human lives, was enormous.
The 2008 financial crisis. A minority of financial analysts had been warning, for years before the crisis, that the structure of the mortgage-backed securities market was producing systemic risks that the official narratives were not acknowledging. The warnings were, in most cases, dismissed as the work of permabears and contrarians. The crisis, when it arrived, confirmed the warnings essentially in full. The contrarians had been reading the room more accurately than the institutions.
The Iraq war. A minority of intelligence analysts, journalists, and ordinary citizens were insisting, in 2002 and 2003, that the official case for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was considerably thinner than the public was being told. The wider register treated these voices as either disloyal or naive. The subsequent investigations revealed that the official case had been, in considerable part, manufactured. The skeptics had been correct. The mainstream had been wrong.
I could go on. The list is, on examination, considerably longer than the wider cultural register has been comfortable acknowledging. Surveillance overreach by intelligence agencies. The misclassification of various environmental harms by industry-funded research. The various instances in which official narratives about wars, financial events, public health questions, and corporate behavior have turned out to be, on close examination, considerably more managed than the wider public was being told.
What this does not mean
I want to be careful here, because the easy misreading of what I have just written is that conspiracy thinking is, by virtue of its historical track record on these cases, a reliable method. It is not. My aunt, who has been right about several things, has also been wrong about many others. She was, for example, convinced that the moon landings were faked, which I have written about elsewhere and which, on the available evidence, is one of the cases the conspiracy framework gets clearly wrong. She is, by my honest count, somewhere around forty percent right across the various claims she holds. Forty percent is not, by any honest accounting, the track record of a reliable method.
Forty percent is, however, considerably better than zero percent, which is the implicit track record the wider culture’s dismissive reflex assumes she has. The wider culture, when it encounters a conspiracy theorist, tends to treat the entire category of their claims as automatically wrong by virtue of being held by someone with a suspicious style. The treatment is, on the historical record, a misreading. The suspicious style produces, in any given case, a particular kind of reading of the situation that is, in some cases, more accurate than the trusting style would have produced. The cases in which it is more accurate are, on examination, the cases that have, in retrospect, mattered most.
The honest position, given the historical record, is something more nuanced than either the conspiracy theorist’s general suspicion or the mainstream’s general dismissal. The honest position is that any given suspicious claim about the behavior of powerful institutions needs to be evaluated on its merits, with the recognition that the institutions are, in some real fraction of cases, operating with considerably less honesty than they are publicly claiming. The fraction is not, in any honest accounting, zero. The fraction is also not, in any honest accounting, one hundred percent. The fraction is, more accurately, large enough that the wider culture’s reflexive dismissal of suspicious claims is, on the historical record, a worse strategy than the more careful approach of actually examining each claim on its own evidence.
What dismissing too quickly costs
The cost of dismissing conspiracy theorists too quickly is not, in itself, a cost to the conspiracy theorists. They are, on the whole, fine. My aunt is fine. She holds her views with conviction. She is not, by any honest accounting, suffering from being on the wrong side of the cultural register.
The cost is, more accurately, a cost to the wider culture, which has, by reflexively dismissing the minority that turns out to be reading the situation correctly, repeatedly failed to update its institutions in time to prevent the harms the minority was warning about. The tobacco harms, the opioid harms, the financial crisis harms, the Iraq war harms, all of these were, in some real way, preventable or reducible if the wider culture had been willing to take the suspicious minority’s reading more seriously at an earlier point. The not-taking-seriously was not, in any individual case, an obviously wrong decision. The not-taking-seriously was, more accurately, the reflexive deployment of a cultural script that classifies suspicion as a sign of intellectual deficiency rather than as a particular kind of cognitive style with its own strengths and weaknesses.
The script is convenient. The script allows the wider culture to ignore the suspicious minority without doing the work of actually evaluating their claims. The script is, on the available evidence, not a reliable cognitive shortcut. The cases in which the script has been wrong are, on examination, the cases that have most shaped the recent history of the developed world.
What my aunt has taught me, in spite of herself
My aunt does not know she has taught me what I am about to describe, because the teaching has occurred in the form of my watching her hold positions that I, by my standard cultural training, was initially inclined to dismiss, and then watching, across the subsequent years, the slow emergence of evidence that suggested her positions had not been entirely wrong.
What she has taught me is that the standard mainstream cognitive style, which I have been operating with for most of my adult life, has a particular blind spot. The blind spot involves an implicit faith in the basic honesty of the institutions whose narratives I am receiving. The faith is not, in itself, irrational. The institutions are, in most cases, basically honest. The faith is, however, miscalibrated in the direction of trust, in a way that produces, across decades, a systematic vulnerability to the kinds of institutional dishonesty that have, in fact, characterized the historical record of the last fifty years.
My aunt’s cognitive style has the opposite miscalibration. She is too suspicious. She is wrong about plenty of things she is currently suspicious about. She is also, on the available evidence, less wrong than I am about the particular category of institutional dishonesty that has, in the historical record, repeatedly turned out to be real. The historical record is, more accurately, on her side on this particular question. The fact that she is wrong about the moon landings does not, on close examination, invalidate the fact that she has been less wrong than the mainstream about a fairly long list of other things.
What I have, accordingly, started doing in the last few years is to actually listen to my aunt when she advances a new theory rather than dismissing it. I do not, in most cases, end up agreeing with her. The listening has, however, produced in me a particular kind of recalibration. I now take seriously the possibility that any given suspicious claim might, on closer examination, turn out to be reading the situation more accurately than the mainstream is. The taking-seriously is not the same as believing. The taking-seriously is, more accurately, the willingness to evaluate the claim on its evidence rather than to dismiss it on the basis of who is making it.
This is, on examination, what the wider culture has been getting wrong about people like my aunt for decades. The wider culture has been evaluating her claims on the basis of her style rather than on the basis of her evidence. The style is, by any honest accounting, suspicious in a way that the wider culture finds uncomfortable. The evidence, in any given case, is what it is. The honest evaluation requires looking at the evidence rather than at the style. The honest evaluation is, on the historical record, a more reliable method than the standard reflex.
My aunt is not always right. My aunt is sometimes right. The fraction of times she is right is, on close examination, considerably higher than the wider culture’s dismissive reflex would suggest. The fraction is high enough that the dismissive reflex is, in some real way, intellectually lazy. I have, in my late thirties, finally retired the reflex. The retirement is, on the available evidence, one of the more important pieces of epistemic recalibration I have performed in my adult life. The recalibration is, in some real way, the gift my aunt has given me, even though she has no idea she has been giving it.
