Reasoning in response to conspiracy theories

Our recent post on conspiracy theories has generated a range of thoughts and observations amongst visitors to the website. Complementing and responding to the initial post, here's a input to the ongoing discussion and debate from Mike Makin-Waite: further contributions and thoughts are very welcome ...

The author of ‘Conspiracy theories’ states that these dangerous efforts to undermine our capacity to make sense of the world are a serious problem: they ‘corrode our personal relationships, poison our popular movements, and tear at the fabric of human society’.

I strongly agree – and I also recognise the importance of sometimes ‘protecting yourself’. I understand why ‘walking away from a conspiracy theorist’ can make sense, both for our own well-being and as a demonstration that we are ‘refusing … irrationality’. The need to avoid burnout and overwhelm is crucial for progressive activists. As Hannah Proctor (University of Strathclyde) details in an important and stimulating book, strategies and tactics for ‘maintaining hope in the face of despair’ have a long history in our movements.

But is ‘walking away’ and ‘stopping engaging’ with irrational and conspiratorial thinking the strategic approach all of us should take?

Does ‘engagement’ with those who are drawn towards and captured by the corrosive and poisonous conspiracy theories which are such a disturbing feature of current culture always amount to ‘indulging’ or ‘tolerating’?

If this is the case, we would be giving up on many thousands of people who are going in these dangerous directions.

Instead, perhaps our aim should be to find ways of countering the influence of conspiracy theories. This isn't easy, and it's a process of exploration to learn how to connect to and counter-influence the people we know who voice and share such theories.

In making such connections, stating that they are delusional and untrustworthy is unlikely to be effective.

A more helpful approach is to try and relate effectively to the reasons why they are entertaining irrational views – and here, as a first step, a range of resources are available to inform our understanding.

Members of the ‘Frankfurt School’ (a strand of western Marxism) responded to emergent fascism from the 1930s by seeking to identify the psychological and cultural causes of this ‘unexpected ideological development’. They explored the drivers and sources of irrationalism, rather than ‘blindly worshipping at the altar of rationalism’ (Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment). Classic works of such thinkers which were published in the 1940s are, unfortunately, no longer of merely historical significance but have immediate relevance.

More recently, a number of psychologists and political scientists have proposed approaches to engaging people with delusional beliefs and enthusiasts for political myths and rumours.

And in a very useful book on these issues, the progressive writer Naomi Klein assesses why ‘politics increasingly feels like a mirror world, with society split in two, and each side defining itself against the other – whatever one says and believes, the other seems obliged to say and believe the exact opposite’.

She shares insights into some of the attractions of conspiratorial thinking: in the USA, ‘plenty of people … have good reason not to trust both Big Pharma and Big Government (poisoned water, Flint; fracking misinformation; Monsanto claims carcinogenic herbicide is safe; drug companies peddling opioids) … it is entirely rational to be sceptical toward monopolistic power … The extreme consolidation in the corporate world over the past three decades has produced a playing field so rigged against consumers that pursing the basics of life can feel like navigating a never-ending series of scams. It’s as if everyone is trying to trick us in the fine print of pages and pages of service agreements they know we will never read. The black box is not just the algorithms running our communications networks – almost everything is a black box, an opaque system hiding something else. The housing market isn’t about homes; it’s about hedge funds and speculators. Universities aren’t about education; they’re about turning young people into lifelong debtors. Long-term care facilities aren’t about care; they’re about draining our elders in their last years of life and real estate plays …. Nothing is as it seems …’

Even as peoples’ reactions to this situation are misdirected by bad actors, and can spill over and extend into bizarre irrationalism, Klein suggests that ‘maybe we should see conspiracy culture – with its theatre of uncovering things that are not hidden – as some sort of twisted lunge for self-respect’.

Klein quotes Marcus Gilroy-Ware to underline that ‘conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion’, and argues that ‘conspiracy theories … are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites’.

Given all this, finding ways to counter ‘the confusion’ and to reason together with those who are vulnerable to it, and to build up a culture of sense-making, is one of the key challenges of our time.

Published 7 October 2025

DLS apologises for the illustration, which is intended to remind us of the well-funded, divisive and cynical bad actors who are promoting disinformation and conspiracy theories which they do not necessarily even believe themselves. Naomi Klein writes with great insight about Bannon in her 2023 book Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world