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(I originally posted this in the Small-Scale Questions thread, but @Primaprimaprima thought it might be a better fit here.)
Last week I finished reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the record straight on the JFK assassination and prove that Oswald acted alone. Posner reserves plenty of ire for the assorted conspiracy theories that mushroomed around the assassination over the last six decades.
I dislike the terms "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", as they're generally used as terms of dismissal or abuse: characterising a particular hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory" is tantamount to saying that it's untrue, and characterising the person who espouses it as a "conspiracy theorist" is tantamount to calling them paranoid and unserious. But this shouldn't be the case, because conspiracies do happen! Some important historical events really were the product of conspiracies. Imagine if a public figure was killed, you thought he might have been murdered, and I rolled my eyes and said "oh, you're one of those 'murder theorists'." Murders really happen! There's nothing intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given dead person might have been intentionally and unlawfully killed by another person; nor is there anything intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given event might have been the result of multiple clandestine actors working together to bring it about. As many have noted before me, theories about history or current affairs are rubbished and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" – right up until the very moment they're proven true, at which point they simply become historical fact.
However. We're all familiar with the type of person described by the term "conspiracy theorist". The people in tinfoil hats, the people who never believe the official story, the people who attribute every setback (no matter how trivial) to the dark hand of da Joos/the CIA/the Illuminati. These people may not be paranoid in a clinical sense, but they reflexively jump to the conclusion that there is more to every news story than meets the eye, and the conclusion seems effectively predetermined. They arrive at the conclusion first, then go looking for evidence to support it.
I wish we had better terms for "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", respectively. When we use the former, what we're really getting at is that a historical event is being attributed to a vast nefarious conspiracy on the basis of little to no evidence. "Conspiracy theory" should be a neutral term which expresses no judgement on whether the theory is true or not, but I think it would be genuinely helpful to have a separate term for how the term is used nowadays i.e. as a particularly far-fetched and implausible example of same. "Truther" is starting to catch on ("9/11 truther", "Lucy Letby truther"), but it would be nice to have a noun for the theory itself, as opposed to the person espousing it.
And when we characterise someone as a "conspiracy theorist", we don't usually mean that they espouse one conspiracy theory and no others. We usually mean that they advance conspiracy theories habitually and reflexively, that there are vast swathes of human history they attribute to the machinations of nefarious organisations operating in secret. People to whom the term "conspiracy theorist" don't, as a rule, endorse the mainstream historical narrative except for one little wrinkle: it's an entirely different worldview, a paranoid style. I think "tinfoil hat wearer" is a much more apt term for people with this worldview or mindset than "conspiracy theorist", except that I'm not sure if anyone actually wore a tinfoil hat in complete sincerity.
What do ye think? Any ideas? What would your preferred terms for these concepts be?
IMO the main problem with conspiracy theory is the "conspiracy": large groups of people are generally bad at closely cooperating without leaking information. Although it does happen, the other main problem with most conspiracy theories is requiring a long-term plan with broad predictions (like public perception) to mostly succeed, which (granted, in the public eye) seems to never happen. And to top it off, most conspiracy theorists don't provide an obvious motive and their evidence seems like obvious mistakes. So you expect me to believe this massive group orchestrated a years-long plan without any leaks or slip-ups, predicted what no-one else could (and relied on those predictions for their years-long plan, so they must have been either very confident or very reckless), except for these glaring flaw only a group of crackpots discovered; and why so much effort and risk, what couldn't be accomplished through simpler means? Well, it hasn't been disproven...
Emergent theories are easier to believe: rather than a group coordinating to do something, members all have similar motivation, and rather than planning ahead, their actions just happen to lead to or benefit from the outcome. In fact, there may be lots of coordination and omission, because people can identify their "ingroup" and "outgroup" mostly reliably and even subconsciously; but no center or plan, just natural human behavior, and it's not actually secret, the signs are obvious just not to you. The other thing about emergent theories is the leaders actually aren't human (there are none), and the plan actually isn't human-made (there is none), which explains no good motive and obvious flaws.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Consequently, never attribute a masterminded evil plan to typical human behavior on a large scale inadvertently causing big problems.
The Futility of Emergence:
Now as for what you wrote specifically, I would call this individualistic theory, and not emergent. That's clearer. But you said:
Let's use red tribe as an example. Clearly, some of their members plan ahead. Are you modeling mice here, or men?
Partially true. Conspiracy = coordination + secret. Sometimes, there's not-secret coordination. However, there is no requirement that there be no center or plan at all. Very often in human groups there is, in fact, a center and a plan. Like Donald Trump and Project 2025. What is more interesting is thinking about the ultimate power of this center. Usually it is there, but it only partially explains phenomena.
No, usually human groups have leaders.
Typically there are some plans and the plans are in fact made with the big brain in the skull which evolved for a reason to be able to make plans.
Members do plan ahead and sometimes coordinate, they may have leadership, may even believe they are forming a conspiracy. The difference from a real conspiracy theory is that the actual plans and coordination are a small part of the overall process, and the leaders have little control over it; more like, the process started and they happened to notice and ride it, but they didn't cause it to happen and it would've happened without them (maybe with others instead).
Or it could be a big but not complete part of the process, and the leaders have a lot but not complete control over it. Or big could be moderate. How do you know whether it's big, moderate, or little/small? What are you basing this off of?
It depends what you mean. In general leaders ride their followers, because they do not have the power of mind control. But their plans are the product of agency.
The typical conspiracy theory heavily implies if not outright states near-complete centralization: a group (spontaneously or after an event) meets, plans something, and carefully orchestrates it. The reality, that what they were planning started without them and would continue without them (via some other group), or that their plan was a small part of what the conspiracy theory accuses them of, makes the theory misleading: it gives the impression these people have more competence and foresight than reality.
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