TIME OF THE CONSPIRACY THEORIST

ONSPIRACY theorists were once called cranks and viewed with contempt by the sophisticates of society.

- CP SURENDRAN

Today, they dominate public discourse. Figures like Joe Rogan (who asks whether the pyramids or ancient Indian temples were built by superhuman technology), Tucker Carlson (who says Israel runs America instead of its electorate) and Candace Owens (who swears that the French president is married to a transgender woman) command larger audiences than traditional media. And, of course, many have seen aliens.

Just as gossip is a collective, if malevolent, approximation towards truth, conspiracy theories grope towards the idea that reality is maya: we do not see what we see. Almost all of this scepticism flows from our largely disappointing lives and the sense that legacy institutions, such as parliament or media, have failed. The real triumph of the conspiracy theorist is not that any one plot has been exposed, but that the conspiratorial imagination is becoming the default way of reading power.

How did this happen? Not through one grand betrayal, but through a series of small, individually rational choices—each perhaps justified on its own—that collectively produce an outcome no one explicitly intended. Each conspiracy theory chips away at public trust until the edifice collapses.

For decades, public truth was mediated through a small set of actors: State broadcasters, major newspapers and the judiciary. There was the belief that these institutions existed for public interest. That faith was largely true, or so we thought—because there was no social media then, not a million voices saying a million different things—if only to feel we all make a difference to the world.