It’s an old saw, but for good reason. Conspiracy theories tend to flourish because they are, in some strange sense, comforting. They create the appearance of order in a universe filled with chaos. If a lone nutcase can kill John F. Kennedy, then there’s a certain inextinguishable randomness to the violence that governs human affairs. But if it were all a conspiracy, one involving the CIA and the FBI and the KGB and the Mafia and the Freemasons and the Knights Templar and Opus Dei, well, then in a deep sense, the world is governed by rules. Cruel and unjust rules, maybe, the kind that rob the country of their telegenic leader. But still, there is a logic to that injustice, a cold sort of stepwise purpose. No wonder even a president can be killed, if the most powerful forces in the world were conspiring to end his life! And that’s a lot more comforting, isn’t it? If Lee Harvey Oswald were just some guy with a gun, well. . . who among us is safe?
It happens that I don’t reject JFK conspiracy theories out of hand. There is enough smoke there that skepticism toward the official narrative is justified. And I’m on the record saying that there is a circularity to the term conspiracy theory that renders these conversations difficult. It’s also simply the case that many conspiracy theories have been proven true over time. After all, the idea that the United States orchestrated the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, aided the Indonesian army in slaughtering half a million people, or deliberately looked the other way as Nicaragua supercharged the crack trade in Southern California—these were all once “conspiracy theories.”
Still and all, I recognize that the desire for order is a major driver of this tendency in modern politics. In a cacophony of limitless information, in a world of irreducible complexity, the tendency of these theories to introduce even more complexity and information paradoxically makes our era seem more comprehensible, more subject to human understanding. Conspiracy theories involve some extremely difficult historical math, the endless multiplication of variables, and the injection of unnecessary operations. But it’s still math. It still appears rule-bound. It suggests that, if we’re only smart enough, there is a solution waiting. And that’s exactly what I think of when I see all of this fixation on Jeffrey Epstein. It’s a record of our desire to force the most disturbing crime of all to make sense.
