The Conspiracy Instinct

A lot of us are paranoid these days. We perceive hidden cabals behind every political victory or national tragedy. It seems as if everything is connected. Yet it’s never clear if these connections are linked behind the scenes or simply inside our heads.

One provocative explanation for why people see conspiracies everywhere comes from cognitive science. It’s the theory that conspiracy theories and religion spring from the same subconscious drives. If we reduce conspiracy theories to their cognitive nuts and bolts, they look like a parody of traditional religious worldviews. By the same token, religion itself boils down to a cosmic conspiracy theory.

Take a moment to forget everything they want you to believe. Put on your X-ray science specs and connect the dots. What do religion and conspiracy theory have in common?

Both attribute invisible agency to otherwise unconnected events. Both claim that subtle control grids—whether metaphysical, technological, or some combination thereof—are pulling the puppet strings through surveillance and sinister manipulation. At the apex of this obscure hyperreality, true powers direct the phony archons sent to hypnotize the masses. You just have to pull back the curtain.

Who sent the plague? They did. Who shot the president? Unseen conspirators. The demons. Them.

Beyond our seemingly inept human leaders, there is a higher intelligence engineering every traumatic event. Terrorist attacks, pandemics, and hurricanes all spring from the same origin. The true causal force behind any man-made catastrophe or supposedly “natural” disaster is a nearly omniscient, almost omnipotent cabal: THEM.

They see what you do. They know what you think. The gods and the demons. The magicians and technicians. They are in total control—or will be if you don’t SEND MONEY now!!

Whenever a subgnostic prophet chews my ear off about the all-knowing “they” and the all-powerful “them,” I imagine some hermetic tranny with black robes and blue hair pushing they/their buttons in a secret CERN control room.

“You wanna know who’s REALLY behind it all???”

“Um . . . They/Them?”

Sit with the reductive, cog-sci point of view for a spell. At the fountainheads of both religion and conspiracy theory, one finds an embattled elect to whom unique powers of perception are ascribed: the priests and the prophets, the pamphleteers and the podcasters. These special knowers can interpret outward events and divine the true agents responsible for them. You see these truth-tellers at the pulpit or hear their truthstreams on a smartphone.

Who sent the plague? They did. Who shot the president? Unseen conspirators. The demons. Them.

This idea of “religion as conspiracy theory” was fashionable in certain academic circles a decade ago, when I was in grad school. There was a decent psych study getting passed around that found a strong correlation between religiosity and a propensity to believe conspiracy theories.

Subsequent surveys have confirmed this correlation: antivaxxers are disproportionately religious, as are 9/11 truthers and QAnon plan-trusters.

At the time, I was studying cognitive and evolutionary science via Boston University’s School of Theology. Sure enough, the libbed-out BU faculty and hard-left seminarians were eaten up with conspiracy theories. Who is actually driving black-on-black crime? White supremacists. Why does the Bible blame Eve for bringing sin into the world? A cabal of sexist theologians. What is the ultimate image of divinity? God as They/Them.

All of this confirmed the idea that brain modules for religiosity are geared to detect conspiracies. To be clear, I’m not saying this theory is true. It’s merely a cold, reductionist lens turned back on the paranoid mind’s eye. So loosen up. Peek into the microscope. Have fun with it.

Trust the Science?

Sian Roper

“Religion as conspiracy theory” has profound implications for cognitive science. Take the standard materialist cognitive model, which discards superfluous factors such as metaphysical vision or transcendent souls. In that spiritless system, human perception and imagination arise from the brain’s cognitive machinery. These cognitive modules have inherent biases shaped by evolution. In our ancient evolutionary environment—where fellow naked apes might band together and come at you for the hell of it—a more paranoid hominid was less likely to be killed by tribal conspirators. So were his offspring.

Under the selective pressure of scheming cavemen, the genes responsible for hyperactive conspiracy-detection would flourish. If your bug-out mode activates appropriately, that’s an obvious win. It was either them or you—but YOU got the drop on THEM. Smash face. Take food. Drag mate. Feel good.

Of course, if your paranoid instinct gets out of hand, you wind up offing your allies and dying alone. Still, the balance of natural selection would allow, and even favor, a degree of over-calibration. Even if your hyperactive module fires off an occasional false positive and you club Ugg to death for no reason—oh well. That’s one less male to impregnate your women. Better safe than sorry.

And so the conspiracy-detection module would multiply and thrive alongside other social instincts, such as ethnocentrism and anthropomorphism—often interacting with these inclinations, perhaps amplifying them. Conspiracy-brain is an apophenic extension of hyperactive agency-detection, which causes you to jump at the slightest movement or snap of a stick in a dark forest. You can afford a hundred false positives if that keeps you primed for the real thing. All it takes is one false negative for a predator to catch you slipping.

Natural selection favors a slightly overclocked detection system. Therefore, a significant portion of humanity is hyper-vigilant by nature. The rest may be mentally stable, but they’re also sitting ducks.

Agency-detection modules function like cognitive searchlights scanning the perceptual environment. It’s as much about projection as detection. In the case of anthropomorphism, you don’t directly perceive faces in the clouds. Your brain is designed to spot faces, so it constantly projects a generic face template subconsciously until an actual face triggers your full attention. Anthropomorphic illusions are a side effect of this mechanism. The same goes for potential conspiracies brewing in your social coalition. Most likely, those menacing faces around the campfire are just a projection— at least until someone clubs you in the back of the head.

Assuming that such cognitive biases shape human culture, the implications for religion are also profound. If our brains evolved to probe the perceptual environment for unseen agents and we’re prone to false positives, what does that look like in the aggregate? From a strictly materialist point of view, this offers a possible explanation for why human societies expend vast resources detecting and appeasing mere faces in the clouds. Follow the Science!

Religion as Conspiracy

Imagine the Exodus as a conspiracy theory. It’s a diabolical exercise, to be sure, but take the ride with me. You can get off any time.

If you read Exodus from the Egyptian perspective, Pharaoh is actually controlled opposition. True, he orders the Hebrews’ firstborn to be killed. In the official story, he leads charioteers to capture the escaped subversives. But ultimately it’s all kayfabe. According to the biblical text, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart from the beginning. The Hebrews were meant to escape no matter what. Moses was always going to win. Every character in the story plays into the Zionist agenda—even God.

You can apply the same conspiratorial rubric to the Crucifixion. For the first-century sheeple herded by the mainstream media of their day, the official narrative was that the Romans executed Jesus for insurrection. But the REAL story is EXPOSED in the Gospels!!! We find out it was actually the JEWS who goaded the Romans into killing Christ. (Every. Single. Time.) According to the evangelist John, this Jewish conspiracy was quietly instigated by Satan. Going a step further, the theological dot-connector sees that God really tricked Satan into bringing salvation to the world. It was all rigged from the beginning.

Take the Gnostic red pill, and you realize Yahweh is really the Demiurge, who imprisoned our souls in these fleshly bags of excrement. You recognize the orthodox priests are co-conspirators, and the real Jesus didn’t come here to be crucified or demand faith in some fictionalized biography. No, he came to confer secret knowledge, or “gnosis.” Think of the ancient Gnostics as forerunners of today’s esoteric podcasters who peel back consensus reality to reveal the dark Truth. (Be sure to *like* and *subscribe*.)

As with our prehistoric ancestors, ancient Jews and early Christians were subconsciously probing their natural and social environments for invisible agents. They may have used language and reason to connect the dots and reveal the true powers that be, but deep down, such revelations were shaped by hyperactive agency-detection modules in the brain. Having limited rationality and few sources of valid information, they projected imaginary characters onto the vast unknown and concocted elaborate stories about their motives. Their own subconscious minds were conspiring against them.

Conspiracy as Religion

The cognitive overlap between religion and conspiracy theory also explains the mass freakouts over vaxxbots, chemtrails, and political assassinations. Starting in late 2020, people began sending me forbidden information about the COVID vaccines, all of which was freely available on the internet. The shots contained luciferase, they insisted. “Look at the PATENTS!!” Demonic mRNA technologies were inscribing the Mark of the Beast onto everyone’s DNA. Each shot was swarming with nanobots that connect the brain to 5G cell towers, allowing “technocrats” to directly monitor and control entire populations with the press of a button. Due to subatomic magic, the vaccinated were channeling Satan himself through the quantum realm.

Demonic mRNA technologies were inscribing the Mark of the Beast onto everyone’s DNA.

Given the blatant obfuscation and lies put out by medical authorities, it’s only natural that vigilant citizens would have their hyperactive agency-detection devices triggered. For over-clocked cavemen, every stick snapping in the dark sounded like a predator. For 21st-century vaxxbot theorists, every stroke or serpentine bloodclot was evidence the jab contained some secret potion or another.

Something similar happened in autumn 2024, when Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc on North Carolina. Before the bodies were even counted, overconfident voices in “alternative” media were declaring the megastorm was actually engineered by them. They had seeded the clouds with nanoparticles. They used the NEXRAD system—that is, Doppler radar—to steer the hurricane to its target. They did this to extract lithium from King Mountain, we were told, or to suppress Trump voters in Appalachia. In fact, they have been “weaponizing the weather” for decades. They basically control everything.

In ancient times, visionary priests would ascribe natural disasters to the wrath of the gods, citing some human infraction or deficiency. In the age of social media, we get thousands of cloudposters sharing pics of regular contrails or even everyday clouds, adding captions like “We’re getting sprayed like hell today!!” or “They are LITERALLY KILLING US!!!”

Feeding into this cloudposter culture, you have researchers like Peter Kirby claiming that rogue CIA agents are using weather control technology to whip up storms and cause droughts. Why would they do such a thing? “Well, if Satanists are in charge,” Kirby speculates, “everything makes sense, right?” Kirby would go on to explain—with no sense of irony—that “woke Democrats” are using the Satanist playbook to “create a whole world in your head, a whole world of lies, a whole fantasy world that you think is real.” Like a snake eating its own tail.

Manufacturing Dissent

Then you have political assassinations and the endless theories spinning out from them. Real-life tragedies become fodder for a booming paranoia industry that repackages your fears and sells them back to you.

After Charlie Kirk was killed onstage in Utah, the official story was hastily stitched together like a rumpled quilt to pull over the public’s eyes. The standard Conservative, Inc. line was that, vaguely, “The Left” was behind it: the atheists, the race hustlers, the trannies, the DEMOCRATS. “They killed Charlie Kirk!” Yet questions remained about how a high-powered rifle would inflict such a modest wound, or why a provocateur in the crowd, George Zinn, created an intentional diversion. In the absence of a convincing mainstream explanation, “alternative” media erupted in fevered accusations to fill the vacuum.

Candace Owens turned her attention away from the world-controlling, Flat Earth-denying Freemasons to ask questions about Israel’s relationship to the Kirk assassination. She cited actual private messages that revealed conflicts between Kirk and his Jewish donors just before his death. The toothy Ian Carroll and bespectacled Harrison Smith also suspected Israel. As if directed by some surrealist filmmaker, Nick Fuentes called the Israel angle a dumb conspiracy theory.

Former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson openly argued the Ukrainians murdered Kirk, echoing a string of stories in Russian media. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev implied much the same: “Maybe it’s time for the MAGA team to realize that by supporting Ukraine, they’re supporting murderers.” The Christian chaos magician Aleksandr Dugin called Kirk a martyr— perhaps the catalyst for a new American “civil war”—and implied that Satanic globalists were responsible for his death.

So whodunit? The Left? The Jews? The Ukrainians? The Satanic globalists? I don’t know. But there is one thread connecting all these theories.

Invisible agents. Subtle control grids. Malicious intent. If the deep origins of conspiracy theory don’t lie in one’s fact-gathering abilities and powers of reason—but rather in the primal projections of one’s cognitive machinery—this circular firing squad of reckless accusation is exactly what we’d expect to see.

Your Brain is Conspiring Against You

For better or worse, certain elements of the human mind function like magnets for paranoid ideas. Just as we evolved to seek out sweet foods and sex, so we evolved to perceive conspiracies. Obviously, this psychological model doesn’t tell us anything about the truth or falsehood of the conspiracy theories themselves, any more than the design of a radar system tells you whether a UFO is man-made or extraterrestrial— or if the blip onscreen even represents an object in the real world. It only tells us why we would evolve to perceive dangerous unseen coalitions, and why our perception is over-calibrated toward false alarms.

Just as evolutionary psychology sheds light on why modern Americans gorge themselves into a diabetic torpor and expend their vitality on goonbot porn, so our cognitive bias toward religious thinking and conspiracy theory provides an insight into why millions of Americans are glued to glowing screens, doomscrolling their way toward some imagined ultimate Truth.

Not that I take such vulgar reductionism at face value. The reality goes much deeper. Everyone knows they push these dismissive “scientific” arguments to subvert our faith in God. They use psychoanalysis and theories of “projection” to gaslight you into denying the evidence of your eyes. They want you to believe their sinister plots are all in your head. That’s how they cover their tracks. That’s how they get you.