Conspiracy Theories

I don't use the term "conspiracy theory" in the way most people do nowadays. After all, there are conspiracies, and in appropriate circumstances it's perfectly reasonable to have theories about them. In fact that's what law enforcement investigators do for a living. For example, Donald Trump and several of his associates conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That's a real conspiracy and you are free to form theories about the details, although we know a lot of the broad outlines already. On the other hand, the "theory" that the 2020 election was somehow stolen from Mr. Trump is ridiculous. In fact there isn't even any actual theory about how it was done, other than something about Italian satellites and the late Hugo Chavez.

So the issue isn't whether there's a "conspiracy theory," the issue is whether there's a ridiculous conspiracy theory. That leading Democratic politicians and Hollywood stars constitute a cabal that rapes children and drinks their blood is ridiculous. Actually that's much too weak of a word. But . . . 

It is undoubtedly true that there is a lot the public doesn't know about what the government is up to and what's really going on in the world. It took a couple of decades before we knew that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a hoax. The conspiracy by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, enlisting their stooge George W. Bush, to convince the people of the U.S. (they didn't convince many Europeans) that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction™ and constituted a threat to the United States in order to justify an illegal war of aggression was a conspiracy that some people understood all along and others only figured out later. Wealthy people and powerful organizations such as banks influence policy making and elections in hidden ways. The government keeps a lot of secrets, and sometimes they lie to us, so it's understandable that people can believe the world works in ways that aren't much at all like what we see on the TV news or read in the newspaper, if you still do that.

Critical thinking is the capacity to distinguish what is likely, what may be plausible but for which there is no compelling evidence, and what is highly improbable or utterly ridiculous. It includes knowing how to assess the quality of evidence and the logical relationships among entities real, probable, or so far purely imagined, the latter being hypotheses that may be testable but must not simply be assumed. Filling in your gaps in knowledge with whatever you make up is not a path to truth. 

So no, you don't have to trust the government or any particular politician or journalist or purported expert. But you do need to know how to think.