Of course people believe ‘conspiracy theories’ – why wouldn’t they?

The rug has been pulled out from under our feet. We can, no longer, agree on anything at all. Ask anyone about anything at all and you’ll be confronted with wildly different answers.

That terrible attack in Moscow – ask an anti-Putin Russian and they’ll claim it was Vladimir himself who gave it the green light; terrorist attacks in the past have been used as a pretext of expanding state power, and in this case was the prelude to further rounds of conscription.

Ask a pro-Putin Russian and it was the CIA and MI6, in conjunction with Kiev, who used Islamic nutjobs to carry out their dirty proxy war. Such a view will also be held by Westerners who, quite rightly, hold their governments in utmost suspicion after they walked blindly into series of unnecessary, unwinnable and hugely costly wars.

Then there is the establishment view – namely that it was ISIS-K. Although this sounds like a low-fat breakfast cereal, it is actually a group of murderous Islamic thugs. Certainly not something you want to start the day with alongside your morning coffee.

Who is right? You, dear reader, are probably a signed-up member of one of these three camps. Perhaps there are other permutations I have not come across – there always are. The flow of information online is so frenetic and excitable that to keep track of theories on any matter whatsoever constitutes a full-time job.

Then, of course, we have the recent drama surrounding Kate Middleton (as I continue to incorrectly call her). Leaving aside the bizarre coincidence of both her and Charles’ simultaneous cancer diagnosis (what are the odds? Are we allowed to mention the rapid increase in cancer diagnoses since you-know-what?), her disappearance from the public square at the beginning of 2024 led to wild speculation.

The theories I have heard vary from last-days-of-the-Roman-Empire debauchery to Agatha Christie whodunnits. Tales of princes with penchants for pegging, wild-eyed murders of spouses’ lovers, secret families and blackmail abounded. With each passing day and each unforced PR error the royals made, the fire was only further stoked.

Subsequently a dramatic denouement followed. People overly excited by the theorising suddenly sheepishly apologised for their exuberance; others meaning stood defiantly by their sceptical positions (how do we know that the diagnosis was not just another ploy, eh?).

It’s all a bit mad if you ask me. I do not particularly blame people for entertaining seemingly wild conspiracy theories, for too often have those once mad notions been proven entirely right. The difference between a conspiracy theory and indelible fact is often just a matter of a few months.

Establishment media outlets have blamed the proliferation of ‘conspiracy theories’ on the usual suspects: China, Russia and Iran. Perhaps it’s true that they originate there – again, how would I know? – but even if it they do it hardly gets to the heart of the matter. If people are lapping up this salaciousness, the question must be why. The answer is surely because they have lost faith with institutions which took their loyalty for granted for too long. The narrative peddled by those atop our systems of government and media are too unconvincing to too great a number of us. It’s a bit like being in a relationship: people only tend to look elsewhere once dissatisfaction reaches a critical level. As far as partners go, our establishment has proven itself disloyal, selfish and increasingly abusive.

A certain rot that has penetrated far into the woodwork of our societies. The beams and joists of what has for so long held up our societal structure is decaying rapidly, our community’s glue is losing its adhesiveness.

People no longer feel bound together as a cohesive unit. This is the product of decades of purposeful undermining of institutions, structures and beliefs that were once taken as a priori truths. The things people took for granted – nation, faith, family – all become the victims of civilisation destroyers’ targeted assault. Suddenly people were unmoored, adrift.

Such a process was started indigenously but was accelerated by the rapid and historically unprecedented dilution of the national character through immigration. A population broadly stable over centuries thrown into a grand experiment. To mention such a fact is naturally uncouth, but millions of people extraneous of the national settlement cannot be injected suddenly without major disturbance to an equilibrium created over centuries of society’s gradual negotiations.  

Suddenly, the bonds that fasten the nation together were undermined. That we were plucky Brits in the face of adversity – variously the Kaiser, Napoleon or that Austrian chap – can not have been true, with those generations of Britons irrevocably racist, sexist and knuckle-dragging in their disposition. Hence their good deeds must have, in reality, been malign. We are merely the beneficiary of uncommon evil, not our own endeavour and our people’s centuries of industry.

And if that is untrue, and our history just a baleful story of brutishness – much at odds with the story we were told for generations – then why should anything we are told today be true? Is it feasible that our past is a lie, but our present is simply truth?

Little wonder that competing narratives spring like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. You cannot expect to dismantle the world people thought they lived in and for them then to slavishly accept the narrative of the new world imposed on them from above.

Most alarmingly such trends will only worsen with time. We are midway through a potentially terrifying change: already AI and deepfakes are so convincing that they are nearly indistinguishable from reality. Whereas once a video, a photo or a document was incontrovertible evidence, they may now simply be the product of a few moments’ computer processing after an inputted prompt.

How will anyone trust anything ever again? As the small imperfections of AI are ironed out – the odd giveaway signs of non-human ‘hands’ at work – we will arrive at a point where you can only trust what you directly experience. As an end point of our ongoing technological revolution, which was supposed to infinitely expand our horizons, it is undoubtedly an ironic outcome.