The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

It’s hard to exaggerate just how big the topic of conspiracy theories is today. Every topic that trends on social networks has a conspiracy-theory interpretation of it. If you are not a conspiracy theorist yourself, surely you know someone who is. And even if you don’t consider yourself a conspiracy theorist, others may.

But what exactly is a conspiracy theory? How is it different from other types of speculation? Are conspiracy theories harmful, and how? If we are to condemn at least some types of conspiracy theories, which ones do we select? And how does that square up against the principle of free expression? These questions are now in the public limelight as social media platforms and public regulators try to devise algorithms and policies that would strike a balance between free and harmful speech.

My intention here is to attempt to apply René Girard’s mimetic theory to the psychology of conspiracy theories in the hope of shedding some new light on the above questions for the readers. The topic is controversial, consequential, and complex, so I must make a disclaimer right here at the beginning that I’m not a qualified professional and that the opinions and analyses that follow are speculative.

To my knowledge, Girard never elaborated on the topic of conspiracy theories directly. In his time, the term did not gain the popularity that it has today. But his analyses proved to be prophetic of the issues we are seeing in today’s hyper-connected world – mimetic snowballing on social media and in the stock markets, the polarization of opinion, and others. And though conspiracy theories have always existed, it is in today’s hyper-connected world that they have become noted for their viral and disruptive power.

Unfortunately, it must be said that no one else besides Girard seems to have elaborated on the phenomenon of conspiracy theories to any great success. Everyone has a theory on them, of course, but we don’t have one that’s garnered much consensus. At least I couldn’t find it by googling.

However, I did find a reasonable technical definition: “conspiracy beliefs are usually described as beliefs in the existence of a ‘vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of most fiendish character.’”

Out of this definition, I would take three elements that can distinguish the unhealthy type of conspiracy theories from sound skepticism:

1. Scale – conspiracies are “vast,” “international,” etc., - and yet no evidence or confession is ever leaked.

2. “Preternaturally effective” – the conspirators possess a level of intelligence or ability that regular people never encounter face-to-face in real life, and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to recognize it.

3. “Fiendish character” – there is never a conspiracy to do something nice for the world; conspirators are always up to a level of evil that, like their intelligence, is beyond the domain of an ordinary human.

Conspiracy theories tend to either contain all of these elements, or none. Those that contain none I will leave out of this conversation. If you think that the CIA conspired to start a war somewhere, you can do so without endowing the CIA with omnipresence, omnipotence, and deliberate evil. That’s fine by me. But if you do endow, well, let’s talk.

The expert consensus on the phenomenon of conspiracy theories is negative and, I would say, dismissive. Often, a genuine attempt at discovering their root cause is replaced by lists of “correlations” and “predictors.” Norwegian University of Science and Technology explains that conspiracy theorists tend to have less education, are less democratic, belong to “groups that feel they should have more power and influence,” to “special political organizations or religious groups,” are more narcissistic and paranoid, spend too much time on social media, and so on. A Frontiers in Psychology paper finds that they score low on agreeableness and high in openness to new experiences. Another scholarly paper in Personality and Individual Differences finds that conspiratorial thinking is predicted by “schizotypal personality,” “social dominance orientation,” “right wing authoritarianism,” “paranormal beliefs,” and, confusingly enough, “conspiracy mentality.”

I am not here to disagree with any of those findings. All these technical-sounding causes of conspiratorial thinking are high-level phenomena that don’t really get to the root of the problem. The question remains: okay, but what causes paranormal beliefs?

Why can’t modern social sciences solve such an urgent and seemingly straightforward problem? My girardian hypothesis would be that digging too deep into the conspiracy theory phenomenon would put the limelight on just how irrational and mimetic we are and may thus endanger a foundational principle of our society: that the individual is and ought to be independent and free.

To avoid this embarrassment, results revealing irrationality are often quickly excused as leftovers of survival mechanisms that were beneficial in our evolutionary past but that have become redundant in the modern environment. A good example is this article from The Conversation that regurgitates the well-known argument that people accept popular beliefs without questioning them because sticking out of the herd increases the risk of being eaten by predators. The evolutionary argument looks a bit simplistic, but sure, groupthink is real, and it’s often harmful. However, there is no explanation as to why popular beliefs would include omnipotent and omnipresent evildoers. Were we that terrified of lions? How did we ever make it off the savanna?

Another article from The Hill takes a similar evolutionary line of reasoning to argue that “some people lie and spread misinformation to gain an advantage over others.” So here, conspiracy theorists are not exactly irrational, they’re just mean. Way to accuse them in the same way they accuse their boogeymen. Way to say “eff you, conspiracy theorists” in sciencese. But seriously, this argument also leaves much to be explained. For example, how does living with a constant sense of terror and powerlessness in the face of aliens or Jews or the Illuminati help one romantically? I don’t remember those guys killing it with girls at school.

Sorting out whether beliefs in conspiracy theories are genetically determined and to what extent is beyond the scope of this essay. It also doesn’t bear on its arguments. The hallowed scientific community would probably tell us that there may be genetic factors that are triggered by the environment (including recreational drug use). Be that as it may, there is surely value in trying to understand conspiracy theorists from the human perspective, to walk in their shoes. 

To understand the mind of the conspiracy theorist, I would focus on how he imagines the conspirators: omnipresent, omnipotent, deliberately evil. I think that if we can understand what leads a person to the belief in the existence of such persons – or entities – we may get a useful understanding of the entire phenomenon.

A student of René Girard would not take long, I think, to find such an entity in his writings. It is the mediator of desire turned monstrous. Girard’s theory of desire states that we learn our desire from people we admire. As we imitate our models, we copy their desires convinced that they are the secret to our models’ higher state of being and that they will give us that higher being, too. Things go wrong, however, as the imitation brings us closer to the model and turns him into a rival. The rivalry can heat up and flare into violence, or into a mental illness in which we perceive our rival as a monstrous double of ourselves.

My argument in this essay will be that pathological forms of conspiracy theorizing may be related to Girard’s concept of the monstrous double.

In a long explanatory arch in the chapter titled “From Desire to the Monstrous Double” of his book Violence and the Sacred, Girard traces how hallucinations and possessions spring from metastasized mimetic violence. He works off the plot of Euripides’ classical tragedy The Bacchae, in which the god Dionysus comes into the city of Thebes under disguise to drive the citizens mad because they have neglected his cult. He causes a group of crazed women to kill the impious king Cadmus by tearing him to pieces with their bare hands.

I won’t get into the tragic play’s details. In short, Girard interprets the play as a sophisticated though coded psychological depiction of social collapse. The madness induced in the citizens by the neglected god stands for the altered state of consciousness of individuals swept by a mimetic crisis, a situation in which a collapse in social norms causes proliferation of rivalrous desire and of resultant violence of all against all. Girard argues that in such an environment, rivalries turn into tragic cyclothymia, an exchange of blows or insults between rivals. Cyclothymia is a key element of classical tragedy; it is when enemies are locked into a struggle that sees now one, now the other strike a blow and rise the top, while his counterpart is despairing in the dust.

As conflict progresses, Girard then argues, the rhythm of cyclothymic alternation speeds up to the point where the subject’s perception of the difference between him and his enemy begins to blur. Persons and entities become “cinematically” superimposed on each other. The subject enters a hallucinatory state in which he either begins to see double – himself as both within himself and as the other – or his mind begins blending images and seeing monsters. To Girard, all doubles are monstrous, and all monsters are doubles. In his own words:

The differences that seem to separate the antagonists shift ever faster and more abruptly as the crisis grows in intensity. Beyond a certain point the nonreciprocal moments succeed each other with such speed that their actual passage becomes blurred. They seem to overlap, forming a composite image in which all the previous “highs” and “lows,” the extremes that had previously stood out in bold relief, now seem to intersect and mingle. Where formerly he had seen his antagonist and himself as incarnations of unique and separate moments in the temporal scheme of things, the subject now perceives two simultaneous projections of the entire time span—an effect that is almost cinematographic. 

The double or the monster is the product of the subject’s fascination with the rival and his reciprocal cyclothymia with him, taken to the extreme at which the subject begins to identify himself with the rival while retaining a powerful sense of antagonism towards him. As such, the monster has the terrifying power of existing both inside and outside the subject. He is felt to be invading the subject’s innermost being as an alien force and controlling it. Again, according to Girard:

The subject feels that the most intimate regions of his being have been invaded by a supernatural creature who also besieges him without. Horrified, he finds himself the victim of a double assault to which he cannot respond. Indeed, how can one defend oneself against an enemy who blithely ignores all barriers between inside and outside? 

The mental condition described here in the context of archaic ritual recalls the defining symptom of schizophrenia, which is the belief that an adversarial entity is abusing the sufferer by “blithely ignoring all barriers between inside and outside.” It also recalls the belief of conspiracy theorists in a cabal of thoroughly evil individuals with virtually omnipresent and omniscient power to control not just the subject, but the society at large.

This is the link that led me to search for causes of conspiracy theory beliefs in Girard’s mimetic theory. The question that arises at this point is: how are the conditions of modern conspiracy theorists similar to those of tragic heroes or of participants in rituals of trance or possession?

Girard shows in the same book that archaic rituals, at least in their origin, are recreations of mimetic crises. They go through its stages – the collapse of differentiation or social order (participants may wear masks at this stage), adversarial confrontation of all against all (expressed in ritualized combat or dances), and finally unanimous violence of all against one – the sacrificial act. And ancient Greek tragedies are derivates of the ritual that reproduce the same stages of mimetic crisis – on the theatre stage.

In this scheme of things, the collapse of differentiation for the modern conspiracy theorist would be the collapse of social boundaries characteristic of modern times. At first, the erasure of social classes has made virtually everyone a potential competitor to everyone else. Then on top of that, the Internet and social media have put everyone in very close contact with everyone else, ensuring that the rubber of competition really hits the road. 

Whereas individuals trapped in tragic conflict or participating in ritual engage in cyclothymia, a rhythmic exchange of blows, those suffering from modern undifferentiation, Girard argues, go through bipolar disorder, its slower and more diffused version.

Girard did not advocate a return to a class system, and neither do I. But the fact remains that our society, which does not have formal class boundaries, creates its peculiar set of anxieties. We live in a world where no one is supposed to be the master, where our leaders as a rule refer to their work as a “service.” In this world devoid of true servants and true masters, everyone is a competitor with everyone else.

And the stakes of competition are vast: anyone can become a modern-day king – a celebrity, a billionaire founder, a Don Juan. The system is a supremely fertile ground for narcissism: it makes the highest virtue of ego; it makes ego the engine for personal success and therefore the generator of self-worth, of personal identity itself.

The system breeds individuals who, in Girard’s words, are “possessed with a prodigious metaphysical ambition.” They have been living in the undifferentiated soup in which they are encouraged to compete against the highest achievers. In this competition, the greater the achievement of others, the more it inflates the subject’s own ego, like a greater weight inflates a bigger muscle. One imitates the highest achievers and absorbs what he perceives to define their personality: they are self-sufficient masters of their destiny. The only thing is, one lacks their external symbols of success, and one strives desperately to acquire them.

The outcomes of this game of metaphysical ambition are many. There are certainly many kinds of losers. Following a decisive loss, such as an academic or career failure, a person may develop a relatively benign “inferiority complex,” admitting his own defeat and bestowing the winners with all the fantastic powers about which he himself fantasized and still fantasizes. What would distinguish an inferiority complex from an objective measure of differences would be precisely the projection of narcissistic fantasies onto the rival. The heights to which the subject now elevates his vanquisher are indicative of his own ego. As Girard puts it:

The vanity weights on the scales and tilts them towards the self; remove those weights and the scales, abruptly adjusted, will tilt towards the other. The prestige with which we endow an all too happy rival is always the measure of our own vanity.

But such an inferiority complex alone does not make a conspiracy theorist, whose convictions of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and evil rival are much closer to ritual possession. Conspiracy theories arise when the monstrous double arises, when our obsession with our rivals reaches such a fever pitch that the boundaries between us and them are blurred. I can only speculate on a process that I’ve never experienced and that may not be clinically testable, but it appears that the refusal to let go of the rival may be due to those especially high doses of “metaphysical ambition.” This ambition may be expressed, for example, as uncommon zeal for liberal Western principles of equality, fraternity, liberty, etc. Or it may be a result of great pressure in childhood to succeed and make one’s family or community proud.

For whatever reason, the subject simply cannot let go of his victorious rival, yet he can neither defeat him nor confront his own defeat. In this stalemate, the obsession with the rival only increases and the rival gains ever more monstrous dimensions – he is ever more powerful, ever more devious. In the moment of crisis, the subject finally finds a way to cut himself free without accepting humiliation: the rival is “let loose” with his superhuman abilities, but the subject “figures it out.” The subject himself does not rule the world, but at least he has the privileged knowledge that his rival does. He must settle for that small victory.

He can now go around and parade this victory by flaunting his access to its great mysteries and being disagreeable to anyone who is not impressed (which is, even today, most people). He can go about looking for patterns to support his views, opening his mind to any narrative that supports a conspiratorial worldview. This overdrive pattern-recognition behaviour is not a cause of conspiratorial beliefs that stems from an overshoot of an otherwise useful evolutionary trait, as is often speculated. Many of us who are not conspiracy theorists could easily trace such patterns; we just don’t have the emotional need to do so.

A necessary and defining trait of the conspiracy theorist is that he cannot live in a world in which someone is not in full control. The studies link him with “social dominance orientation” and “authoritarianism.” He remains fascinated, even enamoured in some roundabout way, by the vision of absolute mastery. It can be said that his belief in superhumans stems from his own narcissism. That same narcissism that convinces the subject that the other is a superhuman also nourishes the belief that at least the other is evil, while he is good. He is an innocent victim. (Hence why evil genius trope is so popular.)

The grand decoupling act between the conspiracy theorist and the subversive conspirators is analogous to the generation of monsters in archaic myth and ritual, and the notion of possession by those monsters. Despite the minimal amount of comfort that he obtains from being in the know, the conspiracy theorist remains under the impression of being watched and persecuted by his powerful enemy. He is paranoid. From my personal encounters with conspiracy theorists, they are more likely to be fatalists, to express a lack of belief in free will, and to see opposite views as naïve. They see themselves as being controlled by a higher power, though they take refuge in the fact that at least they are aware of it. At least they know who are the monsters and exercise a degree of prudence to avoid their nefarious effects.

The conspiring monster is the theorist’s double in the sense that the latter projects onto him his deepest fears and darkest fantasies of domination, built by his own imagination, by his own ego. The theorist, paradoxically, claims to have a deeply intimate knowledge of the conspirator’s mind. He looks down on common consensus and the foolish groping of the masses for empirical evidence, which he knows that the conspirators of course hide with devilish guile.

The same decoupling act is in turn equivalent to the ritual sacrificial act. The monstrous culprit responsible for chaos on earth has been identified. Now, the villagers ought to unite against him and expel him from their midst, and peace and harmony will return. A conspiracy theory is one grand accusation, one grand call to mass persecution of the conspirators. We know all too well how many times such calls were answered and carried out in historical fact.

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If we step back and look at this whole mimetic analysis of conspiracy theory psychology, we can see that it doesn’t run so counter against conventional takes. The correlations and predictors are all involved: narcissism, paranoia, schizotypal personality, projection, inferiority complex, etc. What the mimetic analysis does, in my view, is it describes a single, complete process, it arranges all these floating pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into one coherent picture.

As for advice to social media moderators, we can see a clear problem. In so far as social media networks are fundamentally designed as boundary-erasing mimetic networks, they are designed to be that fertile ground for mimetic desire, mimetic strife, and all the mental health problems those generate, including the problem of conspiracy theory ideation. In other words, it appears that to solve such problems, social networks would need to dismantle their fundamental business model. That’s not going to work for the bottom line. So, while we wait for change, I suggest that a greater awareness of René Girard’s mimetic theory can help you navigate the traps and challenges of the information age.

Read more in the book Catharses.