Karl Popper’s “Conspiracy Theory of Society” and the Traps of Our Age
“The real task of the social sciences is to explain things that nobody wanted to happen.” – Karl Popper (paraphrased)
Open the internet on any given day and you’ll bump into some version of:
“Everything is decided by X.”
Where X might be: neoliberalism, the 1%, the deep state, the world government, Big Pharma, Big Tech, global finance, or some particular country.
This style of explanation is surprisingly sweet. It feels good. It promises to:
-
Tell you, in one stroke, who the villain is.
-
Replace messy structures with a simple story about “a few bad actors.”
-
Lift the burden of responsibility off your own shoulders and dump it onto a shadowy “them.”
Philosopher Karl Popper called this way of thinking the:
“Conspiracy theory of society”,
and he went after it very hard.
His core claim is simple:
Most things that happen in society are not the result of someone’s master plan.
They’re the unintended consequences of many people each pursuing their own goals.
In this essay we’ll look at:
-
What Popper meant by the “conspiracy theory of society”,
-
Why it damages our thinking,
-
And what kind of “rational theory of tradition” and social science he proposed instead.
1. Why Conspiracy Theories Feel So Good
First, why are conspiracy theories so seductive?
-
They make the world look simple.
Instead of dealing with complicated economics, politics, and history, you get a one-line answer:
“Group X is pulling all the strings.”
-
They aim your anger for you.
Unemployment, inequality, political distrust, cultural anxiety—
all of that can be poured into one explanation:
“This is all the result of a deliberate plot.” -
They reduce your own responsibility.
Structures, incentives, sheer bad luck—those fade into the background.
What remains is the comforting feeling that you are a victim of “them,” not also part of the picture.
Popper compared this to an old Homeric worldview: in Homer’s epics, wars, plagues, and disasters are all “the schemes of the gods.”
Modern conspiracy stories do something similar. They just swap out the gods for:
-
Corporations,
-
Billionaires,
-
Secret societies,
-
Foreign powers.
2. What Popper Meant by the “Conspiracy Theory of Society”
Popper’s “conspiracy theory of society” is the idea that:
“All important social events are the result of someone’s intentional plan.”
So if you want to “understand” society, you supposedly just need to ask:
-
Who benefits?
-
Who is really pulling the strings behind the scenes?
Popper thinks this is dangerous on two levels.
-
It’s empirically wrong.
Real-world social outcomes almost always come from the messy interaction of many actors, plus randomness, plus structural conditions. Yes, conspiracies sometimes exist—but they rarely control everything.
-
It misdefines the job of social science.
For Popper, the real challenge is:
To explain “the unintended consequences of human actions”—
outcomes nobody specifically wanted, but which still emerge from the way institutions and incentives are set up.
If you assume everything important was planned by some secret committee, then you stop looking at those unintended consequences. You stop doing real social science.
3. Unintended Consequences: Popper’s Main Point
Popper’s key insight is very intuitive once you see it:
We always act with some purpose in mind,
but in society, results almost never match our intentions exactly.
He often used market examples to make this concrete.
A simple housing example
-
Imagine a small town where a bunch of people decide to sell their houses.
-
Each seller is trying to get the highest possible price.
-
None of them got together in a dark room to plot the market.
But the more people put their houses up for sale at once,
the more the average price tends to fall.
So:
-
No one wanted “lower house prices.”
-
No one planned it.
-
Everyone was acting “rationally” based on their own interest.
Yet the outcome—a drop in prices—is the opposite of what each individual hoped for.
That’s what Popper calls an unintended consequence.
And for him:
Explaining these unintended consequences is the central task of social science.
By contrast, saying:
“House prices fell because Group Y wanted to wreck the market.”
may feel satisfying, but it skips the actual mechanism.
4. The Oedipus Effect: When Predictions Change Reality
Popper also talks about what he calls the “Oedipus effect”—named after the Greek myth, where a prophecy helps bring about the very disaster it predicts.
In social life this happens when:
A widely believed prediction causes people to act in ways that make the prediction come true.
For example:
-
A rumor spreads: “House prices are going to crash soon.”
-
People rush to sell before the crash.
-
The sudden flood of supply makes prices crash.
Again, no secret cabal is necessary. What you need to understand is:
-
How information spreads,
-
How people update their expectations,
-
And how their responses feed back into the system.
That feedback logic is at the heart of Popper’s view of social science.
5. So… Are There No Real Conspiracies?
A common misunderstanding goes like this:
“If Popper criticizes conspiracy thinking,
then he must be saying conspiracies don’t exist.”
Not at all.
Popper openly admits that:
-
Real conspiracies do happen: bribery, cartels, cover-ups, coups, back-room deals, and so on.
-
Intelligence agencies, political machines, corporate boards—of course they sometimes collude.
These are legitimate subjects for investigation.
What he denies is this:
That there is one big master conspiracy explaining all important events,
and that once you’ve named the villain, you’ve “understood” history.
He even points out that dictators like Hitler believed in their own anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, and used a fantasy about a “world Jewish plot” as justification for their own horrific, very real conspiracies.
In other words:
-
Small-scale conspiracies are real and important.
-
A conspiratorial worldview—where everything is one giant plot—is something else entirely, and it’s intellectually toxic.
6. Applying Popper to Neoliberalism, Big Capital, and World-Control Narratives
In today’s debates, you see similar patterns everywhere:
-
“The 2008 crisis was simply engineered by a handful of financiers.”
-
“Neoliberalism is a single secret world-domination script written in advance.”
-
“Every major downturn is a deliberate demolition job by global elites.”
There is a grain of truth in the anger:
-
Powerful states, international institutions, and big capital have pushed highly unequal rules of the game for decades. (Routledge)
-
The Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, for instance, involved rapid financial liberalization, short-term foreign borrowing, and over-leveraged corporate structures—shaped by both domestic policy choices and external pressures, including the IMF. (Routledge)
But a Popper-style analysis asks a different kind of question:
“Given a certain set of institutions and incentives,
how did each actor—politicians, regulators, banks, firms, households—
behave in ways that seemed rational at the time,
yet combined to produce a disaster nobody actually wanted?”
If you instead say:
“It’s all just the work of a small cabal that wanted this precise outcome,”
you risk three things:
-
You stop studying structures and incentives.
-
You ignore the unintended consequences that made the crisis possible.
-
You drift toward politics of pure resentment: “If we just get rid of those people, everything will be fixed.”
That is exactly the mental shortcut Popper is warning about.
7. Healthy Critique vs. Toxic Conspiracy Thinking: A Checklist
So how do we tell serious social criticism apart from slipping into conspiracy-style thinking?
Using Popper’s spirit plus more recent work, we can sketch a rough checklist.
① Can the claim be refuted?
-
Serious critique says:
“If A, B, or C evidence shows up, I’ll revise or abandon this idea.” -
Conspiracy thinking says:
“Any evidence against my theory is just more proof of how deep the plot goes.”
If nothing could ever make you doubt your story, it isn’t analysis; it’s dogma.
② Does it look at structures, or only villains?
-
Serious critique looks at institutions, incentives, information, class, law, technology—
all the boring but crucial stuff. -
Conspiracy thinking skips straight to:
“Who are the evil masterminds?”
Real power is often embedded in systems, routines, and legal codes, not just in smoky rooms.
③ How does it treat complexity?
-
Serious critique admits:
“This problem has multiple causes. Some are economic, some political, some cultural.” -
Conspiracy thinking insists:
“Deep down, it’s actually very simple. It’s them.”
Reality is complicated. Any explanation that always boils down to a single group is almost certainly missing something.
④ What about the critic’s own role?
-
Serious critique allows for uncomfortable thoughts like:
“I, too, benefit from some structures I criticize.
My consumption, my voting, my silence—all of that can be part of the problem.” -
Conspiracy thinking places the believer safely outside the system:
“I am purely a victim or a lone awakened soul; the corruption is entirely elsewhere.”
Popper’s point is not “trust the system.”
It’s: “Don’t let your anger push you into fairy-tale thinking.”
8. Popper’s Alternative: A Rational Theory of Tradition
Popper’s lecture and essay were titled:
“Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition.”
By “tradition” he meant not just customs, but also:
-
Institutions,
-
Shared practices,
-
The inherited ways of doing things—in science, politics, and everyday life.
His proposal was neither:
-
Blind worship of tradition, nor
-
Blind iconoclasm that wants to smash everything old.
Instead, he argued that we should treat traditions and institutions as:
Things we critically examine and gradually improve.
A conspiracy worldview, by contrast, tends to do this:
-
On one side: “We are the guardians of the sacred tradition; everything that challenges it is a hostile plot.”
-
On the other side: “Everything about the system is a lie engineered by a ruling cabal; nothing good can come from reform.”
Popper’s stance is much more patient and harder work:
-
Trace how a given institution or tradition actually arose.
-
Study what unintended consequences it has produced.
-
Decide where it should be reformed, where it should be preserved, and where it should be replaced.
No single mastermind, no magical revolution—just continuous critical improvement.
9. In the End, the Question Comes Back to Us
To wrap up, here’s the core of the argument in one place:
-
Popper’s critique of the “conspiracy theory of society”
-
Explaining everything as “some group’s plan” is empirically wrong
and it hides the true work of social science.
-
-
The real task of social science
-
To explain unintended consequences—wars, crises, inequalities that no one individual explicitly desired, but which arose from how our systems are built.
-
-
Real conspiracies vs. a conspiratorial worldview
-
Actual plots, cartels, and cover-ups exist and deserve investigation.
-
The problem is turning that fact into a totalizing worldview where every major event is one grand scheme.
-
-
What this means for our time
-
Criticism of neoliberalism, global capital, state power, or big tech is not only legitimate, it’s necessary.
-
But when critique degenerates into “a single evil script written by a handful of actors,” we’ve stopped trying to understand and started looking for emotional comfort.
-
Popper’s warning is not:
“Stop criticizing, everything is fine.”
It’s closer to:
“Don’t trade real understanding for a story that merely makes you feel better.”
So the uncomfortable question his work throws back at each of us is this:
Am I really trying to understand a messy reality—
or am I secretly shopping for a one-line story that flatters my anger?
No comments:
Post a Comment