Varieties of conspiracy theory -- identifying the blameworthy?

Inspiration, Conspiration, Transpiration, Expiration (Part #2)

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As might be expected, a number of efforts have been made to document the variety of conspiracies, or those of a particular type:

• Wikipedia: List of conspiracy theories.
• Conspiracies.net: Conspiracy Theory Index: list of all conspiracy theories (also offering a checklist of conspiracy websites).
• Truth Control: Top 100 Conspiracy Theories of All Time

According to Wikipedia, There are many unproven conspiracy theories of varying degrees of popularity, frequently related to but not limited to clandestine government plans, elaborate murder plots, suppression of secret technology and knowledge, and other supposed schemes behind certain political, cultural, and historical events. Some are noted as having been proven to be true (Lauren Cahn, 12 Conspiracy Theories That Actually Turned Out to Be True, Reader's Digest, March 2020). Related to such listings are those elaborating what are held to be conspiracies (The Top 40 Conspiracy Theorists, Exemplore, 3 July 2020).

In identifying conspiracy theories an obvious issue is what to include or exclude for whatever reason, and how they might best be clustered. The following is an adaptation and selective presentation of the clustered list of Wikipedia:

Aviation: Black helicopters; Airline disasters; Chemtrails Business and industry: Price fixing, Bid rigging and Market allocation schemes Science and technology: Global warming; Weather and earthquake control projects; Flat Earth; Technology suppression; Weaponry; Targeted Individuals; False history Chemtrails

Ethnicity, race and religion: Antisemitism; ; Anti-Catholicism; Anti-Islamic; Racism Economics and society: New World Order; Freemasonry Deaths and disappearances Espionage Extraterrestrials and UFOs Space exploration Sports

Government, politics and conflict: Illuminati; False flag operations; 9/11; Deep state; Electoral fraud Medicine: Alternative therapy suppression; Artificial diseases; Fluoridation; Vaccination; COVID-19 pandemic Climate change Global warming

Recognized and clustered otherwise are:

• Regional conspiracies:
  • Conspiracy theories in the Arab world (Wikipedia)
  • Conspiracy theories in Asia (Wikipedia)
  • 35 of the most popular conspiracy theories in the US (Insider, 5 May 2020)
  • 10 Conspiracy Theories About The European Union (Listverse, 12 January 2020)
• List of political conspiracies, as presented by Wikipedia and defined as referring to a group of people united in the goal of damaging, usurping, or overthrowing an established political power. Typically, the final goal is to gain power through a revolutionary coup d'état or through assassination. A conspiracy can also be used for infiltration of the governing system.
• References to alternative ideologies and modes of action as constituting a conspiracy:

  Political ideologies Communist conspiracy Fascist conspiracy Right-wing conspiracy Left-wing conspiracy Socialist conspiracy Anarchist conspiracy Pacifist conspiracy Radical conspiracy Terrorist conspiracy

  Economic / Technocratic Capitalist conspiracy Technocratic conspiracy Military-industrial conspiracy (Neo)-Luddite conspiracy Ethnic, gender and race-related White-supremacist conspiracy Black power conspiracy Male conspiracy Feminist conspiracy Homosexual conspiracy

  Religious Catholic conspiracy; Fundamentalist conspiracy Islamic conspiracy Animist conspiracy Zionist conspiracy Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory Satanic conspiracy Pagan conspiracy

  
  
• Especially framed as "real", are the conspiracies in the articulation by Jeremy Lent (The Five Real Conspiracies You Need to Know About, Patterns of Meaning, 1 October 2020):
  • Conspiracy to turn the world into a giant marketplace for the benefit of the wealthy elite
  • Conspiracy by transnational corporations to turn billions of people into addicts
  • Conspiracy to plunder the Global South for the benefit of the Global North
  • Conspiracy to hide the effects of climate breakdown for corporate profit
  • Conspiracy to grow the global economy indefinitely, while killing most of life on Earth and risking the collapse of civilization.

Missing is a general framework in which the "ecosystem" of conspiracies can be appropriately acknowledged -- potentially because any attempt to do so could even be recognized as instigated by a conspiracy. The question can be addressed otherwise in terms of "otherness" or "alterity" and the suspicions it naturally arouses as a potential threat. Alleviating conspiracies could then be framed in terms of "anti-otherness", as discussed separately (Elaborating a Declaration on Combating Anti-otherness -- including anti-science, anti-spiritual, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-socialism, anti-animal, and anti-negativity, 2018).

Other possibilities include recognition of the variety of phenomena which constitute:

• cognitive biases -- recognizing that one person's bias may well be another person's preference (Systems of Categories Distinguishing Cultural Biases, 1993)
• fake news -- offering the challenge that a piece of fake news may be an inspiration to some, whilst framed as engendering conspiracy by another, as separately explored (Varieties of Fake News and Misrepresentation: when are deception, pretence and cover-up acceptable? 2019). Much advertising, with its reliance on puffery, exemplifies the problem.
• logical fallacies -- recognizing that these (together with spurious arguments and claims) may feature as common currency in political discourse, nourishing perceptions of conspiracy
• cover-ups -- typically recognized as characteristic of conspiracy

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