What do baseless conspiracy theories, algorithms, and meritocracy have in common? All three avoid contingency and frantically look for necessities. The COVID-19 crisis has brought about a proliferation of baseless conspiracy theories that reject, among other things, official accounts of the virus’ origins and remedies, and sometimes even the existence of the virus itself. Conspiracy theories very often link events to secret plots concocted by powerful conspirators, whether it be Bill Gates or Big Pharma. The exceptionally powerful surge of unjustified conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 crisis has several already famous causes: there are increasing ways for new media to massively spread misinformation, and there has been a growing distrust for conventional scientific ideas among large parts of the population. In this book, I examine another dominant driving force: the desire to find apparently reasonable explanations for phenomena that are purely random and contingent. Many baseless conspiracy theories emerge because contingency is not accepted, and necessities are looked for at all costs. David Aaronovitch defines conspiratorial thought as a reasoning that “attributes deliberate agency to something that is more likely to be accidental or unintended” or which attributes “secret action to one party that might more reasonably be explained as the less covert and less complicated action of another” (Aaronovitch 2011: 5). Nothing happens by chance and there must be a plan or an intelligent design behind everything. A large part of this book deals with “contingency phobia.” This special phobia is not only manifest in the conspiratorial mindset, but it appears in Western culture as a recurrent psychological, cognitive, and scientific pattern. It is the cause of a variety of other phenomena that have become emblematic for liberal democracies, such as the contemporary algorithm culture or the obsession with merit and ranking. Not only does the conspiratorial mindset reject a world of contingency and strive to create a universe structured by a necessary order: life coaches, algorithm engineers, and neoliberal meritocrats all do the same. This book analyzes these phenomena by using the same criteria: How do humans deal with contingency, and how do they try to establish necessities?

Conspiracy and Contingency

For the most part, conspiracy theories are political or scientific; some combine political themes with religious convictions, while a few are also cultural or racist.