One place you can really see religious phantasms rear their feverish heads is in the Manichaean rhetoric of Good and Evil that enflames so many conspiratorial and extreme political views. He also recognized something very important: that “religious superstition,” which we should broaden to include the mythopoetic imagination, was woven through these theories, even in secular discourses like Marxism. On the other hand, Popper identified a common problem that all these accounts pretend to solve: definitively naming and identifying singular agents of responsibility out of the confusion, complexity, and contingency of social and political struggle.
There is a conceptual gulf between a hoax like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, crafted to stoke fears about the “hidden hand” of malevolent international Jewry, and the sort of sociological abstractions - “capital,” “imperialism” - that structure leftwing accounts of political economy. In so doing, he skates over some pretty jarring differences. Note here that Popper draws his sinister examples from different frequencies on the political spectrum: populism, the anti-Semitic right, Marxism. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups - sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from - such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists. The 20th century, however, presents a barer landscape. Popper was also a “critical rationalist” who took some of his political cues from the scientific method, which he idealized as an open-ended, transparent, and collaborative search for truth.Ĭonspiracy theories of society were, in his view, not only simplistic, but irrational, evidence of the “secularization of religious superstition.” In the old days, he said, we would turn to the gods to explain the harsh workings of worldly fate. Popper was a hardcore classic liberal who helped shape the philosophical framework for the postwar order, an order that justifies itself partly through a pluralistic model of historical change that - surprise surprise - resembles democratic norms. While acknowledging that history is packed with such cabals, Popper believed that if you turn that insight into an over-arching theory of society, you risk radically misrepresenting a world that is messier - more conflictual, unpredictable, and unintentional in its outcomes - than such puppet master narratives allow. The “conspiracy theory of society,” for him, was the idea that complex social phenomena can and should be directly traced to agents - “men or groups of men” - who conspired to bring them about. Two decades before the phrase “conspiracy theory” rode the wake of JFK’s assassination into public consciousness, Popper framed the concept in a more general sociological sense. One of the classic throw-downs against modern conspiracism comes from Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and its Enemies, published just after the second World War.