The conspiratorial mind...

A real plot can be exposed. A conspiratorial mind makes itself impossible to refute.
Conspiracies exist. Governments deceive, states collude, companies conceal and factions plot. The error begins when conspiracy is turned into a universal principle, a way of explaining every defeat, crisis and surprise. That is not an explanation of the world. It is an escape from explanation.
The conspiratorial mind is not simply the belief that a conspiracy has occurred. It is the habit of reducing every large or obscure event to a single hidden intention. A real conspiracy has limits: a scope, actors who can be named, mechanisms that can be described and evidence that can be tested. The conspiratorial mind is different. It is total and sealed. Contrary evidence does not weaken it; it becomes proof of the plot’s perfection.
Take George Soros. The western far right has turned him into the hidden architect of a global design, supposedly directing migration, elections and pandemics. The truth is more ordinary and more serious. Soros was a formidable speculator who bet against sterling in 1992 and profited, not through occult power, but by reading distortions in exchange rates, inflation and interest rates within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. That he was a bold speculator is true. That he is a politically controversial donor is a legitimate subject of debate. That he secretly moves the world is a myth.
Such myths are rarely built from pure falsehood. They are built from facts torn from context and welded into a total story. In Soros’s case, the old antisemitic pattern is clear: he is Jewish, wealthy and funds organisations. Those facts are made to bear a theory they cannot support. From fragments of truth, an edifice of illusion is raised. Conspiratorial thinking is a human habit, not an Arab defect.
A second example comes from our own recent history. The Treaty of Sèvres was signed in 1920 between the Ottoman government and the Allies, and rejected by the Turkish national movement. It envisaged the weakening of Türkiye and the shrinking of its domain among the victors. The Balfour Declaration of 1917, by contrast, was a political statement without, by itself, the force of an operative treaty, though later events folded it into the Mandate and international policy. If the region’s fate had depended only on the neatness of the scheme, Sèvres should have prevailed.
It did not. Sèvres collapsed before the Turkish War of Independence and was replaced by Lausanne in 1923. Balfour, legally weaker at the outset, acquired immense historical force because it entered a political, demographic and institutional dynamic carried by Britain, the Zionist movement and the international balance of power. Palestinian and wider Arab resistance, fragmented and institutionally weak, could not overturn that trajectory. What mattered was not the elegance of the plan alone, but the power that carried it and the will that resisted it.
This is not to minimise hidden design. It is to refuse to deify it. Between denying conspiracies and reducing all history to them lies the proper field of judgment. It is naive to ignore interests, secret documents and plans. It is helpless to treat them as sufficient causes for every outcome. A conspiracy succeeds when it finds conditions that sustain it, opponents unable to defeat it and time enough to extend its reach.
How does a conspiracy theory arise? It begins when the ambiguity of the world meets the mind’s hunger for intention. The brain dislikes causal emptiness and is uneasy with chance in great events. When a shock occurs, trust weakens, fear deepens and a group’s image of itself is wounded; the mind can turn true fragments into a false total story. Conspiratorial thinking is not mere ignorance. It is an illusory shortcut around the labour of inquiry: meaning, control and comfort bought by abolishing complexity.
The tension is between two natures: an entangled reality that does not move in a straight line, and a limited human cognition that seeks compression and intention. In economics, price is shaped by supply and demand, expectations, interest rates, liquidity, confidence and politics. In politics, a decision meets institutions, elites, publics, opponents and accidents. Because the human mind evolved to read intentions more readily than to calculate the probabilities of abstract systems, it seeks a story with a hero, an enemy and a purpose. Conspiracy theory supplies one.
Biology offers a useful warning. Highly complex outcomes do not always require a central intention. They may arise from small differences, acted upon by natural selection over long stretches of time, until they appear to be the fruit of design. Politics is not biology: it contains actors who intend, scheme and hide what they scheme. But both domains teach the same caution. Complexity is not understood by a single story. It requires a map of forces, interests, constraints and unintended consequences. It is not enough to ask who plotted. We must ask who acted, who benefited, who had the capacity to act, and who merely rode the wave after it had formed.
Why does the conspiratorial mind endure? Because it performs psychological, not cognitive, functions. Personally, it offers relief from the inability to grasp the complexity of human and natural phenomena. Collectively, it explains defeat without making us responsible for it, grants the adversary superhuman power that excuses our failure to match it, and absolves us from action so long as all the strings are in another’s hands. It is consolation disguised as analysis.
Its error is not that it assumes intention exists. Its error is that it turns intention into the sole cause, the beneficiary into the author, ambiguity into evidence and the absence of evidence into evidence of a deeper kind.
The test is simple. Ask about scope, actor, mechanism, evidence and falsifiability. If a claim identifies a specific act, a plausible actor, a describable mechanism and independent evidence, and can be refuted by contrary proof, it is a hypothesis worth examining. But if it expands to cover everything, explains a thing and its opposite, treats the absence of evidence as evidence and always moves proof to a deeper layer of secrecy, it is no longer an explanation. It is a closed creed.
The opposite of the conspiratorial mind is not naivety. It is judgment: the discipline of weighing each event on its own terms. Those who understand complexity have a duty to warn against this habit, because distorted understanding produces distorted action. A nation that misdiagnoses its disease will always excel at choosing the wrong cure.

Hamad Sinan Al Ghaithi The writer is an Omani evolutionary biologist, translator and editor