A fun aspect of any holiday time is subjecting helpless relatives to one’s personal worldviews. Pick the right family member, drone on long enough about your latest hobby horse... and you just might never see them again! However, this can backfire if you come face-to-face with a conspiracy theorist. One minute you are using the cutlery to demonstrate the Overton Window; the next you are playing ‘spot the lizard’ from a line-up of ‘deep-state actors.’
Some of the more ‘far out’ conspiracy theories are easy to disprove. Flat earth theory is an easy target because you can see the curvature of the earth just by looking out to the ocean. Of course, those nice people from the various space agencies could be lying to us. Similarly, visitors from Alpha Centauri could have built the pyramids, but it is somewhat unfair on our ances- tors to suggest that they needed any help. To ancient aliens, we can add the theories that the moon landings were faked, that 9-11 was an inside job, that ‘Chemtrails’ are sterilising the population and Covid-19 - and subsequent vaccines - were cooked up on purpose to control us. And, of course, George Soros is in control of everything too! Disproving the existence of bigfoot is a little harder given that anthropogony now suggests that multiple species of hominin existed at the same time. The Loch Ness monster could be there. Then we reach genuine verifiable deceptions such as tobacco or oil companies burying research they don’t like. Yes, this really happened!
Our current obsession with conspiracy theories perhaps tells you more about society since the advent of the internet age than any increase in our likelihood to believe them. There have always been suspicions that the world is not as it seems. However, the network effect from the late 1990s onwards made it easier for like-minded individuals and groups to interact and exchange information.
In 2016 the science writer David Grimes suggested that the more people who know about a deception shortens the time it can remain hidden.1 He backed it up by applying a Poisson distribution to various popular conspiracy theories. This led to estimates for how long they might remain secret. For example, he concluded that if the Apollo 11 moon landing had been faked in 1969, it would probably have come out by 1973. That would certainly have made Richard Nixon’s job even more difficult as he dealt with the Watergate scandal! Grimes also derived timescales for how long climate-change fraud, vaccination conspiracies and a cure for cancer could have been concealed. In summary, for a conspiracy to last five years it shouldn’t have more than ~2500 participants, 10 years would need ~1200 or less and 25 years would require not more than 500 people.
Naturally, the heavy building materials sector has its own conspiracies both real, imagined, and… who knows. Infamously the cement industry has fre- quently been accused of cartel-like behaviour due to the market demand for its products and the generally low number of market producers in most situations. A more specific example is how Lafarge Syria was ac- cused by the Le Monde newspaper in 2016 of paying terrorist groups to keep its Jalabiyeh cement plant running in 2013 and 2014 during the civil war in that country. A US court subsequently fined Lafarge and its subsidiary US$778m for its conduct. We can only speculate about how many people knew about this before this came out.
Heading off into stranger pastures was the use by the Romans of animal blood as an admixture in their concrete mixes. More recently a patent was filed in 1980 for the use of animal blood to create light colloi- dal concrete. Naturally, various online theorists have linked the ownership structure of some of the cement companies to the New World Order conspiracy theory of an emerging totalitarian world government.
If we can conclude anything from this thorny topic it may be that I should stop watching old episodes of the X-Files. And, during the next holiday, when meet- ing friends and family, a better topic of conversation might be to stick to the weather…
...then again, maybe best avoid that too!
1. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147905
