“the conspiracy theory of society”

“the conspiracy theory of society” is the impulse to explain disorder by asking who secretly controls it. In the novel, this impulse offers an apparent answer to the loss of religious certainty, converts frustration into suspicion of hidden agents, and can become a machinery that generates the very belief it claims merely to uncover. Its most consequential demonstration is the researchers’ invented Plan: a parody of conspiratorial interpretation that, through repetition and others’ belief, ceases to be only a game.

The Question Behind the Theory

The expression is presented through Karl Popper’s question: “Who is in his place?” The question follows the abandonment of God, as if society cannot tolerate an unexplained vacancy at the center of events. Where divine providence once supplied an overarching cause, the conspiracy theory supplies a hidden human director. It promises that frustration could be dispelled, even redeemed, if only the secret were known; the search for a plot thus answers not simply what happened, but who should be blamed.

The narrative gives this psychological need an everyday form. A person facing a complicated failure may prefer a simple external enemy to the possibility that events are accidental or that one’s own decisions contributed to them. The same logic can bind followers together under dictatorship: a named adversary provides unity and redirects blame. The theory’s appeal lies in the order and accountability it seems to restore, even when its explanation is false.

How a Game Becomes Belief

The three researchers begin by joining materials through extravagant associations, intending to parody the reasoning of their occult-minded clients. Yet the practice of gathering evidence and connecting everything to everything else becomes habitual. Casaubon later distinguishes their different degrees of involvement: he thinks himself the least affected, while Diotallevi trains himself to think like a conspiracist and Belbo identifies more consciously with that outlook. Their positions differ, but all lose some ability to distinguish similarity from identity and metaphor from fact.

The Plan’s invention makes this drift concrete. The researchers create a nonexistent scheme, but their clients recognize scattered pieces of their own confused mythologies in it and treat those pieces as parts of a coherent design. Casaubon concludes that if an invented plan is believed in and acted upon, it exists in its effects. The conspiracy theory is therefore not only a mistaken account of reality: it can become a cause within reality, drawing people into the search for the map they imagine will complete it.

The logic also closes itself against correction. When the researchers connect even an arbitrary detail to their system, they risk treating the absence of a mystery as a violation of the system itself. In the invented Plan’s broader reasoning, evidence does not have to be independently persuasive; resemblance and suspicion can be made to confirm one another. The more connections accumulate, the harder it becomes to recognize that the web was made by interpretation rather than discovered as an external design.

Political Uses and Fabricated Proof

The novel places that interpretive habit beside the history of antisemitic conspiracy narratives. In the researchers’ reconstruction, political actors repeatedly redirect accusations among rival groups and adapt existing material to suit new enemies. They discuss the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a text whose claims are contradictory and whose alleged program ranges from manipulating public opinion to fomenting revolution and war. Rather than treating the document as proof of a hidden Jewish plot, the narrative examines how such claims are assembled and circulated.

The account traces a chain of textual reuse. After the Jesuits attribute a Plan to Jews, the novel describes Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel as a source from which the Protocols borrow, while also proposing that Joly himself copied an earlier document by Sue. The researchers then speculate that Rachkovsky altered material found in Elie de Cyon’s writings by substituting Jews for Witte as the alleged conspirators. These nested attributions show how a forgery can acquire authority through layers of copying, selective alteration, and politically useful interpretation. They are presented as the researchers’ elaborate reconstruction, not as independent confirmation of the conspiracy they invent.

The book also shows the consequences of treating fabricated accusation as explanation. The Protocols’ supposed program includes the manipulation of political life and the use of antisemitism itself; in the researchers’ account, such a text makes hatred appear to be evidence of the alleged plot. The conspiracy narrative thus turns its own violence into apparent corroboration: hostility toward Jews is recast as a response to a danger that the accusation has itself manufactured.

The Secret That Cannot Be Filled

Casaubon’s later reflections connect conspiratorial belief to the promise of a final secret. A plot must remain secret to offer the imagined possibility of salvation; once disclosed, its content may prove disappointingly small. The search therefore feeds on deferral. Each answer can be made into a sign pointing elsewhere, producing an endless chain of meanings rather than a final explanation.

That dynamic clarifies the nocturnal gathering around the Pendulum and Belbo’s refusal to reveal what he supposedly knows. The more Belbo denies possessing a secret, the more his pursuers take the denial as proof of its importance. Casaubon interprets their pursuit as a bond that holds the groups together: disclosure threatens not only to disappoint them but to abolish the secret on which their shared identity depends. The scene exposes the theory’s central trap. Its followers do not merely seek evidence; they need the hidden explanation to remain hidden, so that the promise of ultimate certainty can continue.