Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

Jun 24, 2026

A theodicy is traditionally an attempt to explain how evil can exist in a world governed by a good, omnipotent God. It answers the question: Why do bad things happen? Theodicies preserve the idea that the world is ultimately ordered and meaningful, even when suffering appears arbitrary. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz coined the term theodicy in his book Théodicée (1710), though numerous responses to the problem of evil had previously been offered by Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and other world religions.

Many conspiracy theories perform a similar function in our secular age. They reject randomness and contingency, and assume a hidden hand or secret society behind major events. This is the attempt to resolve a chaotic and complex world by assigning a simplistic intentional group of actors.

This provides a morally satisfying explanation for suffering, the decline of the West, or injustice. It is much easier to identify globalist villains who orchestrate and manipulate events. The alternative explanation of anarchy, randomness and chaos does not offer a complete or soothing worldview.

Conspiracy theories often answer the modern question: “If no God governs history, why is the world so broken?”

Their answer is: “Because secret actors are controlling the world.”

The hidden cabal theory replaces divine providence as the explanatory force.

Think of it this way: Where the believer holds that God has a hidden plan, the theorist holds that the cabal does. Religion says evil serves a larger purpose; the conspiracist says events serve a hidden agenda. Scriptures give the faithful possess special insight; but the awake possess special insight into political reality. Revelation discloses the truth, but so does the leak. And where heretics refuse the revealed word, the normie refuses the red pill.

Immanentizing the Eschaton

The political philosopher Eric Voegelin argued that many modern ideologies “immanentize” religious structures, bringing transcendent explanations into secular politics. Similarly, Michael Barkun describes conspiracy beliefs as systems that seek to explain all significant events through hidden intentional forces. William F. Buckley popularized the slogan — Don’t immanentize the eschaton — and circulated buttons and bumper stickers. To immanentize the eschaton is to attempt to bring about the eschaton — the transcendent, divine end of history or "Kingdom of God" — within the immanent world of human history and experience. In simpler terms, it is the effort to create heaven on earth through human political action, rather than waiting for divine intervention.

That does not mean that every conspiracy theory is a theodicy. Some conspiracies turn out to be real. The Watergate scandal, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and aspects of the Iran-Contra affair involved genuine secret coordination. Investigating hidden power is not inherently conspiratorial in the pejorative sense.

Conspiracy theory is a secular theodicy: an attempt to explain evil, suffering, and historical complexity through the actions of hidden, malevolent agents. Where religious societies explained evil through demons, sin, and divine mystery, secular theodicy explains it through conspiracies, hidden networks, and secret elites.

The strongest part of the analogy is not the existence of hidden actors; it is the psychological need to believe that someone is in control, even if the someone is a cabal of evil and secretive billionaires. A theodicy preserves faith in a meaningful cosmos. A conspiracy theory preserves faith in a meaningful history. Both are often easier to accept than the possibility that no one is fully in charge and that many large outcomes emerge from the interaction of countless competing actors.

A reader of this book may suspect it of the very error described here — four factions is, after all, a small number of hands. The distinction is the whole of a forthcoming chapter; for now it is enough to say that convergence is not conspiracy, and the secret meetings never happened. Karl Popper explained that the cabal needs an author, and there is none. Convergent interest requires no meeting. That argument is the next chapter’s; this one only clears the ground for it.

Popper coined and defined the conspiracy theory of society in a 1948 lecture collected in Conjectures and Refutations. He wrote: “The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything.” This is the view that whatever happens in society, such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages — are the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups.

The conspiratorial commentariat is all yin and no yang. If conspiracy theory functions as a secularized theodicy, then it often lacks something that traditional religious theodicies possess: a positive metaphysical counterweight to evil.

In Christianity, evil is real, but it is not ultimate. Satan exists, but God is sovereign. Sin exists, but so does grace, redemption, and salvation. History has a direction that ultimately leans toward reconciliation. The believer can suffer without concluding that evil has won. In Christian theology, ultimately good wins, but in secular theodicy, evil always has the upper hand.

Many conspiracy theories are remarkably asymmetrical: There is a hidden evil. The evil is extraordinarily powerful. The evil controls institutions. The evil controls media. The evil controls finance. The evil controls politics. The evil controls culture.

Yet there is often no corresponding source of good with comparable power, which results in a cosmology of near-total defeat. The believer may possess knowledge, but not agency. They are “awake,” but awakening changes little because the adversary is presumed to control everything.

That said, conspiracy theory is a political religion. The conspiratorial commentariat that posts online in feverish, often fanatical tones portrays a world of ultimate doom, often oscillating between apocalyptic despair (”Everything is rigged,”) and millenarian hope (”The Great Awakening is coming.”)

The Great Awakening is an attempt to reintroduce a missing religious element: redemption. If the conspiracy worldview remained purely secular and purely pessimistic, it would be psychologically difficult to inhabit for long. Eventually it tends to generate some equivalent of salvation—a reckoning, disclosure, revolution, awakening, collapse of the cabal, etc.

This may be why many conspiracy movements gradually acquire quasi-religious features. The structure begins to resemble religion because humans need more than an explanation for evil; they need an explanation for the possibility of good.

The worldview has its prophets — Icke, Jones, Q — who interpret rather than report. It has revelation in the leak and the dump, and the language of conversion to go with it: wake up, red pill, disclosure. It has scripture, a canon of drops and screenshots read with the intensity of exegesis. It has an always-imminent eschatology — the Storm, the Great Reset, collapse is one crisis away. It has its elect, the Awake against the sheep, alienation turned to dissident status, self-identifying heroes fighting valiantly against the deep state or the globalists. And it has judgment: the tribunals, the reckoning, the day the hidden evil is finally exposed. What assembles itself out of these parts is not a theory. It is a secular religion that has misplaced or lost its God.

This may explain why conspiracy thinking can become socially corrosive and personally destructive. If every institution is captured, every leader compromised, every expert lying, and every event manipulated, then trust is irrational. The world becomes populated almost entirely by villains, dupes, and victims.

Doom is inevitable. Resistance is futile. Orwell was right.

Ironically, this is where many conspiracy theories become less realistic than the world they are trying to explain. Actual political and economic systems are usually messier, a labyrinth of corruption and a tragedy of errors. They contain selfish actors, altruistic actors, competent actors, incompetent actors, competing factions, accidents, unintended consequences, and genuine disagreements. The world often contains both more good and more chaos than conspiracy theories allow.

A conspiracy theory is a secular theodicy without grace. The conspiratorial commentariat act as its priest-class, an online panel of daily commentators who explain events, politicians in the context of the revealed scriptures.

Why This Structure Emerges

The deeper question is why these similarities keep appearing — both religion and conspiracy theory are attempting to answer the same existential questions about the problem of evil. Religion answers these questions through God, angels, sin, salvation, and judgment. Conspiracy theory answers them through elites, secret networks, hidden plans, disclosure, and exposure. The sociologist Peter Berger argued that humans require a “sacred canopy”—a framework that makes reality intelligible. When traditional religious belief weakens, the need for a coherent explanatory framework does not disappear.

A traditional religion usually balances evil and good, judgment and mercy, corruption and redemption, but the conspiracy worldview preserves the first half but struggles with the second. They explain evil very effectively, but often have difficulty explaining grace, forgiveness, creativity, love, beauty, or genuine moral progress.

That is why conspiracy movements often drift toward apocalyptic expectation. Once evil becomes the organizing principle of history, some dramatic revelation or judgment is needed to restore hope.

In that sense, conspiracy theories are not merely alternative explanations of politics. They can become alternative cosmology and modern mythology — stories about the hidden structure, purpose, and destiny of the world. The more comprehensive they become, the more they begin to resemble the religious systems they implicitly replace.

Karl Popper named this error. Most large social outcomes are nobody’s plan. They emerge from unintended consequences, institutional momentum, competing interests, feedback, accident. Nothing, as Popper put it, ever comes off as intended. History is rarely a series of orchestrated events. It is almost always: many people pursuing their own goals and the results are often something no one chose.

Conspiracy theory cannot tolerate that. It installs a cabal where God used to sit. Karl Popper wrote that the conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning god and then asking who is in his place. It is, in his phrase, a secularization of a religious superstition. An authored world — even a malevolent one — is easier to endure than an unauthored one. But the throne it fights over is the earthly one, the seat of historical control, and that seat is empty. No hidden hand or secret puppeteers direct the wreckage of human actions.

Whatever one believes about the cosmic order, the worldly order has no author — and the world runs anyway, chaotically, alternately producing more good and more chaos than any conspiracy allows. That is the more difficult thought, and the one neither the believer nor the awake will hold: not that the wrong hand is pulling the strings, but that no human actors are pulling the strings.

About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Institutionalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit