Robert Horning argues that they are a warped form of non-conformity:
It’s a grandiose way of signaling resistance to the normative culture of our time (to borrow a phrase Amitai Etzioni uses in this TNR article). What is at stake for [the conspiracy theorist] in his Holocaust denial is not history at all or even his urge to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda. Rather, it’s nothing other than his own reputation as a stalwart nonconformist. Holocaust denial ends up seeming like the extreme version of hating Coldplay because they are popular.Commenter jimstoic adds:
People want the universe to make sense. It feels imbalanced for one person, like Lee Harvey Oswald, to in a single moment have such a dramatic effect on the the world. The perceived magnitude of the evil far outweighs the perceived magnitude of the perpetrator.
Calm acceptance of this imbalance requires either great faith, or an acceptance that the universe has no inherent meaning. The minds of people between these extremes seek explanations for how a meaningful universe could allow such imbalance.
Frank Furedi writes in sp!ked about the problem of causality:
Conspiratorial thinking is encouraged by a powerful cultural narrative that depicts people, not as the authors of their destiny, but as the objects of manipulative secretive forces. Life is interpreted through the prism of a Hollywood blockbuster, where powerful evil and hidden figures pull all the strings. The flourishing of this imagination springs from mainstream society’s own inability to give an authoritative account of contemporary events. Virtually every aspect of public life is contested today, and there is little agreement on what are the causes of our current predicament. This crisis of causality continually calls into question the official version of events. Of course, the official version of events often needs to be questioned, but not through embracing a simplistic conspiratorial worldview that blames small cliques of evil people for what happens in the world.The jist is that conspiratorial thinking is a form of healthy skepticism, historical reasoning, and the attribution of cause and effect relationships run amok. Ultimately it's a form of intellectual despair in which the drive to create meaning in history and current affairs is caught in a feedback loop of fanciful associations, biases, obsessions, and prejudices: racism, sexism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance. Typically this results in an understanding of events that is private and self-serving. Real history, on the other hand, seeks to understand how social movements, material circumstances, and individual actions drive the historical narrative with the simplest explanation usually being the best one.
