There’s more to conspiracy theories than meets the eye

We know conspiracy theories can be harmful, but we also know conspiracies do happen. In an age of mistrust, the real challenge isn’t simply rejecting conspiracy theories, but knowing how to react to them.

Note: this article contains spoilers for the film, Bugonia. 

In Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2025 film Bugonia, a pharmaceutical company CEO, Michelle (played by Emma Stone) is kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy and Don are convinced Michelle is an extraterrestrial, part of a race of ‘Andromedans’ that Teddy believes are responsible for the gradual disappearance of the world’s honey bees. 

The film seems timely in many ways – bee colonies really have been collapsing – not least in depicting a conspiracy theorist as something far more dangerous than a mere harmless crank. That choice seems very much of the moment.  

But in Bugonia, the conspiracy theorists turn out to be right. Andromedans really are running the world, and Michelle really is one of their leaders.  

I don’t know if Lanthimos spends his spare time poring over academic philosophy journals. Yet his movie echoes a debate that’s been raging among philosophers for the last decade or more: should we be fighting back against conspiracy beliefs, and their increasingly role in public life? Or does treating conspiracy theory – and theorists – as a problem to be solved cause more harm than good? 

Harms of conspiracy

It’s easy to think of conspiracy theories as a sort of harmless game (after all, some are just that), yet conspiracy theories can be harmful in a number of ways. At the extreme, some conspiracy theorists – just like Bugonia’s Teddy – have been motivated to carry out acts of harassment or violence. In December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch burst into the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlour in Washington DC armed with a semi-automatic rifle, intending to expose a cabal of elite paedophiles. Six years later, a trio of conspiracy theorists in rural Queensland murdered two police officers and a neighbour before being killed themselves. 

Conspiracy harms exist on a larger scale too. Consider the role of conspiracy thinking in the return of vaccine-preventable disease, or the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to HIV denialism on the part of Thabo Mbeki’s government in South Africa. Conspiracy theories invite distrust of governments, institutional science, and other institutions critical to healthy civil society.  

There’s also a general moral cost to conspiracy theorising, just insofar as it’s a practice built on suspicion. You can’t have a conspiracy without conspirators, and that means every conspiracy theory is also an accusation – and levelling an accusation is not a morally neutral act.  

Some philosophers of conspiracy theory, known as ‘generalists’, appeal to such harms (among other arguments) to claim that conspiracy theories are always suspect. To generalists, conspiracy belief is both a result of sloppy reasoning and a source of social and political harm, and we’d be better off if we could stop them from spreading.  

But if conspiracy theories can be harmful, the ways in which we respond to them are also fraught with danger. 

Loaded terms

‘Conspiracy theory’, at least as used in the media and in political discourse, isn’t a neutral term. To say “that’s a conspiracy theory” is to rule that theory out of contention straight away. Likewise, “you’re a conspiracy theorist” is a way of saying “we don’t have to take what you’re saying seriously”.  

That can be a problem for two reasons. First, this loaded use of terms can give cover to bad actors: if a politician can dismiss an allegation against them as a ‘conspiracy theory’, they can avoid proper scrutiny too easily.  

Secondly, there’s a risk of violating what Miranda Fricker has famously called epistemic justice. 

In dismissing someone as a conspiracy theorist we risk failing to treat them with the dignity due to them as a fellow rational agent.

This danger is made worse by the fact that conspiracy belief can be more common amongst marginalised groups. It’s easier to believe powerful groups are secretly trying to manipulate or exploit you when they’ve done it before.  

After all, as other philosophers of conspiracy theory point out, conspiring with others is something that humans sometimes do. If that weren’t the case, much of history would be unintelligible to us. Unless we want to deny that a conspiracy of Nixon staffers led to the Watergate scandal, or that al Qaeda terrorists conspired to attack targets with hijacked planes, we can’t simply dismiss any given conspiracy theory purely because it’s a conspiracy theory. 

Threading the needle

So we find ourselves in a quandary. Conspiracy theories erode social trust, encourage suspicion, and can lead to harmful behaviours. (They also suffer from a lack of falsifiability, and a poor track record for turning out to be true). Yet in a democratic society, a standing suspicion of power is also vital, and epistemic justice demands we not simply write people off as stupid or crazy. So how do we balance these things? 

One option is to accept that people – including very powerful ones – do sometimes conspire with each other, but set the bar for entertaining a conspiracy theory drastically higher than for non-conspiracy explanations. We have good epistemic and moral reasons to refuse to engage in conspiracy thinking unless the evidence becomes overwhelming. Conspiracy thinking is somewhere we should not want to go, unless and until we have no other rationally available choice.  

That comes with a danger of being duped. We might fail to spot the next Watergate, or worse. In Bugonia, Teddy uncovers a genuine alien conspiracy. As it happens, his doing so doesn’t help anyone: Michelle escapes, tells her fellow Andromedans their experiment on Earth has failed, and instantly wipes out the entire human race.  

Even so, Teddy got lucky. The rest of us would still have been justified in trying to foil his kidnap attempt – even though he was, improbably, right all along. In the real world, we just have to take the risk that the Teddys of this world are probably wrong. 

Probably.