There is no cabal

Everyone wants to believe in conspiracies. Some people believe that the alarmingly far-right government of the UK is conspiring with shadowy plutocrats to enrich themselves. That government itself apparently believes in the ludicrous ‘15-minute city’ conspiracy theory, and that something variously known ‘the blob’ and ‘lefty lawyers’ is working furiously against them. Trump supporters in the US believe in more conspiracy theories than it’s easy to count. Their opponents believe that Trump is a sock puppet for Putin, or in various conspiracies called ‘disaster capitalism’. People on all sides think the Jews or, perhaps, the Muslims, are behind everything. Or is it the climate scientists?

Here’s the thing: it’s all nonsense. The illuminati do not exist. There is no cabal. If you think there is, you need to get out more.

It’s pretty obvious that large-scale conspiracies are all but impossible: humans are just not very good either at keeping secrets or at running large organisations effectively. And, of course, you can make this formal, if you want to.

In fact this is very easy to see. If you say that a person has some chance, \(c\), of leaking information about some conspiracy they’re involved in each year, then if you have \(n\) people conspiring for \(m\) years, and if all of them independently may leak information, then the chance that the conspiracy leaks after this time is

\[1 - (1 - c)^{nm}\]

What this means is easy to see. For a conspiracy where each person has a 1% chance of leaking it each year you get a picture like this:

Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 1%/person/year

For a conspiracry where the chance is 0.1%/person/year then you get this:

Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year

And I don’t know if this is clearer or not, but here is the 1% graph in 3d:

Chance of a conspiracy leaking, 0.1%/person/year

Well, you can see that the situation looks pretty hopeless: large conspiracies which last a long time are just doomed to leak. Of course real conspiracies aren’t made up of people, all of whom know everything, and who decide, randomly and independently, whether they should leak information each year: they’re more complicated than that. But that doesn’t make them more plausible.

Large, long-lived conspiracies are extremely implausible.

If you don’t want to think about the maths just look at the world. Look at the catastrophic, chaotic mess that is the current UK government. Look at the appalling series of disasters that was the Trump administration¹. These are not people capable of conspiring with themselves, let along anyone else. Trump is not a smart person, and neither is Rishi Sunak.

Look at Putin and Ukraine.

Or look at the supposed great genius of private enterprise: Elon Musk. I mean, it’s impossible not to laugh at the mess he’s made of Twitter.

It’s not that these people can’t do harm: they can do, and are doing, enormous harm. If Trump wins another term, we’re all fucked. But the harm they do is not being done by some clever hidden scheming: they’re doing it in plain sight. They’re doing it both because they are exactly the evil shits they seem to be, and because they are grotesquely incompetent.

It’s not that they’re not corrupt: they are very corrupt. But that corruption is obvious: the reason they don’t get caught is because they run the government. And that’s not a conspiracy: we know they run the government because many of them are the government. When all these government ministers ‘lose’ WhatsApps from 2020–2021 we know what that means: they’re not hiding it, they’re lying, we know they’re lying, and they know we know they’re lying. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s in plain sight.

The problem is not, in fact, conspiracies, it’s the belief in conspiracies. If you believe that some hidden group of people are behind everything (as Trump supporters do, and as many, many other people do), then you believe a thing which is false, and every conculsion you draw from such a belief is therefore junk. The more you believe in conspiracies, the worse your reasoning will be.

The truth is out there: there is no cabal.