Conspiracy and Contingency: How to Deal with Fake Necessities

What do conspiracy theories, algorithms and meritocracy have in common? All three avoid contingency and frantically look for necessities. The COVID-19 crisis has brought about a proliferation of conspiracy theories that reject, among other things, official accounts of the virus’s origins and remedies, and sometimes even the existence of the virus itself. Conspiratorial thinking usually links events to secret plots concocted by powerful conspirators, whether it be Bill Gates or Big Pharma. In this book, I point to another dominant driving force: the desire to find simple and apparently reasonable explanations for phenomena that are actually purely random and contingent. Often, unfounded conspiracy theories emerge because contingency is not accepted, and necessities are looked for at all costs. Nothing happens by chance, and there must be a plan or an intelligent design behind everything.