Why the Conspiracy Theorists are Winning

The consensus on reality just collapsed. That's a good thing.

Everyone knows the Earth goes around the Sun. That part’s not in dispute. But the story we’re told about how we figured it out—Copernicus courageously running the numbers, Galileo defiantly peering through his telescope, the Church finally bowing to overwhelming evidence—is mostly myth. Aristarchus had already sketched a heliocentric universe in the 3rd century BC, 1800 years earlier. There was plenty of evidence long before Galileo ever tilted a lens skyward. The reason heliocentrism didn’t stick until Newton wasn’t a shortage of data. It was a surplus of stigma.

We like to flatter ourselves about how science works. The story goes like this: first you get evidence, then you get consensus, and then the stigma around a new idea melts away. Truth wins because the evidence speaks for itself. That’s the official story, at least. It’s complete nonsense.

The real order of operations is the reverse: stigma collapses first, then evidence can be shared, and only then does consensus pretend it was obvious all along. In his own era, Galileo wasn’t obviously right—he was a conspiracy theorist.

The physicist Max Planck said it best in 1949: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents… but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, you’d get a better map of how knowledge advances by reading obituaries instead of textbooks.

The Cartel That Controlled Reality

We learned the wrong lesson from history. Instead of recognizing how stigma distorts knowledge, we institutionalized it. The 20th century’s solution to unreliable information was to concentrate credibility in fewer hands—scaling Planck’s problem up to industrial size.

For most of modern history, the information economy functioned as a cartel. Three institutions held oligopolistic control over what counted as real: universities, major media, and government agencies. If Harvard didn’t publish it, the New York Times didn’t print it, and the Pentagon didn’t confirm it, then it effectively didn’t exist.

This cartel worked tolerably well when those institutions actually upheld rigorous standards. In an era of competence, gatekeeping had a point: filter the signal from the noise in a world that was getting noisier.

But like every cartel, it eventually corrupted itself. What began as three semi-independent powers—universities competing on merit, government recruiting from that competition, media skeptical of both—merged into a single, financially entangled system. Government money flowed into universities through loans and grants. Universities learned that ideological alignment mattered more than intellectual independence. Media traded skepticism for bookings. The result wasn’t just bias. It was coordination—subsidized by taxpayers and shielded from market correction.

This mutual-credentialing club was so seamless most people never even recognized it as a cartel. The incest was complete: universities credentialed the experts, government funded their research, media anointed them as authorities, and the experts dutifully fed government propaganda back through the media. Each institution validated the others, and together they monopolized what counted as reality. “Conspiracy theorist” wasn’t a description of your beliefs—it was your market position relative to the cartel.

The End of Truth

But no cartel lasts forever. They all fail for the same reason: competition finds a way around them. Kodak lost to iPhones. Broadcast networks bled to cable, then to streaming. Newspapers collapsed under the weight of social media. The academia–government–media triad was no different. What cracked the monopoly wasn’t division from within. It was the rise of an alternative information economy—blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and the rest of the sprawling bazaar of decentralized media.

The establishment didn't lose because they started to get it wrong. They've always been wrong. They lost because the comparison became visible. The internet distributed more information, to more people, in more interesting ways, with lower costs, fewer barriers, and no gatekeepers. The cartel's monopoly had disguised its propaganda as Truth. Once alternatives existed, the spell broke.

Stigmatized ideas no longer lived or died at the mercy of Harvard or the Times. They competed in the marketplace of attention and relevance. Some collapsed instantly under scrutiny. Others, once dismissed as “fringe,” suddenly had room to breathe. That’s the order of operations: not evidence first, but taboo-breaking first.

UFO videos, the COVID lab leak, Jeffrey Epstein, Göbekli Tepe, the Younger Dryas impact, the Telepathy Tapes, the Maidan Revolution. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in any of them. What matters is you’re allowed to, and enough people do. Inevitably, some of these ideas will collapse under the weight of new evidence. But others won’t. Some will turn out to be true—not because we became wiser, or because the conspiracy theorists were smarter, but because the taboo died. And taboo always dies before truth advances.

Market Efficiency in Real Time

The real shift isn’t that the internet created more noise—it’s that it created markets. Information now behaves like an asset class. Stigmatized topics once left to cranks and obsessives are suddenly attracting real analytical capital. Money, talent, and attention flow toward neglected opportunities, just as they do in any other market.

The irony is that the establishment institutions depend on public funding while treating public skepticism and curiosity with contempt. When your business model relies on taxpayer dollars and donations, calling your customers idiots isn’t just arrogant—it’s self-defeating.

Take archaeology. For decades, discussing ancient sites like Göbekli Tepe—or broader claims about advanced prehistoric civilizations—was career suicide. But when independent researchers built audiences outside the cartel, the incumbents couldn’t just sneer and move on. Market pressure forced a response. The once-heretical idea that civilization might be older than a few thousand years is now creeping into the mainstream through Netflix series and Joe Rogan interviews.

The same dynamic applies across fields. Nutrition. Climate. History. Fields where institutional consensus drifted too far from observed reality now face competition from personalities who don't need a Harvard letterhead or a Times byline to point it out. John Q Public doesn't have to understand emissions models to notice they've been told “the climate will collapse within ten years” for the past forty.

That doesn’t mean the outsiders are right. By default, most new ideas are wrong. All markets attract grifters. But that’s not the point. In an open market, bad ideas fail, and the right ones survive long enough to matter. The more ideas we can test without stigma, the quicker truth emerges.

The information economy is finally functioning like an actual economy: competitive, dynamic, and responsive to consumer demand. The old cartel model of institutional fact-declaration is dying, replaced by something more chaotic but ultimately more reliable—market-tested knowledge produced by researchers whose reputations depend on being credible rather than being credentialed. And if you don’t like it, I have bad news for you: the Pope didn't either.