The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis has one display about the conspiracy theories surrounding Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Some of them were pretty far-fetched, but I did not have a good answer to one student’s question about why do people come up with all these conspiracy theories. David Aaronovitch has a new book out about why people believe conspiracy theories, and in an interview with Thomas Rogers he has a pretty believable answer to the question, “What makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories?”:
We want to believe theories that contradict the idea that young, iconic people died senselessly. If a story takes away the accidental from their death, it gives them agency. After the JFK assassination, it was unbearable to many people that they could live in a country where a lone gunman could kill a president. In those circumstances, it’s not surprising that an overarching conspiracy theory emerges. It suggests that somebody is in control, rather than that we’re at the mercy of our neighbors and to some extent of ourselves (as was the case with Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana). It’s the urge to make sense of a particularly traumatic moment.
