In a previous text, I attempted to describe the deep causes behind the accelerated spread, over the past two or three decades, of what I call the conspiracist religion. The expression is not a stylistic flourish: it conveys the idea that we are not dealing merely with a scattering of beliefs, but with a structured system—equipped with its dogmas, its prophets, and its rites—that functions in ways closely comparable to the great religions of the past.
Why speak of religion? Because conspiracism is not just a set of debatable ideas: it is a matrix that claims to explain everything, that shuts the door to contradiction by interpreting it as further proof, and that turns each refutation into an act of heresy. It is also a collective response to existential anxieties: uncertainty, randomness, the feeling that the world is too complex to be mastered. Where traditional religious faith promised a divine providence, conspiracism offers an inverted providence: a hidden hand pulling the strings, a grand narrative that makes chaos bearable by clothing it in coherence.
To this dimension of meaning is added a communal dimension. Like religions, conspiracism creates bonds by drawing a sharp boundary between an enlightened “us” and a duped or corrupted “them.” Social networks have become its temples: the same narratives are recited there, the same signs of recognition are shared, charismatic figures are honored as whistleblowers, prophets, even martyrs. The viral repetition of content acts like a ritual, consolidating belonging and nurturing the intimate conviction of being custodians of a hidden truth.
The political consequences of this dynamic are now visible. The rise of the far right across the West—the election and then re-election of Donald Trump in the United States, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the advance of the Front National in France, and so many other examples—is not an isolated accident: it is one of the direct effects of the conspiracist religion. These outsiders, presented as “anti-system,” appear as desirable alternatives to populations convinced that traditional institutions are betraying them. They are both symptoms and maladies of the interstice upon which we stand: a threshold period, where the old world is coming apart without the new one yet being built. We will have to learn to live with them for several decades, until we have invented a governmental system suited to the digital civilization. They are historical errors, in the strict sense of the term: necessary detours which, through their violence and their dead ends, may allow us to understand what must be surpassed in order to move forward.
It is this reality we must confront if we want to understand why the spread of conspiracism is so rapid, so tenacious, and why rational arguments alone so often seem powerless to stem it. Once this diagnosis is set, another question presents itself: what is to be done? How can we weaken this new religion, reduce its force of propagation, and—above all—protect ourselves, individually and collectively, from the dogmatism that is taking hold?
It is to these means of resistance that I wish to devote this text. I will approach them in an order that runs from the most accessible and immediate—what can be put in place through education and shared culture—toward the deepest and most complex: the transformation of our institutions, without which it will be impossible to overcome this phenomenon in any lasting way.
Psychology education and critical thinking as first lines of defense
The first terrain on which it is possible to act—and perhaps the most obvious—is education. For conspiracism thrives first and foremost on universal vulnerabilities of the human mind. It feeds on our cognitive biases, those mental shortcuts that let us go fast but, misunderstood, become traps. The simplicity bias makes us prefer a short, sharp explanation, even a false one, to a complex and nuanced explanation that is closer to the truth. The negativity bias renders us more attentive to what threatens or alarms than to what reassures. Pareidolia prompts us to see forms where there is only chance, connections in the random noise of events. And above all, we tolerate uncertainty poorly: faced with a world that escapes us, we almost always seize upon the first explanation that reduces the anxiety of vagueness.
So long as we remain ignorant of these mechanisms, we become their consenting victims. Knowing these biases does not abolish them, but it at least allows us to recognize the moment we are tempted to yield to them. This is why it seems indispensable to me to introduce, from the youngest age, a minimal psychological education—a kind of grammar of the human mind. Not to turn every pupil into a specialist, but so that each one has the words and concepts to name what is playing out in their own head.
But this first layer of protection, however essential, is not sufficient. Conspiracism does not prosper only on our inner vulnerabilities: it exploits the radical transformation of the informational ecosystem. In other words, even if we know our own biases, we must still be able to distinguish which information deserves to be believed and which sources merit being followed.
In the civilization of the book, the question presented differently. Newspapers, radio, publishing houses served as filters—imperfect, biased, sometimes partisan, yet built upon collectives of trained people applying minimal methods of verification and cross-checking. Most citizens could thus consume information without constantly interrogating the reliability of the source.
In the digital civilization, that filter has vanished. Anyone can publish anything and be read by millions. This is an extraordinary freedom, and also an unprecedented danger. The internet user navigating today’s networks must perform alone the work of sorting, analyzing, and ranking. Without specific training, they simply lack the means.
Education must therefore go further: each citizen must learn to identify a reliable source, to recognize the implicit intentions of the speaker, to distinguish between an established fact and an opinion dressed up as truth. A few simple questions could serve as basic reflexes: Who is speaking? Whence their authority? What interests do they pursue? Are their claims confirmed by multiple independent sources?
We must also teach what the scientific method is, and why it remains our best instrument for knowing reality. To understand the difference between an isolated testimony and a consensus grounded in hundreds of reproducible experiments; to understand that a fact accepted by the scientific community does not rest on any single person’s authority, but on the patient convergence of multiple studies; to understand finally that science itself evolves not because it is fragile or arbitrary, but because its strength lies precisely in its capacity to correct itself—this should constitute a common foundation.
Such formation does not imply that everyone become a journalist or a researcher. It simply means that, when faced with a claim, each person knows how to deploy a minimum of distance: not to confuse staging with competence, not to take at face value someone who dons the title of “whistleblower” to win sympathy, not to be seduced by the appearance of solitary courage against a crowd of experts when that courage is only hollow rhetoric.
Psychology and critical thinking are thus two faces of the same education: one arms us against our own illusions, the other against illusions produced by others. One protects against inner ease, the other against outer seduction. Without this double apprenticeship, we remain delivered over to the conspiracist religion as to a superior force, of which we will be passive believers rather than enlightened citizens.
Platform responsibility: exiting the fiction of neutrality
We too often place the core of responsibility on individuals: it is up to them to educate themselves, to learn psychology, to develop critical thinking, to sort the information they consume. Necessary, yes—but insufficient. To ask each person to protect themselves alone against a system designed to exploit cognitive flaws is like asking a passerby to face an elite fighter unarmed.
We must therefore rebalance: it is not only a matter of strengthening citizens’ minds, but of questioning the legal framework in which they evolve, and the responsibility of the platforms that organize the circulation of information. These platforms are not mere pipes: they are the invisible architects of the space where our opinions are formed, and they profit directly from it.
Yet they continue to claim the status of neutral hosts—mere technical supports for user-generated content, unresponsible for what circulates. This argument could still be defended in the era of forums and early blogs, when posts appeared chronologically and a content’s visibility depended only on the curiosity of the one seeking it out.
Today information does not work that way. When we open Instagram, X, or TikTok, we do not see the raw totality of posts from people we follow: we see what the algorithm has chosen to show us. And that algorithm is not neutral. It is designed for a precise objective unrelated to informational quality or the public interest: to hold our attention as long as possible in order to maximize advertising revenue.
Because human beings are naturally more sensitive to shock than to nuance, content that triggers anger, fear, or outrage mechanically generates more interaction. Algorithms, which have no intention of their own but continuously optimize for what holds attention, detect that surplus efficacy and amplify it. In practice, when we observe how they operate, it is indeed such content—the most negative, polarizing, and simplistic—that is pushed to the fore.
To this first effect a second, more insidious one is added: hyper-personalization. Each platform not only boosts what performs on average; it builds for every user an exceedingly precise behavioral profile, and adjusts in real time the content offered according to past reactions.
This is what disinformation researchers call the rabbit hole. One enters through a banal curiosity—a video, an article, a comment—and the algorithm, having detected the user’s interest, begins to propose ever more similar content, then ever more extreme. The trajectory is gradual, yet acts like a slippery slope: as one consumes, the system refines its understanding of what captures one’s attention and encloses one in an ever-narrower informational corridor.
The result is twofold. First, confirmation bias is systematically fueled: each past interaction increases the likelihood of exposure to content that reinforces already-established convictions. Second, this informational isolation creates an illusion of normality: since I see only content that aligns with me, I feel that “everyone thinks like me.” The mass effect joins the confirmation effect, and the initial belief hardens into certainty.
This mechanism explains why individuals once only at the margins of conspiracism can, in a few months or years, shift into total—and sometimes irreversible—adherence. Not because they actively sought such content, but because the very architecture of the platforms led them there, in service of a single aim: to maximize time spent watching, clicking, commenting.
It is no longer acceptable, then, for these companies to hide behind non-responsibility. They do exercise algorithmic curation that has vast social and political effects. They should in fact be held responsible, civilly and criminally, for the consequences of the diffusion they orchestrate. This does not mean only a declaration of principle, but the effective opening of legal avenues enabling victims to obtain redress and courts to sanction. Civilly, relatives of a victim of radicalization or violent acts should be able to engage the platform’s responsibility, demonstrate that its algorithm favored the spread of extremist content, and obtain damages commensurate with the harm. Criminally, it should be possible, in the gravest cases, to engage the direct responsibility of executives, as is done in other industries when negligence or willful inaction contributes to mortal consequences.
This is likely the only lever strong enough to break the current inertia. So long as they risk nothing, platforms have no interest in erecting guardrails that would weaken the core of their business model. Their profitability depends precisely on this unrestrained capture of attention, which feeds on polarization, excess, shock. Expecting them to renounce it spontaneously in the name of ethics is to ask them to act against themselves. We must therefore introduce into their calculus what they understand best: financial and judicial risk. Until they are exposed to severe sanctions—be they monetary or penal—nothing serious will change. But once the threat becomes tangible, once inaction can cost the company and its leaders dearly, they will be compelled to do what they refuse today: design safeguards, implement braking devices, and at last assume a responsibility proportionate to the power they wield over our societies.
Resistance will be fierce. The tech giants have every interest in preserving the current model, for it lies at the heart of their profitability. They will brandish the dogma of freedom of expression to defend what is in reality only the freedom of their algorithms to manipulate our cognitive biases. The fight will be difficult, but we must assert a simple principle: when a company makes money by steering human attention, it must answer for the consequences of what it propagates.
The civilizational horizon: refounding the institutions
If education provides a first line of defense, and platform accountability a necessary second front, neither remedy can suffice alone. Conspiracism does not flourish only on individual failings or the excesses of the attention economy: it draws strength from a far broader crisis—that of the legitimacy of our institutions.
We are tipping from one era into another. The civilization of the book, which structured our societies for centuries, is slowly giving way to the digital civilization. Michel Serres showed this magnificently in Petite Poucette. A philosopher, epistemologist, and historian of science, he devoted a large part of his work to thinking about transformations in knowledge and their impact on our ways of living together. His authority here is not incidental: he spoke not only as a speculative philosopher but as a careful reader of the long history of technical and cultural shifts, capable of grasping how a change in the supports of knowledge ultimately reconfigures political and social structures.
What did he argue? That each time a technology for producing and circulating knowledge transforms radically, the whole of society is reconfigured. The move to manuscript writing in medieval Europe allowed the constitution of an organized yet strongly centralized civilization. Knowledge, consigned by hand in rare volumes, remained the privilege of a minority—nobles and clerics. They alone could read, keep, and interpret texts, and it was this mastery of knowledge that grounded their legitimacy to govern. The civilization of the manuscript was thus a civilization of scarcity: scarce books, scarce access, scarce claimants to power.
The invention of printing marked a wholly different rupture. The multiplication of copies, their circulation within an enlarged social space, made possible the emergence of a new class of the literate: educated bourgeois. It was no longer necessary to belong to nobility or clergy to access knowledge and claim a role in governing collective affairs. From this was born a new legitimacy that progressively undermined the monopoly of the former holders of knowledge. After centuries of conflict and revolution, this dynamic culminated in what we today call parliamentary representation, adapted to a society in which printed books widely diffused knowledge and shaped an educated public opinion.
With the digital civilization, we witness a different kind of upheaval. Not only does knowledge production multiply; above all, the perception of its distribution changes radically. Each person can publish, comment, share: each feels themselves no longer a mere receiver but a full actor in the circulation of knowledge. This impression of fully open, accessible, contributive knowledge profoundly alters the relationship to intellectual and political authority. For if, in appearance, everyone can access the same information, why still delegate to scholarly, academic, or political institutions the monopoly of truth?
It is precisely in this context that conspiracist narratives flourish, with their recurring injunction to “do your own research.” They rest upon the illusion of universal access to knowledge: each person, freely navigating the Internet, believes they can verify, compare, and judge for themselves. Lacking training in critical thinking and source hierarchy, this individual quest often reduces to wandering through the labyrinths of disinformation. Far from strengthening intellectual autonomy, it encloses the individual within narratives that confirm initial intuitions and leads them to conclude, almost naturally, that institutions claiming epistemic authority are illegitimate.
Conspiracism thus slips into the interstice of this transition. At bottom it expresses not only fear of chaos or appetite for simplistic stories; above all, it expresses radical mistrust of existing institutions, perceived as illegitimate, opaque, or manipulative. So long as citizens feel their governments decide in secret, act against them, or speak a language reserved for initiates, the conspiracist religion will find fertile ground. The only way to weaken it durably is to refound the institutions themselves, adapting them to the digital age.
This work will be long, uncertain, conflict-ridden. Recall that the invention of printing did not immediately engender what we now call parliamentary representation: it took three centuries of reforms, revolutions, and wars for a representative system corresponding to the logic of print to emerge, not without upheaval. So too today’s passage will take time—a century at least, likely. But it is inevitable.
Toward what should we tend? Toward distributed and decentralized forms of governance, capable of reflecting the real diversity of citizens and guaranteeing the transparency of processes. Sortition, often caricatured, seems to me one of the rare mechanisms capable of ensuring authentic representativeness, breaking with political professionalization and elite insularity. Combined with decentralized consensus technologies, it would allow the establishment of decision procedures that are verifiable, traceable, and impossible for a few to confiscate. This is not utopia: these are experimental paths already explored, at small scale, in certain citizen collectives and within the ecosystem of decentralized autonomous organizations.
Of course, such prospects are not acceptable to a majority today. They appear too complex, too far from habitual thought, perhaps too radical. As ever, it will be the new generations who carry these evolutions, while older ones cling to what they know. We must therefore think of this process not as a sprint, but as a civilizational marathon. Meanwhile we will see convulsions, reversals, triumphant populisms, and despots elected in the name of simplicity. History does not move in a straight line.
The parallel with the fall of Rome is instructive. An empire does not collapse in a day, but when a collective belief ceases to be widely enough shared to sustain a political order. Rome withered because belief in Rome eroded, replaced by other, stronger narratives. So it will be for our current institutions: they will not fall at once, but as their symbolic legitimacy disappears, giving way to new social beliefs and collective imaginaries. Conspiracism is one step in this process—the symptom of a lost faith rather than an end in itself.
This is why it is essential, starting now, to work toward these new institutions. Not in the belief that they can be installed by decree, but by beginning to experiment: building prototypes of distributed governance, creating transparent decision spaces, developing the technical and cultural tools that will render these innovations credible when the time comes. We must become the keepers of a reserve of ideas, so that on the day when catastrophes render inaction untenable, alternatives already exist, ready to be seized.
It will likely take two or three generations for the digital civilization to find institutions proper to it, just as it took centuries for print to make parliamentary representation possible. In the meantime, conspiracism will continue to thrive in the interstice, fed by uncertainty and by mistrust toward institutions perceived as illegitimate.
Hence the need to prepare, now, the ramparts and the alternatives: to teach psychology and critical thinking, to hold platforms responsible—but above all to elaborate forms of governance suited to this new age. It is to this last task, the most complex and the longest to implement, that I will devote a significant part of my forthcoming texts.
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