I want to conclude my series on “Kurt Gödel and the Leibniz Conspiracy” with the following observation about Franz Neumann’s influential 1957 essay on conspiracy theories[1]: Neumann, with his focus on “anxiety” and “politics”, has opened up a veritable Pandora’s box of competing psychological and social explanations to explain away the popularity of conspiracy theories.[2] (See, for example, the book pictured below.) But by painting conspiracy theorists with such a wide brush, these scholarly “explanations” are too comprehensive to be of any value. Let me explain:

A recent comprehensive survey of the literature concludes that conspiracy beliefs are due to “a range of psychological, political, and social factors.”[3] Similarly, another study examines the link between “societal crisis situations” and “belief in conspiracy theories” and blames “fear, uncertainty, and the feeling of being out of control” for “increasing the likelihood of perceiving conspiracies in social situations.”[4] Yet another study highlights the role the epistemic, existential, and social motives play in driving the popularity of conspiracy theories.[5] Is this why Michael Kempe makes no mention of Gödel’s conspiracy theory in his otherwise excellent intellectual biography of Leibniz, The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days?

However my question about Kempe’s omission is answered, the problem with all these dime-a-dozen psychological and social explanations of conspiracy theories, beginning with Franz Neumann’s classic work on conspiracy theories on “Anxiety and Politics”, is that they are ad hoc. Simply put, by blaming conspiracy thinking on such a wide variety of social and psychological factors and motives, these explanations prove too much. Worse yet, some commentators, in their zeal to blame conspiracy theories on “bad thinking”[6] or “cognitive quirks,”[7] come perilously close to committing the ad hominem fallacy.[8] In any case, the argument that “only bad thinkers believe in conspiracies” is not only tautological; it is also overinclusive, as the Leibniz Conspiracy itself demonstrates. After all, the proponent of this particular conspiracy theory, Kurt Gödel, is considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle!

To conclude: Kurt Gödel may have been paranoid about many things (see here or here, for example), including about Leibniz’s missing works, but my larger point is simply this: Gödel’s paranoia, by itself, has no bearing on whether “The Leibniz Conspiracy” really occurred or not. (Footnotes are below the fold.)

[1] See Franz Neumann, Anxiety and Politics, in Herbert Marcuse, editor, The Democratic and Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, The Free Press (1957), pp. 270–300.

[2] By way of example, one early study (Ted Goertzel, “Belief in conspiracy theories”, Political Psychology, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1994), pp. 731–742, available here; n = 348) concludes that “belief in conspiracies [is] correlated with anomia.” (Goertzel 1994, p. 731) By contrast, another study (Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, “Conspiracy theories and the paranoid style(s) of mass opinion”, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 58, No. 4 (2014), pp. 952–966, available here; n = 1935) blames “a Manichean worldview,” concluding that “the likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted by a willingness to believe in other unseen, intentional forces and an attraction to Manichean narratives.” (Oliver & Wood 2014, p. 959)

[3] Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton, “Conspiracy theories and the conspiracy mindset: implications for political ideology”, Current Opinion in Behavioral Science, vol. 34 (2020), pp. 118–122.

[4] Jan–Willem van Prooijen and Karen M. Douglas, “Conspiracy theories as part of history: the role of societal crisis situations”, Memory Studies, vol. 10, no. 3 (2017), pp. 323–333.

[5] Karen M. Douglas and Ricky Green, “Anxious attachment and belief in conspiracy theories”, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 125 (2017), pp. 30–37.

[6] Compare, for example, Quassim Cassam, Bad thinkers, Aeon (Mar. 13, 2015), who blames “bad thinking” for the rise of conspiracy thinking.

[7] Compare Kaleigh Rogers and Jasmine Mithani, Why people fall for conspiracy theories, FiveThirtyEight (June 15, 2021), who identify various “cognitive quirks,” along with social media exposure, as the cause of conspiracy theories.

[8] The ad hominem fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone’s argument or position, one mounts an attack on his appearance, on his moral character, or on some other irrelevant personal attribute. See, e.g., Christopher W. Tindale, Fallacies and Argument Appraisal, Cambridge (2007), p. 82. That is, instead of addressing the merits of popular conspiracy theories, contemporary researchers often end up dismissing or rejecting such theories out of hand, finding some psychological fault or mental defect as the underlying source of conspiracy thinking.