Historicol investigation has largely been replaced by propaganda, as can be seen in the case of the war in Ukraine.
In the public debate, increasingly ossified and constructed with slogans, stock phrases, uncritically assembled pieces of speech, one of the most used phrases is "conspiracy theory".
Used as a passe-partout, it serves to stigmatize any reading, any interpretation that attempts to see what happens beneath the surface of events.
In the journalistic-television vernacular, events, like documents, "speak for themselves", are "clear", "unequivocal"; anyone who tries to dig beneath it - like the famous "old mole" - is comparable to a serial novelist, creator of fictitious conspiracies and fake secret societies.
He therefore bans any investigation "that distances itself from the facts", as if "the facts" existed as such. Yet this is the implication that passes through mainstream communication.
Tacitus already spoke centuries ago about the "arcana imperii", the secrets of power, which had to be investigated beneath the surface if one wanted to understand the events. Before him, Thucydides distinguished between occasional causes and true causes and following him, Polybius, who distinguished between pròphasis (apparent cause), archè (beginning), and aitìa (real cause).
Are they conspiracy theorists too?
The fact is that historiographical investigation has largely been replaced by propaganda, as can be seen in the case of the war in Ukraine, which prevents us from analyzing the conflict at its roots and brands all those who try to understand the different stratifications as "Putinists". Which led to the ruinous (especially for Europe) clash between Russia and NATO.
This attitude of simplification and acceptance of reality "as it is", in which white alternates with black without nuances, is also in full harmony with the neo-Enlightenment trend which is largely dominant today, according to which some terms such as, for example, "democracy", "human rights", "moral principles" are universals removed from the flow of History which actually produced them.
And so when we talk about democracy, we actually mean "liberal democracy", that is, that form of political government that was born within our culture about two centuries ago, after a thousand-year process with a thousand nuances and which we want “export” to China, Africa, anywhere, without taking the slightest consideration of the history of those countries. Losing the adjective along the way, our form of democracy therefore becomes democracy tout-court.
Paul Ricoeur called Marx, Nietzsche and Freud “the masters of suspicion”; today these same philosophers, if they went on television, on some talk show, would certainly be labeled as "masters of conspiracy".
Crushing societies into lumps of independent atoms, held together by a-dialectical, indisputable and abstract principles, satisfies the needs of the current development model, which cannot tolerate complex interpretations, capable of rooting individuals in their history.
By isolating individuals, denying them a concrete identity, surrogate by ideology and false consciousness, they are made malleable and interchangeable on the global market.