Conspirare: “To breathe together”. The latin root is a poetic embodiment of harmonious human consciousness, and perhaps our oldest political act. Yet, drifting through centuries of upheaval and paranoia, conspiracy has been swept into the undercurrent of modern fear.
Conspiracy has curdled from communion into something more sinister.
Now a word defined by shadowy plots and secret cabals, conspiracy has taken root across every institution: from papal banking scandals to climate change denialism, to QAnon and election rigging. But beneath these headlines lies something stranger still. In the 21st century, conspiracy has transformed again into the invisible lifeline of a system built on illusion: capitalism.
Woah, it’s another essay on Capitalism. Not.
Capitalism is often imagined as a machine: banks as gears, markets the engine, and governments the control panel. But beneath these mechanics, it runs on belief.
The belief is in endless growth, in merit as the measure of worth, and in markets as neutral arbiters of value. As William Davies writes in The Limits of Neoliberalism, the market is not a spontaneous force but a “carefully constructed fiction”, one that has been elevated to the status of truth. These are not facts, but fables that legitimise inequality as deserved, exploitation as progress, and crisis as innovation. In an unstable world, these stories offer the illusion of order.
We seek stories to bring humanness to a greater sense of being. There is no such thing as time: we collectively decided thousands of years ago to experience life as a passage of years. Days, minutes, hours are constructions which weave together our experience of our plane of existence. Capitalism is the fable we choose to experience as a collective conscious. Without such a way of being, we exist in socio-economic anarchy. Yet, capitalism begets a sense of naturalness which excuses its flaws and negates its purposeful conception.
As Naomi Klein explores in This Changes Everything, even environmental catastrophe is recast as market opportunity, disaster capitalism turning collapse into commodity. What we believe about capitalism is less about economics than about storytelling.
Conspiracy, then, is capitalism’s most seductive genre. It offers the comfort of control, the idea that there’s an author out there writing each chapter of the world, which is easier to accept than a system with no author, no centre, no exit. As Fredric Jameson famously put it, “conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping” a way of making sense of a system too abstract to grasp. It is easier to name a villain than to face the machine.
Like a conspiracy theory, capitalism explains harms such as inequality, climate collapse, and political inertia through a system that feels coordinated. There’s no mastermind, just structure where outcomes feel intentional, even when no one is in control.
Where conspiracies hide in shadow, capitalism hides in plain sight. Its genius is in naturalising itself so completely that this system is the only way of achieving ‘normal’.
At the intersection of capitalism and conspiracy is a peculiar kind of faith in explanation rather than truth. We crave stories to create order out of chaos, and while conspiracy gives us a puppeteer to blame, the real power lies in the strings. The quiet, structural forces we mistake for fate.
Much like capitalism follows the process of commodification, extraction, and alienation, conspiracy too follows a process. My favourite rendition of this is Subhendu Das’ eight-step model:
- An activity begins, driven by organisational self-interest.
- It is designed to benefit business, not society.
- It gains momentum and spreads.
- People forget who started it and why.
- It becomes mainstream, and dissenters are seen as foolish.
- Society is brainwashed and cannot think otherwise.
- The activity no longer advances humanity; it merely sustains business.
- Negative effects emerge, but the system is too entrenched to stop without force.
Here, unethical behaviours become naturalised.
Capitalism doesn’t simply contain conspiracies: it is structured like one. Capitalists don’t meet in secret rooms, but follow a logic that is concealed by normalisation rather than abstraction.
At the core of Das’ eight-step conspiracy process is the revelation that systems designed for business interests gradually become so culturally embedded they seem natural. Think about the fast fashion industry, the Sheins and Temus of the world. Clothing is sold at prices so low they defy logic, because the real cost is offshored to underpaid workers, toxic dyes in rivers, and landfills of discarded stock.
People buy into the system because it is convenient and affordable. There is an inherent need [adjective/noun] to the existence of this model of convenience, since it is the only one many of us know. The goal is not to clothe individuals, but to sustain a business model. By the time consumers realise the environmental and human cost, the practice has already become a cultural habit. As Das notes, “You do not need a secret room for conspiracy. All you need is collective forgetfulness.”
This is how we maintain the paradox of fast fashion, this fatalistic assumption that the systems exist and are inevitable.
We can look at this phenomenon using physics. Das claims that profit violates the “sigma law” his term for the laws of conservation: “The amount of material and labor used for the product must be equal to the cost.” You must violate or cheat the sigma law to make profit. Profit is not value creation, but extraction disguised as growth: a systemic deception.
Hidden fees drain billions from consumers annually; both political parties are owned by the same capitalist interests, meaning “no matter who you elect, capitalism always wins”. Even democracy is part of capitalism’s conspiracy, an illusion of choice designed to mask an underlying lack of power.
Capitalism manufactures conspiracy theories to ensure its own survival. From celebrity culture to mass media, from consumerism to free market ideology, these stories atomise society, keep people “stupid, sick and isolated” and prevent collective revolt. “We know we are doing bad things, but we cannot escape,” Das writes. “Capitalism is pulling us down.”
Like politician Mark Fisher, who showed how capitalism absorbs dissent and turns rebellion into lifestyle, Das shows how conspiracy operates as a logic, not necessarily a secret. It is a system with no single villain, only incentives and illusions. Fisher called this capitalist realism: the belief that nothing else is possible. Das calls it organised crime against people and the land. I call it something else: the condition we live with, endured because stories help us survive the chaos.
Real conspiracies become invisible not because they are hidden, but because they are routine. There is no mystery when it is all around us. This is how capitalism survives. Once the public forgets who started the system, why it exists, or how it profits, the process can sustain itself indefinitely. Look no further than the Vatican and its enactment of the capitalist order.
The Holy ConspiraSee
The Vatican — the Holy ConspiraSee if you will — is God’s symbol of divine order. On most days, the Holy Spirit floats around protecting the ancient fortress of earthly divinity, but in the 1980s, the Holy Spirit seemed to have disappeared for a little bit. See, the Vatican has housed one of the most complex financial conspiracies of the modern era. Behind its spiritual sanctity, the Vatican Bank, formally titled the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) became a hub of global laundering, Cold War funding, and capitalist ambition cloaked in the language of God.
The most infamous episode came with the collapse of Italian Bank, Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980’s, whose main shareholder was IOR. Its chairman, Roberto Calvi, dubbed “God’s Banker,” was found hanging beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge. His death, ruled a murder, uncovered mafia links, offshore shell companies, and over one billion dollars in vanished funds. The Vatican denied responsibility, but later agreed to pay partial restitution for its “moral involvement.”
The IOR operated with little oversight. It was exempt from Italian law; its books were closed; its leaders answered only to the Pope. A 2025 Guardian report revealed that Pope Francis had inherited a “box of documents” from his predecessor, detailing the scandal in full: a symbolic passing of a systemic conspiracy from one papacy to the next.
According to Fortune, the Vatican Bank manages roughly $6 billion in assets, much of it tied to religious orders and charitable funds, and remains plagued by mismanagement. The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project released that, despite Pope Francis’s efforts to restructure financial governance, the IOR still faces significant criticism for internal opacity and inadequate compliance.
The Pillar Catholic argues that merely treating Vatican corruption as a spiritual failing, rather than a financial and political system failure, risks enabling its continuity.
Looking at the human failings of those who claim to represent God on Earth; it’s clear the Church did not simply fall into scandal. It followed Das’s conspiracy process step by step: elite profit, public amnesia, institutional immunity. Its faith-based legitimacy became the perfect cover. In the same way we do not question the Church’s belief in the existence of God, we do not question the existence of the capitalist system that cloaks us like a hug. As Das puts it, “Capitalism is organised crime disguised as a system.” In the Vatican’s case, that disguise was moral sanctity.
They rigged my election!
Conspiracy also thrives in democratic systems, particularly through the narrative of election fraud. While there’s little evidence of large-scale rigging in countries like the U.S. or Australia, the belief in it is politically powerful. It is a belief built on tiny bricks of mini conspiracy. If we know that sabotage occurs on a small scale, it is easy, even comforting, to believe that larger actors can string together a larger narrative of malicious fraud, snatching autonomy from the hands of the voters. The creation of a larger, ‘plausible’ conspiracy of electoral deception mires our ability to see the broader construction of the capitalist system.
This netting of plausible electoral distrust transforms structural disillusionment, with inequality, representation, or stagnant policy, into a personal grievance. When trust in journalism and science collapses, capitalism’s own chaos fills the void with conspiracy.
Right-wing media outlets such as Fox News and Sky News actively exploit this distrust. They don’t just reflect conspiracy narratives, they help build them. PBS NewsHour has detailed how post-2020 election denialism spread via coordinated misinformation, boosted by algorithms and monetised outrage.
What’s striking is that the real conspiracy often doesn’t happen through ballot-stuffing or hacked machines, but through legal, systemic manipulation. In How to Rig an Election, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas show how authoritarian-leaning governments undermine democracy through more subtle means: gerrymandering, voter suppression, media capture, and weaponised bureaucracy. It’s about engineering outcomes before votes are even cast.
This logic extends beyond the U.S. to Australia. In the lead-up to the 2022 federal election, Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party spent more than $100 million on targeted ads that stoked distrust in both major parties, established vaccine policy, immigration policies framed as threats to “Australian values,” and the electoral process itself. Palmer’s campaign, though comically unsuccessful electorally, helped flood the information space with confusion and suspicion. Meanwhile, groups like Advance Australia have echoed the rhetoric of stolen elections and “woke elites” borrowing directly from the Trumpian American far-right playbook.
According to Monash Lens, Australian conspiracy movements have increasingly adopted QAnon-style language, reframing everything from public health to voting logistics as ‘elite sabotage’. Despite repeated fact-checks from RMIT FactLab and the Australian Electoral Commission, myths about ballot harvesting, digital voter manipulation, or globalist interference continue to circulate.
These beliefs persist because they offer a comforting narrative. The danger is that when real electoral threats of corporate influence, political advertising loopholes, or fake news arise, they’re harder to address in a landscape clouded by manufactured paranoia. The myth of rigging becomes a tool not of revolution, but of reaction. And capitalism remains untouched, protected by the fog.
The world’s on fire
Perhaps no conspiracy better captures capitalism’s evasive genius than the one surrounding climate change. Denial is no longer fringe, it’s a coordinated survival strategy. For decades, fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil funded misinformation campaigns, not to disprove climate science, but to delay regulation and buy time.
These campaigns planted just enough doubt to paralyse political will. Right-wing media reframed climate action as a threat to personal freedom and national identity. Climate change became a culture war. The science, too complex or too confronting, was replaced by digestible narratives: the electric car as saviour, the metal straw as rebellion, the “woke elite” as villain.
As Berkeley News notes, “Scientific papers are hard to understand… you’re more likely to believe someone you trust in your community.” In the climate space, this often means influencers, YouTubers, or TikTok creators repeating misinformation dressed up as relatable content. Not because they’re malicious (sometimes), but because capitalism rewards engagement, and nothing engages like conspiracy.
Meanwhile, capitalism rebrands the crisis as opportunity. Enter green capitalism: the idea that we can consume our way out of collapse. Corporations sell sustainability while continuing to extract. Take Shell PLC — the oil giant sponsors climate conferences and advertises net-zero goals, even as it expands fossil fuel projects and lobbies against reform. Its ads turn public relations into moral cover. The story looks green, so no one asks about the emissions.
Coca-Cola, regularly named one of the world’s worst plastic polluters, markets its bottles as recycled and pledges to recover every one it sells. Yet it continues to produce billions of single-use plastics, most of which will never be recycled. The branding promises a circular economy; the reality is landfill.
These aren’t just hypocrisies, they are stories crafted to redirect scrutiny while business continues as usual. There is no denial, but misdirection.
So keep monetising, narrativising, and redirecting the destruction. Critique is welcome too, as long as it never demands real change. As Mark Fisher writes, “Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it”.
The ultimate conspiracy isn’t that climate change isn’t real. It’s that capitalism wants you to believe you’re solving it, just don’t ask the wrong questions.
When I looked up the origin of “conspiracy” and that smug AI box told me it meant “to breathe together”, I couldn’t stop thinking about how time distorts everything; meaning, values, and of course, capitalism. Once a beacon of freedom and individuality, it now turns life into a commodity. Maybe we’ll get that ‘sustainable capitalism’ everyone keeps promising. Or maybe we just have to move forward with the freedom we have as best we can. If stories have kept capitalism alive, maybe alternative ones can infect it.
