What’s a conspiracy theory you actually find believable?
Nobody Is Driving
The conspiracy I find believable is the one nobody wants to hear: there is no one at the wheel.
Today’s prompt asks which conspiracy theory I actually find believable. I have an answer, but it runs in the opposite direction from almost every conspiracy theory.
Every conspiracy theory makes one quiet assumption: somebody is in charge.
There is a hidden hand. Someone convened. Someone decided. Someone understood the whole picture and chose this. The world may be governed by monsters, but at least it is governed.
After spending the better part of four decades inside the machinery of government, I have found that assumption among the least believable parts of the proposition.
How a decision is actually made
Consider something ordinary, because the ordinary version is the one nobody writes about.
A file begins somewhere modest. A section officer prepares a careful and reasonable note based on what he has been given. It travels upward. At each desk, someone reads it under pressure, changes a phrase, questions a figure, adds a line, and passes it on.
Every change is defensible. None of them is necessarily wrong.
Yet by the time the file reaches the end of its journey, it may contain a proposal that not one of the officers who handled it would have written—and several might have opposed if they had seen the whole thing on the first day.
But nobody ever saw the whole thing.
It arrived in increments, each small enough to accept.
Then it is approved. The deadline is close. Too much effort has already been invested. Sending it back would mean losing another month.
And suddenly, a decision exists in the world, with real consequences for real people.
If you tried to trace it, you might find twelve reasonable people and no decision-maker.
There was no meeting in a darkened room. There was a file, a deadline, and eleven people assuming the twelfth had already thought it through.
I have watched this happen more times than I can count, from almost every position in the process.
It is not corruption. Corruption would at least imply intent.
This is more troubling: outcomes with no single origin, consequences with nobody deliberately behind them, policies that emerge from a system almost the way weather emerges.
Why we would rather have monsters
Perhaps that is why the idea is so uncomfortable.
A hidden hand, however malevolent, offers three things the truth may not.
It offers an explanation: the outcome was chosen, so it must make sense.
It offers a remedy: if someone did this, someone can be stopped.
And it offers an address: a name, a face, a person to hold responsible.
The alternative offers none of these.
If a system produced an outcome that nobody consciously chose, there may be nothing dramatic to expose, nobody obvious to remove, and no revelation that will suddenly put everything right.
There is only the long, unglamorous work of watching the system more carefully than we have been watching it.
A conspiracy is, in a strange way, a form of consolation.
It tells us that the world is at least being steered, even if by the wrong hands.
The alternative is far more unsettling:
the wheel is unattended.
Where this leaves responsibility
But there is a lazy conclusion I do not want anyone to draw.
If nobody is in charge, it does not mean nobody is responsible.
It means responsibility is distributed.
If one person authored a harmful outcome, that person carries the fault and everyone else can remain a spectator.
But if twelve people contributed to it without seeing the whole picture, responsibility is shared among all twelve. Add those who could have asked a question but did not, those who noticed the drift but said nothing because it was not their section, and those outside the system who never looked closely enough.
The circle widens.
It may even reach us.
That is why the unattended wheel frightens me more than any cabal.
A cabal can be exposed.
A drift can only be resisted by people who keep paying attention.
And attention is expensive. It is tedious. It rarely earns applause.
So, my answer
The conspiracy I find believable is not that a few people secretly run the world.
It is that far fewer people are running it than we imagine.
Much of what happens was chosen by no one in particular. The machinery keeps moving through momentum, deadlines, institutional habits, and the reasonable assumption that somebody further up has thought it through.
Somebody further up has often not.
I have been somebody further up.
There is no dramatic revelation waiting at the end of that thought. No secret file to leak. No single name to publish.
There is only a simpler and more demanding conclusion:
The world may not be managed on our behalf.
And where we expected to find a hidden hand, we may instead find an unattended wheel.
That space is not empty of responsibility.
It is waiting for someone to take it.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt for 18 August 2026.
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Incredible information, I would’ve never viewed this perspective.
👏✅
A good and interesting read
🤝👏✅
I’ve often suspected that that’s how ‘big’ decisions are made. I’ve twice been the person about whom the decision was having to be made.
The first time I was saved by the fact that the third person in the chain of command knew my family and reasoned I should therefore have a positive outcome.
The second time the lowly customer spoke with a person who thought the question important enough to physically accompany the request all the way to the top. That outcome was for the company but against yours truly.
But I still think for important decisions having someone accompany the paperwork up each rung of the ladder is the way to handle the chinese-whisper-style of decision making that results in an organization with an asleep-at-the-wheel leadership.