A Mathematical Model of Conspiracy

C'mon this'll be fun

The Sierpinski triangle shown above is a pattern that is mathematically generated. There are many ways to build one, but this is the clearest method I’ve ever seen. It’s from Matthias Desmeth’s book The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

1. Start out by putting three dots on a piece of paper. Place them far apart. You can put them wherever you want. We’ll call these “anchor dots.”

2. Now put a fourth dot on the paper, anywhere you want.

3. Get a ruler. This requires some simple measurements. Pick any one of your anchor dots. Measure the distance between the fourth dot and your selected anchor dot. Divide this by 2 and put a new dot there.

4. Now using this new dot, measure the distance of this dot from any one of your three anchor dots, divide by 2, and put a new dot there.

5. Keep going.

You may not want to actually do this since you’ll need to repeat this hundreds of times to get the end effect. Here’s a little flowchart of how it progresses if you do it in an orderly fashion. But you don’t need an orderly method to get the end result. You just need lots of repetitions.

Mathematicians like this kind of stuff. The point of the exercise is that you can create a cohesive, coherent pattern over time even by a series of seemingly random actions.

For instance, you could build your Sierpinski triangle by working with dozens of people, none of whom had any idea what the end product was supposed to look like. You could even go digital and build one working with people in different countries, in different time zones, none of whom knew the end goal. You can have a crew of 100 people who don’t know each other create one in a few days or a few years.

All you need to create one of these amazing forms is that people follow basic instructions. No one person needs to be given a big task. No one gets the “big picture.” You don’t even need a supervisor, although there is at least one mastermind involved. The point is the people who actually make this happen do not have to know each other, nor do they have to understand what’s going on. They just have to follow instructions.

This is how conspiracies work.

I know a few people who still hold the “lone nut” theory of the John F. Kennedy (JFK) assassination. They believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that his motives remain enigmatic. Their main argument against any sort of JFK assassination conspiracy is that you could not get dozens or even hundreds of people to keep such a big secret.

And that’s the point. You don’t need to do that. You just need to get everybody to do their part, to follow directions, and to mark a spot.

Gerald Ford admitted to having altered the autopsy drawings of the assassinated president (to show that shots came only from the back), but he claimed his motivations were to help the nation get over this tragedy. I’m not sure what that meant. But Ford did not have to know about Oswald’s past history with the Office of Naval Intelligence or the bullet trajectories… he was instructed or led to believe that tampering with the autopsy drawings was a good thing. I don’t know who told him or how he got the idea, but it appears he followed directions and even confessed years later. He did what he was supposed to do; he may have even thought he was doing the right and noble thing.

The windshield of the Presidential limo used that day has been lost to history. Somebody was just following instructions. They were not in cahoots with Gerald Ford or the Warren Commission. It was an instruction, it was obeyed. The glass experts probably thought they were doing the right thing.

Just like everybody who signed the Warren Commission Report (including Gerald Ford) thought they were doing the right thing. They were doing what they were told or what they had come to believe was for the good of the country.

You might argue this type of conspiracy-without-conspirators would work with election fraud. Specific people might be instructed to do small things—deliver a bunch of ballots to a mail drop in the middle of the night or go to a nursing home and collect a ballot from each resident for Candidate X, even if the voter-resident did not wish to vote for Candidate X. All it takes is individuals following instructions.

But how would you motivate people to follow instructions? Well, in many cases something like mass formation is involved. That is a sort of low-level brainwashing that compels people to see things a certain way. The mainstream media are great at this. It’s why they are so infuriating to people not under mind control. They repeat certain stories over and over until they are quasi-memorized. For instance, if you questioned the 2020 election, those were “baseless allegations” or “the big lie.” Climate change is an “existential threat.” Donald Trump is a “threat to our democracy.” These may sound like slogans, but repeated often enough they become ingrained in how people talk and then think.

Go on X now and you’ll find that many people believe that if you vote for Trump, you are voting to end democracy. This is a laughable phrasing because the very idea of voting, inherent to democracy, allows for selection of candidates. If voting means you must vote for Biden, well, that isn’t voting anymore and it certainly isn’t democracy. It’s how China runs its elections, with one candidate who gets 99% of the vote and no opposition tolerated. No one would call China a democracy, yet the mainstream pundits and many media outlets would have you believe that making a choice to vote Republican will end democracy.

On X, people are raging that if Trump is elected, he will end democracy, make himself dictator for life, and never leave office. Let’s break these down. Trump has already been in office, so if he was going to become a dictator who would destroy democracy, he would have likely already started. As for not leaving office, Trump has been in office and has vacated the White House. We have proof he will leave. But even if he had a sudden change of heart, the man is in his 70s. He would be 82 when his term expired and likely easy to remove even if he tries to resist leaving. So Trump will not end democracy and install himself as a dictator in order to live forever in the White House.

Why do people believe that Trump is a threat to democracy? They believe it because they hear it over and over. The incessant drumbeat motif is part of the way mass formation works. It’s the reason I still know the Frosted Flakes slogan decades after the last time I saw the commercial (and why I still think they ought to be great… even when they kind of aren’t).

Thinking people—those who read, discuss, consider, and even revise opinions—are much less susceptible to mass formation than low-information individuals who talk more than listen and never really aggressively examine their own ideas and biases.

But back to conspiracies. A conspiracy works when a network of individuals (who ideally do not know each other) can be brought to do their own small parts. They don’t know the big picture. And part of what allows them to do as they’re told is that they buy into the narrative. Gerald Ford said he thought he was helping America heal by tampering with the JFK autopsy drawings. The guys who hauled off the windshield from the death limo probably thought they were following protocol and wanted to be respectful. The people who bought into the magic bullet theory believed that their government would never lie to them.

So you only need a few masterminds, maybe even just one, to pull off a conspiracy if you have enough mass formation to make people compliant. It’s why the mainstream media is so annoying to people who aren’t being mind-controlled.

In the old movie The Sting, Henry Gondorff (played by Paul Newman) tells Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) that when you play the “big con,” the key to the whole deal is that the mark—the person being hoodwinked—never gets wise.

And that’s how a conspiracy works. As long as people never wise up to the big con, it is working. Think of things the mind-controlled believe: The 2020 election was the most perfect election in American history. Climate change is going to kill us all but maybe in ten more years. Donald Trump is an authoritarian. Bidenomics has made life better. Biden created more jobs than any person in history. Hunter Biden is a great human being with perfect ethics. The Southern border is closed. We have a very manageable national debt, in fact, we should probably find ways to spend more money.

Enter the conspiracy theorists. We are the ones who challenge the prevailing narrative (the one that causes mass formation). We call out climate change or election integrity or the integrity of the Southern border. When the mind-controlled cheer for the much maligned but altogether wonderful Hunter Biden, we remind people that Hunter Biden denied even knowing Lunden Roberts who claimed to have his baby, until she got a paternity test that proved otherwise. The weird thing is that Lunden Roberts was worked for a Biden-owned company for about six months around the time the child was born—well, at least she was on the payroll. Then Hunter suddenly did know her—but she had to take Hunter Biden, the son of the sitting U.S. President to court in order to get child support.

Just knowing the facts makes you a conspiracy theorist nowadays.

Biden claimed just the other day to have lowered the price of insulin. We are the conspiracy theorists who remind them that Trump had actually lowered it in May 2020 before he left office but that Biden repealed that on Day 1 of his regime. For over two years, Americans were forced to pay the higher insulin prices. Suddenly, Biden announced he’s cut the price of insulin. Big statement from the White House! This is sort of plagiarism. Biden undid Trump’s change, let time pass, and now claims it as his own idea and his own achievement. It’s not. In fact, Americans paid unnecessarily higher prices for insulin for two years just so Biden could scrape off a little bit of credit that was rightfully due to Trump. But tell that to a Biden fan and you’re a conspiracy theorist and a kook.

We conspiracy theorists have gotten used to being ridiculed, mocked, and called names. (Some people get upset when they’re misgendered—they should hear what Democrats call us!) The mass-formation crowd never met a swear word it wouldn’t use against us. Even when history and 10 million data points prove us right, we’re still scorned and shouted down. Worst of all, no matter how often we’re right, we’re thought to be wrong.

But think of it like this. Being under mass formation (that is, being a manipulated victim of mainstream media) is like being in a deep and nightmarish sleep. If somebody suddenly comes along and shines a bright halogen light in the sleeper’s face, the sleeper is not going to react too well. At least not at first.

But don’t give up, fellow conspiracy theorists, because waking them up is what it’s all about.