Conspiracy theories circulate so persistently now that they spring easily to mind. The COVID-19 virus, as the malign fantasy goes, did not arise from animal disease reservoirs or from sloppy and risky laboratory processes. Instead, it is a bioweapon devised by evil Chinese geniuses to undermine American hegemony.

And here are two more. A future (and soon-to-be ex) congresswoman rode to office on the claim that solar-powered energy weapons engineered by a devious, ancient banking family ignited California wildfires to, now get this, clear the way for a rapid-rail project. Then, the truth behind the rapidly intensifying Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Milton of 2024 and the deadly Texas flooding in 2025? Sinister geoengineers have deployed weather-control technology to skew election results.

Prove It’s Not?

Can we disprove these silly, malicious claims? Certainly, we cannot. After all, Fu Manchu will stay in the shadows. Even our most penetrating radar arrays cannot detect miniaturized space lasers. Now think, take a leap in faith; controlling the weather is not so hard if you conspire with aliens.

These claims do not leave us helpless because extraordinary declarations demand extraordinary support. We could probe for detail, and of the claimants, call for even a shred of supporting proof.

Who are these evil geniuses? Why did their designer pathogens also infect their own population? Is it possible to shrink a powerful laser? How is it that we failed to notice the plasma bolts and searing beam blasts? Or what technology could possibly steer a cyclone? Wouldn’t direct-mail campaigns better tilt an election?

The cleverest conspiratorialists will respond with ever weaker and more elaborate evasions and excuses that mean to turn the tables on a reasonable listener. When pressed, the various claimants will ask, “Can you prove otherwise?”

The question is meant to be confounding. Of course we cannot. We cannot when the absence of evidence is itself construed as evidence.

Finding the Answer in Bertrand Russell’s Orbiting Space Teapot

In a thought-piece written in 1952, the British philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell, roguishly explored the resilience of fanciful and unfounded claims. He playfully turned the tables back on unsupportable assertions by placing the burden of proof where it properly belongs, on the claimant.

For the crux of his argument, he devised a mischievous analogy.

Suppose he were to assert that an ordinary table piece, a china teapot, were circling the sun somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars? “Nobody would be able to disprove my assertion,” Russell cautioned, “provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.”

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This provision seems to trap the listener, as arguments *against *the floating teapot are seemingly no stronger than arguments for. For starters, how could we deny the existence of a space-teapot if we can’t even find it?

“Still Talking Nonsense”

Russell pointed out that if the proposition of orbiting extraterrestrial household crockery cannot be disproved, it is still “talking nonsense” to say that it is proven. Logically, the lack of evidence cannot add up to evidence. The same goes for claims of mystery particle beams and elusive super villains.

But, sticking with the teapot, the philosopher moved one step further into the territory that psychiatrists claim. What if, he asked, “the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school?” Non-belief would become a “a mark of eccentricity,” he noted wryly. Or in former times, might consign the heretic to the flames.

The Wisdom of the Crowd?

Russell underlined the obvious, that “it is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable in it.” And there lies the danger. Over time, the wisdom of the crowd caused fathomless suffering of the conquered and the colonized, the enslaved, the marginalized, and the persecuted.

So. What if millions fervently believe that dark, conspiratorial religious forces control our world? (Antisemitism lurks in conspiracy theories.) What if the claim that meticulously monitored elections can be stolen is drummed by revered rabble-rousers? (A pilfered election has become an article of faith among true believers.) What if uncredentialed appointees assert that clinical trials suppress evidence that vaccines or painkillers cause neurodevelopmental disorders? (And what of the children left unprotected?) What if a president, himself, insists that climate crisis, plain to see and feel, is a hoax?

Are we not being asked, insistently, to prove that the unprovable isn’t true? Are we riding the orbiting teapot?

Coda: Explaining the Irrational

The questions Russell raised three-quarters of a century ago pose unresolvable tensions for today.

Clinicians still struggle to articulate the difference between delusion and devotion. But practically, drawing a sharp distinction is still a headache.

Delusion, so the DSM holds, comprises fixed preoccupations rooted in extreme, false, overvalued, and harmful belief, individually adhered to and impossible to shake. By contrast, the clinical bible now frames faith generously as shared, sanctioned by tradition, confirmed by culture, bolstering, harmonious with reality, and as the text indicates, also open to doubt.

These last three factors prove hardest to sustain because fanaticism is no stranger to devotion. In some fundamentalist corners, apostasy, once a capital crime, is still punished severely. Women still often bear the brunt of oppressive theocracy. Modern observers, for instance, feel hard pressed to distinguish visions and revealed “locutions” from visual and verbal hallucination.

A Real Headache

And this brings us to a real headache, the chronic kind that beset a 12th-century abbess, Hildegarde of Bingen, likely the composer of exquisite, dreamy medieval chant that church choirs still sing. She is less well known for her compelling art. Her illustrations and diary sketches picture the mystical, floating, draining, cloudlike state that she would fall into. Episodes during which she would hear the voices of angels.

For modern explainers, crucially, her compositions feature bursts of intense flashing light, sparking stars, and jagged lines.

Reaching back, it is useful to note that Sigmund Freud regarded religion as “wishful thinking”— at best an “illusion” (though the German original is closer to “deception”), and a “universal obsessional neurosis” at worst. “It was forbidden to raise questions of their authenticity,” he wrote. Freud’s aim, by contrast, was to deploy the rational—psychoanalysis—against the irrational. Hopefully, the mystifying would yield to dogged, rational examination.

And so, those of us who experience the “fortification hallucinations” of migraine aura—a neon Las Vegas skyline that sizzles nauseatingly over half a visual field—will recognize a fellow, distant sufferer in Saint Hildegarde.