Every few months a man comes to clean the windows of our house. He’s cheerful, punctual, and – without fail – wearing a pair of heavy-duty headphones. He moves methodically from pane to pane, squeegee in hand, nodding occasionally to whatever soundtrack accompanies his day.
Curiosity eventually got the better of me. “What do you listen to while you work?” I asked one morning, as he scrubbed away the smog of the city.
What followed was a roll call of the internet’s most conspiratorial heavyweights: David Icke, Milo Yiannopoulos, a smattering of vaccine sceptics and cloud trail truthers, plus a few names so niche they sounded like password hints from a lost corner of Reddit. His playlist, it seemed, was less Spotify and more “Shadowy Cabal FM.”
Some of his favourites focused on vaccines, others on the clouds – apparently full of mind-altering chemicals – but most circled the same gravitational centre: the so-called Great Replacement. A vast, orchestrated plan, he said, to erode traditional society from within. He spoke with conviction, the kind born of repetition rather than reflection.
I listened, nodding politely, before offering a conspiracy theory of my own. “I’ve got one for you,” I said. “It’s a good one – so compelling it might actually be true. In fact, it is true.”
He looked intrigued, so I began.
“Imagine,” I said, “a world where all the wealth – not just some, but most – is quietly being siphoned upward into the hands of a tiny number of individuals. Imagine that this same elite controls the major media outlets, the political discourse, even the cultural narratives that shape what we believe to be common sense.”
I watched his brow furrow.
“Now,” I continued, “imagine that to stop anyone noticing, they convince the public that the real problem isn’t the people hoarding all the money, but rather the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Immigrants, benefit claimants, refugees, striking workers – anyone, really, except the ones actually in control.”
He blinked. “That’s not a conspiracy theory,” he said slowly.
“No,” I replied. “That’s capitalism.”
And there, perhaps, lies the paradox of our age: the true conspiracies are too banal to believe. While people like my window cleaner trawl YouTube for evidence of lizard people and shadow governments, the real machinery of manipulation operates in plain sight – through lobbying, offshore accounts, and a media ecosystem more interested in clicks than clarity.
The idea that a global cabal is pumping chemicals into the sky seems thrilling. The idea that billionaires are funding politicians to cut their taxes is, by comparison, a bit dull. And yet only one of those ideas can be proven with a quick glance at the financial pages.
Conspiracy theories thrive because they offer narrative coherence – villains, victims, a sense of secret knowledge. But the uncomfortable truth is that our society doesn’t need a secret cabal to be unjust. Inequality doesn’t require a meeting in a smoky back room; it just needs inertia, distraction, and a well-oiled PR machine convincing us to punch sideways instead of up.
So when my window cleaner packed up his gear and popped his headphones back on, I almost envied him. There’s comfort in believing the world’s problems can be traced to a single sinister plot. It’s tidy. It’s cinematic.
But the real conspiracy – the one that shapes our lives daily – isn’t hidden at all. It’s just hiding behind the illusion that there’s nothing to see.