At the height of pandemic lockdown, I often went on aimless strolls through my neighborhood in an effort to stave off cabin fever. On one such outing, I came across a poster, amateurishly made and visibly besieged by the elements, that featured an image of World Economic Forum (WEF) chairman Klaus Schwab speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government alongside a YouTube video URL and a quote reading: “What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders . . . like [Justin] Trudeau.” No further commentary was included, but the implication was clear: here, the poster darkly intoned, was the head of the WEF caught on tape admitting that multinational elites run the world — that the prime minister of Canada is not a patriot but a puppet of larger forces hell-bent on enforcing their wills from above.

The image has stayed in my mind because it’s such a perfect encapsulation of the way conspiracy theory tends to operate. At a certain level of abstraction, its premise — that the world is a deeply unequal place and that a self-serving consensus holds among its most influential elites — wasn’t entirely wrong. Yet, somehow, the rather banal realities of elite power (sourced, in this case, to a video publicly available on the Kennedy School’s YouTube channel) was blown up into a revelatory fantasy of conspiracy unmasked and global evil exposed.

As a political fable the whole thing conveys an attractive moral simplicity. If a tiny group of individuals is really complicit in all of your problems, the business of solving those problems becomes incredibly straightforward. When you cut off the head of a snake, after all, the torso it has wrapped around you will quickly slacken and die.