Many stories are told about the eccentric Kaiser Franz-Josef I, penultimate Emperor of Austria-Hungary. Most of them are presumably urban legends, including this one – but that doesn't matter for present purposes: the story is that the Kaiser was visiting an exhibition of modern art. And he said to one of the artists standing proudly by his painting: “well, that isn't bad, but tell me, young man, why have you painted the sky green, and the grass pink?”

“Because that is how I see them, your Majesty”, replied the painter.

The Kaiser nodded sympathetically and turned away. But then turned back in puzzlement to ask a supplementary question: “But in that case – how the devil did you happen to choose painting as your profession?”

Likewise Christiane Amanpour sees the world like this:

“I think the press was muzzled, and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did.”

Now, clearly she is a talented and cultured woman. She must have had a choice of many careers. But since she is capable of giving credence to such a whopper of a conspiracy theory (intimidated by Fox News?), and since she seems to have no more understanding of the meanings of the terms “press was muzzled”, “intimidated”, and “climate of fear” than a deep-sea oyster, one has to wonder how on earth she came to choose journalism as her profession.

When George Mikes (the humourist and author of How to be an Alien) was very young and not yet able to read, he formulated a theory to explain his experiences. It was that no one can read: older people were merely pretending to see meaning in random squiggles of ink on paper, and were secretly laughing at his gullibility.

This had all the formal attributes of a conspiracy theory: it alleged that significant events in Mikes’ life (adults reading to him, and trying to teach him to read) were part of a secret plan that involved the conspirators’ lying to him about facts and about their own motives, in order to benefit at his expense (in this case merely by being amused). It also explained away his own relative ineffectiveness (his inability to read, compared with other people's apparent ability to), in terms of his powerlessness and their power over him. This is another very common theme of conspiracy theories. His theory differed from a standard conspiracy theory mainly in the way he held it: in particular, in the way he abandoned it.

He did not say how he first came to doubt it, but we can guess what must have been involved: simply taking it seriously as an explanation of reality. Perhaps at some point he noticed that different adults were able to read the same story out of a given book. Such observations would not have proved anything, but they would have multiplied the invisible events that must have been happening if the no-one-can-read theory was true: now, instead of merely laughing at him behind his back, the adults must have been learning stories by heart, and coordinating which ones they were going to pretend were contained in which book. They must have been pretending to find their way to unfamiliar places by reading road signs, feigning frustration when they left the shopping list at home, pretending that mail contained information from distant relatives, and so on. To maintain all those pretences would have involved hidden processes of great complexity, centring on the young Mikes, and laboriously hidden from him.

So what? Nature is full of hidden processes of great complexity; people do often hide things laboriously from other people – not least from children. Mikes was not wrong to be sceptical: initially, he could not have distinguished what he was told about reading from what he was told about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. What was essential, though, was that he be just as sceptical of his own alternative explanation. And more: he needed to be seeking a true explanation, to care whether reality did or did not conform, even in unseen ways, to whatever explanation he adopted. Though his no-one-can-read explanation could never have been proved false, he was not looking for proof. He had not proposed it in order to create an unassailable dogma, but simply because he had a problem imagining a reality in which all those squiggles meant something. But then, given the role that he could see that alleged meaning playing in the lives of the people around him, he would soon have realised that postulating a further slew of apparently meaningless behaviour (the conspiracy) in the reality beyond his immediate perceptions did nothing to solve that problem. In effect it merely raised it again, but all the worse for being projected off the page and out into the wider world.

So, when he thought about the evidence available to him, though he would never have faced disproof, he would have faced a choice: try again to understand the hidden meanings in the squiggles – which might be difficult and, for all he knew, might never work – or attribute everything he saw to the hidden conspiracy. The latter option was guaranteed always to be available. Yet, at some point, he must have realised that the world could not be understood in those terms.

This is the choice which conspiracy theorists make differently and irrationally. They do care about some invisible events: the relatively small number that they love to think about, such as President Bush and his inner circle discussing their evil plan to seize the Iraqi oil fields. But they don't care enough to follow through the implications for the host of other invisible events that would also have to be happening if those were – such as how the conspiracy would recruit its members and how it would agree upon a new plan, and what exactly the conspirators’ reward is and how it gets to them. We shall say more about this in the next instalment, but in general terms: conspiracy theorists chronically fail to form a serious model of what reality would be like if their theory of it were true. They paint on a large canvas with only a tiny area of detail, always preferring the security of familiar patterns of thought that are guaranteed to provide the semblance of an explanation, to the uncertainty and difficulty of trying to understand what the facts really are.

Part 4