ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explain the contemporary popularity of conspiracy theories by taking a biographical methodological approach. Instead of the more common appeals to some psychological or cultural condition, I argue that it is more fruitful to study how people get involved with conspiracy theories. This means putting people’s historically and culturally embedded lives at center stage: I asked people in the Dutch conspiracy milieu to narrate their experience of becoming a conspiracy theorist, with a special focus on their personal motivations. I sought to understand what specific moments in life they assigned as significant and meaningful in their emerging engagement with conspiracy theories. Although respondents draw on a culturally shared awakening narrative, the analysis of their distinct life stories showed more complexity and brought four distinct cultural-historical developments into relief (secularization, mediatization, democratization, and globalization). I argue that these four sociological changes, taking clear shape in the private biographies of people, explain the contemporary popularity of conspiracy theories best: although different in nature and sensitive to the diversity of life, they all set in motion the dissolution of a stable and absolute truth, opening a cultural space for conspiracy theories to thrive. Biography, society, and history are indeed fundamentally connected.
