For several years now, a form of soft conspiracy has been spreading in France. It is a logic of generalized suspicion, which manifests itself more insidiously than certain extravagant theories (chips in vaccines, the rigging of the Apollo mission, chemtrails, etc.) and presupposes, behind any public decision, information or expertise, hidden interests.
This phenomenon has worrying effects on our ability to act collectively. Indeed, how can we make decisions of general interest when we presuppose unacknowledged intentions emanating from different strata of society? It also invites an additional question: why does this suspicion meet with such an echo today, including among so-called reasonable and informed citizens?
Lack of response generates anxiety
The usual explanations focus on misinformation, social media or weakening trust in institutions. And these factors obviously play a major role. But are they enough to explain what makes this posture so attractive? We live in a paradoxical era: humanity has never had so much scientific knowledge, information, tools for accessing knowledge, etc. However, suspicion has never perhaps occupied such a place.
How to understand this paradox? Perhaps because suspicion responds to a fundamental psychological need: that of reducing uncertainty in the face of the growing complexity of the world, that of health, economic, geopolitical or ecological crises whose consequences no one has control over and of which we all experience a form of worry or even anxiety. However, uncertainty is difficult to bear because it confronts human beings with their own limits, with their helplessness, with the impossibility of predicting and knowing everything.
Suspicion then offers “relief”, precisely because it transforms a complex, indecipherable reality into a coherent worldview: it designates those responsible and attributes intentions to them. In short, it provides an explanation where questions still remain, the lack of a possible answer generating anxiety. From this point of view, a conspiracy theory is often less distressing than confronting a reality which includes an element of the unknown.
An increasingly disembodied knowledge
This dynamic is not just an intuition. It is found in opinion surveys which have been measuring the erosion of collective trust for several years. For illustration, the trust barometer produced by Viavoice for the Don entrust indicated in its last edition that only 13% of French people trust political parties, 20% the government, 32% the media, 35% unions and 55% businesses (1).
But another transformation is perhaps also worth considering. For a long time, knowledge was transmitted by identifiable figures: a teacher, a doctor, a parent, a political leader. Their word could be discussed, contested, sometimes even denied; but it remained carried by embodied people whose skills each recognized without their limits necessarily calling into question the confidence placed in their knowledge.
From now on, with search engines and then artificial intelligence, knowledge seems more and more detached from those who produce it; he appears to be disembodied. It seems available immediately, everywhere, as if it could exist independently of all subjectivity and human error.
Relearn doubt
This development fuels a new expectation: that of flawless knowledge. From then on, the hesitations of experts, the contradictions of research or the errors of institutions are no longer perceived as the ordinary mark of always incomplete human knowledge, but as proof of deception.
As if we tolerate less and less the fallibility of those to whom we grant knowledge. Perhaps we are not just suffering from a crisis of confidence. Perhaps we also suffer from an increasing difficulty in accepting that no amount of knowledge can guarantee us against uncertainty.
The challenge is therefore not only to provide better information: it is also to collectively relearn how to “inhabit” this space, a narrow, demanding and sometimes uncomfortable space: one where we doubt without condemning, where we question without systematically suspecting, where we accept that no knowledge, no institution and no technology can definitively deliver us from uncertainty.
The opposite of conspiracy may not be certainty. It is perhaps the ability to remain lucid in the face of what escapes us.
(1) Viavoice Trust Barometer – Confident Donation, carried out among a representative sample of the French population of 2,000 people over 18 years old. Interviews carried out online from August 20 to 25, 2025, representativeness ensured by the quota method applied to the following criteria: gender, age, profession, region and urban category.
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