Many of the alleged “conspiracies” that literal conspiracy theories propose are highly improbable. The more people involved in a secret conspiracy, the more likely it is for someone to leak the secret, either deliberately or accidentally. In order to maintain a conspiracy, it either has to be very small (“three can keep a secret, if two are dead”), or it has to be the case that most people, if they learned the secret, would agree that it should be kept secret; it has to be something closer to a Benevolent Conspiracy instead of an evil one.
One of the most successful large-scale “conspiracies” in recent history was the Manhattan Project, and it was able to be kept secret mostly because anyone who did learn about it would, by default, want to keep the secret. If you picked Americans at random until you found someone who would be willing to betray the Manhattan Project to the Axis powers, you’d have to go through a hell of a lot of people before you found one; despite the large number of people involved, nobody told the Germans or the Japanese. On the other hand, if you picked Americans at random and asked them if it should be kept secret from our allies in the Soviet Union, the percentage of people who would disagree would be much higher—and someone actually did leak the details to the Soviet Union.
Many of the alleged “conspiracies” that literal conspiracy theories propose are highly improbable. The more people involved in a secret conspiracy, the more likely it is for someone to leak the secret, either deliberately or accidentally. In order to maintain a conspiracy, it either has to be very small (“three can keep a secret, if two are dead”), or it has to be the case that most people, if they learned the secret, would agree that it should be kept secret; it has to be something closer to a Benevolent Conspiracy instead of an evil one.
One of the most successful large-scale “conspiracies” in recent history was the Manhattan Project, and it was able to be kept secret mostly because anyone who did learn about it would, by default, want to keep the secret. If you picked Americans at random until you found someone who would be willing to betray the Manhattan Project to the Axis powers, you’d have to go through a hell of a lot of people before you found one; despite the large number of people involved, nobody told the Germans or the Japanese. On the other hand, if you picked Americans at random and asked them if it should be kept secret from our allies in the Soviet Union, the percentage of people who would disagree would be much higher—and someone actually did leak the details to the Soviet Union.