Yet the main cause of conspiratorial thinking is the inability to comprehend the astonishing strength and efficiency of people’s uncoordinated activity as they simply strive to achieve their own goals. Ordinary, everyday (that is, conspiratorial) consciousness holds that if someone, in the observer’s view, stands to lose from a given situation, then that situation was caused exclusively by the actions of whoever stands to gain (again, in the observer’s view)—and by no other means.
In reality, in the overwhelming majority of cases, what we attribute to conspiracy is actually a phenomenon of “coordination without coordination”—the interaction of people pursuing their own interests. Such situations are countless. For instance, a situation familiar to all sorts of innovators: the opposition of the bureaucratic machine, whether state or corporate. This opposition often resembles the most sophisticated conspiracy, but in reality, it typically arises from the ordinary behavior of people choosing from available alternatives. If the apparatus resists innovation, then for each participant, preserving the status quo is more valuable than change. To oppose innovation effectively, the bureaucrats need no conspiracy; it is enough simply to do their jobs without even knowing about each other’s activities and without coordinating them in any special way.
But the best illustration of natural coordination is the conspiracy of Ukrainian voters against the Ukrainian people, which the voters have been successfully perpetrating for twenty years. At every election, Ukrainian voters manage to elect politicians from whom the Ukrainian people suffer until the next election, at which the voters manage to choose even worse politicians—and so it goes.