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As a teenager, did you ever have a wild, wild crush on somebody, a person whom you put on a ridiculous pedestal and transformed into a perfect, fetishised object who occupied all your waking thoughts? And did you ever have a conversation with them that didn’t add up? Perhaps they misremembered an incident — its time, location or relationship to others — and you tasted the possibility of an inexplicable hole in their representation of it. Did your whole world come crashing down in a wild panic? Was your object of desire ensnaring you in an improbably complex web of deceit? The spiral of paranoia that comes with infatuation.

This is how I think of compulsive conspiracy theorists. Yes, conspiracies undoubtedly happen, and yes, the powers that be indeed have nefarious designs, but these are embodied in more systemic rhythms, and on a granular level are characterised by a trillion little incompetencies. Meanwhile, those with a repeated compulsion to uncover improbably expert conspiracies are actually secretly in love with the State. They have a wild, wild crush on it. Every time they encounter an inexplicable hole in representation, they have an epistemic crisis, because the mean, beautiful girl who routinely humiliates them and steals their lunch money also absentmindedly said that she was at the movies with Linda three weeks ago when in fact she was cruising in Dan’s car. Forget the humiliation and the theft — glutton for punishment, these are the things an unrequited crush overlooks or endures — she lied about Dan!