Conspiracy theories rarely feel new because they are designed to feel familiar. Their power does not lie in originality, but in recognition: the sense that the story has been encountered before, even if its details have changed.
This logic sits at the center of Umberto Eco’s fascination with difficulty, forgery, and interpretation. Eco was interested in how meaning is not simply uncovered, but constructed, often through repetition, imitation, and carefully staged complexity. In his work, difficulty functions not as an obstacle, but as a method, a way of inviting the reader into an interpretive game where certainty is always just out of reach.
Forgery plays a crucial role in this process. A successful forgery does not persuade by inventing something entirely new, but by assembling familiar fragments into a convincing whole. It borrows authority from what is already recognized.
The forged document, text, or narrative works because it resembles something the reader expects to be true.
This is where conspiracy thinking becomes durable. Its narratives are not spontaneous eruptions of irrationality, nor signs of collective madness. They are constructed systems that rely on reusable scripts. Antisemitism, in particular, has historically provided one of the most persistent narrative templates: a hidden group, secret coordination, invisible influence, and the promise of revelation.
The details shift, but the structure remains intact.
What makes these stories powerful is not their coherence, but their familiarity. Conspiratorial narratives reward recognition rather than verification. They feel convincing because they echo earlier plots, earlier enemies, earlier fears. The reader or viewer is not discovering something new, but remembering something old.
This helps explain why misinformation often functions less like a delusion and more like a skill. To believe a conspiracy is not necessarily to abandon reason, but to learn how to read certain signals, patterns, and cues. It involves recognizing the aesthetic of hidden truth: the obscure reference, the leaked document, the partial clue that promises access to forbidden knowledge.
Long before the digital age, Eco understood that interpretation could be guided toward false certainty. Meaning can be engineered, not only through lies, but through complexity itself. When everything appears connected, nothing needs to be proven.
This is why contemporary conspiracies so often recycle modular plots. The villain changes, the context updates, but the narrative structure stays the same. Screenshots, anonymous leaks, and document dumps replicate the aesthetic of older forgeries, offering the comfort of familiarity under the guise of revelation.
The power of the forgery lies not in originality, but in recognition. Conspiracies endure because they do not ask audiences to imagine new worlds, only to recognize old ones rearranged.
That is why they never quite feel new.