Cal Hampton and why we believe in conspiracies

In the official bio Rockstar published in May 2025, alongside the second GTA 6 trailer, Cal Hampton gets a tagline and two short paragraphs, and they are enough. The tagline is a question: "What if everything on the internet was true?" Jason's friend, he "feels safest hanging at home, snooping on Coast Guard comms with a few beers and some private browser tabs open." Then the bio nails it: "Casual paranoia loves company."

That is not a diagnosis, neither Rockstar's nor mine. It is a joke, but it carries a serious question: why do so many people, faced with a confusing world, prefer a secret explanation to no explanation at all? Calling believers stupid is the lazy answer. Psychoanalysis has a better one, and a less arrogant one.

It is not stupidity, it is work

A conspiracy theory takes an enormous amount of work: research, a memory for detail, links between distant dots. People who believe one are not thinking less than everyone else, they are thinking in one direction only. So the useful question is not why someone believes something unlikely, but what the belief solves.

My bet is that it solves one of the hardest experiences to bear: not knowing why things happen, who decides, whether anyone is in charge. The conspiracy trades that helplessness for two more tolerable things: an enemy who knows and an ego that finally understands.

One distinction matters. Delusion, in the clinical sense, is a conviction that yields to no evidence, reorganizes a person's life and usually comes with a great deal of suffering. Everyday conspiratorial belief is not that. But the two share a logic, and it was the study of delusion that made it visible.

Freud and the man who rebuilt the world

In 1911 Freud published a study of the memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber, a senior judge in Saxony who had described his own illness in a book published in 1903. During his illness, Schreber was certain that the world had come to an end. In the third part of the study, Freud reads that end of the world as the projection of an internal catastrophe: the libido, the emotional investment that bound the person to others and to things, had been withdrawn, and everything had become indifferent. And he writes that what we take to be the product of the illness, the delusional formation, is in reality an attempt at recovery (Heilungsversuch), a reconstruction.

The rebuilt world is not more splendid than the old one, but it is one the person can live in again, and they regain a relation to other people and to things, often an intense one, even if it may now be hostile. A world that persecutes you is still paying attention to you.

Better an enemy than chance

Sixteen years later, in The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud describes a similar operation, this time on a collective scale. Discussing how culture consoles human beings for their helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) before nature and fate, he names the first step: humanizing nature. Impersonal forces remain forever foreign. But if even death stops being spontaneous and becomes the violent act of an evil will, we can breathe again. We may still be defenseless, Freud says, but we are no longer helplessly paralysed: at the very least, we can react.

The conspiracy makes the same trade. Chance has no face, a crisis has no address, a complex system has no intention, and the conspiracy theory supplies a face, an address and an intention for all of it. If someone planned it, someone knows, and the world stops being chaotic and becomes malicious, but intelligible. Against an enemy, you can react. Against chance, you cannot.

The ego that finally understands

The other half of the trade calls for Melanie Klein. In Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946), she proposes that at the very beginning of life anxiety is lived as a fear of being annihilated, and that this fear turns into a fear of being persecuted. Splitting separates good from bad, and projection, in Klein's view, helps the ego cope with anxiety by expelling what is dangerous and bad, which now sits outside. This is what she would later call the paranoid-schizoid position.

Klein is talking about babies, not adults online, and it would be dishonest to stretch the theory beyond that. But the shape is recognizable: persecutors out there, an ego that sees, in here. That is the conspiracy's quietest gain: a place, the place of the one who saw what others cannot see. This is why contrary evidence so rarely works. It does not threaten only an idea, it threatens the ego's place.

Low tide and company

Go back to the bio. Cal is "at the low tide of America and happy there." It makes sense: at low tide, decisions come from far away, from faceless people, and the conspiracy gives back a face and a group, those who know. Casual paranoia loves company because a group is a shelter.

But his friend Jason, the bio warns, has bigger plans. A theory explains the world and leaves you at home, with the beer and the open tabs. A plan forces you to act without knowing how it ends.

What Freud admitted

At the end of the third part of the Schreber case, Freud notes that the divine rays (Gottesstrahlen) of the delusion look a great deal like the libido theory he himself was building. Instead of hiding it, he says he neither fears criticism nor shies away from self-criticism, and leaves it to the future to decide whether there is more delusion in the theory than he would like, or more truth in the delusion than others find credible.

The difference between a theory and a conspiracy is not in having a system that explains a lot, but in the relation to doubt. A theory accepts correction. A conspiracy turns every piece of contrary evidence into further proof of how well they hide things. Nobody is immune, not even people who write about psychoanalysis. So here is the question, and it reaches well beyond Leonida: the last time something in your life made no sense, were you able to stay a while with "I don't know", or did you go looking for someone to blame?