Conspiracy Denialism can be considered the central doctrine of Neo-Obscurantism, since every other manifestation is at least partially based on this dogma.
In its basic form, Conspiracy Denialism denies the existence and/or possibility of conspirations; in its most extreme variant (also called Conspiraphobia) it can go as far as to deny the very possibility that people in positions of power might act in bad faith.
The followers of this doctrine are called "conspiracy denialists" or "conspiraphobes".
The following are the features that qualify Conspiracy Denialism as a religious doctrine.
RATIONAL THOUGHT | CONSPIRACY DENIALISM |
Neutrality Starts with no preconceived notions and follows logic and evidence wherever they might lead be it conspiracy or not. | Prejudice Starts with a preconceived dogma (conspirations do not exist) and instantly abandons logic and evidence the moment they might contrast with it. |
Rationalism Follows the law of non-contradiction: in case of conflicting claims, at least one of them is rejected. | Anti-rationalism Follows doublethink: accepts mainstream claims even they are logically incompatible (i.e.: they conflict with each other). |
Moderation Avoid making universal statements and analyzes each case in itself without resorting to hasty generalizations. | Extremism Denies *every single* conspiracy, and labels "conspirationism" every opinion even slightly different from that. |
Skepticism Reasons by probabilities; in absence of definitive proof, withdraws judgement and leaves all possibilities open to future review. | Fanaticism Not content with just denying conspirations, categorically demands to not even consider them as a possibility. |
Reductionism Follows Occam's razor: chooses the theory that explains the highest amount of evidence with the minimum number of elements. | Anti-reductionism Comes up with a different ad-hoc explaination for each evidence. Dismisses every pattern as mere "coincidence". |
Materialism Does not rely on miracles or other supernatural forces. | Spiritualism Treats important economic/social/political actors as if they were supernatural beings who are not affected by ordinary human weakness and corruption. |
Of course, far from all conspiracy theories fall into the category of the aforementioned "rational thought"; in fact, a lot of them share the same irrational religious features that define conspiracy denialism. However, the main difference between the two is that, while conspiracy theories *can* often degenerate into a religion, conspiracy denialism is *inherently* religious and can never arise above that level. Conspiracy theories *can* be conducted in a scientific way; conspiracy denialism cannot. This is because, while conspiracy theories are defined by nothing else than the conclusions they arrive to, conspiracy denialism is defined by the very act of starting with a conclusion, which is the very essence of religious thought, and a clear violation of the scientific method.
The "mass conspiracy argument" is the argument sometimes invoked by conspiracy denialists in an attempt to give a rational-sounding justification for their doctrine.
It can be roughly summed up as follows: "Conspirations are impossible because it would be impossible to keep such a huge number of involved people silent about it for such a long period of time.".
This argument is fatally flawed in virtually every conceivable way:
The whole argument is based on the implicit premise that everyone who is in any way involved in a conspiracy is also aware of the conspiracy going on and willingly collaborating with it, which is clearly false; this premise completely ignores the hierarchical and highly specialized structure of our society, i.e.: the fact that virtually every aspect of our society is arranged in a pyramidal way, with a handful of individual rule over a big group of people (a minister over a whole institution; a CEO over its whole company, etc.) where the latter are just mere executors of orders coming from above and have no requirement to know what an order is really about in order to execute it; this guarantees that only a handful of conspirators are often more than sufficient to move huge masses of completely oblivious people towards a specific goal, if the conspirators belong to a very high place in the social hierarchy.
Even regardless of the aforementioned flaws, the argument does not actually prove what initially claims, i.e.: that conspirations are "impossible"; at best, it only proves is only that conspirations cannot be kept completely secret for a long time, but in no way provides justification as to why they are "impossible". In fact, not only it is perfectly possible for an elite to engage in a conspiration even at high odds of secrets being leaked to the public, but often they do not even need to keep them secret at all, since there is a vast array of very effective tactics to deal with those leaks making them harmless to the conspirators.
Last but not least, the theory behind the argument is flatly contradicted by practice, where conspirations of any kind are well known and recognized facts in both history and recent news (until they got arbitrarily removed from the category of "conspiracies"); rejecting conspirations means rejecting universally accepted evidence which, paradoxically, would imply a conspiracy in itself, making conspiracy denialism not only inconsistent with factual reality, but even logically self-contradicting.