A half-formed thought.
Conspiracy-thinking is a type of hypochondria at the level of society, instead of at the level of the individual. It’s an apophenic search for meaning where meaninglessness is the more rational explanation, and a kind of default assumption of malignancy. That said, between the excessive reactions to COVID on the one hand, and the explosion of conspiracy theorizing on both the left and right in our political space, I would dub our current era the “Age of Hypochondria.”
