This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 11th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Paranoia is the style of American politics.

So says Jesse Walker,

author of the new book, The United States of Paranoia.

At the Cato Institute in September,

Walker talked about his book

and the amazing breadth of conspiratorial thinking.

I thought I would start by discussing sort of three themes that go through the book.

Usually I just say there's two and I just sort of realized doing a lot of radio interviews

and such over the last couple of weeks that there's another theme which I did not spell

out as much but it helped motivate the book and I think it speaks to the way a lot of people think about conspiracy theories, political paranoia, and so on.

And that is that you can't reduce conspiracy thinking,

broadly defined, to just a single social or psychological

explanation.

People love to do this, and there's always sort of the moment or

often the moment where the interviewer asks, you know, aren't conspiracy theorists

just trying to simplify a complex world? And the answer is, well, yes, that's true of many conspiracy theorists. Indeed, it's true of many theorists in general. Theories are good like that. But there are others who just delight in complicating things that seem to be simple.

Another popular theory about conspiracy theories say that they take off because people can't accept randomness.

That for example, they can't accept the idea that a nobody like Lee Harvey Oswald

could affect the course of history and again that define that does describe a lot of conspiracy theorists.

But again, there are theorists who thrive on anomalies

...