7) Theory of Agency rather than Process. For the conspiracist, there are no coincidences. Everything happens for a reason, and that reason is always an intentional agent. Any large scale, frequent, or dramatic events must be the product of deliberate planning, and carried out by an commensurately powerful organization. If those events are negative, a vast malevolent agency or cabal is at work. Small criminal groups or sole individuals cannot be responsible. Ignorance, incompetence, poor planning, or impersonal forces cannot play a role. For those who do not understand how the world works, the question is not how, but who, a systematic misapplication of intentional explanations.
8.) Magic. For those who understand nothing about the world, all is magic. The agency is both supernaturally intelligent and powerful, and yet strangely inept. The cabal has virtually complete control of nearly all powerful institutions--economic, political, legal, social, criminal, and journalistic--yet somehow cannot prevent the conspiracists from uncovering their plot. They can, however, hide all the evidence, an ability which would require the cabal to command power that rivals the divine. Benjamin Franklin said that "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead." The conspiracists believes that plots involving thousands can operate without detection, thanks to the near omniscience and virtual omnipotence of the conspiracy, whose members are all unswervingly loyal to the cause.
9) Occult Knowledge. Despite the fantastic powers of the enemy, the conspiracists have uncovered the Hidden Truth, marking them as in some way the champions of divine providence. This too is no accident; the conspiracist possesses a rare and special virtue. The conspiracist is thus cast in a heroic light, often an overcompensation for the mundane reality of their personal lives. They alone have broken through the web of illusions created by the cabal, and it is their destiny to free the world. Their Truth trumps all lesser truths, so outright and deliberate lies are acceptable. The objective is not truth (which does not actually exist unless it is theirs--relativists always make exceptions for what they believe, otherwise the relativist argument itself would collapse) but victory.
10) Mutation, Adaptation, and Cross Breeding. As conspiracists meet contrary evidence, they continue to invent and share counter arguments in a piecemeal fashion. Exposure to reason and evidence, rather than correcting the theory, actually forces it to adapt to become a more reason-resistant strain. In effect, criticism acts as a form of natural selection, weeding out the rational proponents and isolating the loons, while at the same time forcing the theory itself to evolve into something which cannot be falsified by any means. Many conspiracist arguments actually contradict other arguments presented by the same conspiracist, because they are pieced together from variant conspiracy theories. Since conspiracy theories rely on gaps arguments, consistency is not important, and this is why one conspiracy theory leads to another--they share common elements indiscriminately. The only thing that is important is that the real explanation be refuted so that the conspiracist alternative may be offered in its place.
11) Evangelism. Spreading belief in the conspiracy theory is of the utmost importance. The conspiracist believes himself to be the sworn enemy of an immensely powerful malevolent enemy, which must be defeated. Telling others what he knows will make him a less appealing target for the enemy. But in spreading the word, he also becomes the hero in a grand cause, a paladin in gleaming armor against the dragon. Converting others to his beliefs will not only lessen his cognitive dissonance (he is, after all, often told that he is crazy), but will also convince others of his heroic stature. In the eyes of converts, he will go from zero to hero in one easy step.
Although details of justification may vary amongst dogmas, these traits appear to be common to all systems of dogma. Consider Stalinism and National Socialism, both political dogmas. Both employed conspiracy theories of their own. Their biases, and general aversion to truth and the means of establishing truth, are fairly obvious. More suprising, as supposedly secular dogmas, both were notorious dabblers in the occult and wholesale distributors of pseudo-science. In their support for Lysenkoism, the Stalinists apparently thought they were in the position to legislate the laws of science. Hitler railed against "Jewish science". Fortunately for us this included nuclear physics, and led the Nazis to abandon the development of nuclear weapons.
Some invocation of magic and the occult seems to be required to protect any dogma from empirical challenge. Freudian psychology claimed to be able to recover repressed memories which even the patient didn't know about. This eventually led to the inanity of mutiple personalities, past life regression, and tales of vast satanic conspiracies. No evidence for any of this was ever found, and the entire charade has left the cult of Freud in ruins. But at the time it was claimed that only the psychotherapist had the knowledge, and ability, to reach these hidden truths. In the aftermath of these scandals, Freudian psychology was stripped of its scientific disguise and revealed to be an occult practice.
You may have noticed memetic elements at work here. I'm not completely convinced that the memetic model is coherent. For that matter, neither is Richard Dawkins, who merely proposed the idea of memes as the extension of the idea of simple replicators into another domain. But there does seem to be some organic, evolutionary process at work here. Dogmatic systems consist largely of false and irrational beliefs. They are dogmatic precisely because they are not rationally or empirically defensible. As such, a dogmatic belief system appears to be a viral agent which bypasses rational defenses and hijacks the mind. The problem with the concept of the meme is that it is too simple; if a meme is to be considered as a viral agent, we must remember that viruses are not simple gene snippets floating in the blood stream. They are packages of genes contained within a delivery system which includes defensive and offensive adaptations. They must be able to avoid detection and elimination, and they must be able to gain entry into the cell.
By analogy, systems of dogma must, in addition to their main ideological payload, be able to slip past or destroy critical defenses, must encourage evangelism, and must at first approach be attractive enough for consideration. This is no simple meme, but a compex system of mutually reinforcing ideas. The attraction can take many forms. The dogma may offer a seemingly simple solution to a difficult problem, be consistent with existing beliefs, be ethically compelling, make wonderful promises, appeal to the listener's pride, or come from a person loved or trusted. Yet the attraction is not the main problem. It is quite possible to consider nonsense without being convinced by it. It is at this point that the dogmatic defenses kick in.
In a free market of ideas, the dogmas that survive are those that are most resistant to reason and evidence--in short, those that that best resist falsification. No dogma is completely unfalsifiable, as virtually all dogmas make claims regarding the physical world. The solution is not to deal with contrary evidence or arguments piecemeal, but to embrace a broad strategy which undermines the legitimacy of inductive reasoning itself. This is best seen in the Wedge strategy, which seeks first to undermine methodological materialism, the basis of science, before advancing religious dogma in its place. Here we have, exposed for all to see, an element that is hidden in most dogmatic systems. Having found the population too smart for the dogmatists own good, they are actually seeking to reverse the Flynn effect and return us to a pre-modern way of thinking. In doing so, they would cut the thread upon which our prosperity, freedom, and even our very survival hang. Their success would lead to a staggering body count. Natrone23 didn't write this BTW. The credit goes to someone else
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I'm telling ya ... some people just can't handle the fact that people don't buy the lie and want a real investigation ... perhaps it's something they drink? Kool-aid perhaps? I doubt they will ever wake up even when it bites them in the ass ... 
