Conspiracy theories resist traditional canons of proof because they reduce highly complex phenomena to simple causes. This is ordinarily a characteristic much admired in scientific theories, where it is referred to as “parsimony. ” Conspiracy theories—particularly the systemic theories and the superconspiracy theories discussed above—are nothing if not parsimonious, for they attribute all of the world's evil to the activities of a single plot, or set of plots. Precisely because the claims are so sweeping, however, they ultimately defeat any attempt at testing. Conspiracists' reasoning runs in the following way. Because the conspiracy is so powerful, it controls virtually all of the channels through which information is disseminated—universities, media, and so forth. Further, the conspiracy desires at all costs to conceal its activities, so it will use its control over knowledge production and dissemination to mislead those who seek to expose it. Hence information that appears to put a conspiracy theory in doubt must have been planted by the conspirators themselves in order to mislead. The result is a closed system of ideas about a plot that is believed not only to be responsible for creating a wide range of evils but also to be so clever at covering its tracks that it can manufacture the evidence ad- duced by skeptics. In the end, the theory becomes nonfalsifiable, be- cause every attempt at falsification is dismissed as a ruse. Therefore, there is no way to disprove this idea. However, because we can't test it, neither can it be tested.