Conspiratorial thinking happens when people feel like they are not getting honest answers. The media feeds this when it fails to ask the right questions.
That's probably one way conspiracy theories happen. They also happen because it's been an evolutionary advantage to look for patterns and reasons even though sometimes there are none. Creating or subscribing to a conspiracy theory also can create a sense of belonging for an individual within a smaller group that subscribers to the theory that they'd never get in the main stream. There is a great documentary about the flat earth society that drives that point home well.
They also happen because when people are deeply committed to being “in-the-know” at the expense of sounding rational, it’s a fairly cheap way to feel like you know something that the sheeple don’t ;)
They don't have to be crazier, but you have to have enough out there to make people wonder what's what. Eventually people will lose all confidence in official sources --which seems to be happening slowly.
> Unless one of those people is my cousin Charlene
The GP's statement can be reworded as a kept secret implies at most one living person knows it. Leaked secrets aren't counter-examples to the GP's statement.
Assuming Charlene isn't a murderer or a ghost (i.e. all of her secrets involve one of the parties being dead), she reinforces the GP's implicit point that it's very difficult to keep a conspiracy a secret unless one of the conspirators ensures all of the other conspirators die off shortly after.
Every once in a blue moon something legitimately shady happens and it gets tossed aside along with a bunch of legitimate rubbish.
A secret is something known to two people, one of whom is dead.