A theory nothing can refute splinters into endless equal rivals

A theory built to explain away every challenge buys invincibility, and the invoice arrives as arbitrariness. If your theory can absorb any evidence, so can a hundred variants with different villains, and the evidence can never referee between them. Science has the same problem in the strict logical sense, but practice tames it: simplicity, coherence, contrived rescues get laughed out of the room, and fields converge on a winner. Sealed systems never converge. They sprawl.

So 9/11 was the Bush administration, or the Saudis, or the Mossad, via controlled demolition, or nano-thermite, or holograms. Every version fits the data equally well, which is to say none of them is doing any work. Fifty years and hundreds of books into JFK truthing, believers still can't agree on a culprit:

Psychoanalysis sprawled identically: Rank found birth trauma under everything, Adler inferiority, Klein breast envy. The Freud critic Frederick Crews called the movement "drastically centrifugal," spinning off mutually excommunicating schools.

And the arbitrariness has teeth, because a machine that can accuse anyone eventually accuses its operators. Dietrich Flade, university president of Trier and a notably harsh witch-hunter, got named as an accomplice by the accused. His friends argued the obvious: the man hunts witches. The court's reply was airtight inside the system: witches are deceivers, and what better disguise? Strangled and burned, 1589. A theory in contact with evidence narrows over time. A sealed one only breeds, and its rivals don't debate. They excommunicate.

Source claim: Because self-sealing belief systems can absorb any evidence, countless rival versions fit the data equally well, so they proliferate, schism, and eventually turn on their own proponents.