Yes, we try to impose a pattern on events that we perceive and fail
to give enough credit to individual agendas totally unknown to us and
to simple human error.
The real problem with any conspiracy is simply that one needs
discipline and rewards suitable for a herd of cats. Possible but
seriously difficult and even more difficult to hide. That is why the
real ones are outed so handily.
In fact I have found the best rule with anything that smacks of a
conspiracy theory, is to simply test it against the more natural
model of human stupidity running amok. That works far better.
A real conspiracy requires a mastermind and nothing will be stupid
unless it seriously went to hell. If you run into such a situation
and become aware of it, then cut your loses and run. Just how do you
expect to win a business war with the Mafia?
The only counter to a real conspiracy is a counter conspiracy. We
saw something like that when the RCMP took out one hundred leading
mafiosi in Montreal. This has since led to a top to bottom cleansing
of the contracting business by other agencies. It is not over yet
but a criminal enterprise is now been crushed before our very eyes.
What The New York
Times Missed When It Tried to Explain Conspiracy Theories
Jesse Walker|May. 22,
2013 2:25 pm
Maggie Koerth-Baker
has an article in The New York Times that surveys some recent
research on the psychology of conspiracy believers. As a summary of
what those researchers are saying, the story is solid enough.
Unfortunately, most of their research is framed in question-begging
ways.
I don't have space to
list all the problems I have with the claims in the Times piece, but
my biggest issue is illustrated by this sentence:
63 percent of
registered American voters believe in at least one political
conspiracy theory, according to a recent poll conducted by Fairleigh
Dickinson University.
That is indeed what
the poll says, but phrased that way the figure is approximately 37
percent too low. Virtually everyone who has any political beliefs at
all believes in at least one conspiracy theory. Imagining
conspiracies is just part of how human beings tend to perceive the
world: It's where our drive to find patterns meets our capacity for
being suspicious, particularly when we're dealing with other nations,
factions, subcultures, or layers of the social hierarchy. This habit
manifests itself across the political spectrum, and it always has.
And it is intensified by the fact that conspiracies, unlike many
of the monsters that haunt us, do sometimes actually exist.
(Koerth-Baker acknowledges that last point -- she mentions
Watergate, Iran-contra, and the Tuskegee experiment -- so presumably
when she writes "political conspiracy theory" she means
"political conspiracy theory that is not accepted historical
fact.")
As a result, the
article's attempts to generalize about conspiracy believers fall
flat. When Koerth-Baker quotes the psychologist Viren Swami, who says
"The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief
in other conspiracy theories," Swami isn't really talking about
conspiracy theories in general; he means a particular sort of
conspiracy theory that stresses that "the official story"
is wrong and that powerful people are covering up the truth. There
have been plenty of conspiracy theories through the years that are
not especially interested in debunking "the official story"
(sometimes they are the official story) and that aim their suspicions
at people who are not particularly powerful. Koerth-Baker cites a
review-essay that Swami co-wrote for The Psychologist, reporting that
it reveals "a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy
belief." But thePsychologist piece brushes too quickly past an
important sociological question: What gets defined as a "conspiracy
theory" in the first place?
The answer has more to
do with who is promoting a theory than with what it contains. If you
announced in the 1970s that a network of underground Satanic sects
was kidnapping kids and sacrificing them to the devil, you may well
have gotten tagged as a fringy conspiracist. In the 1980s, on the
other hand, allegations that once were confined to Jack Chick comics
were broadcast on mainstream TV shows, from Oprah to 20/20. (Several
of those programs featured "expert" commentary by a guy
with a history of claiming he was a former high priest of the
Illuminati.) Officials took those stories seriously too: People
across the country went to jail for allegedly engaging in ritual
Satanic child abuse. And then, gradually, the hysteria faded, and the
sorts of conspiracy claims that had been uncritically endorsed on
20/20 in 1985 went back to being framed as fringy "conspiracy
theories."
The Satan scare was
particularly bizarre, but it is hardly the only or even the largest
moral panic to seize the government and mass media in the last few
decades; and moral panics, which are paranoid by their very nature,
frequently include fears of conspiracy. But they only appear in the
literature that Koerth-Baker is reviewing to the extent that they
intersect with the X-Files model of an outsider chasing the Enemy
Above, not a powerful figure fearing an Enemy Below, an Enemy
Outside, or an Enemy Within.
So when the Times
piece concludes like this...
Psychologists aren't
sure whether powerlessness causes conspiracy theories or vice versa.
Either way, the current scientific thinking suggests these beliefs
are nothing more than an extreme form of cynicism, a turning away
from politics and traditional media -- which only perpetuates the
problem.
...all I can say is:
At the same time that American slaves were whispering that white
doctors were plotting to kidnap and dissect them, the planter class
was constantly seized by fears of slave conspiracies. At the same
time that the Populist Party's rabble-rousers were warning about East
Coast banking cabals, Eastern elites were perceiving Populism itself
as a product of a conspiracy. At the same time that the New Left was
formulating conspiracy theories about Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson
was pushing the FBI for evidence that the Communist bloc was behind
the country's riots. In the past few years, the paranoia of some of
the activists opposed to the current adminstration has provoked yet
more paranoia from the administration's defenders. Now, people
who wield power can still have anxieties about the things they can't
control, so you can certainly argue that even powerful people's
suspicions are driven by a sort of powerlessness. But I don't see
them reacting by turning away from politics or traditional media. I
see them spreading fear there.
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