Jesse Walker has an interesting column tracing the longstanding prevalence of paranoid conspiracy-mongering in American politics, which dates all the way back to the Revolution and before. What Richard Hofstader famously called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" has always been common on both the right and the left. Widely believed claims that the US government itself planned the 9/11 attacks Obama is a secret terrorist-sympathizer, that the US government developed the AIDS virus for the purpose of killing blacks, or that the Iraq War was cooked up for the secret purpose of enriching Halliburton and Dick Cheney are among the latest examples (for links to polls on some of these, see here).
An interesting question is why paranoid conspiracy-mongering has persisted despite massive increases in education levels and a great reduction in cost of acquiring accurate political information in the age of the internet and 24 hour cable news. A related question is why so few people are similarly paranoid in their personal lives. Many more people believe that a government conspiracy caused the 9/11 attacks than believe that their coworkers or acquiantances are out to get them.
In my view, the answer to these questions is widespread political ignorance and irrationality. As I explained more fully in my February post on belief in political conspiracy theory:
[I]t is perfectly rational for most people to know very little about politics and public policy - and indeed most people are quite ignorant about even basic aspects of these subjects. Because the chance of your vote influencing the outcome of an election is infinitesmally small, there is little payoff to becoming informed about politics if your only reason for doing so is to be a better voter. By contrast, there are very strong incentives to be well-informed about issues in our personal and professional lives, where our choices are likely to be individually decisive. The person who (falsely) believes that a dark conspiracy is out to get him will impose tremendous costs on himself if he bases his decisions on that assumption; he's likely to end up a paranoid recluse....
...[T]he rationality of political ignorance implies that even people who do have considerable knowledge are likely to be more susceptible to conspiracy theories about political events than in their personal lives. As I explain in this paper . . ., the rationality of political ignorance not only reduces people's incentives to acquire political information, it also undercuts incentives to rationally evaluate the information they do learn. As a result, we are more likely to be highly biased in the way we evaluate political information than information about most other subjects . . . Unlike in our nonpolitical lives, most people have little incentive to critically evaluate their political beliefs in order to weed out biases and and ensure their truth.
Rational political ignorance also helps explain why conspiracy-mongering hasn't declined in an age of increasing education levels and easily available information. Quite simply, even a well-educated rationally ignorant voter has little or no incentive to acquire accurate information or to rationally evaluate the information he does learn. As a result, much of his information-gathering activity will be directed to learning "facts" that are interesting rather than informative and that tend to confirm his preexisting views rather than challenge them. A great deal of social science research shows that people mostly read political media that reflects the views they already hold and show little interest in considering opposing perspectives. Once they accept a conspiracy theory, they are unlikely to seek out information that might refute it.
Is there a solution to the problem? Perhaps not; certainly not an easy one. But if we really want to reduce the impact of paranoid conspiracy-mongering on our society, we should consider reducing the size and scope of government. That way, fewer of our decisions will be made by electoral processes in which ignorance-driven paranoia plays a major role.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Voting for All the Wrong Reasons - Why We often Choose Candidates Based on Issues they Have No Control Over:
- The Paranoid Style of Political Ignorance:
- One Last Political Ignorance Post (For Now):
- Academics' Political Views and the Impact of Political Ignorance:
- Why Concern About Political Ignorance isn't Paternalistic:
- Political Ignorance and Belief in Conspiracy Theory:
Well what is the impact of paranoid conspiracy-mongering on our society?
Poorer quality public policy and bad electoral choices.
A lot of the voters resent Obama's nuanced positions on many issues, preferring a simple pro/anti approach. They also believe Obama's practice of listening to people with repellent ideas means Obama endorses those ideas. Further, that some people are beyond the pale, and cannot be spoken with.
1. Often above average intelligence--sometimes markedly above average intelligence.
2. Usually not well educated--high school graduates at most.
3. Usually have a chip on their shoulder about the combination of #1 and #2.
My theory is that:
1. People with this combination imagine that the people that run our society--who have graduated from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc.--are vastly smarter than themselves.
2. One of the measureable aspects of intelligence is the ability to look at a complex collection of data and see a pattern. The sequence 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, is obvious to all of us here--but to a lot of people, there's nothing obvious about it.
3. This ability to find patterns in complex data collections can also, with enough time and energy, lead one to find patterns in completely random data--especially when you don't have enough information to find the real pattern.
4. Once the pattern has been established, all data must fit into that pattern. If you believe in the Trilateralist Conspiracy/Council on Foreign Relations stuff, then when five different members of the CFR say the same thing, it's a conspiracy. When three of them say X, and two say NOT X, then it's either internal squabbling in the conspiracy, or part of a disinformation campaign to hide the conspiracy.
I do very best to explain to people suffering from this problem that conspiracies require intelligence, and I don't see any evidence that the people running our government are that smart. But the sense of inferiority tends to win.
Also it's not political thought that needs to be taught, but other social sciences like game theory. For instance, I tend to not believe in conpsiracies (at least not long lived ones) since they are often just an excercise in iterative prisoner's dilemma. Eventually the conspirators realize it will fall apart, and whoever betrays the others first wins. I think if more people studied game theory they'd look at political issues quite differently.
If you want to diss democracy because most people are uneducated and stupid, you won't get an argument from me.
As for conspiracy theories, they're often, perhaps usually wrong. However, there are conspiracies.
For some reason, it is much more comforting to blame larger sinister conspiracies than simply apply Occam's razor.
Proofreading is such a pain, and hard with the on-screen type.
Local intellectual mystified by dumb people.
I've known a few such people. I will agree with what others have said here; they tend to be very intelligent people - perhaps well educated, perhaps not. But the trait that I picked up on was that they got part of their very sense of identity from the belief in conspiracies. Part of the motive was to be able to hold the view that "I'm so much more clever than most people because I can see and understand what is *really* going on. I'm better than the people around me who just accept the party line / mainstream explanation of everything. Come on Sheeple, wake up like I have!" It is an ego boost pure and simple.
I think a lot of times this attitude was unconsious to the conspiracy theorist, but it was almost universally there. It reminded almost of a teenager who is into the goth scene: "No really, I'm dark and weird and different - I'm SO not mainstream! Look how obvious I make it that I'm not normal!"
I think the "I have secret wisdom that the proles are too dumb to understand" is as much a part of it as being poorly informed about the real facts.
Of course, the reverse is also true. Those who believe that the intoxication of power never influences elites to conspire in furtherance of their interests do so out of a desire to make sense of a complex world. The alternative is a bit too disconcerting to contemplate.
An interesting hypothetical might be to consider, just for a moment, what the implications of a 9/11 conspiracy might be. Without accepting it as true, can you even bring yourself to consider this possibility?
Along the same lines, an interesting question for the ad hominem bomb-throwing arbiters of reality might be:
Are there any conspiracies that have occurred in the history of the world that involve politicians, rather than lower-class criminals? What conspiracies are you allowed to believe in without being considered crazy?
The standard of proof must be very high, because even the mixture of the most secretive and authoritarian administration in U.S. history, combined with undisputable physical anomalies such as steel skyscrapers imploding at free-fall speed, is apparently not enough to even merit an ounce of suspicion.
I think you and some other commenters should make a distinction between active conspiracy nuts who spend a lot of effort on those endeavors and much larger numbers of people who simply believe what those nuts come up with, without becoming full-fledged nuts themselves. I think this post's topic is this larger group.
As to the active nuts, just yesterday I heard a discussion on the radio on the latest brain research re: habitual liers. Contrary to the researcher's expectations, observation of their brain found not some deficiencies compared to average people, but a much more extensive net of connections which presumably allow/force(?) them to produce spontaneous lies really fast. I wonder if some brain peculiarity would characterize active conspiracy nuts.
I think this a good illustration of a relationship between a theorist and a follower.
Basically it used to be much worse. We have come a long way but have a long way to go. One problem is that what came before for the long history of man may be embedded in us. Good luck rooting it out in a few short centuries.
One characteristic of clinical paranoia is that the paranoid believes the evil forces are focused on him. That is, the paranoia sufferer believes he is the central focus, or a major focus, of the evil scheme.
But those who espouse "paranoid" political theories do not typically share that characteristic. For example, belief that Bush invaded Iraq as a favor to Halliburton does not make the believer a focus of the evil scheme.
For the truly clinically paranoid, that same belief would include something like "and the CIA is out to get me for revealing it".
I think that the feature noted by QuintCarte above at 4.25.2008 6:12pm does represent a transition area between clinical paranoia and the more ordinary political "paranoia":As the focus of a believer's political consiracy theory drifts more toward himself, the theory becomes less political and more clinically paranoid.
At least as important as ignorance, I'd argue, is the animal propensity to distrust strangers, and for that propensity in humans to rise and fall with perceived distance, i.e., geographical, cultural, political, ethnic, technological, etc. I'd guess it's the same thing (in addition to pork) that's behind our ability to believe everyone in Congress except our own Representative is a dishonest, incompetent fool. I assume it also contributes (along with our own anonymity) to the disturbingly high levels of hostility and incivility on the Internet. And as long as I'm speculating, I'll also bet there's social science out there supporting some or all this, but damned if I know what or where.
Three choices here:
1. Evil, smart, conspiracy--and they turned stupid and lost their will after invading Iraq.
2. They aren't brilliant people who did the best they could with what they knew, and that's wasn't enough.
3. Bush really wanted to end his presidency with disastrous ratings, lose Republican control of Congress, squander hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of lives, delay (perhaps permanently) winning the War on Terrorism, and seriously impair our national standing in the world.
Which do you really think is mostly likely? #1 requires vast intelligence that suddenly disappeared. #3 is completely irrational--unless Bush is really a Democrat (or an al-Qaeda agent). #2 is the result of applying Occam's Razor.
Pick your poison!
I think a more likely belief is "giant delusion." I don't think that I've ever heard Creationists argue that it was a conspiracy (except by Satan).
If it's any consolation, straw men aren't the sole province of conspiracy theorists and those who defend them. You have plenty of company.
"What Richard Hofstader famously called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" has always been common on both the right and the left. Widely believed claims that the US government itself planned the 9/11 attacks, Obama is a secret terrorist-sympathizer, that the US government developed the AIDS virus for the purpose of killing blacks, or that the Iraq War was cooked up for the secret purpose of enriching Halliburton and Dick Cheney are among the latest examples (for links to polls on some of these, see here)."
Your examples belie the claim that paranoia is bipartisan. In fact, you give three examples of frothing left-wing lunacy and one demonstrable truth (that Hussein symphathizes with terrorists - his continued membership in the Democrat Party demonstrates that beyond any reasonable doubt). In fact, though you can find some examples of right-wing conspiracy loons (though most of them are closer to libertarians, ie, liberals who hate taxes), the vast, vast majority of this sort of thing comes from the liberals, whose moral relativism and rejection of reason in favor of 'feelings' lends itself to conspiracy-mongering.
Seriously, can you name even one 'conspiracy theory' that's as prominent among conservatives as the "Bush caused 9/11" or "Bush invaded Iraq for oil" or "evil pharma companies cause autism with vaccines and hide the natural herbal cures for cancer" or "Israel is plotting to steal Arab land", et al, theories are among the left? And anything taken from Dr. Strangelove , by the way, doesn't count.
It would certainly be helpful if all those conspirators would stop conspiring with each other.
Logic dictates that all effects must have a cause; Creation, therefore, requires a Creator. We exist, therefore God exists. QED.
It's certainly allowable, given that premise, to use reason to weigh the various claims about the nature and power of God. (Rational consideration of the evidence for evolution, for example, shows that the theory is (1) false and (2) actively harmful - see, for example, Expelled.) But anyone who denies that simple logical proof above has rejected reason and logical thought itself. Atheists are, quite frankly, the most irrational of human brings ever to exist; they go in the same category as the people who believe in the healing power of crystals and tell stories about their abduction by UFOs.
The answer to some of your questions may be a mirror.
Clayton, many creationists believe in a world-wide conspiracy. See here.
(I assume ithaqua’s posts are parodies.)
Does that make me crazy? For believing that about politicians, I mean.
I'm not going to try to convince anyone here, but I would plead with you to consider things rationally, rather than rely upon ad hominem attacks and literally question people's sanity because they dare to question the official line.
Some people see progressive leaders repeatedly assasinated by "crazy lone gun men" and buildings defy the laws of physics, and they have a few questions about it. Nothing crazy there.
Applying a variation of the negligence formula, if there is any fire behind the smoke, the potential harm to our democracy is so great that even a 1% possibility merits investigation.
And, by the way, Occam's Razor is not a shortcut to instantly validating whatever argument you are trying to make. The world is a complex place, and that is a lazy crutch.
The ability to defy the laws of physics would indicate possession of supernatural powers, not a conspiracy among men.
How do you square things like that with the theory of ignorance?
1. My article does acknowledge that real conspiracies do exist, and that this is one reason why people sometimes take the next step and adopt theories that are, shall we say, less plausible. The CIA has done many nasty things in its history. Political corruption has existed for as long as politics has existed. A bona fide terrorist cabal conspired to attack the U.S. on 9/11. But that doesn't mean that every theory about the CIA, corrupt politicians, or terrorists is true.
2. It isn't just the extreme and the uneducated who adopt dubious and paranoid theories. They're common in virtually every class of society, including the allegedly sober center. Educated professionals are an in-group, and in-groups will always come up with ways to fear and demonize members of out-groups.
To some extent that might fit Ilya's thesis, if you figure that social classes are rationally ignorant of the doings of other parts of society. But Ilya's theories aren't enough to cover the whole phenomenon. For instance:
3. Richard Nixon was not "rationally ignorant" of politics -- quite the opposite -- but he was an intensely paranoid man (and remained prone to conspiracism until his life: he believed Vince Foster was murdered, for example). In that case -- and in many other cases, I suspect -- a sort of projection was involved.
While I'm not a big fan of Hofstadter's famous essay on the paranoid style, I think his discussion of the way projection plays into conspiracy theorizing was on target. It's a pity he couldn't apply that insight to his own circle, and see how their fears of the "radical right" resembled the right's fear of communist subversion...
I don't know anyone who says Occam's Razor guarantees simple answers. I don't know anyone who doubts the importance of questioning authority. And I don't know anyone who assumes conspiracy theorists are crazy. The conspiracy theorists I know do have an exceptional ability to distort their powers of observation and reason with ideology, and your own Manichaean take on these questions suggests you may have similar tendencies. But that doesn't make them or you crazy.
We solve "what happened" problems by drawing the best inference from available evidence, and Occam's Razor applies. When evidence is irreconcilable with an explanation, the explanation is compromised. But the mere existence of unanswered questions doesn't disprove the explanation.
My problem with 9/11 Truthers isn't that they asked questions. I followed the early debate with interest. But when their questions were answered, they cherry-picked and distorted the answers, manufactured contradictions, came up with new questions and just generally persisted in the same deceptive game of whack-a-mole many evolution skeptics play.
As explanations eliminated the legitimate questions, I got put off by the flimsy, tendentious arguments Truthers used to keep the issue alive. I'm sure there are people who honestly think questions remain unanswered, when in fact they're just never-ending. And the false pretext for the whole enterprise is that we should withhold our confidence in explanations until everything knowable about a thing is known. Of course if we did that, our whole world would unravel. We're constantly and successfully relying on understandings drawn from less than complete information.
Finally, there's the matter of the evidentiary double standard Truthers apply to the official 9/11 narrative and their own often mind-bogglingly improbable theories. But don't get me started....
Whoa! For a moment, you really had me going with your "Obama's nuanced positions", until I noticed your <sarcasm> tags.
OK. I agree with you in almost all aspects regarding rational ignorance and rational irrationality.
But did you REALLY want to say that the cost of acquiring ACCURATE political information has gone DOWN because of, say, FOX News? I watch that channel every day in part to amuse myself with the voluminous distortions and inaccuracies I count. [Jon Stewart's The Daily Show did a brilliant 2-part dissection of Fox recently, available on YouTube.]
For instance, the proverbial "Black helicopters" really do exist, and have been photographed. And there's a non-conspiracy explanation for them. But a flat media denial that they exist, reaching the point that the phrase has become a shorthand for loony conspiracy theories, leaves the conspiracy theory as the only available explanation.
Are you saying that the Iraq war hasn't enriched Haliburton and Cheney? I'm not aware that this was ever a secret. It is rational ignorance for most people to be poorly informed about how Brown and Root has prospered by providing services to governments and politicians.
The paranoid style has better explanatory power than the pollyanna model. To conspire is to breathe together. It's what people do. The world is an ecology of competing and interlocking conspiracies. Some are more effective than others. The one where I'm commenting right now, the volokh conspiracy, is more effective than most.
Oh, I don't suppose it could be because the odds that my coworkers and acquaintances are members of secret societies like the Skull and Bones are considerably smaller than the odds that the power elite are, huh?
Yeah, it's the same old song.
I remember when the truthers started, and were all gaga over the "steel doesn't melt at those temperatures." And they were right, steel doesn't melt. But it does weaken significantly.
And their response to this was "oh, okay, then never mind."
Ha ha, just kidding. What happened was that they came up with a new theory. It's well known phenomenon, called "moving the goalposts."
Now we've got the "freefall theory." When it turns out to be crap (that is, when someone shows them what happens when a 20X mass hits series of 1X mass objects), they'll move onto something else, and wonder why people aren't taking them seriously. In fact, that'll be the proof they need to keep themselves going.
I don't know if any of this is true but I have seen with my own eyes world bank members talk about having to lower the wealth of the developed nations if they are going to raise the wealth of the poor nations. I remember one just about a year ago talk about this with one hand high in the air to represent the U.S. (which she brings down) and the other hand real low which she brings up (representing the third world). She said it with a smile and declared it a fact that had to happen.
This would take into account the trend toward negative conspiracies (what makes me feel weak is what is bad).
It would also account for what other commenters have noticed where some people above average intelligence(imagination) imply "I have secret wisdom that the proles are too dumb to understand". Basically a psychological mechanism maybe for coping with a feeling of impotence.
Heck, the leading candidate for the President of the United States doesn't even care if the low hand comes up at all....he just wants to be sure to bring the upper hand down out of "fairness". Punishing success far more important than actually helping anyone.
MR. GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?
SENATOR OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.
I think the more characteristic conservative or libertarian view is that the AGW political movement is simply explained as emergence or emergent behavior of groups of actors with readily identifiable interests and beliefs. Emergent behavior may look like an actual conspiracy to some, and sometimes it can be the result of an actual conspiracy. But no conspiracy is necessary for the phenomenon to exist.
Actually, this was such an incredibly dishonest and stupid question Obama should have actually answered: "Charlie, you are a frigging idiot and I am not going to dignify such an outrageously biased misstatement of the facts with a response."
Most of the people who own stocks do so through some kind of retirement plan (e.g., 401(K)'s or IRA's). Of course, those are taxed differently than ordinary capital gains and generally taxed as ordinary income upon retirement (and taxed even more severely than even ordinary income if you cash them out early). Even for that portion of the 100 million people who do dabble in trading stocks and other equities other than through their retirement programs, again, tax on ordinary income is by far the greatest portion of their taxable income. The proportion of the population that will see a significant difference in their tax bill because of changes in the capital gains rate is very small and mostly in the top brackets.
Too late. The decision is in.
The Onion
The Da Vinci Code
Raiders of the Lost Ark
The Matrix
Kill Bill
The Bourne Supremacy
Minority Report
Men in Black
Enemy of the State
National Treasure
In some of these the conspiracy element is played for laughs, e.g. Men in Black; but in many, the assumptions about secret armies, the CIA, or even stranger forces are taken for granted.
If I had a quarter for every paperback thriller I've seen where the Vice President or Attorney General was part of some devilish plot, I could buy a big pizza.
It's well known that when men read a bunch of pron, they start to think that sexual promiscuity is normal. When people read a lot of fiction (or see a lot of drama) where high-level conspiracies are rife, wouldn't they tend to think such conspiracies are common?
The creationists and the global-warming skeptics are not making any claims that are different in kind from those made by their opponents. Evolution and global-warming proponents are just as happy to accuse creationists and global-warming skeptics of non-rational motives as the reverse. Evolutionists are accused of manufacturing evidence in their efforts to get rid of God; creationists are accused of ignoring evidence when it contradicts the Bible. Global-warming proponents are accused of trying to change the balance of global power by penalizing the industrialized nations; global-warming skeptics are accused of being paid by the oil companies.
In either case it's a bit silly to accuse one side unilaterally of being conspiracy-minded. However, I do have to disagree with the commenter who claimed that all conspiracy theories seem to come from the Left. Many conspiracy theories are politics-neutral in the beginning or come from the Right. But the Left is willing to embrace these conspiracy theorists and the Right kicks them out. That's why they all eventually come to be seen as a part of the Left.
Funny, I have a couple of right wing friends who used to bend my ear off about the Clintons' murder of Vince Foster. If they've been "kicked out" nobody told them about it. And you might want to look into the political leanings of the 9/11 Truthers. I can't speak to percentages, but an awful lot of them are acolytes of someone who, last I checked, was still running for President as a Republican.
Also, Ron Paul isn't a counter-example to my point, he supports it. He is a wacko conspiracy theorist who was never treated seriously by the other Republican candidates, was repeatedly trashed by the large majority of Republican-leaning pundits (and lost more support among them as his conspiracy theories became known), and was soundly rejected by the voters. As to the voters who supported him, if only 5% of Republicans are prone to conspiracy theories then the Republicans are doing a lot better than the Democrats on that score.
"Bush invaded Iraq for the oil" is, perhaps, too brief an analysis, but it is not a conspiracy theory. That the profit derived by Republican corporate stalwarts like Bechtel, Halliburton and Blackwater shaped aspects of Republican policy in Iraq is a fact, not a conspiracy theory.
Historically, Lincoln criticized the Slavepower interest, and famously charged that Douglas, Pierce, Buchanan and Taney were "working together" to further the interest of the Slavepower interest in extending slavery in the U.S. Lincoln's point was not to charge that a small cabal was in conspiracy, but to show how Douglas, while claiming a perfect independence from Buchanan and Taney, was, as a matter of practical effect, cooperating and coordinating with the them to advance the Slavepower interest. Douglas naturally derided this as a conspiracy theory. Not because Lincoln's actually was a conspiracy theory -- certainly not in the clinical, paranoid sense -- but because deriding Lincoln's theory of Douglas's politics was rhetorically effective.
It should be noted that Buchanan and Taney actually were conspiring along exactly the lines Lincoln argued that they were cooperating. That is, Buchanan and Taney actually communicated with each other and coordinated their actions. Douglas, Buchanan's intra-party enemy, certainly did not "conspire".
One of the most famous "conspiracies" of recent years was Hillary Clinton's "Vast Right-wing Conspiracy" to bring down her husband's Presidency. Mrs. Clinton's ill-advised use of the word, conspiracy, made the charge a joke. In fact, Richard Mellon Scaife and others financed and coordinated relentless attacks and investigations and "scandals", including the bogus Paula Jones suit. Kenneth Starr was rewarded for his efforts by an appointment at Pepperdine University, a recipient of considerable Scaife largess. "Conspiracy theory"?
Calling it such may be more useful to those wishing to deny the phenomenon, than to those wishing to describe it.
You people need to do some reading and quit patting yourselves on the back for apparently not knowing anything about history, military-intelligence, or psy-ops.
The CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, DoD, etc. do what they want and rely on a massive sophisticated propaganda system to keep the public behaving predictably for national security purposes.
Ever studied the WWII-era Office of War Information?
Ever studied the OSS?
Ever studied how Hollywood and Disney were taken over by the Office of War Information to make propaganda?
Have you studied this relationship post-WWII?
Have you studied how the CIA became a covert Ministry of Culture using fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom to co-opt the European left? This is de-classified information.
Read Frances Stonor Saunders' book, 'Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.'
Gee, would the CIA do social engineering in the US, too?
They certainly did mind control experiments and drug testing in MKULTRA.
And along with the FBI's COINTELPRO, suppressed political dissent with their own Operation CHAOS during the 1960s and 1970s.
Did you know that a 1999 jury determined that a US government conspiracy murdered Martin Luther King?
Did you read the transcripts with all the witnesses that came forward after decades of fearfully keeping quiet? People were murdered to hide that FBI crime.
Did you know that the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined in 1979 that JFK was murdered by a conspiracy?
Did you know that forensics and laws of physics prove Sirhan Sirhan is innocent of shooting live ammo into RFK?
Do you know who the CIA-LAPD officers were that helped disappear evidence of way too many bullets fired for just one gun?
This information is openly available to people who know how to find trustworthy sources to read that aren't professional disinformationists.
Read some ex-CIA whistleblowers-
>Philip Agee
>Victor Marchetti
>John Stockwell
>Ralph McGehee
>Ex-DEA whistleblower, Michael Levine
>Ex-FBI William Turner
>Ex-LAPD Mike Ruppert
Read some ex-State department whistleblowers-
>William Blum
>John Marks
Read some honest lawyers-
>Mark Lane
>William Pepper
Read some ex-military whistleblowers-
Operation Watchtower?
Operation George Orwell?
Operation Mockingbird-
>Read at his own website Carl Bernstein's 1977 article based on leaked senate hearings about CIA-run mainstream media.
>Read Deborah Davis' 1979 book about Katherine Graham's Washington Post and the CIA, 'Katherine the Great.' Ben Bradlee got the first printing shredded for outing his CIA ties.
Church Senate subcommittee hearings?
Operation Gladio?
Operation Northwoods?
IranContra?
9/11-
>The sight of yellow-hot molten metal pouring out of the buildings before coming down?
>The chemical signature of thermite and huge pools of unquenchable molten metal for many weeks after 9/11 under the three destroyed World Trade Center buildings?
>The first responders' oral histories suppressed by Mayor Giuliani until a judge released them in August 2005?
>Seems the firemen heard and saw bombs, a controlled demolition, just as the physical evidence proves.
>Any legit video/photo of the Twin Towers shows the debris being thrown hundreds of feet horizontally and even vertically by massive explosive forces.
So quit posturing about "those ignorant conspiracists with their psychological problems" and do your reading homework to see what kind of planning (conspiring) is standard operating procedure for military-intelligence.
You just might start with Suen Wuu's 'The Art of War' written aprox. 510 B.C.--
"War is primarily a game of deception."
By the way, the actors don't have to be hidden for there to be a conspiracy theory. Only the conspiracy does. Most of the Truther conspiracies, for example, revolve around George Bush, hardly a hidden figure. The Queen of England and David Rockefeller also figure prominently in popular conspiracies, and I think the secret is out that they exist too.
And there certainly is a conspiracy theory around evolution. It says God-hating scientists are defrauding us with a junk science theory they ginned up as a Trojan horse to replace religion and traditional values with a culture of materialism. That's classic conspiracy theory stuff. It's fundamentally different than creationist efforts to de-legitimize evolution in defense of their religious narratives. Those are open and, by the way, real. That each side accuses the other of lying isn't the point. Only one side says the other has a broad secret social agenda, unrelated to its subject matter which implicitly makes its whole enterprise fraudulent.
The problem seems to be more with the type of explanation: the conspiracy theorist supposes that events where deliberately planned by someone, and brought about intentionally.
But perhaps we have situations where large numbers of people (each following their own agenda, and intentionally acting to achieve a local effect they individually deem desirable) combine together to have a global effect that no-one planned or anticipated.
Markets are a good example of this: Today I might decide to sell some of my shares for any number of idiosyncratic and personal reasons, such as wanting the money for a holiday. Large numbers of people making these kind of individual decisions affect the share price without them all needing to (secretly) agree on a plan: "Today will reduce the share price by 5c."
But outside of the specialized vocabulary of economics or physics, we don't have very good ways of talking about these kinds of emergent properties. What we have instead is plenty of vocabulary for talking about intentional behaviour, where people plan to do things.
So I might guess that conspiracy theories are down to the limitations of human language and cognition - most people are not good at reasoning about or describing emergent properties. This might be very hard to fix - for example, if there are genetic and biological bases to our abilities to reason about the intentions of individual humans, and we have no corresponding "mental module" for the emergent properties of large-scale societies. (cf. the research on autism for evidence that reasoning about the intentions of other humans is different from reasoning about inanimate objects).
But "paranoid" conspiracy theories also effect markets. For example, if large numbers of people falsely believe that a product is harmful, then it won't sell very well.
Also, the actors don't need to be hidden but their involvement does. The Truther theory is that Bush was involved in the 9/11 event.
There certainly are and always have been many God-hating scientists who were outspoken supporters of evolution. They have written voluminously about their contempt and even spite for religion. When you combine this with the documented cases of suppression of dissenting views and of fossil fraud, it is no conspiracy theory to say that these cases are motivated by hatred of religion and that there have been other cases that were not documented.
Just to be clear, I don't agree with these ideas (except for the part where irrational hostility plays a part in the suppression of dissenting views), but these ideas are more in the "Bush invaded Iraq to enrich Haliburton" category than the "Bush planned 9/11" category.
Certainly, that's never happened in the Bush Administration.
Ilya Somin: "the Iraq War was cooked up for the secret purpose of enriching Halliburton and Dick Cheney"
I think SusanC raises an important point: we do struggle to "explain" outcomes and events which are the product of complex interaction. I don't think it is because we lack appropriate language, so much as the limitations of the human psyche demand compact, succinct summaries and principles, and the human psyche demands moral narratives -- we are story-telling animals. The language of intention is favored, because it is compact, and because it accords. Actor A wanted and intended and struggled and worked and fought to bring about about Outcome X, by means of Policy P. The intending and struggling and "fighting" satisfies the need for a moral narrative, and the formula is brief, with few elements.
The fact that Policy P was strategic, focused on anticipating, responding to, or provoking Actor B, and that the policy was changed adaptively during the course of events, and Actor B and Actor A, together produced an outcome that neither entirely "intended" at the outset is part of the detailed complexity and emergent nature of reality. But, human brains require a reduction to conceptual models, metaphor, statistical summaries, E=MC2 and "survival of the fittest" or economic "supply and demand". Abstraction and generalization serve the limits of human information processing capability.
The human need for compact analysis combines with the human need for narrative stories on a few archetypal templates to produce four kinds of "conspiracy" explantions:
1.) the actual secret cabal manipulating events, saying one thing and doing another, cooperating while claiming to act independently;
2.) the metaphorical conspiracy, which is actually a political movement, loosely organized, but organized, and acting cooperatively, perhaps over a long period of time; the Project for a New American Century, which supplied much of the pre-baked rationale for invading and occuplying Iraq, as well as key Administration personnel for the Iraq policy, was such a metaphorical conspiracy.
3.) the paranoid conspiracy, which is a psychological pathology functioning, perhaps, as an emotional defense -- "they are out to get me" Paranoia feeds on the human capacity to discern patterns and hidden reality from scant evidence, but not in a good way.
4.) the derisive conspiracy, or "conspiracy" in scare quotes, which makes a metaphor out of 3.) and applies that metaphor to claims from a political opponent, as a way of denigrating the opponent or the claims or both. The opponent may be using 1) or 2) to summarize his claims, which naturally invites 4).
I think Ilya Somin was using 4, when he brought up the Iraq War. Sure, the fact that Cheney made several millions of dollars from the Bush Administration policy of squandering American treasure, blood and honor in Iraq is probably merely incidental to Cheney's advocacy of that policy of American self-destruction; Cheney, after all, is an honorable man.
The need for moral narrative and compact analysis means that we are never going to stop chasing our tails in often unproductive "debate" that centers on challenging the bumperstickers with which human beings "think", as oversimplified or ill-advised. The best bumpersticker summaries, exemplified by principles and insights of science, are the product of carefully constructed and examined intellectual compression. The science consists in understanding the rules and apparatus used to pack a vast amount of knowledge into Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection, say, or the marginal principle in economics. Politics, at its best, engages in such construction -- ideology relies on such construction, providing a superstructure to support a bumpersticker, rationalizing worldview into arguments over principle.
Conspiracies and political movements (which are not secret conspiracies among small cabals, but which can, nevertheless, endeavor to obscure their intentions and reach, in the manner of a conspiracy) are part of the way the world works, and things get done. So is paranoia.
Conspiracy theories are just one aspect of a general political argument over responsibility and possibility. If you oppose withdrawing from Iraq, you are argue that it is now possible to withdraw. If you've supported a President, who has lost wars and destroyed the economy with his incompetence, malfeasance and corruption, you argue, "most of the things that Presidential elections are about are things that the President can't do anything about anyway."
It is not that we don't have language to understand that actions have consequences, even in an interdependent and complex world, it is that too many don't have the incentive.
That's NOT what is posited by most of us.
Most likely, a rogue cell within US intelligence decided to write some history and get the oil occupation launched much further into the sand by using double-agents as patsies, possibly software-controlled and beacon-assisted planes, and PROVEN controlled demolition as the unexpected Big Finale.
Many institutions were poised and ready to take advantage of the next big *boom.* Plans for invading Afghanistan were already in motion for oil pipeline reasons that the signatories to the Project for the New American Century global dominance plan had already very publicly declared online.
The PNAC even mentioned the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" to start the plan rolling into history.
Many of the Bush-Cheney administration insiders are part of PNAC. What a coincidence!
A 1998 security conference was held about the culture shift and security plans to be put in place (Patriot Act) after a catastrophic terrorist event. This conference had all the CIA-FBI-CFR honchos there including Phillip Zelikow who later played the Allen Dulles role on the 9/11 Omission Panel's version of the Warren Commission.
So there seems to be a plausibly deniable complicity dynamic along the lines of "Who will rid me of this priest?"-messaging that things would be just great for the military-industrial-CFR-media complex once something big goes *boom*. Raises for everyone and the public doesn't get that damned 'Peace Dividend' they were whining about.
And this dynamic was decades old since this is how the illusion of the Cold War was kept going, too.
Somebody heard this ready answer just waiting for the question and applied their technological savvy to recharging the war machine for a few more decades of massive profits and social control.
The media cover-up mechanisms (in place since WWII) were already tested from WTC'93, OKCity, and TWA800.
The FBI had an informant in the WTC'93 bombing and allowed it to happen. Documented. Complicit judges here and there help with these things.
Physics proves that bombs were planted in OKCity, too. General Partin, a Pentagon ordinance expert, researched this and published the proof which any junior high school student can understand, just like the Conservation of Momentum at the World Trade Center.
The initial news reports that day reported unexploded bombs being cleared. People were murdered to cover this up, like Officer Yeakey who was absurdly declared a suicide.
Hundreds of witnesses, including pilots, and radar saw a missile shoot down TWA800. Chemical testing on recovered materials found the missile rocket fuel. All covered up and journalists likw Kristina Borjesson were fired who reported the truth. CIA produced an animation that defied the laws of physics, just as they did for 9/11.
Standard operating procedure for capping an inconvenient truth.
This is just a thumbnail of suppressed history.
Those of you who really eschew political ignorance will follow up.
I suppose there are some that fall into each category, and the difference is one of degree, not kind. Certainly many truthers believe the Haliburton narrative. It's hard to say that doesn't make it all part of one consistent theory. It's also hard to say how much you'd have to trim from the 9/11 part to turn it into simple partisan delusion. I think these things are fairly fluid. For example, what about, "OBL's hijackers blew up the WTC with Bush's prior knowledge and tacit complicity?" Active complicity? He had nothing to do with the bombing, but saw its advantages, so he had NORAD stand down, and snuck the Saudis out of the country knowing their complicity? At some point the semantic limits of "conspiracy theory" are hair splitting.
I do hope, for your sake, that this article, its suppositions, aspersions, and lazy logic, in no way, relate to the thesis you will be defending at Harvard.
Really, in the face of all the incidents HughManatee points out,(plus, I would add the bombing of the Maine and the Gulf of Tonkin incident), isnt the more compelling question,
"Why would rational politically informed Americans (most assuredly, those libertarian legal-wonkish types on Volokh, for example) NOT entertain conspiracy as a matter of course in looking at what 21st-century America has become?"
In getting a Masters in Public Policy, I had to develop and defend a cost-benefit analysis. I chose a topic where I had a certain notion as to what was the "right" course, but it was, in no way clear that that would be the most economic course. To add rigor to my assessment, I performed the analysis from the opposing view (ie, what I perceived to be a cost was, to some parties, a benefit). I would not have achieved the top marks I did, without approaching the analysis from something other than my default perspective.
Prof. Somin, your thinking on conspiracy is in need of a similar exercise. But then, its been my experience, introspection into the very topics some very elite professors claim their bailiwick is often in order. While studying for a Masters in Operations Engineering, from the top ranked (at the time) institution in that field, I found the professor of organizational design focusing on worker motivation alienated his students, the professor teaching Scheduling theory lumped all the work in the course at the end of the semester, and the just-in-time expert needed to chedule an extra class session because he could not manage his lecturing on topic. And it would seem that, with published papers like "Knowledge about Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information" on your CV, you most definetly dont want to go the way of my esteemed professors, focusing all their energy, expertise, intellectual capital, and reputation on a field they study, but really dont get.
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: "Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?" For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot - though they call it "planning" and "strategizing" - and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
Yet there are individuals who ask with patronizing, incredulous smiles, do you really think that the people at the top have secret agendas, are aware of their larger interests, and talk to each other about them? To which I respond, why would they not? This is not to say that every corporate and political elite is actively dedicated to working for the higher circles of power and property. Nor are they infallible or always correct in their assessments and tactics or always immediately aware of how their interests are being affected by new situations. But they are more attuned and more capable of advancing their vast interests than most other social groups.
The alternative is to believe that the powerful and the privileged are somnambulists, who move about oblivious to questions of power and privilege; that they always tell us the truth and have nothing to hide even when they hide so much; that although most of us ordinary people might consciously try to pursue our own interests, wealthy elites do not; that when those at the top employ force and violence around the world it is only for the laudable reasons they profess; that when they arm, train, and finance covert actions in numerous countries, and then fail to acknowledge their role in such deeds, it is because of oversight or forgetfulness or perhaps modesty; and that it is merely a coincidence how the policies of the national security state so consistently serve the interests of the transnational corporations and the capital-accumulation system throughout the world.
Whereas the intellectually challenged attempt to make sense of a complex world by 'conspiracy theory', if only they were as wise as the majority view in these comments and took their reality from what has been decided for them by higher authorities ! If ever there is a lazy and simplistic way to attempt to understand then surely it is to swallow whole someone else's analysis ?
Surely no-one truly believes, for example, that Oswald really was a lone nut and no others were involved ?
The truth of the JFK story will probably never be known, and I doubt that 9/11 will ever be fully explained. That, however, does not mean that the convenient official accounts are true.
You fall into the trap of observing others, who seeing inconsistency, deception, cover-up and misdirection attempt to come up with alternative hypotheses to explain events. When some of these are far out and unlikely (eg there were no planes involved in 9/11) it does not mean that the official account must be true, and that all attempts to question it are to be described by the catchall 'conspiracy theory' and immediately discounted.
Engage your critical faculties. Ask cui bono ?
You need to try harder, and look more carefully.
100% US Grade A straw.
For example: the trade in illegal drugs. For illegal drugs to be imported into the U.S., and distributed and sold, a moderately large number of people need to plan in secret to do something illegal.
[Of ourse, there may be several drugs acting independently. But my point is that any single drug smuggling operation necessarily involves quite a few people.]
As a second example: terrorist groups like the IRA. Some actions by the IRA were clearly illegal, and it is also clear that there was an organization behind them with many members. It's a matter of public record that Gerry Adams is the leader of Sinn Fein.
I admit that I hadn't heard that there were bombs inside OKC. That's a new one for me.
And there is substantial evidence that there is a 'secret government'.
There is substantial evidence that the CIA have been integrally involved in the overthrow of democratically elected populist governments as well as the creation of 'death squads' to murder masses of people.
These sorts of things simply exist and have been well-documented. They are not conspiracy theorist's wet dreams.