A rant against conspiracy theories
posted 09/12/06 (edited Tuesday, Sep 12, 2006 22:51)
http://bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=448 Surely, you have heard the 9/11 conspiracy theories by now. The U.S. government, not Osama bin Laden and radical Muslims, brought down the World Trade Center. Attacked the Pentagon. Tried to hit Congress, even. Why? To justify launching the War on Terror.
And why do that?
If you are a Muslim conspiratorialist, it's because the Great Satan wishes to destroy the Muslim world.
If you are a libertarian conspiratorialist, it's because a War on Terror would allow excuses for the diabolical neocons to violate our liberties, vastly increase government spending, and consolidate power.
If you are a leftist conspiratorialist, it's because that gives the imperialistic U.S. an excuse to colonize the Middle East.
If you are a conservative conspiratorialist, it's because it gives the communist Insiders and international bankers a greater stranglehold on our finances.
The wonderful thing about that 9/11 conspiracy theory is that it can be cited to explain damned near anything, for damned near anyone. Like the Blob from the 1950s horror movie, an ambitious conspiracy theory like this one can expand amorphously in any direction, allowing it to encompass -- and account for -- any conceivable fact, thus allowing its proponent to imagine himself unassailable to any challenge.
Popular Mechanics editor Jim Meigs and staff recently have taken on and refuted the various 9/11 conspiracy theories. (See also Meigs's brief summary here. His magazine has also published a book on the same topic; read all about it on this blog).
But the 9/11 conspiracy nonsense prompts me to address a wider issue: the general susceptibility of many people to conspiracy theories of all sorts.
Mr. Occam, forget your "razor": there is no simple, obvious explanation for anything that can possibly withstand the orgies of speculation, assumption, and rationalistic deduction conducted by conspiratorialists. Celebrities like Marilyn and Princess Diana never simply die, you know; some always-gargantuan, always-brilliantly-orchestrated, and always-perfectly-kept-secret conspiracy wasted them, for reasons of cosmic importance and Byzantine complexity. Same with any tragic event or attack. Pearl Harbor. 9/11. The Kennedy assassination.
So popular are conspiracy theories that some storytellers have turned them into lucrative careers. Robert Ludlum. Dan Brown. Oliver Stone.
But why do they attract such vast audiences?
At the root of conspiracy theories is a primitive, childish view of the universe -- one in which all physical causality is reduced to some conscious intention. Primitive peoples believed in polytheism -- a kind of metaphysical "conspiracy theory," if you will, where everything that happens (wind, rain, thunder, flowing water, volcanoes, etc.) occurs because some specific god or specialized demon caused it to happen. But polytheism made for a universe of unwieldy complexity. Monotheism came along as an effort to integrate, and thus simplify, the dizzying number of metaphysical conspiracies (and magical agents) into one grand source of all causal intention: a single god.
In the same pattern, we still have some conspiracy theorists who see everything that happens in society as being the result of a multiplicity of conspirators and plots. But others, claiming to have a more sophisticated understanding of the universe, see everything that happens in society as the result of a single grand conspiracy run by a small number of devious plotters.
Observe that like traditional gods and demons, secular schemers share the same traits: omniscience, omnipotence, and infallibility. I mean, these guys control everything; and no matter how many people are involved in their grand designs, their complicated machinations are never exposed by a single traitor. That's why conspiracies are so often regarded and described as "diabolical." Who else but an all-powerful devil could do so much evil, yet never get caught?I dealt with the more global conspiracy theories many years ago in this article, which immediately earned Yours Truly a shrill (and delightfully illogical) critique in none other than American Opinion, the John Birch Society's magazine. Clearly, I was either a conspirator myself, or a "dupe" of the "Insiders" who control the universe.
On their face, most alleged conspiracy theories are breathtaking in their magnificent stupidity. UFOs have been visiting the earth for years; they are so Superior that they have never left any incontrovertible physical evidence of their presence; but the government knows, and is covering it all up; the only real evidence are those dead aliens on ice in Area 51. The CIA and FBI and Lyndon Johnson murdered JFK, according to anti-American conspiratorialist Oliver Stone. AIDS was a disease devised in U.S. labs and then spread deliberately in Africa by the racist U.S. government, according to other whack jobs.
Well, what's so bad about believing such garbage? Because, respectively, they divert precious resources into dead-end government boondoggles to find elusive ETs, divert attention from the much more plausible machinations of Fidel and the Soviets in JFK's death, and provoke anti-science and anti-American sentiments around the world.
The alleged 9/11 conspiracy, for example, has the Twin Towers and the Pentagon simultaneously attacked by our own government. Yep, government officials decide to target the seats of their own economic and military power. Now there's diabolical deviousness for you, eh? Not only that: they manage to orchestrate the firing of a cruise missile into the Pentagon, and recruit and secretly train Arab stooges to hijack and fly airliners into the World Trade Center, in a conspiracy so vast and complex that it would have had to involve hundreds of co-conspirators worldwide; and yet not a single soul ever got cold feet and blew the whistle in advance, or got pangs of conscience and betrayed the plot afterwards.
This incredible secrecy, in a city where a U.S. president couldn't even keep secret his sexual romps behind closed doors. Where the government can't keep laptop computers with sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands. Where Nixon couldn't hide administration involvement in a third-rate burglary from the Washington Post. Where the all-seeing, all-knowing NSA and CIA and DIA couldn't find out that the Soviet Union was on the brink of collapse -- or provide accurate intelligence to the President about WMD in a backwater like Iraq.
Yet bedazzled by their own rationalistic deductions from a few isolated facts, the conspiracy theorists conclude that the success of this incredible 9/11 conspiracy only PROVES how diabolically cunning the government plotters were, and "how high up" in the government the conspiracy goes.
Common to all conspiratorialists I've met are the traits I outlined in my earlier article, linked above. They tend to be powerless, frustrated people living in social isolation, who have no contact with the Big Shots whom they assume run everything, and no inkling about how high-level decisions are really made. Many of these people do have highly honed deductive capacities, however: they are rationalists par excellence, who have the tenacity to meticulously follow any random premise or fact down a long, attenuated deductive chain, to the most absurd conclusions imaginable. How? By evading or explaining away any inconvenient empirical fact to the contrary that might blow their grand theories to smithereens. In fact, theorizing is the sole source of their pride: impotent in the social world, all they have left to exercise control over are the contents of their skulls. So they take great solace and pride from their ability to add 2 and 2, and concoct the totally creative 9.That's also why, incidentally, so many religious fundamentalists also tend to be susceptible to conspiracy theories: both involve the same mental methodology of taking a few premises (or articles of faith), then rationalistically deducing away, with unwavering devotion, to absurd conclusions.
In the film "Conspiracy Theory," Mel Gibson's character plays just such a wounded and isolated soul, drowning in paranoid fantasies from his own imagination. The conceit of the film is that, for the first time in his life, the guy uncovers a real conspiracy, and nobody believes him. It's fine light entertainment -- but that's all. Conspiracy theories are rarely light entertainment. Too often they have pernicious impacts, because they blind people to the real, underlying causes of events.
How emotionally satisfying it is to believe that some vast U.S. government conspiracy brought down the Twin Towers. How inconvenient it would be, though, to grasp that those towers came down because of the power of certain very popular ideas in the world today. The latter explanation, which I presented here, is much less romantic, and also much more difficult to face and address. Doing so would require an understanding of the power of philosophies and ideologies in motivating people; the ability to sort through and separate good premises from bad; the willingness to abandon one's own long-held but toxic ideas; and the understanding that stopping the jihadists requires the slow, patient spread of those good ideas. How much simpler to blame it all on Karl Rove and Richard Perle, for god's sake.
Observe that in political conspiracies of this sort, we often see the whack-job left and the moonbat right meet and blend. Nutcase "paleolibertarians" on the Lew Rockwell website, tinfoil-hat John Birch conservatives, chromosome-challenged Marxist ideologues from the Workers World Party, and envy-eaten Eurotrash intellectuals all wind up on the same side, and doing the same thing: feeding the paranoid delusions of anti-American radical Islamists. They constitute a de facto coalition of paranoid malice, united in only one respect: in their shared hatred for the great Satan, the U.S. government.
So, to all you conspiracy moonbats out there now ready to pounce:
Please, spare me your long-winded tracts and obsessive wackiness. Just. Don't. Bother. I'll delete your comments to this blog, and your email, unread. No, not because I'm one of "Them"; no, not because I am a "dupe" who "can't handle the truth"; no -- because I've heard it all a million times before. In every form imaginable, since I was a kid and ran into my first neighborhood John Birchers. Yes, I've seen and heard you all, and have actually read many of your loonytune books. Even the footnotes.
Right wing, left wing -- you are wing nuts, all.
No, you are not benign, and no, you are not Doing Good. In fact, the damage that you do -- by spreading paranoid delusions, by breaking down the bonds of social and institutional trust, by diverting people from pursuing valid, scientific causal investigations, and (in the global arena) by fomenting anti-American hostility -- is incalculable.
Please peddle your paranoia elsewhere.
Robert James Bidinotto
Enviado: 3/11/2006 0:40
). Em relação aos mulçumanos julgo haver muita condescendencia pela nossa parte, reparem que uma mulher ocidental num pais mulçumano acaba por ver limitada a sua liberdade e os mulçumanos no mundo ocidental gozam de toda a liberdade não obstante muitas vezes ainda quererem mudar a nossa sociedade. Por isso cada vez mais me convenço que os mulçumanos sentem muita inveja do nosso modo de vida ocidental ( imaginem -se a viver nesses paises) e por isso recorrem á violencia, nada mais simples, e essa história de que o Islão é uma religião pacifica, apenas mostrem provas que nunca as vi. Por fim quero dizer que nada tenho contra o Islão, apenas acho que já tiveram o seu auge, até ao final da idade média em que eram muito mais desenvolvidos que os povos cristãos, agora não o são tem em média um nível de IDH muito inferior aos países ocidentais, e isso para eles é humilhante, pelo que não se decidem se nos copiam ou matam.
- onde?! que sutra descreve ou incita à violência?! - não são retiradas, obviamente, do livro sagrado do Islão. São apenas excertos de um artigo enciclopédico de alguém que provavelmente também fala de cor sem compreender nem penetrar no espírito daquilo que critica, apenas porque NÃO é possível ligar o Corão a actos de violência, ao contrário do que já sucede com a Bíblia, principalmente no Antigo Testamento, com a descrição de barbáries, pilhagens, assassinatos e outras crueldades cometidos pelo povo de Israel sobre as tribos que então habitavam o território da Palestina. E, note-se, estes actos, que hoje em dia prefiguram crimes de guerra, são directamente ordenados por Deus, segundo o que está escrito em vários livros históricos do Antigo Testamento. E isto já para não falar nos abundantes episódios de imoral licenciosidade que enxameiam o livro santo de Judeus e Cristãos.