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Conspiracy Theories |
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The Truth is Out There…Way Out There
by George Case
The peak popularity of the television series The X-Files, and the initial
Internet-boosted acceleration of the Information Revolution are behind us,
but their legacies live on, in the pervasive familiarity of the conspiracy
theory. Indeed, the trust-no-one phenomenon is today so much a part of our
culture that it has become an object of suspicion: recent books such as
Daniel Pipes’ Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it
Comes From, Robert Anton Wilson’s Everything is Under Control: Conspiracies,
Cults, and Cover-Ups, and Devon Jackson’s Conspiranoia! The Mother of All
Conspiracy Theories, dissect the history, nature, and function of phobic
fantasies in all their sprawling interconnectedness. Yet conspiracy
theories—let’s call them CTs—remain almost routine elements of our
socio-political discourse, even if few of their exponents would describe
them as such, and even if fewer of us recognize one when we see it. Why?
A lot of CTs’ attractiveness, logicians will say, is in their dexterity at
skirting the basic rules of deduction and inference. The world is
complicated; many arguable factors contribute to events; CTs simplify things
enormously and with great flair. Psychologists might add that the sheer
randomness of modern life is so distressing that CTs offer a weirdly
reassuring “master narrative” no longer provided by religion. No matter how
malevolent the alleged String-Pullers are said to be, they are perhaps less
scary than the thought of no String-Pullers at all. And rhetoricians may
remind us that CTs are a kind of all-purpose argument winner, inevitably
shutting down further debate by invoking sinister, shadowy agents whose very
elusiveness confirms their existence and influence. Through all of
these—supposition, evasion, innuendo—CTs work, in journalism, education,
political activism, and ordinary conversation. But they aren’t infallible:
studied carefully, they form patterns, fall into categories, and hide errors
of reason and common sense. A brief field guide to their habits may help
detect them before they turn dangerous.
Hidden Connection CTs
George H. W. Bush and Osama bin Laden have shared interests in a Saudi oil
company. Lee Harvey Oswald was seen in his future killer Jack Ruby’s Dallas
nightclub. A numerical translation of Bill Gates’ full name adds up to 666.
Or, the synchronicities found in any daily newspaper, e.g. “Unexpected
Shutdown of Corruption Inquiry” on page one, and “Lawyer’s Death Called Foul
Play” on page ten. As Hidden Connections, such links are essentially twisted
chains of circumstantial evidence, whereby any tenuous overlaps of time,
place, and incident become proof of deliberate collusion. But all of us are
never more than a few relationships removed from everyone else (the
so-called “six degrees of separation”), and putative causes and effects are
always happening around each other, especially in hindsight; a really
compelling Hidden Connection would accurately predict a future event, rather
than employing the hindsight bias by stringing together a disparate
assortment of dots after the fact. Chance, simultaneity, and accidents are
never conceded by Hidden Connection spotters, and their only conclusion is
the ultimate hanging question, “Coincidence? You be the judge.” In the court
of Hidden Connection CTs, a verdict of “Guilty” is never in doubt.
Manipulated Media CTs.
At their most sensible these might reflect the view that print and broadcast
news and entertainment outlets have an interest in maintaining a stable,
none-too-critical audience of pliant consumers. But towards the fringe the
Manipulated Media message is less “Don’t believe everything you hear,” and
more “Don’t believe anything you hear,” with the straightforward truth—that
trivial material can distract people from serious matters—embellished into a
scenario where all information is mere propaganda that obscures government
or corporate misdeeds. Implicit here is the assumption of a single entity
called “the media” that can be wholly hijacked by a single body, giving us
deathless slurs like “The Jews control Hollywood” (did they steal it from
the Amish?). Thus the inconvenient responsibility of informing oneself
through one or many of the thousands of publicly available news and opinion
sources is dismissed. Manipulated Media CTs are a favorite of anyone who
hasn’t seen their own ideology spelled out in banner headlines or heard it
echo back from the six o’clock news. Nowadays given a wide forum in the
free-for-all of the Internet, their odd irony is that it’s only ever through
the media that we’re told how spun, suppressed, and censored the media is.
They Know Everything CTs
This posits that important figures behind closed doors instigate or are
aware of impending disasters, but allow or encourage them to precipitate
some broader, beneficial (to them) outcome. The Iraq war (started by the
U.S. to guarantee its oil supply), the September 11 attacks (sanctioned by
the CIA to kick start an American pipeline project in Afghanistan) are only
the latest fodder for such speculation. Oliver Stone’s film JFK may
represent its supreme example. The problem with They Know Everything CTs is
that these kinds of elaborately murderous schemes are hardly the most
effective or predictable means of steering the tides of history. It has been
pointed out, for example, that if Franklin D. Roosevelt knew the Japanese
were about to attack Pearl Harbor but let them proceed because he wanted a
pretext for U.S. entry into World War II, why wouldn’t he have prevented the
attack at the last minute? Wouldn’t an intercepted “surprise” have produced
the same result as a successful one? Similarly, was atomizing several
thousand New Yorkers an obvious, practical step to the commercial
exploitation of Central Asian gas reserves? And why would the U.S. military
shoot down TWA 800 over Long Island, with so many potential witnesses? And
would assassinating John F. Kennedy on a sunny afternoon safely ensure his
successor’s dragging the U.S. arms industry into a profitable Vietnam War?
If They—whoever They are—really Know Everything, would They gamble so big on
such catastrophic rolls of the dice? And how good are They at conspiring if
Their cover gets blown so easily and so widely?
The blunt truth is that conspiracy theories very seldom make a solid case.
Either they play on pre-existing prejudices (how corrupt you already take
the government / the media / big business to be), or contradict each other
(if the Iraq war is all about Halliburton contracts, then it can’t be about
Judeo-Christian millennial fanatics within the Bush administration; if the
Mafia killed JFK, then the Freemasons are off the hook), or defy rational
dispute (so the more the supposed conspiracy is denied, the more obviously
there is one). CTs do not admit the glum, unresolved reality that public and
private officials of good will may make single mistakes that spin vast webs
of unintended consequences, nor do they allow that the likelihood of a few
cynical individuals covertly trumping the infinite variables of human and
organizational interaction, and never getting caught at it, is pretty slim.
For all their curiously gratifying implications (“We didn’t lose; they
cheated,” sums up Daniel Pipes), they permit us to forfeit our rights as
engaged, aware citizens by insisting on a permanently skewed,
nothing-is-as-it-seems order. If conspirators are running the world, then
why bother to read, vote, think, discuss, act, progress? Today, more than
ever, we should be demanding straight answers to our questions. Whether or
not we think of them as “conspiracy theories,” glib brushoffs about Hidden
Connections, about a Manipulated Media, and about how They Know Everything,
are no longer good enough.
George Case has published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the Vancouver Sun daily
newspaper, and is also the author of a speculative novel titled Silence
Descends: The End of the Information Age 2000-2500 , published in 1997 by
Arsenal Pulp Press to positive reviews in the U.S. and Canada.
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