Why Rational People Buy Into (read: create) Conspiracy Theories

I haven't talked about it much here, but I spent last semester teaching the first edition of a class on the theme of distrust in communication, about half of which dealt with conspiracy theory.  One of the biggest misperceptions about conspiracy theory (including in some scholarly literature) is that it's the realm of deluded idiots.  In fact, it's more accurate to say conspiracy theory appeals mostly to people with a moderately sophisticated skepticism, but without either the training in citation and information management to find reliable alternative sources, or perhaps even without the basic faith that there is such a thing as 'the truth.'

The New York Times explores these issues in a new blog post from Maggie Koerth-Baker.  The comments section is well worth scanning - not a single one of the first dozen responses comes down on the side of information-based rationalism.  They all defend conspiracism as somehow a positive model for 'questions that need to be asked.'  Or they say that left-wing conspiracism are okay, it's right-wing conspiracies that are harming democracy.  It's really mind-boggling and scary that this is the audience for the New York Times.

Dr. James Tracy and the Paranoid Style in Floridian Academia

Starting December 20th, just one week after the shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dr. James Tracy of Florida Atlantic University began offering a version of the events quite different than that seen on the nightly news. On his blog, Tracy has speculated that the Connecticut medical examiner in charge of the case was an impostor, and claimed that there were two to four gunman in addition to accused shooter Adam Lanza. He has written that “compelling geopolitical and diplomatic conditions” suggested those additional shooters were part of an Israeli paramilitary team. In the culmination of these postings, Tracy wrote that he “is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shootings ever took place, at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described,” and suggested that the event was engineered by the Obama administration to help erode civil liberties. Even in its skillfully hedged form, the claim that Sandy Hook didn’t really happen, combined with Tracy’s position as a tenured professor, has made his claims national news.

Tracy has other odd ideas – his blog refers to weather-controlling “chemtrails,” FEMA-run concentration camps, and a shadowy conspiracy aimed at undermining American sovereignty. These echo a shockingly widespread belief in what is known as the New World Order, conceived by adherents as a massive plot to establish a single, oppressive, authoritarian global government. The New World Order is believed to include such groups as (variously) the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, and the Rothschild banking family. These groups and others are believed to have orchestrated everything from the Kennedy Assassination, to first contact with space aliens in Area 51, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Sadly, without the “PhD” after his name, Tracy’s strange beliefs would be unremarkable – the conspiracy industry is big business in America, with figures like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and Pat Robertson peddling versions of the “Master Conspiracy” to an eager audience. Of course, it’s all hokum, part of a long tradition of fabricated pseudo-politics that stretches back to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document showing an international Jewish plan for world domination, but which was really cooked up the Russian secret police in 1903 as a way of whipping up anti-Jewish hysteria. The Protocols were eagerly touted by notorious American Nazis such as Henry Ford, and to this day anti-Semetism remains a major underlying theme of New World Order ideas. But conspiracism crops up in many smaller ways; For instance, when the Pinellas County commission voted in 2011 to remove fluoride from county drinking water, it was partly due to New World Order theories that linked the mineral to government mind-control. But isn’t this the province of some narrow lunatic fringe? Hardly. Dr. Tracy’s strange and hurtful outburst illustrates an important point about conspiracism – very smart, sometimes very accomplished people can be pulled in by strange ideas, and they tend to be very good at defending their conclusions. Tracy’s blog is soberly written and carefully argued, for the most part sticking to the common conspiracist tactic of ‘raising doubts’ about the official narrative, and concluding that the discrepancies must mean there’s a larger, malevolent force at work.

Tracy’s descent into the rabbit hole shows the fine line between the healthy distrust that has driven some of the best of American politics, and a growing plague of conspiracism that threatens to erode the common cause that allows our society to function. There are some very good reasons to be skeptical of both government and the media – for instance, the tragedy on 9/11 really was used as a political tool to institute frightening curbs on American civil liberties, and programs like COINTELPRO and FBI surveillance of Occupy show that the U.S. government sometimes works against its citizens’ freedoms. Skepticism of the media, moreover, is vital to real democracy, and Tracy has published respectable academic work unpacking various forms of media bias and institutional failure. In fact, Tracy’s scholarly work is very similar to my own – we even both got our doctorates from the University of Iowa. Where does healthy skepticism cross the line to destructive conspiracism, and why?

The conspiracist fallacy is an emotional as much as an intellectual one. We live in a world of human imperfection, one in which not just natural disasters, but the failures of individuals and institutions seem constant. Depending on your politics, you’re likely to see various failures as causes of the Sandy Hook tragedy – but only a few of us will be tempted to explain those failures as part of a larger, carefully coordinated agenda. In a strange way, the conspiracist viewpoint is comforting – it transforms the complicated and sad reality of our imperfect world into one in which dark, Machiavellian forces are the source of all suffering. James Tracy and conspiracists like him would rather live in a world ruled by sensible evil, than have to confront senseless tragedy.

Book Review: Daniel Pipes, "Conspiracy"

I just happened to see this on the library shelf the other day, and I thought I'd give it the rundown. For people with an interest in conspiracy (and/or the related social phenomena of New Age thinking, self-help, and racism), this book provides a solid and critical intellectual history, giving you the names you need to know if you're trying to understand where all these crazy ideas come from. Pipes also makes some contributions to the social analysis of the conspiracy phenomena, though he falls quite short as a philosopher. Specifically, his epistemology is hazy at best, so he has some difficulty drawing meaningful lines between "conspiracy theory" and real, if complex and sometimes overzealous, attempts by intellectuals and laymen to understand the broader forces that impact society. The most egregious of these slips is his characterization of perceptions of anti-black racism and misogyny in the West as paranoia, characterizations that are both deeply offensive and demonstrably wrong – institutional racism and sexism are about as real and widespread as it gets. Similarly, Pipes harries a false distinction by claiming that the proven, documented involvement of CIA operatives in the crack trade in Los Angeles in the 1980's is not the same as a conspiracy, and that therefore Black anti-government sentiments are unfounded. Such statements are simply ludicrous.

More generally, Pipes often blurs the distinctions between conspiracy theories that place immense power in the hands of a few individuals, and known "conspiracies" that take place across the globe because of how the economy, government, or culture are structured. So, for example, he will describe people's fears of the Rosicrucians and the Jewish conspiracy in the same terms, and apply the same explanations to them, as he does people's fear of Western imperialism. This looks particularly bad reading it ten years after the fact, as documents are increasingly readily available showing that many of the economic attacks that Pipes characterizes as conspiracy theories have actually taken place – for example, the fully intentional roles of the WTO and World Bank in destabilizing developing countries.

But despite the seeming tenuousness of Pipes characterization of, for example, Noam Chomsky as the equal of Lyndon LaRouche, he did succeed in getting me to ask some hard questions about the intellectual style of the left. It is undoubtedly true that, as Pipes points out, leftist Afrocentrism is far more institutionally accepted than right-wing Farrakhanism, even though each are based on tenuous concepts. Ultimately, how much responsibility do theorists such as Chomsky have to be rigorous in their diagnoses of wider political or social situations? Pipes provocatively quotes Susan Faludi's statement that misogyny is an ideology that has moved through "the culture's secret chambers" – and while clearly Faludi is speaking metaphorically, I think Pipes is fair in pointing out the parallels in style. Left-wing intellectuals do have a tendency to cast a very wide net in searching for causes of the problems they seek to diagnose, as well as attributing observable effects to causes both subtle and widespread – invisible, mysterious and often malevolent forces such as racism or exploitation. Sometimes this style of thinking can verge dangerously close to conspiracism; it is not enough that a system or statement be true in essence, it must be true in fact.

While he may be a lummox on more recent events, the benefit of hindsight makes Pipes a very good resource, as he recounts the history of conspiracism in high style. This is a shockingly long history, but measurable, with anti-Semitism and anti-Masonism having their starting points roughly in the 11th and then 14th centuries. The passage of these originary ideas forward in time is easily where the book is most useful and least controversial, as Pipes explains quite clearly and convincingly how the anti-Semitism of the Crusaders traveled through time to fuel the Nazis and, ultimately, over the sea to Japan (the popularity of anti-Semitism in Japan makes perfect sense if you've had much exposure to that culture).

Pipes also does a very creditable job of presenting some ideas as to why people chose Jews and Masons as the overwhelming targets of their suspicions, saying that these two groups represent the Modern – they are generally sophisticated and often powerful, thus fomenting resentment among people less likely to be dedicated to intellectual rigor. The only real problem with this thesis is that it is inconsistent with Pipes' millennia-long history of anti-Semitism – Jews were not always the successful, "model minority" they are now. They could hardly have been hated for their modernism, social advancement, or financial prowess in the 12th century, when most were living in segregated ghettos and were penniless.

The most important unanswered question, though, remains that of epistemology. How do we determine where "conspiracy" theories sit on the spectrum from concrete knowledge to broader, "spiritual" truth - is there a spot available somewhere between religion and science? Ultimately, how do we determine what is a 'conspiracy theory' and what is potentially valid speculation? It is because he fails to address such questions beforehand that Pipes occasionally stumbles in his classification of specific cases. But it is also what leads him to the very interesting choice to include left-wing theorists in the 'conspiracy' category, a move which I think is manifestly incorrect, but nonetheless sends a powerful message of warning to the most extreme indulgers in left-wing rhetoric that, if you're not careful, you might be mistaken for an Antimason.