Conspiracy theories are nothing new. Today’s list includes 9/11, “chemtrails” (versus contrails), genetically modified foods (GMOs), fluoride in drinking water, and the new world order. Older ones like the the worldwide Jewish conspiracy and one of The Beatles being replaced by a doppleganger persist but they currently take a back seat. The tragic Ebola outbreak in West Africa was raging in 2015. At least one alternative media source claimed it was a conspiracy between the American government and big pharma.
Many of these theories seem to be rubbish to a lot of people, although precise numbers and ratios are unreliable. A few of my friends and relatives accept some of those theories. Two of my cousins, for instance, believe the moon landings were a hoax and I respect them greatly. I tend not to believe in that conspiracy but I have no concrete proof to the contrary. Like everyone outside the inner workings of NASA, I must rely on news and historical reports to tell me what happened. Could we have been lied to by some sources? Sure.
When I refer to someone in this piece as a conspiracy theorist, I mean someone who believes in, or theorizes on, several conspiracies. I use the term as a description, not an insult.
I have a friend I will call Bill, which isn’t his name. He believes in all the theories I mentioned in my first paragraph, excluding the Jewish conspiracy stuff. I have trouble buying any of those, despite how passionately and confidently he speaks of them. Still, there are several noteworthy aspects to Bill that I must and do consider.
I cannot think of one time he has lied to anyone, even a little, even if it would help him, even when it was awkward. He’s repeatedly called me an idiot or a sheep, to my face, for not being in lock-step with him and his beliefs. Yet he also provides me valuable information and helps me in tangible ways. Thus, I conclude he is trying to help me even when he attacks me.
He is a passionate salesman for all sorts of beliefs but stands to gain nothing personally from me buying into those. He doesn’t sell any products, canvas for any donations, push any memberships, or try to be the popular guy. That makes his positions less suspect than one guy at a home show, who once told me of the evils and toxicity of conventional candles only to try selling me bees wax candles from his booth moments later.
I believe in consistency of principle and practice. In a previous post, in my recent book, and elsewhere, I warned against the dangers of absolutes. Stating an absolute is most often a fallacy too. Few beliefs are absolutely right or wrong, good or bad, true or hogwash. So, Bill frustrates me when he implies that all his beliefs are 100% correct but I would be a hypocrite if I believed that everything he believes is 100% false. Accordingly, I believe that some of the sources Bill believes may be correct, perhaps somewhat and perhaps a lot. I simply have no idea or opinion on which ones.
The term conspiracy describes an action planned and/or executed among two or more people. A robber and a getaway driver form a conspiracy. The Holocaust was a massive conspiracy. The Normandy invasion was a conspiracy as were almost all military actions since the dawn of time. So too are efforts of family and friends to get addicts into treatment as portrayed on the television show Intervention. Not all conspiracies are unlawful or evil or selfish but some certainly are. Such is human nature that many people are fairly good but some are very bad, particularly if left unchecked. History has shown far too many examples of unchecked badness, sometimes individually and sometimes by a team effort. Nonetheless, not every bad outcome or even most needs a conspiracy to make it happen.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I referenced in an earlier post, Daniel Kahneman described intuitive thought, how rapidly it jumps to conclusions, and how steadfastly confident most of us feel about any conclusions from such intuitions even when they are wrong. He also explained how mistaken intuition can be, and how it can be mitigated by deliberative, critical thought. He revealed research showing how common intuitive thought is, and how firmly many mistaken beliefs are held when produced by intuition. Putting words to this often-subconscious process, Kahneman described it as, “What you see is all there is”.
The far less common thought process, System 2,requires training, formally or informally, as well as a questioning one’s own intuitive beliefs. That is no easy task. We all have intuitions but far fewer mitigate those with reason. The central element of fast thinking, of intuition, is that it produces heuristics. Our brains produce these to save time and energy, often subconsciously. And, while not all heuristics are bad and some of can save us in times of need, they can also cause us many problems.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, a common heuristic appears to play a part: guessing at patterns. With this heuristic, we seek to find patterns that may not exist, especially in preference to chance or randomness. Georgia State University has a handy list of common heuristics for easy reference.
On April 14, 1912 over 1,500 passengers of the RMS Titanic died within hours of it striking an ice berg in the North Atlantic. Multiple examinations revealed that over a dozen factors contributed to that disaster. Many of them were human errors committed by many strangers over the course of more than a decade, from the people who passed the life boat regulations which were based on ship tonnage instead of the number of passengers to a sloppy evacuation and so on. Nevertheless, it was the combination of those elements that resulted in the disaster.
Disaster Theory suggests that in the case of many bad events, even one less contributing factor can sometimes avert tragedy. It can be quite discomforting to think that a series of disconnected mistakes randomly strung together can result in such tragedy, that stupidity randomly coupled with luck can result in over a thousand deaths. So some people seek out or believe theories that seem to provide some unifying explanation. Some people seem to feel less comfortable with randomness and chance than with the belief of ubiquitous treachery. And yes, there are conspiracy theories for the Titanic.
Fast forward to September 11, 2001: Investigations by the U.S. government and others, such as the magazine Popular Mechanics, provided explanations that combine evil acts with sloppy security and investigative work, a design flaw in the architecture of the World Trade Center and other factors. Yet some people, including a conglomeration of 2,200 plus engineers and architects, theorize that it was a conspiracy involving controlled demolition and other elements. The thinking among those theorists and other self-called truthers is that there is no way things could happen the way their government says it did, there is no way so many disparate things and random chance could have gone wrong over many years. The trouble is, sometimes they do. Were horrible events of 9/11 a conspiracy? The U.S. government says it was, carried out by Al Qaeda and aided by lots of errors. I can’t prove either the truthers’ conspiracy theories or government accounts. I do not, however, buy the impossibility of randomness. That would be a fallacy as well as a heuristic.
My trouble with conspiracy theorists, those who believe in many of them and mockingly dismiss any contrary information (known as confirmation heuristic), is precisely that, how they dismiss or attack any question of their beliefs. When you add emotion (the appeal to emotion fallacy) and personalized attacks (the ad hominem fallacy), I get even more suspicious. Nevertheless, I have to stop myself from rejecting everything from such people out of hand, because that would itself be biased. Besides, some of these conspiracies could be real. Evil has been done by many people and groups and governments, and thereafter hidden, sometimes for decades, centuries, or maybe forever.
As the oft-quoted Edmund Burke said, “All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”. Bill’s sometimes angry words are simply his attempt to do something, to wake some people up, including me. It’s hard not to admire his moral conviction, and his passion. Historically, many people who were derided as liars, imbeciles, or lunatics turned out to be correct. Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642), to name just one, was forced by his country and church to recant his theories. He lived the rest of his life under house arrest. Nevertheless, he wrote books of his theories while in captivity, those theories were later proven true, and they formed the foundation of modern astronomy and physics.
I feel pretty sure that the moon landings happened, and my suspicious cousins have no direct knowledge to prove otherwise. The problem is that I have no direct knowledge to prove they did happen. In the absence of our beliefs being proven beyond all reasonable doubt, we must each meander through the most reliable sources we can, reasonably question what we know, and navigate our lives as best we can. The same holds true for Bill, for millions of others, and for me.
Bill and I agree that we should question what goes on in the world. We just need to be open minded enough to consider information from various sources, and weigh the relative credibility and reliability of those. Not all books or web sites are equally credible. Hitler wrote a book and ISIS runs web sites. By contrast, Bill is a good guy with good intentions so I still listen to him. I hope he occasionally listens to me too. I may be an idiot, but in a way, at least I’m his idiot.