18 November,
2011
A week ago the weekly
discussion group’s topic was conspiracies, mostly Freemasons. My take on
conspiracies is that generally conspiracies are more about the fears of those
who believe in conspiracies than the actual occurrence of conspiracies. It is
easier to believe someone has done something to us rather than to believe our
circumstances are arbitrary or maybe by our own neglect. No doubt there are groups
who conspire to aspire secretly to power and wealth by subversion and
corruption but our need and ability to see conspiracy much outweighs the
conspiracies to be found (but mostly it is about sex and money). Secrets are
not kept well. There is always someone who wants to brag. Our willingness to
believe in the grand conspiracies may make use blind to the mundane and close
that is more fundamental. We see the world with cultural minds. It is in part
about the we and the they in the world. (Just because someone is paranoid does
not mean that they, the ubiquitous they, are not after them.) Or maybe, we are
afraid of that which goes bump in the night.
A traditional Scottish prayer
From goulies and ghosties and
long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the
night
Good Lord, deliver us!
This week’s topic was
foster care in Native American communities. The attendance was half or a third
of the previous week’s attendance. A problem that needs attention and one that
could yield to some concerted effort, but does not pique our interests in the way
nefarious, dark forces of the world are planning our demise do. Most of what we
see as conspiracies is human behavior without overt, planned evil. The residue
of culture and institutions is the kind of evil that is hardest to deal with. I
knew an old Jewess who had fled Germany during the time of the Second World
War. She said, “The universe conspires against us.”: not humanity, not the
world, “the universe”. The Native Americans must see the conspiratorial in the
way they have been treated.
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Why People Believe in Conspiracies
A skeptic's take on the public's fascination with
disinformation
By Michael Shermer, September 10, 2009, Scientific American
After a public lecture in 2005, I
was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of
exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin
Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing
what was to come.
“That’s what they want you to
believe,” he said. “Who is they?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as
if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some
members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated
about what a glorious triumph it was?”
“Oh, you’re talking about that
video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked
to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign
going on ever since 9/11.”
Conspiracies do happen, of course.
Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian
archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called
Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some
conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a
conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference
between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of
Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a
self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid
don’t mean they’re not after you.”
But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon
Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government
conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their
mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people
want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the
squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more
elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be
involved, the less likely it is true.
Why do people believe in highly
improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers,
citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise)
and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible
intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into
meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add
to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory
evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors
after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the
foundation for conspiratorial cognition.
Examples of these processes can be
found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies,
and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the
Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and
the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up
to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail
seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explains, noting the JFK
assassination as a prime example. “Knowing what we know now ... film footage of
Dealey Plaza from November 22, 1963, seems pregnant with enigmas and
ironies—from the oddly expectant expressions on the faces of the onlookers on
the grassy knoll in the instants before the shots were fired (What were they
thinking?) to the play of shadows in the background (Could that flash up there
on the overpass have been a gun barrel gleaming in the sun?). Each odd
excrescence, every random lump in the visual texture seems suspicious.” Add to
these factors how compellingly a good narrative story can tie it all
together—think of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, both
equally fictional.
What should we believe?
Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and that
all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and
coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should
depend on evidence for each individual claim. The problem for skepticism is
that transcendentalism is intuitive; empiricism is not. Or as folk rock group
Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will
creep ...
Note: This article was originally
printed with the title, "Paranoia Strikes Deep."
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