Addressing the Cult of Anti-Conspiracism
Clearing the air on basics of conspiracy and its theories
A lot of modern people treat the word "conspiracy" itself as a taboo, or as something laughable by default. They will say you have to be a crank to believe in any at all and if you probe them any further, often they will cite you this Alan Moore quote which is an absolute strawman of an argument.
Alan Moore is a very ironic person to cite here because when he came out with this 'No one is in control' spiel, he was speaking in the context of having written an extremely well-researched nonfictional graphic novel about the CIA's many crimes, and was saying so precisely to emphasize their danger.
I have noticed lately that many people use the terms “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory” interchangeably as if there is no difference in their meaning. What I find even more annoying is that many people use the word conspiracy as a term for urban legend these days. Perhaps because they don’t know the difference, perhaps because they can’t tell the difference, or perhaps because their vocabulary is limited and they don’t have a separate word for urban legend which makes them conflate it with conspiracy theory.
Getting the terms right
First of all, we must begin by asking: What is a conspiracy theory?
'Conspiracy theory' is a theory that proposes the existence of a certain conspiracy to explain something. This "something" can be a specific event, a particular repeating/continuous phenomenon, or anything else like that. It doesn't necessarily have to be an all-encompassing all-explaining theory of everything, which is so ambitious that it would fail.
That's it, Nothing more, nothing less. Like any theory, It can be true or false, and that verdict depends on the content of the given theory. A theory can not become false merely because it suggests the existence of a conspiracy. Not every conspiracy theory is an all-encompassing explanation of everything that happens in the world. Most conspiracy theories that tend to be true are modest in their scope and advocate for a case-by-case explanation of events.
Moore(or fans of his quote) is deliberately picking the worst possible examples like illuminati to attack a very well-established legal concept. What is a conspiracy? Conspiracy isn’t something necessarily related to jews, aliens, or anything like that.
Conspiracy is a collective action or a plan of collective action, that requires conscious but covert intention or interests.
Hence, a Conspiracy theory is any theory that attributes conscious but covert intentions or interests to a given phenomenon or incident.
This means we have 3 key elements that make an action a conspiracy:
Deliberation: the action or the plan of action is voluntary, conscious, and intentional. it is not an accident or a coincidence. It does not happen impulsively, reflexively, or under the influence of a substance. Key persons involved fully know the nature and purpose of the action and engage in it freely.
Collaboration: At least two or more people are knowingly and voluntarily involved. People who are coerced or misled into it can not be considered conspirators.
Deception: The nature and/or the purpose of the action requires keeping it a secret or lying about it.
Hence, any hypothesis proposed to explain something that satisfies all of the 3 conditions given above is qualified to be labeled a conspiracy theory, and if they rigorously introspect, many people will be surprised to find that many things they have believed so far can be qualified as conspiracy theories even though they don’t think of those things under that label.
But Why must it be Political?
If the origin of the term conspiracy comes from a legal concept, why has it become so political in nature? Why do complete non-experts of criminal law speculate conspiracies in politics?
If politics goes through the process of gangsterization, then it is only natural that the concepts of criminal law must be applied to the study of politics. And since all the professional experts of criminal law are themselves partner-in-crime to politicians, laymen will have to pick up that responsibility.
Now why is this concept of conspiracy so essential to politics? Why don't we humbly limit it's application to actually existing criminal cases itself as the legal world does? Why must we speculate?
As Clausewitz said:
Warfare is the violent continuation of the pursuit of political goal.And hence, conversely: Politics is a continuation of warfare by non-violent means. Civilian politics and warfare are inseparably joined together on the same spectrum and only differentiated by the use of or lack of violence since their means differ, but their goal is essentially the same: Power. And that is why you can treat either of them as an extension of the other.
Keeping this context in mind, it is worth noting what Carl Schmitt had to say on the matter:
The impulse to secrecy and to learn the secret is the first tendency of any power, whatever form of government or method of administration it serves. No ruler can escape this impulse, which becomes greater and more intense the stronger and more effective power becomes.
Since the asymmetry of information in your favour is a key advantage in warfare, so it should be obvious that it would also be an advantage in politics. You need to know more than your enemies, better than your enemies, and earlier than your enemies while hiding from or misinforming your enemies as much as possible. Hence the element of spycraft will pervade both war and politics. And what is spycraft if not an art of conspiring?
Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means.
He rightly considered the act of conspiring a norm of politics rather than the exception. Politics without conspiracy isn't politics, but something else, like management if the crucial element of power contest and its inevitable consequences are removed from its purview. As someone said, “An honest political science would be just rigorous conspirology”.
All political actors are in on some conspiracy. There is no ‘one big conspiracy’ running the entire world, but a host of competing interests with competing conspiracies churning it.
Allergy to Conspiracy theories
But why do some people believe that all conspiracy theories are wrong by default? There is a general convention of dismissiveness that has taken root among intellectuals on the topic of conspiracy theory. People brush them off even before looking into the content of these theories. Understandably, nobody wants to come off as a crank in civil society, that’s just not a respectable look, and being unrespectable is always unfashionable among them. How the label of “conspiracy theorist” became unfashionable among them is a story for another day. But what are their arguments against it, if any? Turns out, they have some preconceived notions about conspiracy theories which they use as arguments against them. Besides strawmen like that of Alan Moore’s above, here are some of the most prevalent ones summed up in a now-deleted tweet that went viral a few months ago by a certain person I won’t be naming:
“Most conspiracy theories are wrong, for three reasons. 1. They assume that large groups of people can keep a secret. They can’t. 2. They assume that systems and elites are strategic and competent. They aren’t. 3. They presume the conspirator cares about its “victim.” It doesn’t.”
So let’s address these arguments one by one:
1. They assume that large groups of people can keep a secret.
The essence of this argument is that:
only small groups can keep a secret
hence only small groups can execute a conspiracy successfully
but executing a big project requires a large number of people
a large number of people cant be disciplined/coordinated into keeping a secret
hence a big conspiracy remaining a secret is impossible
An obvious counter-question to this point would be why would anyone leak a conspiracy? Conspirators conspire in the first place because they have ulterior motives, they keep things secret because it is in their interest to keep the secret. Large organizations such as military and intelligence agencies feasibly keep big secrets all the time, making them public only when it becomes strategically safe and convenient for them to do so. There are plenty of counterexamples such as The Manhattan Project which were successfully kept secret until the bomb was dropped.
If conspirators are not going to leak it themselves until it becomes safe and convenient for them, we reach a follow-up question: who would leak or blow the whistle on a conspiracy if not the conspirators themselves? And our plausible suspects are:
Unwilling or unwitting participants ie people who were coerced or tricked into being part of the scheme
Direct victims of the scheme, or their next of kin
Accidental witnesses to the whole or a part of the scheme who werent accounted for in the planning
People whose job it is to look into this type of stuff: Government officials, Investigative Journalists etc
Hobbyists and activists type vigilantes, voluntary OSINT sleuths etc
Keeping this aspect in mind, here are some counter-arguments to the first point:
I. Firstly, there is nothing out there that says a big conspiracy necessarily requires a large group of people at all. A small group is sufficient enough to enact large conspiracies in the first place. Because not everyone involved in a conspiracy has to have decision-making power, so they don't need to be told everything about it. Such people can’t even be considered conspirators at all since they were only following orders without being told the purpose of orders.
What do armed forces all around the world have in common? The first thing they do to their cadets in training is that they beat the traits like curiosity and skepticism out of them as much as possible while traits like discipline, loyalty, and obedience is beaten into them instead. Primarily, the main thing that they are conditioned into is to "Follow Orders, Don't Ask Questions". Now guess what? Mafia, terrorist, and cult organizations train their recruits the same way.
II. “Perhaps you can ask foot soldiers to follow orders without asking questions because they are usually doing relatively simple tasks that do not require much detailed information input for the task to be executed. But what about those functionaries who are performing complex tasks that require much detailed input, how do you keep secrets from middle management?”
That's a good cross-question to the previous point. However, it can still be answered:
In large-scale conspiracies, cracks in the armor usually occur in middle management, not at the bottom. Many whistleblowers tend to come from the middle to higher-middle ranks. But intelligent organizations have developed their ways of keeping secrets from them, too.
There is a methodology of planning and execution that intel agencies use which is called "compartmentalization”
As the name suggests, In this process the chief coordinators of the operation compartmentalize the information among the acting agents on a "need-to-know" basis. That is, you are only provided as much information as you need to get your part of the job done, and not any bit more. As the saying goes, “the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing” even though both hands belong to the same body and are controlled by the same head.
This method of compartmentalization is not only common to intel agencies, but also common among organized criminal gangs, corporations, and armed forces around the world.
III. Another phenomenon is that many times when whistleblowers do gather the courage to come forward and speak of conspiracy, conspirators with enough power to influence the media use it to launch a smear campaign against the person(s) who has/have come forward to speak against them. The idea is simply to character-assassinate the person in the eyes of the audience. This thread by Robert Skvarla notes some very good examples from the history of such cases.
IV. And if for some reason the leaker is someone powerful or influential enough to tip the scales of media in balance to them, they can always hold blackmail or counter-blackmail as an option of last resort against the possible leakers. An accusation with some actual evidence is a lot more potent than baseless smears. Condition applied, the leaker in question himself is guilty of something.
V. If nothing else works, conspirators can simply kill the witnesses/whistleblowers to keep their secrets. Many a time they don’t even have to kill, just a threat is enough.
VI. A consideration that I don't see detractors of conspiracy theories thinking of is that many facts in our society are held as Open Secrets. Something that everyone knows, but nobody says in the open. The existence of open secrets and the existence of the very concept of open secrets should make one ask herself, "How can something be both open and secret at the same time? Why do respectable people in our civil society engage in this (seemingly) useless charade?"
The answer to that is very simple: it is easy to know something but difficult to prove it. If you speak of these things, not behind closed doors, but openly in public, you will be challenged to prove it in a court of law, and if you can't prove it in the court of law, you will be hit with a defamation lawsuit. For example, everyone knows what Modi did in 2002 but no one in the media speaks about it anymore because the court has already given its verdict on the case and Modi has been exonerated.
A lot of conspirators do not mind their secrets leaking out at all as long as those leaks do not carry any weight of consequences. You can call it the "What You Gonna Do About It?"-factor. A lot of secrets don't count zilch in a court of law, because often enough the court itself is in on the conspiracy.
2. They assume that systems and elites are strategic and competent. They aren’t.
It's laughable to find some people act like, "Yeah those elites don't know anything. But me? The literally who? Yeah, I'm smarter than them." The Critic always knows the best especially when you are the one who is the critic. Surely there is no self-flattering bias in action here. I have come across this argument from so many people, paraphrased in so many different ways that I have started calling it the “Incompetence Argument“ as a shorthand.
"But most institutions in our existence are and have been dysfunctional! economy sucks! law sucks! public services suck! how can you not accept that elites are incompetent??"
My dear, they suck. They do suck indeed, but they suck for you, not for them. It is important to keep in mind for whom does the system suck before declaring its administrators incompetent. The purpose of a system is what it does, and if what it does isn’t serving the purpose, then the designers and controllers of the system will do everything in their power to change it. If it sucks for you, and they aren’t changing it, then that’s by design, it’s intentional. No bugs, only features.
The fact that elites use "Oops I did it again" and you buy that excuse only serves their agenda further by making them look like innocent little idiots who never do anything wrong intentionally.
This is not to say that honest, unintentional, and unforeseen mistakes do not ever happen in any kind of planning or policymaking, they do, but either they get corrected or the entire institution collapses very quickly before they have the chance to correct the mistake. But if a certain "mistake" sustains itself continuously without the institution collapsing, then it has to be on purpose. Makers and Operators of the system do know how to run trial and error.
3. They presume the conspirator cares about its “victim.” It doesn’t.
At first, I was a bit confused about what the original poster was even trying to say here, then I realized that maybe he is assuming here that for someone to commit something illegal or immoral, they have to have a feeling of personal animosity towards those who suffer because of it. He is assuming that for someone to do something bad consciously they have to be malevolent sadists or something like that.
Firstly, I can’t find any definitive proof of this statement. Why should we take it for granted? What if the conspirator does care about the victim after all? May be sometimes they don’t, but may be sometimes they do. What makes him so sure that it is generally the case that they don’t? Did the killers of JFK or Caesar not care about their target one way or the other? Did the nazis not care about jews? One can argue that jews were all nazis could think of! These are the kinds of things that we should judge on a case-by-case basis rather than painting it all with one broad stroke.
Secondly, it is not necessary at all. A person doesn’t need to hate victims of his actions for him to consciously commit said actions, he just needs to be apathetic and indifferent to them. For example, many crimes are knowingly committed by business owners against the rights/interests of their customers or employees, not because there is personal animosity between the capitalist and his employees, or the capitalist and his customers, but because the capitalist is too self-centered to care about anyone else’s needs and is only focused on his profit maximization. They know their actions can and will hurt some people, but they have already accounted for them as a cost worth paying in the form of out-of-court settlements. Willful Negligence exists, and it is considered a crime across every system of law. If an act of willful negligence is committed by a group of people, say a board of directors, and kept secret, then that would be a conspiracy. Do not confuse indifference for unawareness, do not confuse apathy for unconsciousness. Powers that be don’t necessarily need to be proactively misanthropic or malevolent to hurt the people they rule over. However, they can be and should be held responsible regardless.