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(Reposted in the Culture War thread.)
Reading Case Closed has got me thinking about conspiracy theories. I dislike the terms "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", as they're generally used as terms of dismissal or abuse: characterising a particular hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory" is tantamount to saying that it's untrue, and characterising the person who espouses it as a "conspiracy theorist" is tantamount to calling them paranoid and unserious. But this shouldn't be the case, because conspiracies do happen! Some important historical events really were the product of conspiracies. Imagine if a public figure was killed, you thought he might have been murdered, and I rolled my eyes and said "oh, you're one of those 'murder theorists'." Murders really happen! There's nothing intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given dead person might have been intentionally and unlawfully killed by another person; nor is there anything intrinsically ridiculous about the hypothesis that a given event might have been the result of multiple clandestine actors working together to bring it about. As many have noted before me, theories about history or current affairs are rubbished and dismissed as "conspiracy theories" – right up until the very moment they're proven true, at which point they simply become historical fact.
However. We're all familiar with the type of person described by the term "conspiracy theorist". The people in tinfoil hats, the people who never believe the official story, the people who attribute every setback (no matter how trivial) to the dark hand of da Joos/the CIA/the Illuminati. These people may not be paranoid in a clinical sense, but they reflexively jump to the conclusion that there is more to every news story than meets the eye, and the conclusion seems effectively predetermined. They arrive at the conclusion first, then go looking for evidence to support it.
I wish we had better terms for "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorist", respectively. When we use the former, what we're really getting at is that a historical event is being attributed to a vast nefarious conspiracy on the basis of little to no evidence. "Conspiracy theory" should be a neutral term which expresses no judgement on whether the theory is true or not, but I think it would be genuinely helpful to have a separate term for how the term is used nowadays i.e. as a particularly far-fetched and implausible example of same. "Truther" is starting to catch on ("9/11 truther", "Lucy Letby truther"), but it would be nice to have a noun for the theory itself, as opposed to the person espousing it.
And when we characterise someone as a "conspiracy theorist", we don't usually mean that they espouse one conspiracy theory and no others. We usually mean that they advance conspiracy theories habitually and reflexively, that there are vast swathes of human history they attribute to the machinations of nefarious organisations operating in secret. People to whom the term "conspiracy theorist" don't, as a rule, endorse the mainstream historical narrative except for one little wrinkle: it's an entirely different worldview, a paranoid style. I think "tinfoil hat wearer" is a much more apt term for people with this worldview or mindset than "conspiracy theorist", except that I'm not sure if anyone actually wore a tinfoil hat in complete sincerity.
What do ye think? Any ideas? What would your preferred terms for these concepts be?
I think it depends. If the person in question is working off some sort of actual evidence, some sort of documents, photos, recordings of an event, I’m willing to entertain the possibility, but I don’t see much benefit in just going off some other guy’s vibes.
I think JFK stinks to high heaven. (For the record I think it was Russian agents, but given the climate at the time, if they’d admitted that, earth would be irradiated by the following nuclear war). That’s not a weird one, and I’m certainly open to other possibilities including a failed defector pulling off a miracle shot by himself and running faster than Usain Bolt only to be captured and murdered on national TV before he could be deposed.
Well, it certainly wasn't a miracle shot, and he didn't have to run faster than Usain Bolt, for starters.
A house cat can run faster than Usain Bolt. Don’t diminish my hopes for believing this conspiracy.
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