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(I originally posted this in the Small-Scale Questions thread, but @Primaprimaprima thought it might be a better fit here.)
Last week I finished reading Gerald Posner's Case Closed, his attempt to set the record straight on the JFK assassination and prove that Oswald acted alone. Posner reserves plenty of ire for the assorted conspiracy theories that mushroomed around the assassination over the last six decades.
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?
Two things can be true at the same time. You don’t have to be one of those people who goes the other extreme and says, “I don’t believe in conspiracies. You’re right. I believe everything the government tells me.” Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not being followed; and just because JFK wasn’t a conspiracy doesn’t mean people think conspiracies don’t happen. “Conspiracy” in the popular sense of the word carries a lot of baggage and has become something of a tarnish word; in the same way “skeptic” has to those outside of the scientific community (which is akin to calling someone a “naysayer”).
Part of the problem your average person has is coming to grips with the fact that absurd and impossible seeming things, happen literally every single day. In a country of approximately 300 million people, if you have an event that’s a million to one, you’re statistically guaranteed to have 300 of those events at any given moment. High profile people get shot every single day. So what if one of them happens to be the US president? There’s been documentaries that claim the government killed 2Pac. (It was just Compton related gang activity.) And as far as secrecy goes, there are a lot of secrets in the world. There are secrets in my own life that I’ll keep and go to the grave with. Just remember the US couldn’t even keep the nuclear bomb a secret; and it got leaked to the Soviet Union anyway. I believe in “conspiracies” much the same way anyone else does. Conspiracy to commit murder. Two rich people conspiring to fuck over their workers. Conspiracies that a lizard king secretly rules in the White House? Call me skeptical. Very skeptical.
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