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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?
IMO the main problem with conspiracy theory is the "conspiracy": large groups of people are generally bad at closely cooperating without leaking information. Although it does happen, the other main problem with most conspiracy theories is requiring a long-term plan with broad predictions (like public perception) to mostly succeed, which (granted, in the public eye) seems to never happen. And to top it off, most conspiracy theorists don't provide an obvious motive and their evidence seems like obvious mistakes. So you expect me to believe this massive group orchestrated a years-long plan without any leaks or slip-ups, predicted what no-one else could (and relied on those predictions for their years-long plan, so they must have been either very confident or very reckless), except for these glaring flaw only a group of crackpots discovered; and why so much effort and risk, what couldn't be accomplished through simpler means? Well, it hasn't been disproven...
Emergent theories are easier to believe: rather than a group coordinating to do something, members all have similar motivation, and rather than planning ahead, their actions just happen to lead to or benefit from the outcome. In fact, there may be lots of coordination and omission, because people can identify their "ingroup" and "outgroup" mostly reliably and even subconsciously; but no center or plan, just natural human behavior, and it's not actually secret, the signs are obvious just not to you. The other thing about emergent theories is the leaders actually aren't human (there are none), and the plan actually isn't human-made (there is none), which explains no good motive and obvious flaws.
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Consequently, never attribute a masterminded evil plan to typical human behavior on a large scale inadvertently causing big problems.
This basically misunderstands the dynamics at play in real life wholesale:
This last point is very important to understand because the popular version of conspiracy theory, indulged in by the worst conspiracy theorists and the favorite strawman of debunkers, does often postulate large degrees of covert coordination, which allows real conspiracies to operate more-or-less openly without even being viewed as sinister. Obviously there are in fact covert actions that take place, but real life conspiracies (much like real life espionage) operates on a spectrum from covert to overt, and overt actions can be chained together with less overt actions to achieve desired goals.
It's true that the straw-man conspiracy theory, with 300 bloodsuckers sitting on thrones in Lichtenstein somewhere deciding the fate of the world isn't true (at least, I don't think it is; I haven't had direct personal experience of it) but the popular version of a conspiracy theory, where hidden forces work behind the scenes to sway the fate of the nation, is basically true. It's just that general shape that it takes is so familiar that it doesn't strike us as a conspiracy, because we're all conspirators. We've (almost) all signed an NDA, or spilled a rumor at just the right time, or "gundecked" a report to keep somebody from looking bad. And the "big" conspiracies often aren't really different from this in mechanism, only in ambition.
However these basically mundane ways can be very effective. They're just not very satisfying to people who are excited to learn about Hyperborea, lizard shape-shifters, or at least something out of a James Bond movie. Things like "the military spying on the President and leaking classified information to the press undermine his policies" not only happen, but can be successfully covered up for decades, and the details are so mundane that when they are released, conspiracy theorists and the public alike are barely aware of it, even though it's a textbook case study of supposedly-mythical "Deep State" at work.
One of my favorite episodes of the X-Files was one where Mulder got mind-swapped with a guy whose entire job was creating fake conspiracies, selectively leaking to the press, etc. all to distract from the real secret stuff that the feds were doing.
People eat this up because they know the « feds » are a criminal (natural law, inb4 But The Badge) conspiracy, but the issue is this overemphasizes their competence. They are also not that smart. In fact you know how on TV you consume propaganda about how they have genius analysts working for them? They don't in real life. They contract out technical stuff like cracking locked phones to criminal (natural law) corporations. It's actually kind of pathetic. The state is clearly this unintelligent appendage sucking out intelligence from the broader civil society; it is not self-generating.
The actual quality of "the feds" depends on the fed. Some of their personnel (NSA geeks, Navy nuclear technicians) are extremely intelligent (at least as far as test-taking goes).
The areas of the federal bureaucracy that select for politicking in particular are quite capable of pulling off conspiracies.
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