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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.
Wasn't he (and Epstein) prosecuted? Not everyone was arrested, but especially with the amount implicated, Epstein is evidence against the elite successfully keeping conspiracies (although it did seem to involve everyone, so was particularly hard to keep). He was also publicly prosecuted once before his final arrest, the only reason it never made headlines is because the mainstream didn't care; look at how it suddenly cared years after his final arrest, more than ever before, (although this could be a conspiracy of its own) I suspect because some people realized Trump was involved and Biden (and other Dems that would be government staff) were no longer relevant.
I'm still very skeptical of this: so far all the "evidence" I've seen has been unconvincing and not very plausible. How come UFO reports have gone down so much since the proliferation of cameras and other technology that would verify them?
Samsung and "Smart TVs" in general have been known for years to spy on users. And the recent revelations are also evidence against a successful conspiracy. Samsung employees never had strong incentive to leak these features, because the reaction would be "duh", and consumers who pay attention and care have long abandoned Samsung's TVs.
A "conspiracy" by definition must be secret. You're right that large groups operate in the open, with basic obfuscation or a low profile so most people don't realize what they're doing. But that's not necessarily intentional (they probably present themselves as ordinary and ethical...because they genuinely think they are); and when it is, it's trivial to bypass if one looks closely, which only roughly fits the idea of "secret".
Right, but years after it was an open secret that he was abusive.
You see my point. You're correct to be skeptical. But the idea that something leaking thwarts the thing just isn't true; did Weinstein stop abusing women once it was clear other people had learned about it? No, he was convicted for things that happened years and years later! Similarly, if there's any truth at all to the UFO thing, the conspiracy has been ticking along despite being "leaked" in the 1940s.
I don't think they have gone down.
The idea that cameras and other technology could verify them is mostly nonsense anyway; pictures and (accounts of) radar returns of "UFOs" have been public for years and it's not some slam-dunk that persuades people; believers will believe them even when they are fake and skeptics will doubt them even if they aren't. Step outside and take a picture of an airliner at cruising altitude with your cell phone. What's that tell you if you don't already know it's an airliner? Next to nothing, and setting up a radar in your back yard to get a skin return doesn't tell you much more unless you have NTCR.
Of course in real life most people have better things to do than e.g. sort through old photographic plates looking for bright spots and thus it's pretty much only people who go looking for UFOs who find them, which rather taints the credibility of the whole affair.
Any conspiracy that's been verified is "evidence against a successful conspiracy" inasmuch as people are aware of it and don't really dispute it. But a successful conspiracy is one that accomplishes its goals; once that happens, it often doesn't actually matter if people are aware of it (hence why we learn new things about World War Two and the Cold War every year.)
But at the same time no conspiracy by definition is secret, because by definition at least two people must know. This is a neat little trick you can use to argue that no conspiracy is really a conspiracy, because (obviously) inadequate steps were taken to keep it secret. But obviously if the conspiracy is illegal it's no defense that you didn't try to keep it a secret. Similarly, I would argue that "secrecy" has various levels, and that simply because something is not secret to everyone or even to non-members of the conspiracy does not render something not a conspiracy.
For instance, look at the famous example of how the Soviet Union was able to deduce that the US was working on an atomic weapon (because, as I understand it, the American scientific literature on the topic dried up). Just because the Soviets were able to figure it out does not mean that there was not an attempt to keep it secret. Furthermore, it was successfully kept secret from the public. Finally, it's noteworthy that the effort was detected precisely because of the conspiracy to keep it secret.
Thus there was a conspiracy to cover up information and it succeeded, albeit imperfectly. The fact that it was not perfect does not mean that there is a conspiracy.
It very much can be intentional; there's a reason "black money" organizations exist (and that's on the legal side of things.)
I think it's helpful to step back and ask yourself if knowing the information would make a material difference. For instance, PR firms are real, and businesses hire them, and sometimes PR firms even publicize which businesses they work with or vice versa. There's no secret there. Nevertheless, newspapers do not disclose that they've been assisted by a PR firm on a story. Why not? Would knowing they have been materially change the way you read the article?
Similarly with ghostwriters. If you've read an op-ed (not a column, but an op-ed) in a newspaper, there's a good chance it was ghostwritten, and this fact is also public. But this is not disclosed. Why not? Would knowing who wrote it materially change the way you read the op-ed?
(Check out Paul Graham's "The Submarine" if you haven't already, it highlights a lot of what I am trying to gesture at.)
So it is that when you open up a newspaper, the entire thing is riddled with little falsehoods or lies of omission that create a false impression, and are the result of not one grand unified conspiracy but dozens of little trivial ones. And as I said, not much different in kind than you adhering to your corporate NDA, or not telling a friend that you're regifting their present, or winking at a subordinate's smoke break, or what have you - but vastly different in ambition because the goal of these little conspiracies is to change the world in which you and I live. And those are relatively mundane, but the same mechanisms that can obscure these little mundane conspiracies can also serve to conceal the CIA recovering a secret Soviet submarine, or USAID trying to undermine the Cuban government by creating a Twitter clone. Tor (which was made by the US Naval Research Laboratory, by the way) conceals the online activity of the petty drug purchaser and the U.S. intelligence operative alike.
You're going to feel like my comparison of PR firms to the Grand Illuminati Council of Lizardfolk is absurd, that the former doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy theory. But I'm trying to tell you that the latter is a weakman that trains your mind to dismiss real conspiracies. The voice in your head that says "that's trivial to bypass if one looks closely" is the same voice that tells you not to look closely.
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