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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.
The secret ingredient is moralism and ideology. You have to establish beforehand what a good person believes, and what only a bad person would support. This way, a leak can be dismissed as a traitor, a heretic, an inhuman monster. This can and often is substantially emergent (where IMO the term "prospiracy" is nice), but plenty of people actually know perfectly well what they're doing. Another valuable trick in the book is establishing that not only is it immoral to reveal the conspiracy, it is already immoral to even investigate. That way, a conspiracy can simultaneously recruit large numbers of people, with only very few being in on the details in practice.
I've personally seen this in action on HBD, where many geneticists think it's true, yet actively spread slander about anyone who publicly talks because they genuinely believe that revealing it would have terrible outcomes. But the basic principle is always the same, whether it's companies, cults or large-scale activism.
Do they believe that? The motivation has always struck me as more like "I have to make public statements about HBD being evil in order to progress in my career," not that it'll result in a Fourth Reich.
Of course, that's speculative about interior mental states we don't have access to, but so is the Fourth Reich hypothesis.
For some yes, but one of my PhD supervisors who is otherwise not shy to get into fights has, after a pint in private at the pub, all but explicitly said that he thinks the public is simply not ready. To him, the average person is really bad at parsing statistical average differences as anything but "is better than", the worst racists will feel vindicated, it's just going to result in a lot of unfair discrimination, and it's not even clear if that discrimination will be strictly speaking irrational. I may not entirely agree with him, but I 100% believe that he believes this.
And one part where I've not quite changed, but let's say expanded, my mind on is how bad zealots can be depending on ideologies. I'm convinced the same kind of person who used to mindlessly support the Nazis in the 30s (or the communists in the USSR), has been mindlessly supporting the left in western countries since ca the 70s. It's a person that thinks in black and white extremes and can't handle anything but simple moralistic tales, who is always looking for scapegoats.
This may seem like a terrible indictment of them as people, and it mostly is, but it also means that we've successfully "defused" them, since the left of that time simply wasn't that bad in comparison. Getting them into campaigns for LGBT rights, environmental protections or animal right of some stupid spotty owl or whatever other issue impacting 0.1% of people was actually kind of a good deal. What we really need to avoid is that these people switch again to a murderous ideology, whether far right or far left. The problem is they've been steadily moving towards the murderous far left, and there seems to be no way to hold them in check which doesn't also involve empowering the far right. But they'll never go away, only ever get into different ideologies.
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