Area: C:CNSPIRE3
  Date: 01-1694  03:57
  From: Michael Seidl
    To: All
  Subj: PERSPECTIVES ON CONSPIRAC


        From: mseidl@brahms.udel.edu (Michael Seidl)
Organization: University of Delaware

The following remarks are the product of several years of reading
alt.conspiracy.  They consist of some observations I have made
based upon certain consistent patterns appearing on alt.conspiracy
in the attitudes of both conspiracy theorists and skeptics; they
also include some suggestions toward a new theory of conspiracy.
As critical ruminations, they may sometimes appear to be hyper-
critical of particular theories--they are, in fact, intended to
represent neither belief nor disbelief in any particular approach
[you'd be surprised by what I actually believe] but to suggest
structures and methods of approach.

I begin with two propositions which I have developed, in part, as a
result of the intractability of some of the opinions, pro and con,
expressed on this board:

1]  People [usually as a segment of the general population] who believe
in conspiracies frequently do so because the alternative is even more
unthinkable to them.

2]  People [usually as a segment of the ruling class or governmental
population] who disbelieve in conspiracies do so because the alternative
is literally unthinkable to them.

I will detail the first proposition first.  For many people, belief
in conspiracy is the natural alternative to accepting a world of chaos
where things happen for irrational "reasons" or for no reason at all;
we wish to give more order to the world than is [maybe] actually there
because even though the conspiracy we theorize is threatening, it is
still less threatening than nothing at all, than existential
randomness.  This is also symptomatic of what I call "citizen ideology,"
the false belief we are inculcated with from youth that there "must"
always be someone in charge, from the parent in the family to the
teacher in the classroom, to the government in the world at large, we
are not permitted or able to theorize a situation where there is not
someone in charge.

        Examples of this process in action are rife in popular
        assassination theories surrounding the murders of President
        Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy.  The world
[or whatever], so we think, could not be so cruel as to take the
embodiment of hope or figures of great importance from us [similar
disbelief is expressed at the death of loved ones, of which we
naturally think how could X let this happen or do this?].  In the
political or social arena, speculating that a single murderer or
racist could take so much from us, from our society, is unbearable; to
inflict this level of harm, we think, there must have been more than
a single person acting from hatred or rage.  If one person could so
harm us, we seem to think, then no one is safe and the underpinnings of
our ordered society are knocked loose--it is much easier, in these
instances, to accept conspiracy than to think disorder.

Second proposition.  Those in positions of power, either because of
class or because of actual roles in the government, do not accept
conspiracy theories [in general] because thinking them is impossible.
Imagine the scope of the conspiracy postulated sometimes in the
assassination of President Kennedy, one involving the Secret Service,
the Dallas Police, the military, Bethesda doctors, the Executive Branch,
foreign governments, and organized crime.  The offical mind would quite
naturally balk at this--it would mean the same thing could happen to
him or her as easily and the anxiety this would produce would make the
idea of conspiracy almost unacceptable.  Furthermore, what I refer to
as the "governing ideology" would find it difficult to accept that
a conspiracy of such scope could be underway without him or her
knowing of it.  These two factors, fear of theorizing an act always
hanging over one's head and political conceit make it unlikely that
conspiracy theories will ever come from political centers [at least
conspiracy theories as they are most frequently developed on this
newsgroup.]

Now, given the willingness of certain segments of the population to
accept conspiracy and other segments to deny it, regardless of
evidence and for what may be purely cultural or psychological
reasons, is there anything we can say about a methodology of
looking into conspiracy itself which might evade these traps?  I
propose five general observations:

1]  Nothing which can be explained by stupidity requires an explanation
of conspiracy [a variant of Occam's Razor].

{}I have looked far and wide for smart people, and I have found very
few.  This is not, in itself, evidence that there is not a
conspiratorial Council of 235 which rules the world.  But I have found
generally the same distribution of foolish, ignorant, and self-
interested people everywhere I go, people incapable of conspiracy on
the level theorized.  I have found no partcular wisdom among the
politically powerful.  Our distance from these people [and citizen
ideology] may encourage us to think that they are in the know; the
power we have given them may encourage us to think they are wiser than
we are--neither is necessarily [or even probably] true.  Take a look
at the people who surround you where you work or live; statistically,
the same distribution of idiots exists in the corridors of power
[inherited wealth may even have bought positions of power for
people congenitally very stupid].  Now, if they are as dumb as
we are, and if bureaucracy is half as slow and ignorant as it is
fabled to be, then much of what may appear to be conspiracy is
occurs because of stupidity rather than because of a plot.  An
analogy exists in the wartime factory where "accidents" and slowdowns
on the job were paranoidly thought to be foreign plots; those in
power did not want to allow for random screw ups--they thought there
had to be a reason.  What appears to us today as conspiracies may
in fact be only cover-your-butt responses of people who have messed up.

The documents retained surrounding the Kennedy assassination are a case
in point.  The fact that documents are being concealed does not mean
that there must be a conspiracy--stupidity would explain it as well.
The documents may be retained for  nogood reason [out of stupidity]
or they may reveal stupidity [reveal, for instance, gross negligence
on the part of the Secret Service or government investigation].  Rather
than a conpiracy to kill the president, it is entirely possible that
the coverup is a means of hiding not a plot but bureaucratic
inefficiency which might have saved his life.  Looking for a plot
would thus be misleading--we'd be looking for conspiracy too early,
before the assassination, instead of after.

2]  Nothing which can be explained by raw brutality and stupidity
requires an explanation of conspiracy [a corollary of 1].

{}Prisoners who die in incarceration and the fiasco at the Branch
Davidian compund, indeed many governmental power excesses, sometimes
generate a theory of conspiracy to deny civil rights or freedoms.
Although there may be conspiracy afterwards to coverup stupidity and
brutality, the conspiracy beforehand, if any, need actually be no more
than a certain savage willingness to bust heads that arises in some
people given positions of power.  Treating these events as planned,
instead of as exercises in savagery, is actually counter-productive
in putting an end to them.  To stop it, we need to know why it happened;
if it happened not because someone planned it but because someone lost
control or was on too long a leash,the cure is not conspiracy busting
but education and restraints.

3]  Mere improbability of an event does not necessitate a conspiracy.

{}This is a popular fallacy.  People think that because Oswald's shots
could not be duplicated in tests, because the car was moving slowly,
because security may have been lax, there must have been a conspiracy.
Not necessarily.  If I fire off three shots at a stationary target on
a range, the possibility of duplicating my result is slim, not because
I am likely to do anything spectacular but because doing precisely a I
did is almost impossible.  Citizen ideology encourages us to think
that fate could not be so cruel as to permit a one in a million [or
billion] shot by Oswald to take the President's head off, but the fact
that it might have been a one in a billion shot which killed the
President does not, in and of itself, mean Oswald did not make it.  If
he was acting alone, he probably couldn't believe it himself.  The same
holds true int he Lincoln assassination, where critics remark on the
unlikeliness of Booth taking the one unclosed road out of Washington.
Ignoring for the moment that there might have been practical reasons
which Booth knew of which prevented the closing of the road and
encouraged him to take it, if there had been only one road _closed_
and Booth had taken that one and been caught, the unlikeliness would
not so trouble us.  In short, the improbability bothers us not
because it is improbable, but because we dislike the outcome.

4]  Looking at who profits from a "conspiracy" does not mean there is
a conspiracy.

{}Gerald Ford profited from the coming out of Watergate, but no one
speculated that he was Woodward and Bernstein's leak [hmmm, maybe he
was!].  We ask who profited form the Kennedy assassination and
conclude that because the mob did, or big business did, or Johnson did,
that they had a role in some conspiracy.  Rubbish.  I profit from an
increase int he value of IBM's tock, of which I own many shares, but
we cannot conclude thereby that I had a hand in the increase.  While
we might look for motivation after we have a suspect, too many
profit form such things for us to conclude anything profitable from
such speculation.

More perversely, such understandings of profit tend to hinge on the
political or monetary rather than the personal.  If he acted alone,
we might say that Lee Harvey Oswald profited the most from the
assassination--he could not have know he would be caught, and, when
caught, could not have known that he would be killed.  He wanted fame
and he certainly got it; we almost cannot speak of Kennedy without
mentioning Oswald today.  More privately, the thrill he got from the
killing, again assuming he did it, must have been a tremendous rush.
All of this is just to say that profit motives are so many and
variable to be of little practical value in conspiracy theorizing.

5]  The process of labeling assassins as lone nuts belies the real
political implications.

{}Only in America are we so quick to label our assassins mad.  Perhaps
they all are.  More likely we contain real political activity by
labelling them mad.  If only crazy people assassinate then such is
not perceived as a real political option or to consist of a real
political statement.  Dismissing an assassination as the work of a
"lone nut" belies the conspiracy of social biological, and political
imperatives that caused the act.  In one sense, everything is  a
conspiracy; if we wish to understand assassination we need to do more
than say "crazy"--we need to look at what the assassin thought he or
she was doing.  Th elision of assassins in our society is
symptomatic of the depoliticization of all but the most tame gestures.

{}Given these observations let me now provide principles for the
excavation of conspiracies.  "Real" conspiracies will most often
arise post hoc as a result of acts of stupidity or brutality--they
will be coverups rather than plan acts of power.  Traditional
conspiracy is irrelevant in a society where anyone, any legislation,
can be bought; there is no need to kill people or squash information
when the people can be bought and the information is irrelevant: I
mean, what would you do if you found a "real" conspiracy, anyway?
The most successful conspiracies will thus be not improbable or
dramatic, but probable and everyday.  They will be those things which
we most take for granted [ideology] and may be systemic rather than the
conscious production of a few.  Historically, a few examples of
successful conspiracies are: the sun goes around the earth; to eat, one
must work; women are inferior to men; heavier than air craft cannot
fly.  It is, of course, easier to see old exploded ones than ones in
which we are imbedded, easier to think some secret circle shot the
President in Dallas than to imagine a world that so alienates a vast
majority of its people that essentially "anyone" could have done it.
I daresay that little on alt.conspiracy deals withthe real conspiracies
that shape our lives.  I think those conspiracies which make it more
likely for a man than a woman to be an engineer, for a black male than
a white male to be stopped by police, for social services to take the
child of a low income family than one of a middle or upper income
family are more interesting.  What do you think?

{}{}{{}
Disclaimer:  These aren't even my opinions.  They're beamed to me in
laser transmissions from an orbitting platform operated by super-
intelligent time-travelling dinosaurs and transcribed for me by the
spirits of Philip K. Dick and Socrates in the mist on my bathroom
mirror in the morning.

ObQuote: "And I guess, but I just don't know."--Lou Reed.