Some Thoughts on Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories

Since we're barreling headlong into a national election season, all of us are likely to hear a heightened number of conspiracy theories, often invoked to vilify political rivals or people who don't serve the interests of some party or politician. 

As such, some thoughts on conspiracies and conspiracy theories strike me as in order--to help us sort through when we should take conspiracy claims seriously, and when we should be skeptical.

Let's start with what we mean by a conspiracy. Generally, a conspiracy exists when a group of people collude (work together in secret) to impact events in the world while trying to make it look as if no such collusion is taking place.

Conspiracies happen. And if they are successful, no one knows that the conspiracy happened: the event is seen by the broader world as being readily accounted for by the publicly available facts. We'll think it's an accident, or the work of a known rogue actors, or the ordinary operation of familiar processes. The role of the conspirators in producing the event remains hidden.

But here's the thing about conspiracies: they work best when they involve small groups of people or, if they involve more than a few people, do so within an organization that has very powerful control over their members in terms of ensuring coordinated effort and secrecy. 

As soon as you get large numbers of people involved--especially if they come from a range of diverse groups or walks of life, and most especially if they include characteristically "unruly" groups of independently-minded people (such as, say, journalists)--the coordination required for success starts to break down along with the capacity to retain secrecy.

So, here's the thing with conspiracy theories. They often (not always) start out plausible enough. A highway accident, involving two cars and a bus, results in the deaths of two dozen people, including a prominent politician. The theory: it was no accident, but something deliberately brought about by a group of conspirators to kill the politician while making it look like an accident.

Often, the theory finds traction in some odd fact. Suppose the purported accident was triggered by the erratic driving of one the cars involved--but an autopsy of the driver found no evidence of drugs or alcohol that could explain the erratic driving, nor any evidence of mechanical problems with the car. Furthermore, the driver had no cell phone, being notoriously opposed to them--and so wouldn't have been distracted by that.

This oddity motivates the conspiracy theory, lending some initial plausibility to the hypothesis that the driver deliberately swerved so as to cause the accident. Other odd facts emerge. Maybe, before getting in the car that day, the driver was seen burning a stack of letters. What if he was destroying evidence that could link him to people with an interest in seeing the politician dead?

Of course, these facts can be explained in many ways, most of which don't involve the driver deliberately causing the accident as part of a larger plot to kill the politician. But someone "connects the dots" between an array of odd facts using the conspiracy theory as a unifying explanation for them all. 

In the real world, lots of things happen that aren't connected to each other at all. That a certain story connects a lot of things isn't really evidence for the story. But a story that unifies stray facts into a cohesive story is attractive to storytelling animals like us--and sometimes disconnected facts are the visible signs of some unified explanation hiding under the surface.

In any event, what we have at this point is an explanatory hypothesis that accounts for a set of facts in a particular way--making them part of a unified story instead of a bunch of coincidentally related things. And even if the way the story unifies stray facts isn't by itself proof that the story is true, there might be reason to investigate the hypothesis--to treat it as something that might be true.

But it is here--when investigation into a proposed conspiracy starts--that things start to get wonky. IF a conspiracy is going on, then the conspirators will presumably try to hide the real story. And that means they will be working at cross-purposes with those investigating the hypothesis that a conspiracy was at work. 

For this reason, those investigating a conspiracy have some grounds for not immediately dismissing the hypothesis the first time they encounter contrary evidence. Things that, with more ordinary hypotheses, we'd treat as a good reason to set the hypothesis aside, might not be enough to stop investigating a purported conspiracy.

But it can be easy to incrementally slide from being someone who hangs onto the hypothesis a bit longer than usual to becoming someone for whom the hypothesis of a conspiracy has become unfalsifiable. 

The conspiracy theorist is someone who slides into the latter territory. And as they do, something happens which should throw up red flags for the rest of us. First off, evidence against the theory is increasingly treated as evidence for the theory--as further proof of how well organized and determined and powerful the conspirators are. Secondly, not only do they explain away all the contrary evidence, but they do so by expanding the size of the conspiracy. 

Suppose a doctor comes forward to say that the man who drove erratically showed evidence of a health condition that could explain that behavior. The conspiracy theorist explains this away by making the doctor part of the conspiracy (maybe an unwilling one acting under threat from the conspirators). 

Suppose an investigative journalist reports that the erratic driver recently broke up with a long-time girlfriend, and that according to a friend the driver collected love letters from early in their courtship--a collection that is now gone, offering an explanation for his being seen burning letters earlier that day. 

What does the conspiracy theorist do with the fruits of this investigative journalism? Well, obviously, the journalist is part of the conspiracy, too.

And as other doctors corroborate the first doctor's claims, it becomes the medical establishment that is part of the conspiracy. And as other reporters and journalists claim to have seen the work and vetted the sources that the first journalist used to reach their conclusions, it becomes the mainstream media that is in on the conspiracy. When a vocal proponent of the conspiracy theory is found guilty of defamation of character against the doctor, the judicial system is now part of the conspiracy too.

More and more people, across increasingly varied group, have to be part of the conspiracy (or somehow under the control of the conspirators) for the conspiracy theory to remain standing in the face of the mounting contrary evidence.

And the problem, of course, is that these are precisely the conditions under which conspiracies are unlikely to succeed.

So, when someone claims that some significant event is the product of a nefarious conspiracy, look for a pattern like this. If the conspirator has to bring in more and more groups and organizations and individuals into the conspiracy to make the conspiracy theory hold up in the light of the evidence, you have reason to be highly skeptical. 

So Eden Sank to Grief: Dubious Endorsement from Famous Philosophers!

My science fiction novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, is now available for purchase in both kindle and trade paperback formats. Check it out here.

In honor of the book's release, here are a few endorsements from philosophers long dead:

Philosophy, Fiction, and the Human Condition

For most of my adult life, I’ve been both a philosopher and fiction writer. Through both, I’ve tackled the deep questions that most engage me, especially questions of faith, social justice, human sexuality, and violence. The imminent release of my debut novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, has got me thinking about the relationship between these two things that have so shaped the course of my life.

 

Two Distinct Roles

Fiction and philosophy are two distinct approaches to engaging with questions central to understanding the human condition—questions about our values and basic assumptions, about the things that shape our worldviews and, by implication, how we respond to our world, what kinds of lives we strive for and what choices we make.

Fiction does so by telling stories about people—distinct individuals who have their own perspective on things, who live in a concrete environment, and who have problems. Fiction is about these individuals in these circumstances, facing and trying to overcome the problems they face.

Philosophy explores these questions by developing various alternative answers to these questions, and then formulating and critically evaluating arguments for and against these alternatives in the effort to determine which answers have the stronger arguments in their favor.

Both disciplines focus on the human condition, on issues about who we are and how we ought to live, how we should understand our world and our lives and the point of it all. But each has a different primary role.

Here’s my sense of these distinct roles. Fiction at its best inspires us to ask questions about the human condition—new questions, or old question asked with greater urgency or honesty or openness. Philosophy at its best helps us to decide which questions we have to answer (however tentatively) in order to live our lives, and it provides a means of fairly and honestly seeking out answers that make sense to us while also enabling us to understand why different answers might make sense to someone else.

In brief, oversimplified terms, fiction prompts us to care about the questions; philosophy offers a path to look for answers.

Of course there is overlap here. Great fiction can help us explore answers to our questions, and philosophy can help us to ask new questions and see why they matter. The difference is one of emphasis. But the emphasis matters. It matters especially to me, as a writer of fiction and as a philosophy teacher.

The Limits of Philosophy 

In my role as a teacher of philosophy, I pose to my students questions that we then explore philosophically. Some of those questions are ones my students care about already. But that’s not always true. When it’s not, what do I do? I’ve tried to get them to see the importance of the question by presenting alternative answers, showing how there are arguments for and against each, and showing that each answer has different implications for how we ought to live.

Sometimes that works. But if I rely on philosophy alone to inspire my students to really care about these questions, I have far less success than if I pause to tell a story that dramatizes the question’s importance. Tell a story, and the students listen. Tell the right story, and they see why the question matters. Tell a story featuring a character they care about, facing a problem relating to the question, and they care about the question.

Furthermore, I’ve discovered that sometimes when it looks like a student cares about a question, what they really care about is their preferred answer. The question, and the inquiry it triggers, is not for them something they value. On the contrary, they see it as a threat. It treats as dubious or debatable something they don’t want to treat that way.

As Plato stressed, we are furthest from the truth not when we are uncertain but when we are in the grip of false certainty. If we think we have the answer, we stop asking the question. Or, perhaps more accurately, we stop believing that the question matters as a question. Instead, we only care about it as a layup to the slam-dunk.

Like a catechism, the question is posed not to prompt inquiry but to set the stage for announcing our answer. Put simply, it is treated like a closed question.

When students confront a question in this spirit, arguments that challenge their preferred answer are not something to be taken seriously and wrestled with but, rather, something to be discredited. Something to be attacked.

When someone treats a question that way, they aren’t in a place where they can do honest philosophy about that question. At best, they can be philosophical apologists: they can recite the arguments in favor of their preferred answer and bash the arguments against. To do honest philosophy about a question, the question must be treated as open.

Open Questions, Closes Questions, and the Power of Stories 

Now there may be a time and a place for refusing to treat a question as open, and hence to refuse to approach it philosophically. If someone asks whether Black people are really human with a human’s right to life, I would think it better to insist that this is not an open question, that the right answer is they are fully human with a human being’s right to life. Perhaps, also, I might say a few words about why—but without legitimizing the opposing arguments and objections by taking them as serious arguments and objections worthy of consideration.

In other words, there are cases where it is more than fitting to treat a question as closed. But how do we decide when this is true? I’d look to stories. In the case above, I’d look to stories from the point of view of Black people living in environments where their full humanity is treated like an open question. Stories that lay out what that’s like.

On the flip side of things, imagine a story set in a community where a particular religious question is treated as closed. Suppose the community thinks that non-Christians are all damned. The main character, let’s call him Bill, meets a practicing Jew for the first time—Jacob, let’s say. Through a series of events, they become friends. Bill, desiring to save Jacob, tries to convert him, prompting conflict and ultimately an angry challenge to the idea that Jacob is only acceptable if he gives up his faith and identity to become something utterly alien. Bill goes through an anguished internal struggle. Does he really believe that Jacob, who is a good person, who is committed to his faith and appears to love God deeply, is doomed to hell?

Bill is further torn by competing perspectives and testimonies—especially from Jacob and from his beloved mentor and pastor, Luke. In the end, the friendship with Jacob falls apart. Jacob is clearly deeply wounded by what he describes as Bill’s intolerance. Bill returns to the pews of his church but is now grieving, and he can’t listen to what Luke preaches with the comfortable confidence he used to have.

It is at least conceivable that such a story, powerfully told, could inspire a Christian reader to wrestle with the question of whether Jacob is saved—that is, to treat the question as open—when previously it had for them been closed. This might happen even if the reader doesn’t actually change their answer to the question.

I think that most of the time, stories are more likely to open us up to questions that we might have previously treated as closed, rather than closing questions we’d previously treated as open.

This is true because of the ability of stories to expand the range of our experience. They help us to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to get a sense of what something is like that we haven’t experienced personally. Often, the reason we treat a question as closed is because we haven’t personally had an experience that challenges the answer we’ve come to accept. Such personal experiences are the primary pathway to being jarred loose from fixed ways of seeing things.

But stories can offer another way—vicarious experiences to supplement our own. The point is that stories inspire us not only to care about questions we didn’t think were important before, but also to treat questions as open—or as closed—that we didn’t treat that way before. And they do this by their power to give us vicarious experiences, a sense of what it would be like to face challenges we’ve never faced or to see things in a way we haven’t before.

If someone with a fixed idea is presented with philosophical arguments that challenge that idea, their spontaneous reaction is defensiveness. Something they believe is being attacked, which means they are being attacked. The walls come up, and they become even more entrenched in their position than they were before.

But tell someone a story, and there is a different response. A leaning in. An opening up. This is the power of stories.

Stories, Propaganda, and the Need for Philosophy

But it is one thing when a story opens us up to new questions. It is something else when it leads us down a narrow narrative tunnel to a single answer, an answer so vividly rendered that we lose sight of any other possible answers. Plato was worried about oratory and poetry because it has the power to persuade even if it offers no instruction. This is the dark side of storytelling: it’s potential to function as propaganda. 

The worst fiction is preachy. Few stories can survive preachiness, and teachers of creative writing warn against it for good reasons. A preachy story tells you what to think, what to believe. It’s in-your-face about it, and it is off-putting. I think our aversion to preachy stories tells us something about what stories are supposed to be about: not answering our questions, but encouraging us to wrestle with questions by shedding light on them. 

Stories are meant to expand the range of human experiences available to us, thereby providing us with more data than we had before, more information with which to wrestle with the big questions. But if we want to wrestle with those questions fairly and honestly, we need to do it in a way that considers the arguments for different answers, the objections to alternative arguments, the ways that different human experiences feed into alternative answers, etc. In other words, we need to get philosophical.

A story overreaches when it becomes preachy—it tries to draw too universal a conclusion from something that is essentially particular. Stories are about particular people in particular settings facing particular problems.

But propagandistic stories are not necessarily preachy. In fact, the best propaganda is not preachy at all. Rather, propaganda tells a particular story without ever telling you explicitly what to believe. Instead of telling us what to believe, the most crafty propaganda creates a story experience that fits with the view the propagandist wants us to believe: vicarious experiences that, typically, reinforce those preconceptions or prejudices that serve the propagandist’s interests, making it less likely that we will question them.

Two kinds of propaganda are particularly significant. First, there is propaganda that relies on othering. It tells a story in which the protagonist, who belongs to the same group as the audience, encounters the Other (someone who belongs to a different and unfamiliar group). And not only is the Other the source of the problem the main character faces, but the Other turns out to be just as bad (or worse) than the audience fears they are based on their preconceived ideas.

The other kind of propaganda is what I think of as manufactured discontent. It follows the model of the dandruff shampoo commercial where the first step is to make the viewer worry that they have dandruff and that others are rejecting them because of this (by dramatizing a scene in which exactly that happens). The second step is to introduce the shampoo as the solution to this manufactured problem (by having someone buy the shampoo, use it, and suddenly be embraced by those who had previously rejected them).

For this kind of propaganda, the aim is to hit on common sources of anxiety—and to magnify our anxiety about them. For the hero of the propogandist’s story, these aren’t niggling worries to be lived with. They aren’t things to be solved by an inner change of attitude. In the fictional world the propagandist creates, there are people out there free of these worries who are living idealized lives. As the story unfolds, what might have been something the reader hardly worried about is now something that clearly is a matter of concern—because it is standing in the way of protagonist’s best life. A threat to happiness. Fortunately, the thing the propagandist is selling comes along to fix things, and our hero lives happily ever after.

Propaganda, by its nature, relies on caricatures, stereotypes, and clichés. That is, it relies on reinforcing a single narrow body of experience through repitition. A single story along these lines—a single story in which audience fears and preconceptions about the Other prove all too real, or audience anxieties are presented as serious impediments to happiness that are cured by the right shampoo or ideology—isn’t enough to push the audience towards a specific answer. Propaganda works through volume (one kind of story dominates) and through marginalization (alternative stories go unheard).

When we look to stories to give us the answers, we are empowering the propagandist, because it is only in the hands of propagandists that stories will tell us what to believe. This is one reason why we need philosophy—why stories are not enough. When stories are not controlled and shaped by propagandists, they open us up to considering new questions and they shed light on those questions by expanding the scope of our experience. But then we need to think about those questions, making use of our own experiences and the range of vicarious experiences that we receive from the stories others have to tell.

The necessary follow up to good stories is philosophy. Not necessarily academic philosophy, but philosophy nonetheless.

If we aren’t prepared to do that work—that philosophical work—of thinking things through for ourselves, we become easy prey for the propagandist. This is true because, simply put, we need to come up with answers to some of the more pressing questions of life. If we don’t find those answers through thinking philosophically about our experience and the range of vicarious experiences that diverse stories provide, we risk putting ourselves into the propagandist’s hands. And in their hands, stories narrow the range of our experience in the way well-worn grooves in a trail narrow the path a cart will take. We find ourselves channeled reliably towards the answers the propagandists want us to have.

So Eden Sank to Grief Excerpt: The Hiddenness of Our Hearts

The previous except from my forthcoming novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, touched on the hiddenness of God. But God is not the only thing that's hidden in our lives--and it's not the only thing that's hidden in the novel. In fact, hiddenness is one of the recurring themes.

The passage below captures an intimate moment between the main characters, Caleb and Sally. It's an interlude of quiet after a harrowing "underworld" journey (in which they touch up against something the alien creators of their artificial world are hiding) and before all hell breaks loose.

It's a moment when the hiddenness of Caleb's heart comes to vivid life for them both. Here's the passage:

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She sits up, looking down on Caleb. Something about the contours of his face or the way he breathes makes her realize he’s not asleep. “Caleb?”

His eyes crack open. “What are you looking at?” he murmurs, a lazy smile forming on his lips.

“That thing about the Rapture and your dad,” she says. “It’s…I think it’s the first thing you’ve ever told me about him. Was he…theology and Bible interpretation—”

His smile withers. “He went to seminary but it didn’t stick.” He looks away. “You don’t want to hear about my father.”

“I do.”

He takes a breath. “Some stuff—it’s better just to leave it in the past. Burned up and gone.”

“What? Did he beat you or something?”

Caleb shakes his head, closes his eyes. 

She lets out a snort of frustration. “Sometimes…sometimes it’s like—I don’t know—it’s like you think that telling me the wrong stuff will make me fall out of love with you.”

He takes a long breath before sitting up and wrapping his arms around himself. “That’s stupid,” he says.

“Yes. It is.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Of course it matters.”

“He’s dead!”

“He’s your father.”

“Everyone’s d…d…dead.”

His stutter makes her heart ache. She touches his brow. “I’m not dead,” she whispers. “You’re not dead. I…I just feel like I don’t know you.”

“Y…you know me b…better than anyone ever has.”

“You know what?” She cups his face in her hands, her eyes darting back and forth between his. “I think that’s probably true. And when I think about that it…it makes me want to cry.” 

-----------------

What reasons does Caleb give for not wanting to talk about his father? Do these sound like the real reasons? Why does Sally think he's holding back?

How often do we hide our hearts from one another, and why? And what effect does that pattern of hiding have on our capacity to fully connect with those we love, to realize authentic union with others?

Is it ever true about anything that it's better just to leave it in the past, "burned up and gone"? Or, perhaps better: under what conditions can we actually leave some ugly part of our lives behind?

So Eden Sank to Grief Excerpt: The Hiddenness of God

 So Eden Sank to Grief releases in just over a month, on February 27. It's a science fiction adventure about a group of people who wake up in a giant greenhouse that's floating in some star-rich corner of the galaxy--with no memory of how they got there. Think Lost meets Lost in Space. 

I've been writing and publishing short stories for years, but I'm always a philosopher--and that leaks through into my fiction, especially when the story is based on a parable I originally developed to make a philosophical point. So Eden Sank to Grief grew way beyond that parable, and as soon as I created the characters of Caleb and Sally, what happens to them and what they do about it became far more important than any philosophical point.

Still, So Eden Sank to Grief inevitably became a vehicle for raising philosophical questions that have long been of central importance to me, and Caleb and Sally can't help but reflect on philosophically significant ideas from their own personal standpoints, especially given the mysterious circumstances into which they've been thrust. A lot of those moments of reflection have to do with religion and God. Go figure.

Excerpted below is one such moment, followed by some reflection questions. 

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“The last thing I can remember,” she says. “The fight with my…boyfriend. I think something came afterwards. Like something’s missing.”

Caleb nods soberly. “I know what you mean.”

“But what? Is it possible to forget the end of the world?”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d forget, isn’t it?”

“But maybe our visions…maybe they weren’t about what’s happened. Maybe it’s a warning. They’ve brought us here to teach us something and then they’ll send us back. You know, to help keep the vision from coming true.”

“Or maybe the visions are a bunch of crap.”

Sally looks up, up through the trees at the gap that’s just above them, and from where they sit it looks like a normal slice of night sky. “Do you believe in God?” she asks.

Caleb lets out a tired laugh. “I acolyted every month as a kid. Confirmed at fourteen. Vacation Bible School attendee through grade school, volunteer since Junior High.”

“Good God, I’m dating an altar boy.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not gonna be a preacher. Too afraid of public speaking.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Caleb stares past her. Maybe he’s thinking about what the question really means. “If there is a God he’s far away. Hiding himself.”

“Herself.” Sally flashes a wicked grin but can’t sustain it. “Somehow, after it happened, Mom found religion.”

“But not you.”

“It was either not believe at all, or hate God for letting Daddy die.”

-----------------------

Have you ever, like Sally, found yourself in a situation where atheism seemed the only alternative to hating God? For someone in that situation, which alternative is better? And which is closer to having faith? And why might the very tragedy that put Sally in that situation be the occasion for her mom to "find religion"? What about Caleb's perspective--the idea that God is hidden from us? 

And why do you think that reflecting on their visions led Sally to ask Caleb about God?

Would love to hear what you think.

Tidbits and Snippets from the forthcoming novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, Part 1

 In anticipation of the release of my novel, So Eden Sank to Grief, on February 27, I thought I'd do a series of posts extracting some tidbits and snippets from the novel, especially ones that connect with this blog's theme of wrestling honestly with religion and God.

My first snippet, quite short, is inspired by the outcome of tonight's divisional playoff game between my beloved Buffalo Bills and the ever-irritating (if talented) Kansas City Chiefs. If there is one silver lining to the Bills' loss, it is that this snippet still remains fully relevant.

Here it is:

There are moments when she almost believes her mother's religion. In those moments, it's that sea of unanswered questions that does it: it seems too unfair for people to just end without ever learning the answers.

Never knowing how the next book in the series goes.

Never knowing if the Buffalo Bills will ever win a Super Bowl.

Never knowing what happened to your kids, or what waits beyond the secret passage or on the far side of the universe.

Never knowing what life is really about, and why we all have to go through so much shit.

More to come, so stay tuned!