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. 

Bumbling Idiocy, Reticent Dutifulness, or Superhuman Conspiracy: Alternate Versions of the Mar-a-Lago Search Decision

Let us consider some alternative versions of what happened behind the scenes in the FBI and DOJ prior to and leading up to the execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Which version is the most likely or most plausible?

Version 1--the Bumbling Idiocy Version:

“Let’s find a judge who’ll sign off on a legally unjustified, politically-motivated fishing expedition--um, that is, search warrant--against an ex-President! With a nefarious scheme of this scale and with this many people involved, there’s no way the legal fishiness of our rationale will be exposed! It’s not like Trump will start screaming bloody murder and riling up a base that’s already shown they’ll storm the Capitol for him, and it’s certainly not like the Republicans in Congress would paint it as politically motivated misuse of power in a bid to win votes. Nothing to lose and everything to gain! Now which judge will look at a bunch of piss-poor evidence and call it good enough for a search warrant against an ex-President—and won’t worry about his unjustified decision being put under the microscope?”

 

Version 2--the Reticent Dutifulness Version:

“Holy $#!*. We’re talking about executing a search warrant on an ex-President. Half the country is going to scream that it’s political, and Republican politicians will encourage that! The credibility of the FBI and DOJ will be the immediate topic of national conversation. Are we absolutely sure our professional duty and the evidence before us demands that we do this? Because it's going to be a $#!*-storm. Okay, okay. So if we’re going to do this, we’ve got to be absolutely sure that our case is ten times stronger than would be sufficient for executing such a search in any other case, that everything is so by-the-book, with such an air-tight legal justification & such impeccable documentation, that we can answer every challenge that is going to be raised. Because even then, a third of the country is going to believe that we did this as an unjustified political attack rather than as an effort to ensure no one is above the law.”

Which version is more plausible, given that we are talking about both the FBI and the DOJ, organizations filled with career public servants of varying political allegiances, many of them very smart, at least some of them very principled, and all of them surely operating with the understanding that this action will put them under the microscope in an unprecedented way?

Maybe it's a third alternative. Maybe, rather than bumbling idiocy (version 1) or reticent dutifulness (version 2), you think the behind-the-scenes-story is a conspiracy. 

Version 3--the Superhuman Conspiracy Version:

"We, the Deep State, are a highly secretive and hidden cabal within the US that actually pulls the strings of national and global events without public knowledge. We have agents everywhere who are absolutely loyal. And our reach extends into every dimension of public life. We've achieved all this without anyone giving us away, and we will draw on these superhuman resources to fabricate a legal justification for the search of an ex-President's home and offices, one so meticulous and carefully constructed that there is no way it will fall apart in the light of even unprecedented public scrutiny. And just to be safe, we will have Judge X sign off on the warrant, since we have such damning dirt on him that he'll sign it no matter what. And we have dirt on every journalist who might be inclined to investigate Judge X and his decision! Not that we'll need to use that dirt, because all the journalists are in our pocket except Alex Jones, and we've managed to shut him down with that lawsuit. We're that powerful! Bwahahaha!"

  

Conspiracies happen. They do. But they depend for their success on secrecy. Such secrecy is maintained by staying under the radar as much as possible and by having as few people as possible aware of what is going on. The kind of raid we're talking about is exactly the sort of thing conspirators would want to avoid: the scale if it and the resultant massive scrutiny are the greatest enemies of the secrecy on which conspiracies depend. 

The idea that the conspirators are so powerful that they don't need to worry about threats to secrecy--that's what, inspired by philosopher Brian Keeley, I'd be inclined to identify as one defining hallmark of a "conspiracy theory." In a conspiracy theory, we begin with a story that explains events in terms of the operation of a group of hidden conspirators--but as objections to this story are raised, the objections are handled by increasing the size and reach of the conspirators. The judicial branch approved it because they're in on it! Your objection is based on information provided by the news media, but they're part of it, too! Eventually, the conspiracy reaches a size and level of power and unity of purpose--and continued secrecy--essentially impossible to reconcile with the messy realities of fallible human enterprises. 

(In addition to the above, in his seminal philosophical work on conspiracy theories Brian Keeley focuses special attention on another dimension of conspiracy theories: in order to be sustained, they require adopting a kind of global skepticism about our ordinary sources of public knowledge. I find this a rich source of reflection about the dynamics of conspiracy theories.)

Superhuman conspiracies have been popularized in films and TV shows and novels--and they make for great fiction. But in real-world conspiracies, there is a real possibility of exposure, increasing as more people are involved and more public scrutiny is directed at the events the conspirators are involved with. And this means that conspirators don't tend to work through such things as highly-publicized officially-sanctioned raids that are guaranteed, by virtue of the political climate, to inspire many powerful politicians to demand and bring about unprecedented levels of scrutiny. 

In short, a realistic formulation of the conspiracy version of the story folds into the bumbling idiocy version (version 1).

One more thought: Someone might think that the "reticent dutifulness" version (version 2) is too idealistic about public servants working in agencies like the FBI and the DOJ. But here's the thing. It might be too idealistic to assume that the people working at these agencies are so overwhelmingly guided by a sense of principle and duty that it would be impossible to pull off a less-than-above-board search. It is not too idealistic to assume that most people want to be seen as good people, and most people don't want to be caught in the act of doing something unsavory--and on those grounds posit that when they know they are going to be subjected to intense public scrutiny--as they will when they are involved in ordering a search of the property of an ex-President--they try to be as professional and above-board as possible.

That's just a basic inference about the way people generally are. Given that fact, and the competence and intelligence of so many who work in these agencies--along with the fact that many of them are professional and principled human beings who take the rule of law seriously and come from a diversity of political persuasions--it seems to me that the reticent dutifulness version of the story is considerably more plausible than the bumbling idiocy version.

But if the bumbling idiocy version is true, that should become apparent in the days and weeks to come (unless, of course, there is a superhuman conspiracy working to systematically silence all evidence of bumbling idiocy--and doing it so successfully that the truth is only known to that one guy who posts earnest YouTube videos about these conspiracies from inside his car, referencing unnamed sources that are "really high up" and have entrusted their secrets to him).