The Nature of Conspiracy Theories. Michael Butter

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Название The Nature of Conspiracy Theories
Автор произведения Michael Butter
Жанр Зарубежная публицистика
Серия
Издательство Зарубежная публицистика
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isbn 9781509540839



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of event and systemic conspiracy theories. The Nazi theory of the global Jewish-Bolshevist conspiracy is a superconspiracy theory because it amalgamates two systemic conspiracy theories, the Jewish one and the communist one. The scenario presented by Robert W. Welch in The Politician is quite similar. He traces the global communist conspiracy all the way back to the Illuminati. Even more extreme is the conspiracy theory of the former footballer David Icke, which has many followers, mostly in the English-speaking world. Icke believes that the world is ruled by an elite class of reptiles who landed on Earth from outer space in prehistoric times and feed on the negative energy of human beings. In his view, these extra-terrestrial conspirators are behind almost every event and group around which conspiracy theories are woven. Here we have a particularly striking illustration of the idea that everything is connected. The huge scale involved – something that Welch’s and Icke’s theories share with those of Churchill and many others – is an important criterion for distinguishing imaginary conspiracies from real ones.

      Up to now, I have omitted to discuss – at least explicitly – the question of whether conspiracy theories are true or not. At the same time, the wording I used at the beginning of this chapter – namely, that conspiracy theories ‘assert’ the existence of a plot – and, above all, the examples I have chosen so far, point to the fact that I, like the vast majority of academics, view them with a great deal of scepticism. That is not to say, of course, that conspiracies do not occur. From the Catilinarian conspiracy through to the by now widely documented attempt by the Kremlin to influence the 2016 American presidential elections, there have always been secret plots, and it is highly unlikely that this will ever change. But real conspiracies are very different from those that conspiracy theorists claim to have uncovered. And there has never been, to the best of my knowledge, a conspiracy theory as defined in the first part of this chapter that has subsequently turned out to be true.

      One might object that this argument disqualifies systemic and superconspiracy theories, but not event conspiracy theories which mostly relate to assassinations or coups or other clearly definable events such as the moon landing. Admittedly, it is easier to imagine such conspiracy theories ultimately turning out to be true. But even leaving aside the fact that most event conspiracy theories soon escalate into bigger scenarios, this is still very, very unlikely, since even event conspiracy theories differ from real conspiracies in one important respect: that of size.

      Real conspiracies are generally the work of ‘a small group of people’,9 whereas conspiracy theories construct scenarios in which at least dozens, but usually far more people would have to have been involved. A gigantic deception like the staging of the moon landing in a TV studio, or the 9/11 attacks, which unfolded live before the eyes of the world, would require hundreds, if not thousands of insiders and accessories. Against this, critics sometimes contend that, even in the case of an event on the scale of 9/11, it only takes a small number of conspirators acting under false pretences to persuade all the other parties involved – the air defence pilots who failed to intervene, the agents who quickly leapt on the trail of al-Qaida, and many others besides – to do their bidding. But this argument is not conclusive because the involuntary accomplices would discover after the event, if not before, what they had unwittingly helped to engineer, in which case they too would become accessories to the conspiracy.

      Perhaps the strongest argument against conspiracy theories, however, is that they are rooted in a view of human agency and history that has been radically challenged by the modern social sciences. Conspiracy theories are based on the assumption that human beings can direct the course of history according to their own intentions – in other words, that history is plannable. They credit conspirators with the ability to control the destiny of a country or even the world for years or decades at a time. Indeed, they often understand history as a series of plots by one or various groups. Consequently, they have a fundamentally different view of the world from that of psychology, sociology or political science. According to psychology, the ego is not master in its own house, as Sigmund Freud famously put it; in many cases, we don’t know exactly what we do or don’t want, and find it accordingly difficult to act on our intentions. But even if we did always know our own desires, we still couldn’t achieve them, since social systems – as sociology and political science have shown – have a life of their own and generate effects that no one intended.

      Few people have articulated this insight as clearly as Karl Popper. In the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, he begins the chapter ‘Marx’s Method’ with a general discussion of why human beings ‘are, if anything, the product of life in society rather than its creators’. He does not of course deny that ‘the structure of our social environment is man-made in a certain sense’, but stresses that this is only part of the story: ‘even those [institutions and traditions] which arise as the result of conscious and intentional human actions are, as a rule,