Among The Truthers: An Examination of Modern Conspiracy Theory

There is no subject which I am as simultaneously fascinated and appalled by as conspiracy theories.  The ability of so many people to truly believe the most absurd and toxic things both intrigues and terrifies me, for it is both profound insight into human nature, and at the same time a fundamental danger to a democratic society.  I have been searching for insight as to why conspiracy theories are so durable, and why they almost always contain an antisemitic element.  It turns out there are answers, especially to the later.

I was gripped by the excellent book Among The Truthers: A Journey Through Amerca's Growing Conspiracist Underground by Canadian journalist Jonathan Kay.   While 9/11 Truthers, as proponents of the most famous contemporary conspiracy theory, loom largest in the book, the book also addresses 'Birthers', anti-vaccine activists, JFK assassination deniers, and many others.  In fact, as I will explain below, none of these can be considered in isolation.  Kay's eclectic professional background in engineering, law, and journalism prepared him well for delving into the strange paranoid underworld and emerging with important insights.

The Problem Defined

Right off the bat Kay does something very useful, which is to define what a conspiracy theory is precisely.  This is important, to differentiate conspiracy theories, which are characterized by improbability and cult-like adherence, from real-life conspiracies that do actually exist in the world, such as how al-Qaeda really did conspire to carry out the 9/11 attacks.  Kay adopts the definition given by scholars Steve Clark and Brian Keeley:

A conspiracy theory traces important events to a secretive, nefarious cabal, and its proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their theory, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of conspirators controlling most or all parts of society.

This definition gets at the essential difference between conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies, and also between conspiracy theories and run-of-the-mill paranoia.  Conspiracy theories adopt to contrary information only by widening the circle of supposed perpetrators.  For instance, when I have tried to tell moon landing deniers that the Apollo astronauts put mirrors on the lunar surface that scientists have since used to bounce lasers off of and precisely measure the distance to the moon, those conspiracy advocates simply decide that these scientists must also be in on the conspiracy and are lying about the research they have done.  When I tell Khazar Hoax advocates about genetic studies disproving their claim, they likewise decide that the scientists, research journals, and funding agencies must all be part of a nefarious Jewish plot.

Nothing New Here

A major insight that Kay delivers is quite profound: All modern conspiracy theories are the same.  All you have to do is switch out the names and some ultimately trivial details.

Fundamentally, conspiracy theories provide what Kay calls "an explanation for evil".  Rather than having to recognize the world as a place full of random, unpredictable, and largely unavoidable danger and pain, where a handsome President can be killed in Dallas by a lone loser with a rifle, or savages can fly planes into buildings on a Tuesday morning and kill thousands, or innocent children can come down with crippling autism, the conspiracy theorist can blame events on an evil conspiracy, with the hidden implication that without the conspiracy everything would be alright and the world would be benign.  It gives people, even sub-consciously, a way to account for evil in the world, without having to acknowledge the world as fundamentally a random unforgiving place where basically nobody is safe.

In addition to A) providing an explanation for evil, all modern conspiracy theories share the following characteristics:

B) Unity of evil:  Conspiracy theories claim that distinct and opposing or competing forces in the world are actually unified, and their outward oppositional nature is only a ruse.  For the conspiracist, there must only be one source of evil in the Universe.  9/11 Truthers insists that Islamists and the US Government (and often the Mossad) are all in league.  Anti-vacciners insist that the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, and major research hospitals and journals, which are often adversarial or competitive at times, are actually one in the same.  The number of adversarial groups that are actually acting in concert in the minds of Birthers, from hospital administrators to the sheriff's office, is mind-boggling.  And in the Illuminati / New World Order fantasies which unite all of these and more, all nefarious actors in all of the sub-plots are ultimately united.

C) Hypercompetence:  Conspiracy theories attribute superhuman and ultimately impossible abilities to the supposed conspirators.  This is most obvious is in the claims, common to all modern conspiracy theories, that hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of people can keep an unbelievably profound secret for decades.  How many people would have needed to be in on a plot to stage the 9/11 attacks as a US government plot?  When you consider everyone within the airlines, the military, the demolition experts who supposedly rigged the buildings, the investigators both within the government and without, and so in, it is an enormous number of people.  It is utterly superhuman for absolutely nobody to blow the whistle in all this time.  Even more remarkable would be that happening for the 50 years since the JFK assassination or the 45 years since the moon landing, which considering that the Apollo program employed 400,000 people, is incredible.

It is not just in ability to keep a secret, but in every realm of human achievement, from science to technology to public relations that conspirators are apparently not subject to the constraints of mere mortals.

D) Lack of nuance:  To the conspiracist, the supposed (unified) conspirators are evil incarnate, without the normal range of human emotions and opinions.  To cite an obvious example, anti-vaccers believe that tens of thousands of scientists and doctors both in the private sector and government - people who in reality choose to go into science out of a thirst for knowledge and into medicine out of either a love for people or money - are in reality pure monsters who want nothing other than to afflict children and families with autism.  Birthers can't conceive of a doctor, county registrar, or small town newspaperman in 1960 simply wanting to do his job, instead insisting that all of these people and others plotted, for some unknown reason, to have an 18 year old single mother travel to the other side of the world to give birth.

The recipe for a modern conspiracy theory, then, is as follows:  1) Take an event or trend of events that reveals the arbitrary nature of misfortune in the world, and instead attribute it only as the result of nefarious actions of a powerful group.  2) The powerful group must include many forces in society, some of which appear to be in opposition or competition but are actually unified.  3) The evil and power of the unified group is boundless.  4) Any facts that contradict the hypothesis are simply evidence of the reach and penetration of the evil group into whatever generated the fact.

Really, Nothing New Here

Kay brings it all home with yet another a very interesting insight, which addresses one of the perplexing things about conspiracy theories that I have always noted:  Why do they almost always have an antisemitic component?

The reason, as Key shows, is that not only are all modern conspiracy theories the same, but they are all based on the Elders of Zion.

"The Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion" was the first modern conspiracy theory, that is, the first one that fits the mold discussed above, and it served as a template for all to come.  The book was a hoax, appearing in Europe in the chaos following World War I and the Russian Revolution, which purported to be the transcripts of the meeting of a secret group of Jews that run the world.  The supposed transcripts revealed the Jews' secret plot for world domination, in which they would plant the ideas of liberalism and secularism in order to seed catastrophic events such as the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and various wars which would eventually allow them to take over.

This contained all of the elements discussed above:  An explanation for bad events, and a group of unified, supremely evil, and hypercompetent (engineering the French Revolution!) conspirators behind it.  It is no surprise then, that since the 20th century's most notorious antisemitic tract was the blueprint for all modern conspiracy theories, that all modern conspiracy theories would contain an element of antisemitism.  From the supposed Mossad and "Israelis who stayed home from work" connections to 9/11, to the explicitly Jewish connotations of the Illuminati, to the Khazar Hoax and the USS Liberty Hoax, antisemitism is a staple of modern conspiracy theories, and no wonder.

What Can Be Done?

Kay presents alarming statistics on the number of Americans subscribing to various conspiracy theories, and anecdotally, I think it may be worse than even the statistics paint.  I would estimate that certainly a significant minority, and possibly a majority, of the self-declared "reality based community" at blogs such as Huffington Post and Daily Kos believe in some form of 9/11 Trutherism, anti-vaccism, the Khazar hoax, "ZOG", or another modern conspiracy theory (See here and here for some examples).  On the political right it is just as bad, with large numbers of people believing in Birtherism, the New World Order, the NAFTA superhighway, and other nonsense, even at a supposedly mainstream conservative forum such as Human Events.

As Kay points out, and anyone who forays into the jungle of major online blogs and comment boards can attest, it is basically impossible to convince a conspiracy theorist otherwise once they have gone down that road.  Furthermore, once someone has embraced one conspiracy theory, they will likely embrace more, for as discussed here, they are all essentially the same anyway.

Matters are made worse because of our contemporary media landscape, where, thanks to the decline of the traditional print and broadcast media and the rise of blogs and cable pundits, people can now go an arbitrarily long time without ever encountering a dissenting viewpoint.  This is a problem that of course extends far beyond conspiracy theories, but it certainly helps to feed them.  When both the left wing and the right wing speak dismissively of the "mainstream media" and largely refuse to accept any facts or opinions presented therein, the opportunities for moderation of extreme views are few and far between.

It would all be a laughing matter if conspiracy theories were not a big deal, if we could simply make fun of theorists' zeal and the implausibility of their claims.  But conspiracy theories and their peddlers erode the very heart of a democratic society, which depends on a certain amount of public trust in our public institutions.  Not blind faith, certainly, but also not complete dismissal of the value of elected governments or the principle of voluntary associations.  People who believe elections are useless because the government is controlled by a secret group, or that professional qualifications such as mechanical engineer or doctor are useless because those professionals are part of a giant nefarious plot, do not make for good citizens in any sense.

What then, is to be done, about the proliferation of conspiracism?  This may be the point where there are no good answers at present, given human nature and our media landscape.  Kay makes a modest proposal for a high school or college course about conspiracy theories, teaching the Elders of Zion as a case-study since it is a conspiracy theory which few people believe anymore (except in the Arab world, of course).  I think that this might be a mistake that would simply lead to its re-popularization.  Instead, I would like to see a new conspiracy theory created from whole cloth following the formula - perhaps that the atomic bombing of Japan was a hoax and never actually happened, and then that taught as a case-study in a new high school or college course.  It isn't a magic bullet, but it would be a start.