18th August 2022
I am working on a couple of long posts, and one of these – about Freeports and so-called “Charter Cities” – involves consideration of “conspiracy theories”.
So I thought it may be useful, as a separate post, to consider this term.
I do not think it is a useful term in many discussions, because it is pejorative.
You may have considered, rational opinions – but they believe in conspiracy theories.
Few people will admit readily that they believe – or could believe – in a conspiracy theory.
And so merely calling something a conspiracy theory is unlikely to change minds.
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This is not to say conspiracies do not exist.
Conspiracies do exist.
That people can act in concert for wrongful purposes is a common feature of everyday life.
Of course, there is also the cock-up theory.
And cock-ups – that is, things that happen by chance – also exist.
In my view, conspiracies often come into existence to cover-up the cock-ups – for it is only when there has been a mistake that there will be sufficient focus and motivation for people to act in concert.
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At this point in this discussion, someone will usually refer to “Hanlon’s Razor” – the rule that one should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
(They will often also link to an explanation of it, on the assumption you have not heard the term before.)
And Hanlon’s Razor may be a good general rule, but concerts and conspiracies do exist – and can be hidden under a guise of stupidity.
So Hanlon’s Razor is perhaps a sound presumption, but it should never be an absolute law.
A better approach when looking at something untoward is just to see where the evidence takes you, and what best explains that evidence.
Sometimes the evidence will point to a cock-up, sometimes to a conspiracy, and sometimes to a mix of both.
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People like to see patterns, people will tend to want their prejudices confirmed, and some people even find comfort in the idea that bad things happen for a reason.
Writing about issues of law and policy – especially controversial and topical issues – means that I realise some readers will just want their views endorsed and suspicions confirmed.
A few – a minority – will say instead they want their views challenged, and a smaller minority will actually want to be challenged.
But the readers I am writing for primarily are those who are aware of an issue and want understand it better so as to form their own views, and want also to have the tools to do so.
They are the people I blog for – and, indeed, blog with.
And so, oddly, even the act of regularly writing a blog in partnership with attentive readers is a form of concert.
Though, of course, if this blog is ever successful in explaining an issue well, then that will be sometimes by chance.
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A wise man once told me that if something can be explained by either a conspiracy or a cock-up then nine times out of ten it is a cock-up.
😚, love it – wise man indeed.
Except, as DAG has written, once a cock-up has come to light then the conspirators will pile in to conceal it, or to disguise it or to cast the blame elsewhere.
“nine times out of ten it is a cock-up”, eh?
That’s what THEY want you to believe
That’s an interesting piece of rhetoric, where the meaning of ‘can be explained by’ shifts.
One of my responses to people automatically assuming conspiracy or malice is that we assume other people would do what we would do.
Obviously, in my case that would be cock-up.
I agree that sometimes – perhaps often, I don’t know – there are conspiracies but rather than being shady and hidden they play out in public but we seem not to notice them.
“..They are the people I blog for – and, indeed, blog with..”
This is both a commendable & also ubiquitous aspiration of many quality bloggers.
The advent of social media gives literally everyone with an access to the internet a persona and a channel (Voice) to market.
The difficulty that everyone faces is , as you indicate, which blog offers true or false, conspiracy or cock up.
Many/most blog writers are spectacularly removed from the issues about which they write – much is heresay or validated by legacy media/mainstream media sources.
At the end of the day – people really tend to believe what they want to believe and individuals have to work out for themselves cock up or conspiracy.
My own pennyworth – it’s 51 cock up & 49 conspiracy – but I’m a self professed optimist.
52:49 surely
:-)
As an old student of History / history, I tend to subscribe to the AJP Taylor “Cock up” theory of history as opposed to the “conspiracy” theory. Yes, it’s a cousin of Hanlon, but then personal experience of crisis management for mere corporate entities, let alone society or national states, in which so many irreversible laws apply; from Newton’s third law to that of unintended consequences, the inability to return to the “status quo ante bellum”, TS Eliot’s data to wisdom ladder and half a dozen others; and, given the frailty of mankind and the cowardice of politicians, “cock up” is so much more compelling, as well as more likely, as an explanation.
I have come across conspiracies from time to time, and I agree that as a rule of thumb they most commonly occur in order to cover up a cock-up. By the way, if you’re going to refer to Hanlon’s razor, I think cock-ups are more properly described as embarrassing acts of stupidity (individual or collective) rather than as “things that happen by chance”.
Numerous examples of a conspiracy of this type have been uncovered during the work of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse, whose final report is due in October this year.
These have almost all been of the same form: a member of staff at an institution (e.g. a school) is discovered to have sexually abused a child, and rather than report the matter to the authorities the leadership of the institution has sought to protect its reputation by addressing the abuse “in-house”, sometimes keeping the abuser on the staff, sometimes quietly sending the abuser on his way with a good reference. Unbelievably, there is no legal obligation in Britain for anyone to report suspected or even known child sex abuse to the authorities.
It has happened that the abuser has gone on to abuse another child at the same institution and the leadership dare not report the new incident because it would inevitably lead to disclosure of the original cover up, with even greater damage to their reputation than if they had reported the original incident. And so they are trapped in the ever-growing conspiracy. There have been locations where the cover-up of repeated and continuing child sex abuse persisted for decades.
Was it Frederik William III or IV of Prussia who declared “Liberalism is a disease. Its first symptom is a refusal to believe in conspiracy”?
Darn. Fat thumb. Obviously meant 48!
A cock-up, not a conspiracy.
It’s a conspiracy 😉
I thought 52:49 worked rather well
The “Paul-Daniels Razor” is the more common technique where proponents of a particular scheme – Freeing up pensions – Panorama, to enable people to take control of where they invest their pension. This was cheered to the rafters, by the Tories when George Osborne announced it. PFI schemes were presented as a way of bringing I private sector skills to public sector procurement. There are many other examples. You can bet in all such cases we’re invited to focus on the wrong hand.
Unfortunately some “conspiracy theories” may become self fulfilling.
People may blog about how their ideological opponent is planning to use some obscure thing in ways that they think are wrong. Expressing outrage and spreading the word.
The ideological opponent may think “nice idea” and considering the outrage has already been poured they may as well go ahead with the plan.
If the conspiracy theory hadn’t taken legs the idea would still be unthinkable.
From personal experience, it is easy to be dismissive of conspiracy theories until one has direct, personal and impactful experience of one. Considered in the abstract, or seen from a distance, they can have almost a comedic or tragic air to them.
For example, seen from across the Atlantic, we might consider the idea that “the 2020 Presidential Election in the United States was stolen from Republicans thanks to the ghost of Hugo Chavez using Italian Space Lasers to alter voting machines” to be somewhere between a sad or laughable conspiracy theory. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars thanks to its proliferation. Then, one week ago today, Ricky Shiffer took an automatic rifle and a nail gun and attacked an FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio, because he believed that theory, resulting first in a stand-off with Police and then in his suicide. So it can be important to take such constructs seriously, given their potential for real-world impact.
We should also consider why an ostensibly laughable notion could become a conspiracy theory in the first place. Here, potential clues run deeper. We could look, for example, to Carl Jung’s writing on the “Collective Unconscious” and on the “Shadow” archetype, not necessarily as the source, but certainly as the fertile soil for the seeds of such ideas.
Yet on a practical level, conspiracy theories are powerful because people *want* to believe them. This basic principle can be used to devastating effect if/when someone has the opportunity or position to do so. Whether or not he understood his actions, Donald Trump demonstrated this when he managed to persuade a large percentage of the U.S. population that the reason they had cr4ppy jobs and cr4ppy lives was because they were being subjugated by “the man”, he was using the tools of conspiracy theory – encouraging people to believe that 1. their ill-fortune was “not their fault” but came at the hands of another; 2. identifying a target for their ire – the Mexican gangs/establishment politicians/China; then trying to persuade people that “he alone could fix it”.
I don’t know whether he studied the data, but Statista.com suggests that in 2019-2020 as many as 37.25 million people (more than 10% of the population) lived below the poverty line. In the richest nation on Earth. That’s a lot of people to tap in to when your conspiracy theory is built on the ideas of “subjugation” and “being forcibly kept poor”.
Sometimes, however, conspiracies can start because their instigators don’t realise that what they are doing is conspiratorial. Many years ago, I was approached at work and asked if I would apply internally for a vacancy that had been advertised. It can be flattering when asked to apply for a role – especially if it is a good one – but in this instance it was in a field I didn’t wish to switch to, so I demurred. The person who approached me – not the hiring manager, but one who reported to them – was persistent, going on to explain that he had learned the identity of another applicant and was working to ensure that the individual in question would not get the role because they were “the wrong sort”. His technique was to get lots of people to apply so that when the unwelcome applicant was rejected, it would make it harder to appeal. (Challenging a rejection when you are one of two candidates is a lot easier than when you’re one of 20). My response was to point out that I was being asked to participate in a conspiracy and that I would not. “On what other grounds would you come to me and ask for help like this? Because the candidate was a woman? Because they were disabled? Because they were black?” I asked at the time. My would-be co-conspirator reacted angrily: nearly a decade passed before they came back to me and apologised – sincerely – explaining that they had just themselves been through an experience where they felt there was exactly that style of conspiracy to thwart their attempts at promotion that they had seen “the other side” and had realised the error of their ways.
It was this experience – and others like it – that leads me to believe that another reason we can be willing to believe in conspiracy theories is because they can be so common-place. We are are a construct of prejudices, whether we like to admit it or not – I am prejudiced against smoking: I’ve never smoked, but vehemently opposed to the practice – and I suspect that conspiracies and prejudice make strange but frequent bed-fellows. Neither are entirely rational, both are difficult to identify or accept when you are “living them”, they share a common emotional and mental construct.
And if you look to the demagogues – the great manipulators of conspiracy theories – then you see that one of the most effective techniques they use to start things off is prejudice.
Going to the substance of your future post, you might know this (the existence and content) already, but another blogging lawyer has written on the subject:
https://simonicity.com/2022/07/30/ez-does-it-charter-cities-freeports-development-corporations/
There’s a follow-up to Hanlon’s Razor I’ve been using lately: “Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.”
There is clearly a conspiracy here: to get us all thinking rationally.
Now, you’re just being paranoid :-)
One issue that interests me is where conspiracy, cock-up and conspiracy theories all intersect.
A good example is 9-11. That was a successful conspiracy to hijack planes and use them as terrorist weapons by a group of motivated fanatics. Cock ups occurred in US authorities that could have intercepted this conspiracy. And, of course, the massive growth in wild conspiracy theories simply because the success of the actual conspiracy was so unbelievable.
Conspiracy requires imagination. To protect against conspiracy requires imagination. Yet if your imagination runs away with you, the state will unlawfully kill innocent people whether you’re a Brazilian commuter on the underground or you’re carrying a table leg under your arm for examples.
There’s a horrible space where edges are blurred and cock-up v conspiracy is a Rorschach test. That’s just humanity for you.
I think it’s pointless to look for general rules here, like 90% of cases are cockup 10% conspiracy. All we can do is examine the concrete examples and find the best evidence we can (in a world in which everybody has an opinion about everything). And try to recognise the cases where having an opinion is not like just shouting at the television.
I think whether or not you find patterns; whether or not you find useful countermeasures, is going to depend in large part on what you are looking *at*.
Attempt a thematic analysis, location/origination analysis, transmission-rate-by-meme-type or any one of a dozen other elements and you would be right.
But psychologists, psychoanalysts… and Cambridge Analytica would all beg to differ. As I noted above, if you view through the lens of say Carl Yung’s ‘collective unconscious’, or the ‘shadow archetype’, you will almost certainly get a useful insight.
One of the things you are likely to be able to do is to figure out ways to analyse and triage the characteristics of any given conspiracy theory, ‘burst its bubble’ as it were, and be able to erode confidence in it.
One of the challenges this process faces is the irrational behaviour of the “true believer”. There were conspiracy theories on line in the run up to Inauguration Day that President Trump was going to reveal some terrible conspiracy at the heart of government. As literally every CT deadline came and went, so a new one would be offered… because people became so invested in the lie that they would rather deceive themselves than admit they were wrong.
This is why people sucked in to that world need de-programming to the same degree as cult members.
That’s why this is so incredibly dangerous.
But yes, the patterns are there, if you’re trained and qualified to know what you’re looking for.
Once had a minor role in computer security and came across a few examples where a cock up had exposed a problem/weakness which was successfully covered up. Occasionally the weakness the cock up exposed got exploited some time later but mostly nothing much happened.
Another facet was a department writing very large money transfers, over time it got slimmed down to two ladies who shared passwords and keys when going on holiday etc. A bit exposed but nothing went wrong and indeed those ladies would have been highly offended at any thought they might not be worthy of trust – they knew the risks and took their role very seriously. Most people are trustworthy if treated with respect.
Another time in a very dangerous industry something happened that could have had a very serious public health (and reputational) impact. The works cavalry got called out and strings high and low pulled on the QT. Nothing came of it and procedures were tightened up and wrists slapped. Had something gone wrong you can be sure a cover up would have followed.
Then there was the FD and secretary who disappeared just before Easter Bank holiday, I think you can guess the rest.
Cock up and conspiracy are close bedfellows.
What matters, it seems to me, is that there has been a big shift to the right in UK politics. The Tufton Street mob has been pushing for it for ages, and they have plenty of money (the source of which is secret, but generally believed to be from Putin and the US far-right). You can call that successful lobbying or you can call it conspiracy It doesn’t matter much what you call it. What matters is to stop the erosion of democracy.
One useful way of approaching this issue is not to focus on whether events are explained by conspiracy or cock-up, and therefore whether a conspiracy theory is or is not a good way of understanding those events, but on what *kind* of theory a conspiracy theory is.
I’m not an expert on this, and it’s years since I read about it as a student, so I know the following is a very simplistic and probably flawed account. In fact, the extent of my knowledge is really only enough to know that its limitation.
Anyway.
One way of thinking about theories is Karl Popper’s idea of falsifiability. Popper argues that the test of a good theory or hypothesis is whether, and to what extent, it is falsifiable by an empirical test.
The classic, and now cliched, example, is the theory (hypothesis): ‘all swans are white’. This is falsifiable because if a swan were observed that was any other colour than white then we would know the theory was incorrect.
By contrast, the theory ‘we are surrounded by intangible angels’ isn’t falsifiable by empirical test. If someone says that they have never seen, touched, heard or smelt an angel, then the proponent of the theory can simply reply ‘that is exactly as I said, these angels are intangible.
From that point of view, conspiracy theories are always of the latter sort, because the essence of conspiracy is that it is secret. If no evidence can be shown, that ‘proves’ the theory because ‘of course’ the conspiracy is secret. If evidence is presented that contradicts it (photos of Moon landings, say) then this also ‘proves’ the theory because there is a conspiracy secretly to fake such evidence.
This doesn’t mean that conspiracies don’t exist: as you say in your post, they do. And it doesn’t mean they can’t be proved to exist – for example by investigative journalists or subsequent historians getting information from inside a secret conspiracy. Which also means that any conspiracy theory might turn out to be true – by verification. But that still doesn’t make it, or any other conspiracy theory, a ‘good’ theory, since it can’t be falsified, only verified.
So conspiracy theories can sometimes be proved right, but can never proved wrong, meaning they can persist forever without evidence and in the face of evidence to the contrary. It follows that, whilst it’s true that adherents of conspiracy theories are unlikely to have their minds changed by being told it is a conspiracy theory (I agree with you that that is unlikely), they might be willing to be more sceptical if invited to reflect on what kind of theory they are subscribing to. In other words, to ask them: what is the evidence you could be shown that would persuade you that this theory is wrong?
One of the delights of getting older is the yearly release of government documents into the official archives under the thirty year rule.
Records of events that officially never happened sit waiting for scholars to report on them, usually to a limited audience who say they knew it all along.
Most people have no idea about what goes on in the so-called corridors of power, because their lives have no connection with it and get their information from the media.
Anyone who does have some inside link, perhaps through a personal connection first or second hand, knows that so much of what is reported is not true.
The journalists, of course, know much more than they publish, and again there is another in crowd with insider gossip.
Those on the outside can only guess, looking for clues and finding out years later what was thought a conspriacy was in fact true.
I’ve long felt that conspiracy theories are usually popular with people who are simplistic, and with simpletons.
Such people look at their lives, and the lives of those around them, and see disorder, chaos, sometimes disease, poverty, misery. They compare this with their childhood and education, which largely promised them a reasonable and reasonably happy life, and painted it as being reasonably easy to obtain.
Because they are simplistic and/or simpletons, they are unable to understand the complex and often unseen forces that result in the difference between what they were promised, and what they got.
For them, it’s easier and more significantly *less frightening* to conclude that there are one or more conspiracies that are at the root of the problem, rather than that it’s how life in an indifferent universe has worked out.
This works for 9/11 truthers through to David Icke and his nonsense to Alex Jones and his crisis actors up to Trump’s ‘stolen election’ lies.