Why people believe in conspiracies?

Jpass's picture

http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/09/paranoia-strikes-deep/comment-page...

After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.

“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Who is they?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?”

“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after- the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.

Examples of these processes can be found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explains, noting the JFK assassination as a prime example. “Knowing what we know now … film footage of Dealey Plaza from November 22, 1963, seems pregnant with enigmas and ironies — from the oddly expectant expressions on the faces of the onlookers on the grassy knoll in the instants before the shots were fired (What were they thinking?) to the play of shadows in the background (Could that flash up there on the overpass have been a gun barrel gleaming in the sun?). Each odd excrescence, every random lump in the visual texture seems suspicious.” Add to these factors how compellingly a good narrative story can tie it all together — think of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, both equally fictional.

What should we believe? Transcendentalists tend to believe that everything is interconnected and that all events happen for a reason. Empiricists tend to think that randomness and coincidence interact with the causal net of our world and that belief should depend on evidence for each individual claim. The problem for skepticism is that transcendentalism is intuitive; empiricism is not. Or as folk rock group Buffalo Springfield once intoned: Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep…

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Jpass's picture

hah

Shermer wants us to believe that government bureaucrats are so incompetent that they could not have been responsible for the 9/11 attacks... but at the same time these same bureaucracies are competent enough to be responsible for preventing and investigating the same attacks?

gretavo's picture

Shermer's skepticism is so profound...

...that he is skeptical of skeptics and skepticism themselves!

willyloman's picture

Sometimes, Today's "Paranoia" is Tomorrow's "Courage"

The funny thing about conspiracy theories Michael, is that sometimes they have a tendency to become "yesterday's news".

There was a time not too long ago when those of us who claimed that members of Bush administration were lying to us to justify an illegal war, were thought of as "conspiracy theorists".

But then along came the Downing Street memos and the truth about the forged "Nigerian Yellow Cake" document, and now... it's "old hat", isn't it?

There was a time when some claimed that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened, that it was just a false-flag operation to justify stepping up the war in Vietnam. Those people were called "conspiracy theorists" too, Michael. What do we know now?

Used to be that you had to be a "conspiracy theorist" to believe that the CIA was operating covert/illegal weapons deals in other nations like Iran and Nicaragua. What do we know about that now?

And for a more recent example, many of us who warned that Obama was going to be just an extension of the Bush/Cheney neoliberal policies prior to the election of 2008 were dismissed and shouted down by status-quo backing "progressives". Well, how did that work out Michael?

Fact is Michael, it's only a "conspiracy theory" till enough evidence is discovered... and then REPORTED by courageous reporters who put their careers and sometimes even their lives on the line.

The truth is, with the evidence that is out there right now, with all the reports of high ranking officials who have stated for the record that the 911 Commission was lied to repeatedly, the fact that at one time members of the Commission wanted to bring OBSTRUCTION charges against NORAD and the PENTAGON (but were talked out of it by Zelikow), and add to all that the fact we NOW KNOW that the head of the 911 Commission not only showed up on the first day with an outline of the report already written but he was also in CONSTANT secretive communication with Carl Rove at the White House...

... you put all that together Michael, and you can't help but feel a little skeptical about the Official Conspiracy Theory of 911. The things I have mentioned above aren't "paranoia" anymore Mr. Shermer, they are now... fact.

Perhaps one of these days, Mr. Shermer, you will be on record for getting out ahead of the curve on something, on anything, rather than just parroting the status quo. Til that day, maybe you should leave the critical thinking to those of us more qualified. Those of us who aren't afraid to step a little outside the lines to tell the facts of the case that people NEED to know.

Look up Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers. In historical hindsight, it's called "courage" Michael, and it is the stuff that journalistic heroes are made of. "Paranoia" is what it's called by other, less courageous writers, til it's "safe" to call it "history".

"The future is not inherited, it is achieved." JFK

Jpass's picture

ding dong

Nicely put WilyLoman. That should ring his bell a bit.