What is a Conspiracy Theory?
This week, we’re going to try out something a little different. Rather than writing blogs on two separate topics, we (Nastia and Shilo) are going to have an open conversation about the ideas we stumbled into during this week’s Demystifying Science interview with author of Conspiracy Theories, Dr. Quassim Cassam.
On the show, Micky & Quinn had a conversation with Dr. Quassim Cassam, philosophy professor at the University of Warwick. Currently, his attention is focused on the origins of conspiratorial thinking, and our conversation with him spanned a multitude of subjects - from who gets to wear the mantle of “expert,” solutions to the problems with peer review, and the seductive nature of “Truth telling,” the modern version of snake-oil. The interview is available in its entirety as a podcast or on Youtube.
AB: Right off the bat, we get to the heart of why I love speaking with philosophers. You ask him what a conspiracy is, and he actually has a definition! What did you think of how he defined it?
MSD: Yeah, now if only philosophers could define philosophy as easily. But I think the definition “A small bunch of people acting in secret to do something bad,” really cuts away a lot of the broader accusations you find. You can’t have the entire government conspiring under that definition.
AB: No, but there are plenty of occasions where a small group of people do something bad, right?
MSD: I suppose so, but that doesn’t really make it a conspiracy in the common usage of the word. “Conspiracy theory” in my experience seems to imply an alternative explanation for some set of events. By, the way, Dr. Cassam’s definition requires that we are all on the same page about what the word “bad” means, yeah?
AB: Generally, it’s an alternative to some kind of consensus, common sense narrative. Contrails go from being water vapor to chemical weapons. 9/11 goes from a collection of mistakes and mismanagement by an incompetent administration, to a highly effective sinister cabal that puts a marvel villain to shame.
I tried to think of a Marvel villain that would be the equivalent of the government committing a 9/11 style conspiracy but blanked….
MSD: Can we improve on his definition, since we’re going to talk to a lot of folks about this in the coming weeks (?). This is a really important subject — with all the fake news, deep-fakery, and science denialism prevalent today. Not to mention the very real failure of the traditional institutions responsible for vetting information pertaining to those matters.
AB: That’s a really good point… I think an important starting point is the difference between a conspiracy, and a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy would be the collection of secret actions, and the conspiracy theory would be the movie of how all these secret events caused a phenomenon to occur.
MSD: Yes.
AB: Does a conspiracy ever result in something good happening? Like, are your parents acting in secret to bring presents that allegedly come from some mystical, unseen being - is that a conspiracy?
MSD: Okay, so yes, conspiracy could be positive but the term “conspiracy theory” always points to something bad. Let’s say bad is the violation of consent. This encompasses harm, damage, cost, etc..
AB: If it’s happening in secret, wouldn’t it always violate consent, since, by definition, one has to solicit it? By that reasoning, the parents and mythical gift giving creature would violate consent. I never agreed to your make-believe, type of thing.
MSD: I guess there is some imperfection in the morality of the action, but generally the children are quite happy on balance with the whole day, so you’d probably be hard-pressed to find one that didn’t consent.
AB: I’d even prefer just expanding my perspective wide enough to accept the gift question as a conspiracy, just not one whose actions have negative repercussions. That makes it something that we could evaluate on a case-by-case basis, all the way acknowledging that people do stuff in secret around us all the time - but only some of those things have massively negative outcomes.
MSD: Yes and this opens up an entire can of worms about the greatest good in any situation. So we have a definition of conspiracy theories as “alternative narratives of secret groups acting to accomplish bad things” but the real question is, what’s the problem with a theory like that? Couldn’t secret groups of people actually conspire to cause harm? What if that event avoids becoming an accepted narrative? Like the Russia/U.S. election scandal, or The Gulf of Tonkin, or M.K. Ultra or just about anything ever done by the C.I.A.?
AB: Do you mean from the standpoint of, ‘are these actually legitimate explanations for a phenomenon?’?
MSD: Yeah, in so much as a theory is a ‘conspiracy theory’ by our definition, why the negative connotation? Especially if it’s a well-reasoned possibility?
AB: I think this starts to bring in some of the other ideas in the conversation, especially the idea of peer review. When we were in grad school I read a book - that I can’t remember the name of for the life of me - but it had a really interesting graphic. One axis was the certainty the general public had in a certain idea, vs the amount of time that the idea had been around. With stuff like MK Ultra, the Gulf of Tonkin, enough time has passed that these events are verified from multiple perspectives. At the time, if you were walking around saying that the US government was slipping mind-altering substances to the general population, you’d be locked up. But now we look back and sagely nod about it.
So I would think that the danger isn’t the prevalence of the theories, but the effect that they end up having on the population, stability of the government, and cohesion of the social structures of the society. If no one trusts the government, it’s like no one trusting the dollar. Things are going to fall apart, fast.
MSD: So conspiracy theories are inherently destabilizing. Destabilization is definitely bad unless it removes bad actors. But the U.S. Government, by definition, can’t enact a conspiracy because they aren’t a small group of people. I doubt the average government employee, like my mom’s mail carrier back in the 60s had anything to do with drugging college kids at Harvard.
AB: There’s a lot in that little chunk ‘o vocables.
Number 1, I would say that widespread certainty in the accuracy of conspiracy theories is what is destabilizing.
Number 2, the government itself can’t, but a secret inaccessible portion, the deep state, could.
Number 3, no, but he may have been getting drugged.
MSD: Okay, so then the question becomes, how godlike is this deep state and what are they capable of? Dr. Cassam seems to think that in general we ascribe too much ability to bureaucracies like this. In any case, is there really anything wrong with being suspicious of the shadowy tentacles of the military in any country?
AB: Well, we can only assess the godlike powers of the state in retrospect, which isn’t always representative of the present. It’s like with evolution - looking at the creatures that have existed in the past doesn’t necessarily give you a complete picture of the kinds of creatures that exist in the present.
If we can agree on that, then I’d say that the problem isn’t being skeptical or suspicious - it has much more to do with how certain people are of these beliefs. It’s just a theory, people! Like any theory, you’ll only be able to evaluate it with the evidence you’ve got at the time. Can’t believe completely in imaginary evidence.
MSD: Yeah, i love that. I think we’re making ground here. Conspiracy theories aren’t the problem. Rather, it’s the conviction that their proponents and deniers express that is polarizing, divisive, and threatens sense-making.
AB: Exactly! It’s like what you said earlier, about the fact that destabilization can be good, if it’s clearing bad actors from the board. But it’s really a tool of last resort, which can only be applied when you’re absolutely, beyond a shadow a doubt that you haven’t made any mistakes in your reasoning, all your evidence is absolutely rock solid, and you’ve gone through it with others to make sure there isn’t anything you’re missing. Otherwise, the risk is too great, and people will get really hurt.
MSD: Right, so one thing you’ll see often with conspiracy theories is that the only hint of a solution given is to level the civilization, shake the etch-a-sketch and start over. Back to the caves! But it always occurs to me that law is there for exactly this reason. To reconstitute our civilization without crashing it. To build the plane while flying it.
AB: Back to the caves! Yes exactly. Wasn’t it nice before all this complex modernity came about? But then you try to trace the origins and people end at “well, before agriculture…” I really appreciate your perspective on law, and how we use it to keep going even when things get dodgy.
That, then, is the problem with conspiracy theories. They sow a conviction that the system is so rotten that the only thing that can be done for it is to throw it away and start over. No one seems to consider for a second that doing things from scratch would probably lead you to the exact same situation another 10,000 years from now.
MSD: I think this is why so many thinkers have an aversion to conspiracy theory. It’s the tenor of the conversation more than the content. So long as some theorist’s solution is chaos, no one can really stand for the presentation. And i think the theorists’, either conspiracy or otherwise, inability to communicate objectively is unfortunate, and perhaps even dangerous in the opposite way - that they might actually have some viable new evidence to bring to the discussion.Concerning the harm of conspiracy theories, Dr. Cassam also points to the intentions of the theorists. Many have conflicts of interests, themselves: monetized YouTube channels, books, diet pills, or God knows what. He also notes that conspiracy theories often require that blame be placed on individuals where there is perhaps really just systematic incompetence. Group blame can get ugly really quick.
AB: Both of those are really good points. The former, that the format of the discussion is central to the discussion itself, can’t really be overstated. That one is still something I struggle with, where I have a tendency to want to get upset when I can’t get someone to agree with me. It’s always difficult to remember that the goal of conversation isn’t conversion, it’s understanding.In terms of the latter, he pointed out that “follow the money” is a really effective rhetorical tool on both sides of the argument. When you start to realize the goal of someone’s conversation is literally conversion, the tech term for getting an audience member to buy something, the issue with these theories start to get clearer.
It seems to me that people really want to have more certainty about their world right now. Trust in institutions is at an all-time low, for whatever reason, and I think believing in a conspiracy theory has this counterintuitive effect of feeling like you actually have a grasp on what’s happening around you.
MSD: Well I think trust in institutions is at an all time low, at least in this country but probably worldwide, because of the revolving door paradigm with industry. A lot of leading academic institutions are tightly woven into the industrial motivations. The pharmaceutical industry is a clear example. The academies are essentially responsible for the first leg of privatized research. Public money for privatized ends. And in that case, you’ve also got regulatory commissions like the FDA swapping people with industry, as well. In general, academic knowledge is held for ransom behind paywalls.
For the most part, this sort of corruption undermines faith in otherwise extraordinary productive institutions.And conflicts of interest get institutionalized at this point. This trap extends beyond the academy to the legal/prison system, and the for-profit healthcare structures as well.
The point is, there are a lot of problems with our hard-wrought institutions but humans invented law in large part in order to repair corruptions that might arise as an alternative to violent detonation.
AB: And I think that was kind of where the conversation with Dr. Cassam ended up. Corruptions occur, and we need to be aware of them, but it’s important not to go so far in the other direction that we fall into a completely different corrupt swamp.
I’d heard him previously talk about the need to rely on experts, but he presented a more nuanced perspective in this conversation, where he recognized that we need a better system for deciding what experts to rely on.
MSD: Right. During the conversation, a TripAdvisor-like public review emerged as an alternative to academic peer-review. It would allow us to address nepotism and favoritism.This is something I’m really interested to learn more about: methods for building trust in reports, not necessarily because of their association with any particular brand or personality.
AB: Yeah, I think about what makes a trusted source as well, and I think that it comes down to someone who isn’t willing to exaggerate in order to prove a point. I realize that this disqualifies a lot of overreaching academic writing, but really deserves more attention. When you get the sense that someone’s goal has become that of convincing you of their great idea, it’s time to get suspicious.
MSD: It’s interesting you talk about a trusted source, but I’m wondering if we can develop a means of vetting the report itself without necessarily concerning ourselves with the reporter.
AB: One way would be to compare the report with our own experience, but that doesn’t really work, it just leads to people rejecting things that contradict their established narrative.
MSD: Yes, I don’t have the answer today, but I’m certain that there is a solution that allows individuals to submit usable reports regardless of their status within some professional arena. I’m excited to hear from other thinkers on this.
AB: That seems like a good place to wrap up. The answers to this question are going to lie in the wheelhouse of “how do I evaluate evidence,” right?
MSD: How do I evaluate evidence on it’s own two legs. Yep.
- DS -
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