{"id":187995,"date":"2021-07-05T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2021-07-05T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=187995"},"modified":"2021-06-30T08:57:53","modified_gmt":"2021-06-30T07:57:53","slug":"conspiracy-theory-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/07\/conspiracy-theory-and-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Conspiracy: Theory and Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

29 Jun 2021 – Toward a Taxonomy of Conspiracies<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious \u2014 not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public\u00a0and with a modicum of pride. They\u2019re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they\u2019re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens \u2014\u00a0 all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.<\/p>\n

The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can\u2019t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.<\/p>\n

This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.<\/p>\n

Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices<\/em> \u2014 the methods by which true conspiracies\u00a0such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized \u2014 are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories<\/em>: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.<\/p>\n

In my life, I\u2019ve had enough of both the practice and the theory.\u00a0In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a Top-Secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing \u2014 and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press \u2014 I couldn\u2019t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those\u00a0that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse \u2014 Facebook.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
Contrary to what a surprisingly large number of people on Twitter believe, that is very much not me.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of Internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background, and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: \u201cWhat is wrong<\/em> with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket <\/em>is not enough? You have to sauce that<\/em> up?\u201d<\/p>\n

It took years \u2014 eight years and counting in exile \u2014 for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories<\/em> in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices<\/em>, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.<\/p>\n

II.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s my hope in this post and in\u00a0posts to come to engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by examining the relationship between true and false conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions about the relationships between truth and falsehood in our public and private lives.<\/p>\n

I’ll begin by offering a fundamental proposition: namely, that to believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system\u00a0or sector\u00a0run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major banking institutions and the Federal Reserve\u00a0\u2014 the point is, a conspiracy is an inherently anti-democratic force.<\/p>\n

The recognition of a conspiracy \u2014 again, whether true or false \u2014 entails accepting that not only are things\u00a0other than what they seem, but they are systematized, regulated, intentional, and even logical. It\u2019s only by treating conspiracies not as \u201cplans\u201d or \u201cschemes\u201d but as mechanisms for ordering the disordered that we can hope to understand how they have so radically displaced the concepts of \u201crights\u201d and \u201cfreedoms\u201d as the fundamental signifiers of democratic citizenship.<\/p>\n

In democracies today, what is important to an increasing many is not what rights and freedoms\u00a0are recognized, but what beliefs<\/em> are respected: what history, or story, undergirds their identities as citizens, and as members of religious, racial, and ethnic communities. It\u2019s this replacement-function of false conspiracies \u2014 the way they replace unified or majoritarian histories with parochial and partisan stories \u2014 that prepares the stage for political upheaval.<\/p>\n

Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn\u2019t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.<\/p>\n

III.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The concept of the enemy is fundamental to conspiracy thinking\u00a0\u2014 and to the various taxonomies of conspiracy itself. Jesse Walker<\/a>, an editor at\u00a0Reason\u00a0<\/em>and author of\u00a0The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory\u00a0<\/em>(2013), offers the following categories of enemy-based conspiracy thinking:<\/p>\n