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Truth Trajectories (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
39 Plays1 year ago
Having sucked the philosophical literature dry (for now), M gets some anthropology into the mix, by having Josh read through the 2011 paper “Conspiracy theories and their truth trajectories” by Mathijs Pelkmans and Rhys Machold. It's a gripping read - so much so that even Siri can't resist butting in at one point. Or is it because M is a wizard? They do dress like one - the signs were all there!
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Transcript
Indiana Jones and Anthropology in Pop Culture
00:00:00
Speaker
So today we're looking at a piece of anthropological work on conspiracy theory theory. Nice. I'm assuming it's all about punching Nazis? Well... Because, as we all know, everything a person needs to know about anthropology can be summarised by the plot descriptions of five notable documentaries on the life of one Professor Henry Indiana Jones.
00:00:17
Speaker
Whose first notable work was returning the Sankara Stones to a small village in India, whilst also defeating the Thuggy Cult. A little bit racist, but it was the 1930s. And then, only a year later, he helped discover, well, actually, he's musty along for the ride. But yeah, he was present when the Ark of the Covenant was opened, which caused a lot of face-melting consternation for German High Command at the time. He punches several Nazis, but in the end, he's just a bystander when, as the kids say, shit got real.
00:00:44
Speaker
That, of course, he was in part responsible for the Holy Grail falling into a crevice, which prevented the Führer from gaining access to eternal life, although the fact he and his dad did have sex with the same Nazi as the only reason they even got within the sipping distance of the Grail. And then there was his attempt to smuggle the Spear of Destiny out of Europe, although it turned out to be a fake, which is actually pointed out to the Nazis by a Nazi, but he did manage to get part of the Dial of Destiny from a Nazi, so that's a win.
00:01:10
Speaker
And of course after the war he discovered that flying saucers don't come from outer space but rather inner space. No Nazis, that time it's the Russkies he's fighting psychic Russkies. And then late in life that whole dial of destiny thing saw him travel back in time in a bootstrap paradox way and the Nazis get killed by ancient Greek ballistas. It was a bit anticlimactic but the 70s was a messy time. Anyway I'm assuming this paper's all about that kind of thing? No.
00:01:35
Speaker
Well, then it must be about famed archaeologist Lara Croft, whose first notable exploit was either killing a Japanese god or destroying Atlantis for the second time. It gets a bit confusing. A lot of wild animals get murdered, but as you can see...
Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
00:01:59
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I'm Josh Addison and sitting right next to me so close I'm wearing them as a hat. It's Dr. M.R.X.Tenteth. You were threatening to punch me before. Now you want to wear me on your head like a crown. Both could be true.
00:02:16
Speaker
Also, you'd be punting yourself in the head effectively. And listeners, let me be clear, I didn't threaten to punch you in the face. I simply said it's a thing that's probably going to happen at some stage. And then we agreed that the more podcasts we do, the likelihood of it actually occurring gets closer and closer to one. Yeah, that's just how statistics work, I'm afraid. That's fate, baby. That's fate. Anyway, we're not here to talk about punching him in the face, although we could.
00:02:44
Speaker
Uh, because you've subjected me to anthropology, which to be honest I didn't actually mind.
Anthropology and Conspiracy Theories
00:02:49
Speaker
No, why is it you go to the soul? This is a paper I cite a lot. So it's a paper I kind of cite in the same breath that I cite Jima and Marty's paper, Dangerous Machinery. It's a paper I quite like, I think it commits a
00:03:05
Speaker
few mistakes, some of which I've also committed in the past, i.e. treatment of Brian's work. But generally, I think there's a lot to like about this paper. It is deserving of the masterpiece in the Conspiracy Theory Theory Masterpiece Theatre label.
00:03:22
Speaker
Right. I mean, it also might be a theatre. Although, as theatres go, I don't think journal articles make particularly good stages for holding plays. Not the best, no. But should we then play the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre chime and get right into it? Maybe we should. Maybe we will. Maybe. I'll do that right now. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:03:56
Speaker
So, is this just because we're starting to run out of, well we've got close enough to the present that the current papers on philosophical papers on conspiracy theory haven't been around long enough to count as masterpieces? It's a little bit of column A in that we need to kind of slow down, let the literature build up so that we can apply the masterpiece label to papers a reason. No, it's also because
00:04:24
Speaker
There are a few papers in which we're getting to the point where suddenly I publish a lot. And we have to work out a plan for talking around the fact that there's quite a number of papers which may or may not be masterpieces, which definitely are written by me. And as you know, we don't cover those papers.
00:04:46
Speaker
There's a chapter I co-wrote with Brian Alkely, and of course you've never met Brian. It'll just be a perfect chance for you and Brian to meet virtual face-to-face and talk with the maestro himself.
00:05:00
Speaker
So we need to kind of arrange things. Brian is currently down country in the US doing some health renovation related stuff. So we need to get dials in motion, gears flowing like clockwork, sand flowing through the fingertips of our lives. Metaphors mixing in an uncontrolled manner, yes.
00:05:22
Speaker
But we will get back to the recent stuff because there's a lot of really good recent stuff. And there's also some really interesting recent stuff that we need to look at. But also because we're doing masterpieces, we should be looking at things not just in philosophy. So we've done a bit of sociology. We've done a bit of political science. Now we're doing a bit of anthropology. We've got a bit of social psychology coming up very soon. Ooh la la.
00:05:50
Speaker
We're doing some masterpieces from outside of philosophy. This particular masterpiece, of course, being Conspiracy Theories and Their Truth Trajectories by Matisse Palkmans and Rhys McCold. Published in FOCAL, the journal of global and historical anthropology, back in the venerable age of 2011. I know where I was.
00:06:12
Speaker
when I read this paper the first time. Where were you? I was on practicum at Freeman's Bay School when I was doing my teaching degree and I was reading it in the staff room of Freeman's Bay School when I was suffering from a very bad case of laryngitis. How about that? Some things never leave you like laryngitis. So 2011
00:06:39
Speaker
I was reading this in 2014, so three years after it was published. But nevertheless. Just take us back a little bit. So we had the very first work in the late 90s, and then in philosophy at least.
00:06:55
Speaker
Where was the philosophy at by 2011? So we've got the David Coady collection which comes out in 2007. So we're basically, we're post Brian, we're post Charles, we're into the special issue that David Coady did. Actually no, we're both
00:07:15
Speaker
The book David Coady did, Philosophical, uh, The Philosophy of Conspir- Ah, no, actually, that the Philosoph- The Conspiracy Theory is a philosophical debate, and also the special issue of Epistine that he published. At least he was the editor thereof.
00:07:32
Speaker
So you've got two collections of work, one of which is taking old work and commentaries, which is David Cody's book. And then we've got the special issue of Epistem, which is dealing with new work by most of the usual suspects. And we've read all but one paper from that special issue. The only paper we haven't looked at is Michael Borman's paper. And that's because it's so tangentially related to conspiracy theories, it's really not worth looking at.
00:08:02
Speaker
And now we're into the kind of the fellow period of publications around conspiracy theory, theory and philosophy, which is not to say nothing comes out. I think Curtis has one or two pieces that come out in this time, as does Johar Reicher. But we're gazing to the point where suddenly I'm going to burst onto the scene in 2016.
00:08:24
Speaker
Right, yes, no, just looking through the references now, I see this particular paper, it references Lee Basham, Steve Clark, David Cody, Brian Keeley, Karl Marx, interestingly enough, but yes, so I guess that does... Yeah, it's just like Karl Marx saying, well he's dead, he doesn't care about his H in Dex at all. Wouldn't have thought so. No. Now, beginning at the beginning,
Socio-Political Dynamics of Conspiracy Theories
00:08:46
Speaker
Which we do like to do, it is traditional. It starts with an abstract, and it's my turn to read it. Feels like it's always your turn to read it. No, you predominantly read all of the abstracts, you just think I'm reading them all, but actually you read most of them. You take the lion's share of the abstract. I'm seizing back the abstract for this one. The sheer cheek of it, off you go.
00:09:12
Speaker
This article aims to invigorate analytical debates on conspiracy theories. It argues that definitional attempts to set conspiracy theories apart from other theories are flawed. Blinded by the irrational reputation of conspiracy theories and deluded by the workings of institutionalized power,
00:09:31
Speaker
Such approaches fail to recognize that there are no inherent differences between the two categories. We argue that assessments of conspiracy theories should focus not on the epistemological qualities of these theories, but on their interactions with the socio-political fields through which they travel. Because conspiracy theory is not a neutral term, but a powerful label, attention to processes of labeling highlights
00:10:04
Speaker
Because conspiracy theory is not a neutral term, but a powerful label, attention to processes of labelling highlights these larger fields of power, while the theory's trajectories illuminate the mechanisms by which truth and untruth are created.
00:10:21
Speaker
As such, this article offers a way forward for assessing both the truth and the use-value of conspiracy theories in the contemporary world. So as we'll see, it takes a slightly different tack in some places from the philosophical articles we're used to, but it is quite, quite similar. And interesting seeing right at the start there saying that it's, you know, the attempts to set conspiracy theories apart from other theories in these right away saying there are no inherent differences between the two categories.
00:10:49
Speaker
We'll see where they take that. So... To the moon! Well, something like that. The moon landing conspiracy theories do feature in this story. So the first section of this paper is called Blinded by Power. Should have been blinded by science. Could Thomas Dolby reference? He was in the film Rockula, you know. I don't know neither him nor the film. You should watch Rockula. Is it like Dracula but with rock music?
00:11:17
Speaker
Yes. Yes, it's a musical about a vampire. I'm not a fan of music. You see there's a new musical episode of Star Trek?
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, good music, stage direction, a bit subpar I felt. Well, that's the thing. The music is written by Kay Hanley, formerly of... But it takes two people some letters to clear. The same people who did work on Jersey and the Pussycats. Indeed, and other stuff. So I'm a big fan of her work, but I'm a big hater of musicals and especially musical episodes of TV shows. So I think I will have to watch it and see whether my love can overcome my hatred.
00:11:53
Speaker
So you're tearing yourself apart. And there are musicals which have songs about that. Can't you hear me yellow? Anyway, to the paper, blinded by power, first section starts like this.
00:12:08
Speaker
As the object of conspiracy theories is secrecy, it is in their nature to attract popular attention. This is certainly true of recent times, which has seen an ever-expanding list of popular books and websites devoted to the topic. The general public seems to be particularly enticed or amused by wacky theories, such as the one that barcodes are intended to control people, or the one asserting that NASA faked the first moon landings.
00:12:31
Speaker
If such theories are attractive to most because they offer a frivolous diversion, this is not to deny that some people take them very seriously, alternative claims about the 9-11 attacks have not only attracted attention from the general public, but have also been the subject of mainstream media documentaries and the object of scholarly investigations. Such academic attention is a precarious undertaking for the involved scholars because of the potential to be seen as a conspiracy theorist unworthy of academic status.
00:12:57
Speaker
Conspiracy theories may be intriguing to some and a sign of paranoia to others, but in any case the label conspiracy theory is a powerful one. The mere mentioning of the term may set off alarm bells, pushing the listener to doubt the credibility of the postulated theory. Given the public fascination with and suspicion of conspiracy theories, it is amazing that the most powerful theories of conspiracy, those that have the largest geopolitical impact, are not recognised as such.
00:13:21
Speaker
And this is where it gets interesting, because they do the, isn't it interesting that a theory about a conspiracy, such as Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, isn't really- A conspiracy, also known as a plot, is a secret plan or agreement between people for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason, especially with political motivation, while keeping their agreement secret from the public or from other people affected by it.
00:13:51
Speaker
No! Why? What set that off? I have a remarkable ability to somehow encode into everyday speech the key phrase that sets Apple's AI off. It happens in classrooms all the time. I'll be in the midst of a discussion and discover
00:14:15
Speaker
If I'm lucky, my Watchers Taking Dictation is about to answer a very convoluted question, or it will just start talking halfway through the lecture, even when I put it onto Do Not Disturb mode, as you saw me do before the recording started, but no…
00:14:34
Speaker
She had to intervene. What I'm hearing is that you have magical powers, so I'll ask you to keep those in check while we continue. I make no promises. But yeah, it's interesting that they immediately go for the isn't it interesting that theories of conspiracies
00:14:51
Speaker
such as the invasion of Iraq and also the 9-11 attacks as an official theory aren't labeled as conspiracy theories even though they kind of fit what we should think a conspiracy theory to be. Yeah, in fact they call that the theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was working with Al Qaeda, they call that the most powerful conspiracy theory of the last decade. And yet
00:15:16
Speaker
didn't actually get called a conspiracy theory. They talk about how the US government or various, various forces within it conspired to discredit opponents of the Second Iraq War, in particular talking about the whole Josephine and Valerie plane being outed as a CIA agent thing.
00:15:35
Speaker
And they go on to say, the apparent incapability to recognise the most powerful theories of cons... Oh, and I should say, like you said, they make a point of using the term theories of conspiracy to mean any theory that happens to talk about a conspiracy as distinct from conspiracy theory, which is they're going to say is a label that gets applied... Yeah, so conspiracy theory here is a pejorative label. They're interested in the broader class of theories of conspiracies and how that labelling
00:16:05
Speaker
of certain theories of conspiracies as those conspiracy theories affects our ability to have discourse around conspiracies in our society. Yes. So they say, the apparent incapability to recognise the most powerful theories of conspiracy as conspiracy theories, and the tendency of some real-life conspiracies never to be labelled as such, have important analytical implications.
00:16:30
Speaker
They suggest that our analytical faculty to make critical inferences about how political forces may collude is itself thoroughly influenced by asymmetrical power relations and flows. This problem of being, quote, blinded by power, unquote, also has its reverse side. If there are theories of conspiracy that are patently untrue, yet will never obtain the negative label conspiracy theory, one may also assume that there are theories of conspiracy that are true, but will never be seen as true due to the negative connotations of their conspiracy theory label.
00:16:59
Speaker
These insights about the ways in which theories of conspiracy are constructed and consumed as well as the potential of actual conspiracies to occur show that our present understanding of conspiracy and conspiracy theory requires substantial review. Indeed. Which is what they're into doing.
00:17:14
Speaker
They go on to cite David Coady among other philosophers and other academics and talk about how within the field of anthropology people have discussed conspiracy theorising as they put it, sense making in a way similar to occult beliefs. They say anthropologists will talk about it as conspiracy theories are a way for people to make sense of the world by sort of trying to explain what might otherwise be complicated or chaotic or incredibly complex.
00:17:43
Speaker
socio-political, societal stuff in simple terms as, oh, these bad guys are behind it. But they don't want to go along that track, and they put forward their own view as, however, we argue that in doing so they reveal a lingering functionalism that fails to interrogate systematically the links between power and truth.
00:18:04
Speaker
Because conspiracy theories can also be potent tools in discrediting opponents and in rallying supporters, the convergence of truth and use value needs to be at the centre of analysis. A fruitful assessment of conspiracy theories should thus not restrict its analysis to the postulated claims, but study the sociopolitical trajectories or roots of those claims.
00:18:25
Speaker
As such, we offer new insight in how we should go about analyzing a world in which conspiracies occur, in which conspiracy theorizing is rampant, in which the label conspiracy theory is a vital political tool, and in which there is a dire need of dispassionate analysis of conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
00:18:41
Speaker
Now, actually, this is one of these things where they've actually prefigured a complaint which some of us have with some of the more recent literature. So, Kasam Kasam's work on conspiracy theories as right-wing propaganda
00:18:58
Speaker
has this kind of lingering functionalism. He won't say, look, we don't want to worry about the content of conspiracy theories. We want to worry about what function do they play in society. His argument is their function is to spread alt-right, right-wing anti-Semitic political propaganda. One of the standard complaints there is that taking a functionalist analysis of these things is incredibly reductive. And they're already talking about this back in 2011, prescient.
00:19:28
Speaker
So that brings that initial section to a close and leads on to the next one called conspiracy theories as mischievous theories. Mischievous in brackets. So they define theory in a fairly conventional way and define conspiracy as
00:19:45
Speaker
activities that are planned or carried out in secret by at least two political actors. Usually the term conspiracy denotes activities that are illegal or at least controversial and therefore need to be hidden from public scrutiny. And they do point out that in this paper they are only interested in political conspiracies and political conspiracy theories. Yeah, and this is an argument I've had which is
00:20:08
Speaker
I mean, so I have a rather broad-brush approach towards conspiracy and conspiracy theories, given that I take it that surprise parties are examples of conspiracies, and if you theorise about someone holding a surprise party, you are theorising about a conspiracy, you're engaging a conspiracy theorising, you are generating a conspiracy theory. But I also think it's fair to go, well, look,
00:20:30
Speaker
There are certain conspiracies that we take to be more salient, more pressing, more personant. And so it's understandable that many scholars restrict their analysis to the political ones, which as Charles Picton would say, conspiracies of pith and moment.
00:20:48
Speaker
And to be clear, they're not saying that only political conspiracy theories are conspiracy theories, they're just saying that of all of them, that it's only this group that you're interested in. We're focusing on a subset here for the purposes of this analysis. So having defined it in that way, they say, for many observers, the basic definitions outlined above are unsatisfactory because they do not reveal anything about the theory's truth values and their perceived low performance in this regard.
00:21:14
Speaker
Aiming to account for this poor performance, several philosophers have tried to isolate the epistemological deficiencies of conspiracy theories and starts going into the very earliest sort of papers by philosophers on conspiracy theories. So they talk about Brian, who they say argues that the negative status of conspiracy theories is deserved.
00:21:33
Speaker
That's some conspiracy theories. They're wrong here. It's only some conspiracy theories. The mature unwarranted conspiracy theories. Yes, we'll get more into that in a minute. They talk about errant data and how he treats it and what they think about that. They talk about Steve Clark and the fundamental attribution era, which we've looked at that paper as well. And they basically find fault with both of what they say, or at least with both of what they say, Brian and Steve say.
00:21:59
Speaker
Yes, because, I mean, you should point out, by this point in time, Steve Clark has kind of given up on the FAA approach. So having written about the fundamental attribution error in the David Cody book, which is out by this particular point, it's going, well, actually, maybe that wasn't the right way to approach it. I understand the criticisms of this particular move.
00:22:22
Speaker
So the authors of this paper say that those two philosophers start with the conclusion that conspiracy theories are likely to be false, and then work their way backward to see if epistemological differences can be found between false conspiracy theories and true official accounts. This strategy has little value if we acknowledge that some theories of conspiracy are true. And I have to say, reading through those earliest papers on conspiracy theories, that did kind of seem to be
00:22:48
Speaker
the tech, there did seem to be a lot of, OK, we know conspiracy theories are silly, so let's see if we can prove why, which quickly became, well, OK, not all of them are silly, but some of them are. So can we identify the ones that we are safe to say silly and kind of went from there? But they do. Yeah, they talk about Brian quoting his earliest paper.
00:23:07
Speaker
They save Brian, from his point of view, conspiracy theories should be considered unwarranted as a category, whereas if we go and look at conspiracy theories from 1999, Brian says in the conclusion, for Hume, miracles are by definition explanations that are never warranted in believing,
00:23:27
Speaker
If my analysis is correct, however, we cannot say the same thing about conspiracy theories. They are not by definition unwarranted. Yes, so that's...
Defining and Labeling Conspiracy Theories
00:23:38
Speaker
we'll be coming back to that. At the time, they basically... I mean, essentially they seem to get Brian wrong, but pretty much everyone is getting Brian wrong. Yeah, I got Brian wrong.
00:23:47
Speaker
Which, and to be fair to all involved, is because Brian could have been a little clearer in setting things out, and tended to jump between talking about unwarranted conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories in general. But anyway, once you get down to it... Time is sorting out language, terminology, etcetera, etcetera. Exactly, yes.
00:24:09
Speaker
But no, so in this paper they say, although there are many examples of fantastical conspiracy theories that contain little evidence of real conspiracies, high-profile historical examples of conspiratorial behaviour underline that the wholesale dismissal of anything labeled a conspiracy theory is equally out of touch with reality. I mean, it's the same old conspiracies occur, because there's no denying the fact that history's full of the damn things.
00:24:31
Speaker
So they go on to look at David Cody and his definition of conspiracy theory, which as you'll recall, he makes him the idea that a conspiracy theory is by definition opposed to an official theory. Which is a position that Curtis Hagen also has.
00:24:46
Speaker
But once again, these are not pejorative definitions. So they're non-pejorative. They're simply saying, look, what is labeled as a conspiracy theory? As a theory which is counter to some official theory, which involves a conspiracy. Nothing about David or Curtis's definition says these theories are bad or unwarranted. It's a function of them being called a conspiracy theory. They are tilting against an official theory of some kind.
00:25:15
Speaker
Now, they kind of like this addition to the definition. They say, this is a valuable definitional addition for two reasons. First, because conspiracies are by definition secretive and concocted by powerful but not all powerful actors who are often able to significantly alter political realities and influence official accounts.
00:25:34
Speaker
Second, because it illuminates the political field in which conspiracy theories are up against their official counterparts whose credibility is primarily derived from the social status and institutionalized power that the holders of these accounts possess. It clarifies why many conspiracy theories have such a hard time being taken seriously even if they have substantial data at their disposal.
00:25:56
Speaker
Now, having said that, they do acknowledge that there is a problem in restricting the definition to only theories that oppose the official narrative. They go on to say, in doing so, it forecloses the possibility to analyze how theories of conspiracy differently mesh with fields of power. It also fixes the official, which is problematic in two distinct ways. First, because what counts as official today may not be official tomorrow. And second, because there may be competing notions of what counts as official.
00:26:25
Speaker
Which is an interesting point. Yeah, and it's a point which those of us who are against the qualification that we should define conspiracy theories as being contrary to some official theory. Yes, I mean, what do we mean by official here? Who's actually credentialing the authorities that make these particular claims?
00:26:50
Speaker
it just seems to add in a layer of complication and also it has the problem of what to do about theories which appear to be conspiracy theories which are put forward by officials I mean surely we all want to say the invasion of Iraq looked for those weapons of mass destruction that was a conspiracy theory but it was the official theory of the time and it gets you into a weird kind of metaphysical conundrum of what do you mean
00:27:18
Speaker
These theories go in and out of the official versus conspiracy theory category, depending on what appears to be the whims of the officials or the population. I just don't think it's a tenable distinction. No. So, they end this section, which frankly wouldn't have been out of place in any philosophical paper, I think. A good bit of definition.
00:27:41
Speaker
They finish by saying, to recapitulate, the truth value of conspiracy theories cannot convincingly be assessed from a purely epistemological perspective, while assumptions about the subaltern status of conspiracy theorising limit our understanding of the power dimension involved. Analytic attention should therefore focus on the practice of labelling, an aspect that has received surprisingly little attention.
00:28:02
Speaker
In order to advance, however, we first need to have a clearer picture of the use value that conspiracy theories offer to different actors, their creators, consumers, and adversaries. This entails discussing the various scales of theorizing and the contexts in which this theorizing occurs. Which leads us into the next section, the potency of conspiracy theorizing.
00:28:20
Speaker
Ah, this is where they go to sell us some pills? Something like that. I think, yeah, this is where we come back to Brian. They start with the view that the philosophers that they had mentioned in the previous sections, quote, focus on the presumed illogical characteristics of conspiracy theories, which as we say, certainly in Brian's paper, he was looking at the illogical characteristics of a subset of conspiracy theories, the ones that he thought were unwarranted. So it seems like they got a little bit wrong.
00:28:47
Speaker
I don't know, how excusable is that in 2011, do you think?
00:28:51
Speaker
Well, I mean, given that I was getting Brian wrong in 2014, very excuseful indeed. Well, there we go. That is my argument there. If I got him wrong three years later, then ipsofactor, it's right for them to get it wrong three years earlier. That's how time works. That is exactly how time works. So referring back to Brian and David Cody's words. So I'll interject here. So in many respects, given that they cite Lee, and I was citing Lee,
00:29:20
Speaker
The origin story of Brian getting it wrong, as in Brian having the wrong view. I think it's very much Lee Basham's interpretation of Brian's work being so influential in the early literature. So if you read Keeley and then you read Basham's commentary on Keeley and you think, oh, you know, Lee's largely right about some of the details here, you end up with a picture of Brian's work.
00:29:48
Speaker
which looks pretty bad. It's just that when you go back to Brian's work you go, oh, maybe Lee and Lee's successors, including myself, we should have actually gone back and double checked what Brian actually wrote.
00:30:04
Speaker
But here they are talking specifically about Brian and also about David Coady, and of the two of them they say,
00:30:27
Speaker
And I currently... David Coady did say stuff along those lines, didn't he? He talked about locating them in a bit of a context and it seemed to have a problem with the fact that contexts can change over time or over location. So yes, David's very keen on the idea that conspiracy theory is essentially the modern equivalent of heresy and the term conspiracy theorist is the modern equivalent of calling someone a witch.
00:30:53
Speaker
which has contextual cues, it's a lot worse to be a heretic and a witch a hundred years ago than it is to be a heretic and a witch today. And I mean David wasn't writing about this with the current kind of
00:31:08
Speaker
heterodoxy which is so popular amongst the alt-right online these days but these days being a heretic online shows that you're a very sensible person indeed tilting against the woke that's that's the real forward thinking progressive position we're meant to have apparently something i'm trying to make sense of how this works and no one can no no but um having talked about the philosophers they then start to get properly anthropological
00:31:38
Speaker
They say even though no extensive political geographical mapping of conspiracy theorising has been carried out, fragmentary ethnographic evidence suggests that the intensity of conspiracy theorising correlates with the organisational features of societies. Conspiracy theorising flourishes in situations of societal distress produced by conflict or political transformations.
00:31:57
Speaker
And when there is a palpable discrepancy between political rhetoric and experienced social reality, see for example Sanders and West's 2003 valuable suggestion that transparency rhetoric may actually trigger conspiracy theorizing. So that starts to go over my head a little bit, but then they start referring to some concrete examples. In particular, they talk a bit about a sort of post-collapse Soviet Union. They talk about Algeria in the 90s when a civil war was going on there.
00:32:26
Speaker
And they use these examples to basically just show that conspiracy theories flourish in uncertain times or in cases where people have no faith or trust in the government of the time. And then
Anthropology's Role in Understanding Conspiracy Theories
00:32:37
Speaker
having gone through, I'm sort of glossing over a few pages there, but having gone through those examples, they then refer to Lee Basham and in particular his question of how conspired our society is.
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, which is a crucial question. If you're going to work out the legitimacy of conspiracy theorising at a given time or in a given place, then you need to have a discussion about, well, how conspired do you think
00:33:06
Speaker
your time or place is, because the more conspired you think your society is, the more reasonable it is to start thinking, well, conspiracies may well be rife, whilst you might go, well, you live in an era where conspiracies never occur. In that kind of situation, a conspiracy could still occur, but you might go, it's all you have to
00:33:30
Speaker
There's a high burden to be able to then go, yeah, but I need to take this one seriously. So looking at this question, they say, at this point, it's useful to highlight that conspiracy theorising addresses conspiratorial behaviour at vastly different scales. And they talk about the fact that not all conspiracy theories are created equal. They talk about the idea of sort of petty or everyday conspiracy theories. Still political ones, though, they're talking about.
00:33:57
Speaker
which either contradicts or maybe is a refinement of what they'd said earlier, if you recall back in that earlier section they talked about conspiracy theories being conducted by powerful but not all powerful actors who are often able to significantly alter political realities and influence official accounts and now they're saying but also
00:34:15
Speaker
conspiracy theories can just be fairly minor little things that might happen in the political sphere. And then, of course, they compare that to the other end of the scale, which is your worldwide conspiracy theories, your theory, you know, the Nazis theories about Jews running the world. Not just the Nazis, but various anti-Semitic theories about Jews running the world, about Freemasons running the world, about the UN running the world, all that sort of stuff.
00:34:37
Speaker
And they say that in this paper they find the most interesting conspiracy theories are somewhere in between the two. They call them conspiracies which supersede the petty without extrapolating suspicions to a global scale, and they call these operational conspiracies, giving more examples of the such from the post-fall Soviet Union.
00:34:58
Speaker
Although there'll be lots of Soviet Union examples you could also lean on as well. Well, yes, yes, exactly. So they refer to a bunch of anthropologists who've talked about conspiracy theories, and they say that when anthropologists have talked about them in the past, they tend not to address whether or not conspiracy theories are true. They don't talk about whether or not they are or how you might determine whether or not they are. They just sort of talk about their significance
00:35:26
Speaker
within a society or a context. They're less concerned about the content, they're more concerned about the form. And again, they give comparisons with, I mentioned the occult before here, they talk about witchcraft, as you said. Again, sort of saying, they're just comparing it with how, what it does, I guess, within a society.
00:36:06
Speaker
They also say that other anthropologists, quote, only pay attention to those conspiracy theories that were constructed by the relative powerless and were already labeled conspiracy theories precisely because they seem fantastical and irrational. But as we argued above, conspiracy theories should not be seen as a category in and of itself. After all, conspiracy theories start their trajectory just like other theories, and only later do they become labeled as conspiracy theories.
00:36:15
Speaker
And they say of this,
00:36:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's a better way to phrase that using their own languages. After all, theories about conspiracies start their trajectory, just like other theories, and only later do they become labeled as conspiracy theories. Yeah. But then again, that's a, you might also go, yeah, but it's also a bit arch.
00:36:51
Speaker
Yeah, well, we'll see. I suppose we get into it. Most academic writing is a bit harsh. Well, yeah, I guess there's a bit of that as well, yes. So they think that contextualizing conspiracy theories might help with this problem. So they round out this section by saying, it is only through such a dynamic approach, which emphasizes the social interactions in which the status of theories is defined, that we can make inferences about truth and use value in ways that overcome the functionalist biases detected above.
00:37:19
Speaker
which leads them into the next section, Travelling Theories and the Power of Labelling. Good album, bye.
00:37:26
Speaker
I want to call him Wilbur Orson. The Travelling Wilburys? Yes. What's his name? Roy Orbison. Not Wilbur? Not Wilbur Orson, no. It's a shame really. It's a much better name. I think we should petition the world government to rename Roy Orbison to Wilbur Orson. I think that's got some legs, that plan.
00:37:49
Speaker
So this section, they start by looking at the competing theories of who was behind 9-11. This sort of popped up immediately. They give the three alternatives which kind of went around that Al Qaeda was behind the 9-11 attacks, that the attacks were an inside job and the US government was behind it, and then the theory that it was Al Qaeda working with Saddam Hussein, which is a theory that got advanced by some elements within the government.
00:38:14
Speaker
And by some elements in the government, a major problem in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now, they say that these were theories that were advanced within the first days of the attack. And I don't know, I mean, I guess some people must have straight away said, oh, it was probably a false flag by the US government because there are some people who just had an innate distrust of the government. I mean, as we've seen, it kind of took a few years for the inside job to take off.
00:38:40
Speaker
This bit is a little bit a historic given what we know about the development of 9-11 conspiracy theories. So yes, there would have been people who said it's a false flag almost immediately. But the mainstream 9-11 inside job theories really start to appear years afterwards. And the US itself is actually not particularly quick
00:39:05
Speaker
to do the Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein thing. The initial it's Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein hypotheses are largely poo-pooed by the public who are going, well, that makes no sense. They're actually enemies. They're not friends. They're not going to be working together. It actually takes a while for the US to kind of trample people and force them to go, well, look, it's going to be these two not brothers in arms fighting together at last.
00:39:33
Speaker
So, yeah, they're overstating their case by saying within the first days of the attack. And I mean, given their writing in 2011, and assuming given publication may have
00:39:48
Speaker
written the paper in 2009, went through peer review in 2010. It's still several years after the fact. They could have simply said within the first few months or years, but I guess they wanted to go with something slightly more salacious. Yes, they sort of wanted to put forward the idea that
00:40:05
Speaker
These theories all pop up and as they say, in the first instance these were all unsubstantiated speculations as no evidence had been brought forward yet. That's true. Nevertheless, right from the start it was predictable in which direction each of those theories would travel. And I guess that's also true as well. In that no matter what you think about Bush's cabinet and how members of it were involved in the project for a new American century,
00:40:35
Speaker
most political commentators are going well this is going to be bad for the Middle East because those are hawks in the Bush White House and any excuse to get into a land war they're going to take yes but so in this space they say you know you had those three theories al-qaeda
00:40:54
Speaker
inside job, Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Only one of those three was likely to be labelled a conspiracy theory. I wonder which one there was. Only history could tell. So they say the reasons for these different trajectories can be found in the political clout that the different theories could attract and in the ways in which the theories resonated with popular ideas about the national and international political landscape.
00:41:19
Speaker
The trajectory of a theory depends on its location in a given field of power as well as on the strength of its claim to truth. The various ways in which theories of conspiracy are perceived as situated along two axes, the truth axis and the power axis, can be displayed through a heuristic diagram.
00:41:35
Speaker
Which we will now draw on screen. So Josh is going to use his psychic projection powers to put it in. Can you just describe the diagram as I'm drawing it? It's a fairly simple diagram. You've got two axes, vertical and a horizontal. They label the vertical one as power, the horizontal one as truth. And the point of the diagram is just to illustrate the fact that
00:42:02
Speaker
And is there an X in the middle saying you are here? Unfortunately, there is not. There are some pluses and minuses there. So they essentially want to, they show that you have a theory which can move in different directions but towards a positive truth or negative truth, I guess, truth or absence of truth. And they point out that depending on the power of the people putting these things across,
00:42:28
Speaker
is as to whether or not a theory goes from, well actually let's put their words to it, they talk about things at best those put forward by people in power start at as contested facts or they might just be thought of as facts right from the start
00:42:48
Speaker
And then they'll either go from a contested fact to a fact, if it happens to be proven true, or to a mistake, if they happen to be disproved. However, they'll then say that if you go down the power axis, theories put forward by people with less power, they tend to start as conspiracy theories and finish as conspiracy theories, no matter
00:43:12
Speaker
no matter where the truth happens to go. And they refer at this point to a 9-11 truth of David Griffin, whose works we've mentioned at various points. A philosopher of religion. Previous episodes. David Ray Griffin. And they point about the fact that his theories will never not be conspiracy theories, no matter how many books he publishes on the subject, no matter how much data he puts forward.
00:43:38
Speaker
They say as long as Griffin and his associates do not have the political clout to shed the conspiracy theory label that has been glued to them, the defenders of the official conspiracy theory will hardly feel pressured to answer challenges to their account.
00:43:51
Speaker
Now I noted, reading through this, you would put a note there pointing out that it isn't just powerful governmental figures who put forward the official theory. There are plenty of normal people, plenty of civilians outside the government who have devoted a lot of time and have presented a lot of evidence and data debunking the debunking, supporting the official act and arguing against
00:44:16
Speaker
these conspiracy theory narratives so that doesn't seem quite as clear-cut as well if you don't have power you're always going to be a conspiracy theorist yeah I mean there are it's an interesting kind of intersection of power and rationality and that yes it is the case
00:44:34
Speaker
that if people in positions of power are resolute in labeling your view as a conspiracy theory, you have virtually nothing that you can do to stop that label from applying to your work. So you can have insincere people go, well, that's just a conspiracy theory. But also,
00:44:57
Speaker
People without power may well go around labeling your view as a conspiracy theory and then back that up with reasons and arguments to go look at one of those pejorative conspiracy theories. It has the features of being a bad theory. And indeed you might get a situation where the people in the position of power who initially labeled your view as a conspiracy theory insincerely and that they wanted to make
00:45:25
Speaker
a view they couldn't fight or didn't have time to fight disappear. You may well then find that with time the public take on that role and they do it on a rational basis. They're not just applying the label as applied by the powerful, they're finding reasons to go actually really is a conspiracy theory. Here's five reasons why David Ray Griffin is wrong about X, Y and Z.
00:45:50
Speaker
But they want to say in this paper that only if subaltern theorists are able to claim truth, which demands a vertical shift along the power axis, can their theory status be altered? And they then give an example of what they're talking about in the Iran-Contra affair, where basically they want to say that it was written off
00:46:10
Speaker
People in power wrote off the stuff as a conspiracy theory, but then eventually other people in power started taking it seriously, and at that point it then became a real thing, as they put it.
00:46:28
Speaker
First, we saw that power differentials between the defenders and challengers of the official story created an uneven playing field that allowed members of the Reagan administration to influence and steer the path of investigations. I saw a point out, Josh, you said an uneven playing field rather than uneven. And I actually quite like that it being an uneven playing field. I'm pretty sure it was quite an evil playing field in this context.
00:46:52
Speaker
Nevertheless, because both White House officials and Congress members enjoy a high political standing, the challenges of the official account could not be accused of promoting a conspiracy theory. Finally, their ability to assert and substantiate truth claims through legal proceedings made it possible to transform conspiracy evidence into fact.
00:47:10
Speaker
Now, there's an interesting analogy here, and this is a very hypothetical situation, because at the moment, in the US, we've got this extreme polarization between people who are mostly left-wing, Democrat-aligned, who are going President Trump very definitely tried to subvert an election and engaged in a criminal conspiracy to do it. And Republicans go, oh no, it's this free speech man. He's allowed to question.
00:47:37
Speaker
I mean, you just try to criminalise free speech. So at the moment, Republicans are accusing Democrats of engaging in a conspiracy theory about Trump. Democrats are accusing Republicans of believing a conspiracy theory being promoted by Trump. And you can imagine a situation.
00:47:55
Speaker
where a candidate who isn't Trump suddenly gains prominence on the national stage in the build-up to the next election, and then Republicans do that 1984 thing of we've always been at war with Oceania, and they go, of course Donald Trump is promoting a conspiracy theory. You can imagine that
00:48:16
Speaker
Given a change in what I call the political reality, people might go, oh, yeah, no, no, that definitely is a conspiracy theory and just move the category.
The Power Dynamics in Labeling Theories
00:48:27
Speaker
I mean, that's always a thing we saw in the previous... There's always that contrast between the primaries and then the election, where in the primaries, all the candidates, especially you saw that in the Republican ones, with Trump, you had all the... In the original primaries, you'd have all Trump's opponents, Trump's rivals, I guess,
00:48:46
Speaker
for the candidacy, talking about what a horrible human being Trump is, and how completely unsuitable. And then as soon as he gets the candidate, as soon as he becomes the presidential candidate, they're all immediately, oh, he's a great man, and once he wins, he's our president, he's the best president we've ever had.
00:49:04
Speaker
Previously, Donald Trump accuses Ted Cruz's dad of being in the conspiracy to kill JFK. As soon as Trump becomes the nominee and then the president, Ted Cruz loves the man who accuses his dad of being involved in the conspiracy to kill one of America's most beloved presidents.
00:49:25
Speaker
Yes, no, so I can see the political winds changing in the manner that you suggest. So in this bit, they finish off by giving another example of looking at the McCain versus Obama election, which was what, 2008, wasn't it?
00:49:44
Speaker
Back when we thought America was going to pull through and become sensible again. So they talk about how John McCain and Sarah Palin spread what were basically conspiracy theories about Obama. There were quotes about him peeling around with terrorists or something.
00:50:02
Speaker
and the whole idea that he's a secret Muslim and stuff like that. And there were some coded references to his parentage, calling out the fact that he had spent a lot of time with liberal professors back in the day, some of which he liked to smoke the doobie.
00:50:18
Speaker
But as they say, Obama, nobody referred to those as conspiracy theories. Obama tended to just laugh them off most of the time, but nobody was referring to anything as conspiracy theory. And the idea that they're putting forward in this paper, at least, is because they were both sort of high power individuals. So neither
00:50:40
Speaker
They're going to call the other a conspiracy theorist as they put it. The label conspiracy theory will only stick if the power differentials are large enough and they're claiming that in that case there wasn't a significant power differential. But all of this leads us to their conclusion. The conclusion section is called conspiracy truth in fields of power and it's short enough that I'm going to read the whole thing out.
00:51:02
Speaker
It says conspiracy theories have a stigma attached to them that on the face of it seems well deserved but the stigma is assigned to a constructed rather than a natural object because there are no persistent epistemological differences between conspiracy theories and other theories arguing that the stigma is deserved as an empty statement.
00:51:21
Speaker
We have demonstrated that attention should focus instead on the contextualised trajectories of theories of conspiracy, as these illuminate both the labelling of specific theories and the fields of power through which they travel. Theories of conspiracy that are communicated by the powerful will never be labelled conspiracy theories, even if they are demonstrably false, whereas theories that are expressed by the relatively powerless will only really succeed in shedding the negative associations of the label.
00:51:45
Speaker
The key point is that the negative connotation of conspiracy theory adds constraints and competitions for truth with official accounts.
00:51:53
Speaker
As suggested, the conspiracy theory label is simultaneously a tool for those in control and an obstacle for those challenging the political status quo. This Janus-faced potential of ideational power manifest in the case of conspiracy theories can be compared to other systems of ideas. A century and a half ago, Marx hinted at some of the same issues in his critique of religion. Marx compared religion to the sigh of the oppressed creature without dismissing entirely the radical potential of religion.
00:52:20
Speaker
Similarly, conspiracy theorising can be seen as a means to render an inexplicable world comprehensible, but it may also address and thereby challenge real conspiracies. We suggest that it is important that anthropologists, and social scientists more generally, focus not only on the sense-making value of conspiracy theorising, but take serious the truth claims and assess these while paying attention to the distorting effects of the fields of power through which theories travel.
00:52:45
Speaker
If, for Marx, religion was a tool for oppression because the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch of the ruling ideas, then we see the inversion of this principle in the case of conspiracy theorising. The conspiracy theory label is a tool for oppression because its irrational connotations will push subaltern theories that allege an official conspiracy to the margins where it easily becomes the subject of ridicule.
00:53:07
Speaker
There are no compelling reasons for why we should embrace conspiracy theorising, just as there are no good reasons to dismiss them out of hand.
Conclusion: Analyzing Labels in Context
00:53:14
Speaker
As with other theories, we need to be cautious, but we should be especially cautious when political theories are dismissed as conspiracy theorising.
00:53:21
Speaker
Oh, man, brother. Yes, I can see why you liked this paper. It does jibe with your views quite nicely. Yeah, and I do cite it a lot. So, yeah, I mean, that was a fun read, really, as far as these papers go. It only seemed to get sort of blatantly anthropological in the middle there when they started talking about the sort of studies and methodologies.
00:53:47
Speaker
And yet also quite critical of anthropological perspectives on conspiracy theory. It almost reads like philosophers engaging in anthropology. Almost. Almost. But yes, I mean, which, depending on your view, is either
00:54:05
Speaker
praise or an insult. Well, I don't know. Yes, you can make up your own mind, dear. But no, I thought this was a good paper and possibly because it agrees with all of your stuff, which we've been going through and it's
00:54:21
Speaker
interesting to see it back in 2011, these things, you know, as they said at the end, no compelling reasons why we should embrace them or dismiss them. And that idea that coming up, that there is a danger in the idea that things can be written off by being labeled as a conspiracy theory by the powerful, which is, yes, a very definite concern. So yes, I approve, rubber stamp.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yes, let's put it onto the mantelpiece and appreciate it for the genius piece that it is. And that's the end of this particular episode. But it's not the end of tonight's recording session because we have a bonus episode and given that Patreon is no longer causing problems, this will be once again behind the Patreon paywall. So if you want to find out about the following news stories, you'll need to give us at least a dollar a month or more
00:55:15
Speaker
And then you can have all of the Patreon goodness we provide, which is one additional episode per week, and sometimes a few other things along the sides, but only sometimes. Josh, what are we talking about this week? Well, obviously a bit more Trump, because it's all going down at the moment. Better talk about the good old Patriot front. I don't think you should say good or old in front of Patriot front. But I'm doing it sarcastically.
00:55:43
Speaker
That means I mean the opposite. But our US listeners don't understand Australasian ways of trying to do that kind of thing. Anyway, we'll also see what that wacky Elon Musk is up to.
00:56:00
Speaker
And it seems like we're going to say things possibly slightly negative things. There's been some revelations about US President Richard Nixon that do paint him in a bit of a bad, bad stuff. I'm shocked, but we'll just have to listen out. It sounds like revisionist history to me, but let's see what the story says.
00:56:20
Speaker
That is the end of this episode. If you're not a patron and you've just listened this far, well, good for you. Thank you very much for being our listeners. And if you are a patron, stay tuned for the bonus yet. But for now, I think I'm just going to say goodbye. So I will. Goodbye. Goodbye. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself.
00:56:44
Speaker
Associate Professor, M.R.X.Denters. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, nothing is real. Everything is permitted, but conditions apply.