Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast's guide to the conspiracy. We don't normally start these episodes with me addressing the audience directly, but we had a bit of a snafu with the recording this week. Namely, it turns out that when it came to editing my side of the audio stream, something had gone wrong with my mic and the sound is a little bit scary.
Speaker: UF as you will hear I have done some post -processing to try and make it sound not as bad as it sounded on original recording But unfortunately, there's only so much remastering someone who knows nothing about audio engineering can do So we're just going to have to cope and by we I mean you're just going to have to cope enjoy the show
Speaker: Hello there, my good fellow. I would like to buy some shoes. Very good, comrade. We have many shoes in the shoe store. Please try these on. Hold on, you don't even know what kind of shoes I want. They might be casual. They might be work related. I think you'll find these shoes suitable for when the duck flies out of the summer, the birch tree will blossom. I'm sorry? Oh.
Speaker: Maybe when alligators roam, the empire will fall. So which empire? What, alligators? Oh, oh, you're an actual customer. So sorry. Can I get some identification, please? Identification? Yes, a passport, a quick card, maybe a copy of your mortgage contract. My mortgage contract? Oh yes, I want to make sure you're able to pay for these shoes.
Speaker: Okay, but why do you need my passport? Oh, so we can ensure all the shoes fit. Obviously, comrade. Obviously. Well, no, not obviously at all. All your biometric data will be very useful in finishing... in furnishing you with...
Speaker: Sorry, what kind of source is this again? A shoe store. Ah yes, all your biometric data will be useful in fishing you with shoes. Let my comrade, Yigor, take his documents to the back room for a quick perusal. Have you been to Sumatra, comrade? No. You will enjoy it there. Ah, and here is Yigor with your identification papers. Congratulations, comrade, on your new citizenship. And these fine ami boots. Perfect for marching. Ah, now comrade, you've been served. Good day.
Speaker: Well, that was strange. I guess to make sense of it, you'll have to listen to the patron bonus episode. Mmm, enticing. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to the podcast as Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China, it's Associate Professor of Philosophy and the only one of us who actually exists, Dr. M, are extended. I dispute that. Ah, I thought you liked a bit of solipsism. No, no, no. See, you just made a conjunction and I'm denying one of the conjuncts. So I'm disputing the conjunction, but I'm not necessarily disputing what the conjunct that you are claiming. I'm disputing.
Speaker: conjunction. Is this the dark crystal reference? I've lost. You mean you have had the COVID? Josh, how are you recovering from the COVID -19, the novel coronavirus, the pandemic virus, also known as the threat that does not exist?
Speaker: It's true. I've been riding the Rona. I've been doing the Covid two -step. I've been eating bat stuff. I don't know, whatever you feel is important. You know, I've had Covids. I'm eating bat man, bat woman, bat girl, bat mite, bat horse.
Speaker: bat car, bat mobile, bat copter, bat skyscraper, bat computer, bat pills, bat shark repellent. I'm literally Robert Pattinson. One of the side effects, interestingly. That's Robert Pattinson. It should be now. Yeah, it's
Speaker: I've had all my vaccines and my booster shots, so I did not get hit hard. Most people I know who've had it, the whole, it's just a bad head cold. Yes, it is just a bad head cold. Bad head cold suck.
Speaker: For two or three days I was just absolutely wretched and now I'm in the period which I'm told from other people who've had it last about a couple of weeks where I'm just feeling a little bit run down, still a tiny occasional cough, occasional headache, but otherwise I'm basically fine. My kids, my whole household got it. My kids had the sniffles for a day. That was it. Other than that they've just
Speaker: had no symptoms whatsoever. So yes, all fine in our household, but given the choice, I would have rather not had it. My plan thus far is to not get COVID -19. I'd just rather not have COVID -19, especially, and this is the disturbing part to talk to someone who's just had COVID -19, especially the worry about long COVID.
Speaker: and the neurological effects that long Covid can have, and the idea that some people are going to be suffering with the ill effects of Covid for a very long time, i .e. their lifetime. And I'd just rather not roll those dice. Yes, better not to risk it if you have the choice. I assume because the first of us to get sick
Speaker: I started showing symptoms pretty much the day after we got back from a short holiday in Tauranga in Phakatone. We picked it up somewhere down there. So my advice to you was never travel anywhere, ever. Well, I mean, isn't that the Auckland way? Eh, it can be. I don't know. We like to like to see the country from time to time. Anyway, the point is I've I had COVID. I'm pretty much over it. All is right on Earth and in the heavens, except for
Speaker: all the other people who currently do have it and have bad cases and are in hospital or are dead or what have you. But I'm not among their number. So unless you have something else... Well, no, no, no, hold on. You said I'm the only member of the podcast who exists, which in case you are dead.
Speaker: Oh, I did. It didn't... Decades I don't exist. I could be a figment of your imagination and therefore never alive in the first place. Josh, why would I imagine you of all people? Why would I imagine you? I don't know. I assume you imagined everybody else. You're probably getting bored. Needed a bit of variety. Josh!
Speaker: You are the bland white man of the podcast. You're not variety. You are not the diversity candidate. You're not a national MP or someone who wants to be a national MP who's put forward by, as Chris Luxon, the leader of the national party, is saying, oh, this guy's a finance degree. He's a diversity candidate for national. Yeah, it was, I didn't follow that. Anyway, enough local politics. Chris Luxon doesn't have any idea of what he's doing at the best of times. Doesn't seem that way, no.
Speaker: No. Giant son. Yes. The man bores me to the extent that I don't wish to talk about him any longer. I would like to talk about a paper, because it's an episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. What? We have another Curtis Hagen paper. Ah, except that we don't have another Curtis Hagen paper. We hate Curtis. So, Hagen paper, because his last name rhymes with Reagan.
Speaker: As I discovered, because as a conference organizer, I did the good thing of actually asking people, can I have a pronunciation guide for your names? And Cursors got in contact saying, well, you know, it's Hagen as in Rhymes with Reagan, and I'm going,
Speaker: I happen to know you listen to the podcast, so you've been suffering through us mispronouncing your name for quite some time. So Curtis, I apologize for the mispronunciation of your name on previous episodes. Unfortunately, I cannot apologize for Josh's attitude in this episode, because as usual, your paper seems to have rubbed Josh entirely the wrong way.
Speaker: I don't know how to say that, but maybe play a chime before we give away too many spoilers and then we can actually start discussing the paper in earnest.
Speaker: So yes, first things first, the paper we're going to be talking about today is called Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style. Do conspiracy theories posit implausibly vast and evil conspiracies? By Curtis Hagen. Now I should point out that normally, any kind of title in a newsprint which ends with a question mark, the answer is always no. The health crisis is going to collapse in the next five days.
Speaker: No. Is Hitler coming back from the dead? No. So it has an abstract. I think I'm on abstract duties this week, so I would do it. It reads, in the social science literature, conspiracy theories are commonly characterized as theories positing the vast network of evil and preternaturally effective conspirators, and they are often treated either explicitly or implicitly as dubious on this basis.
Speaker: This characterization is based on Richard Hofstadter's famous account of the paranoid style. However, many significant conspiracy theories do not have any of the relevant qualities. Thus, the social science literature provides a distorted account of the general category, conspiracy theory, conflating it with a subset of that category that encourages unfairly negative evaluations of conspiracy theories. Generally, when evaluating theories, one should focus on the most plausible versions. The merit of a theory is independent of the existence of less plausible versions of it.
Speaker: By ignoring this and glossing over important distinctions, many academics, especially in the social sciences, have misclassified many conspiracy theories, and in doing so, have contributed to an epistemically unfair depiction of them. Further, even theories that genuinely fit the description of the paranoid style cannot be completely dismissed on that basis. All conspiracy theories ought to be judged on the totality of their individual merits.
Speaker: So straight off the bat, good bit of particularism, I approve. But I think, before we get into this, I think I need to ask you for a bit of background on the other social sciences, because obviously I've only ever read
Speaker: the philosophy papers that you've presented to me. This paper seems to be based entirely on the idea that in other social sciences people are commonly, as he says, commonly characterising conspiracy theories in this really unflattering light.
Speaker: In 2017, was that and is that still true? I mean, the answer to this question is, of course, complicated. So in the Josinski 2018 book, Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them, I give a rough taxonomy of the way in which people talk about conspiracy theories in the academic literature. So there are some social psychologists
Speaker: who go so far as to say all conspiracy theories are false and thus there can be no warranted belief in conspiracy theories, these people are mercifully rare in the literature. Most social psychologists and social scientists associated with social psychology
Speaker: will make some kind of claim that conspiracy theories are generally unwarranted or generally irrational to believe and Richard Hofstadter's notion of the paranoid style does come up quite frequently when people talk about the history
Speaker: of the disciplines. Starting with Richard Hofstadter, conspiracy theorists have been put forward as exhibiting a paranoid style, and so there is this kind of latent portrayal of the paranoid style in an awful lot of the social science literature associated with social psychology. So this is a ripe target to look at.
Speaker: Because Hofstadter's name does come up a lot, they don't necessarily mean that people engage with Hofstadter at any large degree. Sometimes Hofstadter is simply a citation for an indication of what people in the literature think.
Speaker: But it's also quite clear that Hofstadter's work is very fundamental to at least some of this work for the way they talk about conspiracy theorists having something akin to, but not exactly like, paranoia. Yeah, so that's sort of what I assumed reading through this. Like my reaction to a lot of this paper
Speaker: is it will say something and I'm like, yeah, obviously, like, doesn't everybody know that? But obviously, no, not everybody knows that. And these are the disciplines that I do not have experience with. I guess that's not true. I mean, right at the start, when we start talking about
Speaker: Hofstadter, I was sort of thinking, I had to quickly check the date, this is a 2017 paper, why are we going back to Hofstadter from 1964? Wasn't Charles Picton already gone through all that in the late 90s? Well, it's in part because all I know is the philosophy. The philosophers are not being read. Also, I should point out there are still people in the year of our Lord, 2022,
Speaker: who will quote Karl Popper as being definitive on conspiracy theories when talking about it from the philosophical perspective, at which point we're going back to the mid -1950s, or 1972, if they're reading more up -to -date volumes of Popper. So there is a tendency to go back to the earliest discussion, and they go, oh, well, X, Z, Y in year blah,
Speaker: So that must be the case. I mean, you do find that when people are citing philosophers in the current literature, they tend to be citing either Brian or Charles, and they're not citing the most recent work, they're citing the earliest work and in part this because there was this tendency in academic writing to find the earliest reference to go, oh, that must indicate what people think now, which when you think about it,
Speaker: isn't a very accurate portrayal of how you'd want people to cite work in your discipline, but it does tend to be a way that we cite work in other disciplines to find the foundational papers and maybe not interrogate whether those foundational papers have been, say, fisked by later authors. At any rate, so this paper starts with an introduction and talks about Hosteta and his paranoid style.
Speaker: points out that Hofstadter himself acknowledges, in his words, there are conspiratorial acts in history and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them. But in particular, he's, it's, well, what always gets sort of about his paranoid style.
Speaker: So expressions in the paranoid style are an all -encompassing, vast or gigantic conspiracy involving pretty naturally effective conspirators of almost transcendent power who are sinister, fiendish and cruel. They are demonic forces or demonic agents engaged in absolute evil.
Speaker: And so this paper goes on to say that citing Hofstadter's famous essay, many social scientists characterize conspiracy theories as having the characteristics mentioned above. And was followed up with a few citations of social scientists are doing exactly that.
Speaker: And Hagen notes that while the above -sighted scholars do not say that conspiracy theories always have the qualities mentioned, they nevertheless leave the impression that these qualities are sufficiently characteristic to adequately serve as the principal probabilities by which conspiracy theories are to be understood and thus evaluated.
Speaker: And so again, so this again, this is like, okay, I'll take your word for it. I'll take Curtis's word for it and I'll take your word for it. But this is the fact because I have not read any of the outside of this discipline. So I'm in no position to contradict it. And so basically the
Speaker: I'm going to be clearing my throat a lot by the way, because I am still just a little bit COVID -y. But basically setting up where things are going from this portrayal of Hofstadter's work, this paper says, although Hofstadter's depiction of a vast conspiracy of Finnish supermen continues to be cited by social scientists as though this somehow provides an authoritative definition of the phrase conspiracy theory, it was never intended to be this.
Speaker: Hosted was not, strictly speaking, discussing conspiracist ideation in general, nor the cluster of ideas we now call conspiracy theories, he was discussing something narrower.
Speaker: I aim to explain that the common characterisation of conspiracy theories in the social sciences, that of belief in a vast evil pressure naturally effective conspiracy, is at least misleading, especially when generalisations regarding the plausibility of conspiracy theories are inferred. Though undoubtedly some conspiracy theorists have such beliefs, these beliefs have not been shown to be characteristic or typical of conspiracy theories, and yet it's unlikely that most people who believe in conspiracy theories hold these views.
Speaker: Now, I have a paper on this, The Problem of Conspiricism, which was published in Ikementa in 2018. It's kind of a pity that we don't cover my papers on conspiracy theory, masterpiece, theatre, because I argue that yes, there is a worry that there are certain conspiracy theorists
Speaker: who have a kind of irrational predisposition to believe in the existence of conspiracies. And sometimes we take this irrational predisposition to believe in kind of godlike or sinister evil, mustachio twilling.
Speaker: Twilling would be making a fabric out of pistachios, which is the idea of making clothing out of the pistachios from other people is a conspiracy theory I am willing to get behind. It's the idea that there are these pistachio twirling villains.
Speaker: And one of the ways we kind of diagnose conspiracism, and as I argue in the problem of conspiracism, this is a legitimate concern to have. Maybe there are people who are predisposed to irrationally believe in the existence of conspiracies, but it's actually not even clear under the accounts of conspiracism made by social scientists
Speaker: that this category of person exists in the way that they take it to exist. And normally when you interrogate a conspiracy thirst and go, why do you believe this thing? It's not just a wild predisposition. There are, there's some degree of reasoning going on as to why they think the conspiracy exists.
Speaker: So it's a problem in the literature that sometimes people talk about the paranoid style, and they talk about the paranoid style as if it were straight paranoia, even though Hoftheater is very, very clear that the paranoid style is not paranoia, and it's also a much narrower thing.
Speaker: than the kind of way that social scientists treat his work now. So Curtis is right to go, look, there's a problem of characterization here. People are taking work and they are fundamentally misunderstanding Hofstede's central point.
Speaker: Yeah, I and I agree completely. I think that that was sort of one of the things that threw me about this paper was reading through this and the implication from this paper is that people actually think this way. They really, they really say all conspiracy theories are like that. It just seems. So as a kind of side point on this, so before the podcast record today, I was filling out a survey for a project which is going to occur at a university in I'd say the EU, but actually technically,
Speaker: the nation state is in the middle of europe but is not a member of the eu which will now go to the oh i mean it's almost as small almost as small and the way that they would carry so they were going over we want your characterization how what do you think of conspiracy theories and misinformation here's a definition if you disagree with the definition explain why and the definition they put forward of conspiracy theory isn't as bad as the kind of
Speaker: pseudohosterian one, but it's all one which bakes in the idea that conspiracy theories are prima facie irrational. And so yes, there are, it turns out, and it's surprising, if you're only immersed in philosophical literature,
Speaker: It turns out there are a lot of people who just assume that basically all conspiracy theories are bad, and they have spent a lot of time carving out exceptions to explain why the theory about a conspiracy that they endorse isn't a conspiracy theory.
Speaker: So in this article Curtis makes a point of saying that when he's going to refer to conspiracy theorists in this article, he isn't doing so in a pejorative sense and quotes Charles Picton to point out that everyone is a conspiracy theorist in one way or another.
Speaker: And so basically the guts of what he says, when determining the best explanation, it's important to formulate the best version of competing hypotheses and then evaluate those. And it really, this whole article is basically just saying, don't commit the straw man fallacy. It's saying that these people are presenting sort of the worst, least defensible definition of a conspiracy theory when to be arguing properly, you should be doing the opposite.
Speaker: But surrounding out the introduction he says, to show that we should adopt a more charitable interpretation of what belief in conspiracy theories entails, I address in turn the following three questions. One, do conspiracy theories imply implausibly vast conspiracies? Two, do conspiracy theories imply preternaturally effective conspirators?
Speaker: And three, do conspiracy theories imply implausibly evil conspirators? The answer in each case will be negative. Which does agree. Once again, if you put a Christian mark in the title, the answer is always no. He says, I then turn the tables and ask whether the official account of 9 -11 has the qualities of the paranoid style and also challenge the view that Western leaders ought to be presumed to be good or benign.
Speaker: So there's a little bit of, we'll see towards the end, there's a little bit of sort of accusation of a double standard here, how the people involved in, in quote unquote conspiracy theories have all these assumptions about them and yet the people involved in the quote unquote official theories often don't get characterised the same way.
Speaker: So this is all a question of portrayal. So Curtis is interested in the way in which generalists portray conspiracy theorists, and he's going to two tables and go, well, actually, we can also portray official theories in the same way. And this is not saying that we're going, the theories are equivalent with respect to content. We're talking about the presentation of the theories instead, and go, well, look,
Speaker: If you're going to have a standard for one, you should have the same standard for the other. It's quite clear we're exceptionally interested in conspiracy theorists, but when people commit the same areas or patterns of reasoning in favor of official theories, we go, well, there's nothing to see here. Doopie doopie doop. It's like Grandpa Simpson walking into a brothel and out of a boiler. It's exactly what it's like.
Speaker: which leads us to the first main section. Do conspiracy theories imply implausibly vast conspiracies? No. Now the answer obviously is no. And so I mean, like I say, this is where I first started to get thrown. I was like, you know, of course they don't. Why would you say they do? But obviously,
Speaker: I'm coming to this from a much more limited perspective. Yeah, I was actually thinking about this before. It's a little bit so people who are theists or at least former
Speaker: is serious when they talk with people who grew up in atheistic households end up going you really don't have any idea about religious world views at all because of course if you grow up in an atheist household why would you have an idea of what religious world views what it's like to have faces and i think the problem for you josh is that i've immersed you in a literature of the philosophical discussion of conspiracy theory where it's lovely
Speaker: And everyone's going, look, we need to address these theories on their merit and have conversations about A, when conspiracy theorists get right and B, when they get it wrong. And now we're talking about a literature which goes, no, they always get it wrong. And it's quite jarring. Yes, I mean, it starts by talking how people will often characterise and often dismissively characterise conspiracy theories as vast.
Speaker: and talk about 9 -11 London bombings, JFK, and just assuming that these conspiracy theories are enormous. And so the paper thing goes on to say, well, obviously that's not quite true. And taking 9 -11 as an example,
Speaker: They say that people claim that 9 -11 conspiracy theories would take on this view, would take thousands and thousands of people to cooperation plotting and executing them.
Speaker: Whereas Curtis says none of this is necessarily true, where has it been authoritatively demonstrated that any of these claims must be so? Many conspiracy theorists have much lower estimates, even for versions that involve controlled demolition. These lower estimates may or may not be justifiable. The point is that many conspiracy theories do not believe in a vast conspiracy, and it's not fair to assert that they are nevertheless committed to such a belief, given their other beliefs, without adequate argumentation.
Speaker: the charge that conspiracy theorists assume a vast conspiracy even in cases like mihop theories about 9 -11 is contestable and is in fact contested by at least some and perhaps most of these conspiracy theorists. Now he goes on to say, further such critics generally make no distinction between a conspiracy alleged to have brought about an event and the conspiracies involved in subsequent cover -ups
Speaker: nor do they acknowledge that many other factors that are not themselves conspiratorial may come into play that may result in large ripple effects emanating from genuinely conspiratorial activities of a relatively modest size. Which here I found myself disagreeing a bit because certainly I think
Speaker: He said we need to distinguish between the conspiracy and then the cover -up of the Conspiratorial Act. But I think certainly, at least when it comes to 9 -11 conspiracy theories, the reason why people assume they're vast is because they assume it would take a vast cover -up. I think there are, I've read people say, yeah, sure. In fact, I'll get to an example in a minute. Sure, a small number of people could have actually been involved in the plotting and the carrying out of the attack.
Speaker: but a vast number of people must have been on and afterwards just because of the enormous number of public and private organisations involved in investigating the attack, all of whom would have had to have kept quiet, you know. And so it sort of seemed to me, especially in these cases,
Speaker: I don't see that the distinction does matter because you can't have the sort of the conspiracy in the cover up a hand in hand. You can't really have one without the other. Now, obviously, that's not going to be true of every conspiracy theory. But in these particular cases, it seemed like saying that
Speaker: you don't need to have a vast conspiracy theory as long as you're only looking at the planning and the execution. That doesn't sound relevant when in order for the full conspiracy, because this is where we're talking about cases where the secrecy condition is that it remains secret forever. And for that to be the case, it seems like then a large number of people would be involved.
Speaker: I mean, I guess Curtis's concern is the kind of brute way in which social scientists talk about 9 -11 ignores fact that there are actually kind of two conspiracies with a standard 9 -11 in such job, hypothesis.
Speaker: There's the conspiracy to bring about the event to ensure that the event occurs. And then there's the continued coverup of the event afterwards. So you can imagine a situation where 9 -11 occurs as an inside job, and then no one's interested in it. So we're going to war with a
Speaker: off with Afghanistan now, and there's no investigation or inquiry into it. So there's no 9 -11 commission. It's simply, this has occurred. It's a terrible event. But because there was an investigation into 9 -11 after the fact, suddenly a new conspiracy has to be formed to, oh, we can't allow the people to know what really happened there. And I agree.
Speaker: this might be a meaningless distinction when we're actually concerned about the conspiracy around 9 -11 because it turns out in the aggregate in the world we live in if 9 -11 won inside a job then presumably the conspiracy of the cover -up is committed by people who committed the conspiracy caused the event in the first place we're not talking about two different conspiratorial groups of oh
Speaker: A conspiracy occurred. We can't allow people to find out about those conspirators. We separate conspirators are going to cover up what the first set of conspirators did as a kind of weird mutual cooperation pact where there's no communication. But I think it is important to note that you can imagine a version of 9 -11.
Speaker: where that's the only conspiracy. And then it got unveiled, which of course is precisely what investigators of 9 -11 want to do. They want to expose the initial cover -up. And now they're concerned. There's an additional cover -up going on to make it hard to get access to that fundamental truth.
Speaker: But yeah, I mean, it might be the kind of point that a philosopher likes to make, but it might actually have no real bearing on any subsequent argument. It's what we might take to be a false distinction, which for many people will turn out to be meaningless. Yes, and I was just reminded of Jason Pargin's older.
Speaker: article on craigslist .com from 2007. You have not mentioned craigslist .com in years. It's basically, it's died to death, that website. All those people, Jason Pajit himself got fired ages ago. But anyway, I'm sure I must have mentioned when we talked about loose change and stuff like that, but he sort of had an article back in 2007 where at one point he says,
Speaker: He basically says, yes, maybe you could keep the plan itself a secret. You know, that would only take a few people, but the coverup would have to be immense and sort of goes through all the different people who investigated and so on and so on. But anyway.
Speaker: This is the classic Michelin web sketch about the covering up of the moon landing. So we have to build the rock, we have to build the rock, because you have to actually launch something so people can actually witness the event. And we're not going to save any money because the catering for this event is going to be gigantic. Yeah, the number of people involved is larger than you would think, just because of
Speaker: ensuring that particular things don't get out. They've been said, this is contentious. I remember having a debate about this with Lee Basham years ago, because in Secrecy and Conspiracy, a paper that I wrote with Marty Orr, another one we won't be reviewing for conspiracy theory, Masterpiece Theatre, we talk about the scale of A9L inside job hypothesis.
Speaker: And we go look, you know, even given the hierarchical nature of a conspiracy could be argued for understanding conspiracies as either being monolithic or diverse in nature. So there's a small set of conspirators for one conspiracy.
Speaker: or whether there's the management of multiple moving parts or sub -conspiracies within the structure. I mean, look, 9 -11, it requires quite a lot of people to, I mean, let's imagine you're blowing up the Twitter hours, you have to hire the demolition experts, you then have to ensure that the people
Speaker: who witnessed the demolition experts doing their work over the weeks they would have been putting the charters into the building. Don't talk. There's ongoing costs to ensure that people don't reveal that there was a series of strange events in the Twin Towers before them.
Speaker: And Lee was going, no, no, no. I mean, I've done back of the envelope calculations. And you need more than, say, a dozen or two dozen people to enact this event. And so it's a contentious thing, because depending on how much effort you think is required to keep something covered up, the numbers are wax and wane.
Speaker: And, of course, given that none of us philosophers are involved in managing groups of people, more than, say, a dozen people in a reading group, we probably had no really good idea as to how big or small an organization needs to be to be effective, because we're philosophers. We sit in armchairs and dream up ideas. Personally. You might not currently do, because you claim that I'm the only person's podcast who exists.
Speaker: I can't remember if I claimed that all the facts are true or false, but whichever one it is, it's one of them. So there are a couple of other points there that can mitigate against this. I mean, this paper does point out the fact that government agencies cover stuff up all the damn time. And the idea that certainly when you're talking about government departments,
Speaker: There are a lot of people there where you don't really need to say anything more than it's in the interests of national security and they'll go along with whatever it is. He also points out the idea that people might sort of go along with the conspiracy and therefore be part of it sort of.
Speaker: because they're afraid of the consequences of opposing it. He cites a doctor who attended to JFK with the implication that this doctor reckoned that JFK's wounds indicated he was shot from the front, not from behind.
Speaker: But in a book years after the fact, he was asked why didn't he come out with that straight away. He basically says he and his colleagues were worried what might happen to them and to their medical careers if they were seen to go against the establishment straight away.
Speaker: So there are a bunch of factors that can possibly inflate the supposed size of a conspiracy theory that aren't necessarily people being, quote unquote, part of the conspiracy.
Speaker: Right at the end I thought it was interesting, he says, interestingly, describing what they take to be a standard definition of a conspiracy theory, Joseph Jusinski and Joseph Parent suggest that such theories involve a small group of powerful persons as the conspirators. Which I was a little bit like, oh, is Joe, is Joe Jusinski, is he one of us or is he one of them? Is he one of these people who knows
Speaker: who makes wild claims about conspiracy theories or is he more measured? So, I mean, Joe does a lot of co -writing. So I think it's fair to say that sometimes there'll be a quote associated with an article or a book or a chapter that Joe's an author on. And you won't be able to infer exactly what Joe's specific thoughts on a subject are.
Speaker: because it's going to be mediated by the other people he's working with. I also think that early Joe Yusinski is much more generalist than latter Joe Yusinski. I got in contact with Joe because I read a draft of a paper that he put online and actually wrote about it on my blog back when we had blogs and people read blogs and Joe got in contact with me
Speaker: and debated with me on how I characterised him and Joe Parent's views, which led to me getting a draft of the book and putting comments in about that. And I do think that Joe has moved on from a more generalist take,
Speaker: back in the day to a more particular one. But of course, Joe's interest has always been how many people actually believe conspiracy theories. And it's like, you know, it is not as many people as you think. And I think Joe's right about that. The polling is quite clear. Conspiracy theories are no more popular than they've ever been. And make their
Speaker: decreasingly popular from about the 1960s. People are overhyping the problem of conspiracy theories because it's a hot topic and it's important to make hot topics look big. Not really as big a problem as people want them to be.
Speaker: Anyway, so this moves on to the next section. Do conspiracy theories imply pretty naturally effective conspirators? No. No, no. So I think these these next two will go through a little bit quicker, because again, it's the same sort of thing stuff, which to me, naive fool that I am appear to be completely obvious. A lot of people. I have the cardigans love for going through ahead now. As well as do I at all times, just regardless of anything that's going on. And that's not a COVID symptom.
Speaker: This is Josh's brain. Yes, one thing that did stick out to me says sophisticated conspiracy theorists do not generally assert or assume this, i .e. that conspiracy theories are the conspirators are pretty naturally effective. While they do assume technically competent agents will be deployed, for example, to pull the trigger, they also assume that things can and do go wrong for the conspirators. They are not able to control everything, in no way approaching almost transcendent power,
Speaker: The conspirators are thought to be limited human beings who put their pants on one leg at a time, as conspiracy theorist Daniel Sheehan likes to say while making this point. I wasn't sure about that. I'm thinking that as Daniel Sheehan likes to do whilst making this point. Look! Actually, accuracy, do you put your pants on one leg at a time? I often will just sit on the bed, put my legs through both legs of the pants at the same time.
Speaker: Depends on the pants a little bit, I think. That is true. But I do think a generalism about how people put pants on is almost as dangerous as generalism about conspiracy theories themselves.
Speaker: And obviously to any of our British listeners, we're still talking about pants and the sense of trousers. Although pants and the sense of underpants, I suppose the same thing applies. Personally, I like to peg mine to a couple of opposite chairs and take a running leap into them. It's the only way to get the full proper fit. Anyway. Isn't that also the way you achieved your estimate?
Speaker: modified version of it, yes. The thing that took me out there was this talk of sophisticated conspiracy theorists. I wasn't quite sure who these sophisticated conspiracy theorists are supposed to be. Are they theorists, conspiracy theory theorists like you or I, who are more sophisticated in our talk of them, or is he talking about actual people who think up conspiracy theories but are more
Speaker: new ones to make them social science. In the Picton sense, which I actually have to assume Curtis must mean, because he's talking about how he's going to use conspiracy theorists in the Picton sense, then yes, it's going to refer to people like us. But I actually think in this case, he's not talking about the Picton sense. I think he's talking about a the way that people talk about conspiracy theorists, where we should actually think about them as being more sophisticated, the kind of naive fools,
Speaker: that social scientists make them out to be. And it turns out that when you start interviewing conspiracy theorists that are projectively labeled as conspiracy theorists, they do have rhyme and reason for believing their conspiracy theories. So yes and no.
Speaker: So from this, he considers a weaker claim, which is not necessarily that conspiracy theorists think that conspirators are these infallible geniuses, but a claim that you do hear a bit, which is that conspiracy theorists basically underestimate the incompetence of, in particular, government officials, when you're talking about government
Speaker: conspiracy theories, but it is a claim I hear a lot. All these people who believe in these conspiracy theories, they've obviously never been a project manager. They've obviously never had to try and marshal, you know, more than a dozen people onto a single task and what have you. He then quotes Kath Sunstein saying, conspiracy theorists typically overestimate the competence and discretion of officials and bureaucracies, which are assumed to be capable of devising and carrying out sophisticated secret plans.
Speaker: And they're probably there as well. Do they? Do they though? I don't think... It doesn't seem to be a supportable claim to say that conspiracy theorists think that there are people putting forward these claims are geniuses or never get anything wrong or what have you. They just need to be good enough basically. It's another example of a kind of weird double standard in that
Speaker: Often we're told we should trust our intelligence apparatuses. They're competent people who know exactly what they're doing. And we're also told in the same breath that these competent people who know exactly what they're doing are running secret operations overseas quite successfully to get the information we need to fight the terror overseas or back at home.
Speaker: So something odd about the fact that conspiracy theorists overestimate the competence and discretion of officials and bureaucrats. But of course, by and large, we can trust officials and bureaucrats because, you know, they are competent.
Speaker: And we would know if they were lying to us, because the competency is the reason why we trust them so much. There's a weird standard when it comes to talking about how conspiracy theorists see the world with a kind of naive distrust of authority. And at the same time, there is a weird naive trust in authority that tells us, you know, when the CIA tells us they're not doing bad things,
Speaker: We should believe them. Well, the CIA wouldn't lie to you, honestly. But yes, they've got a bridge in London to sell you. So that's going to be a section coming up. But before we get to that one, we have the final of the three questions. Do conspiracy theories imply implausibly evil conspirators? No. No, they generally don't. This is a complete side point to
Speaker: to this paper, but I was thinking about, in New Zealand and Australian English, we tend to lilt at the end of our centre, so everything we say sounds like a question. And because there's another Australian on campus, I've suddenly spotted that
Speaker: in order for us to mark out an actual question now we have to actually basically make the last word of every sentence in a higher pitch so we have to go do conspiracy theories and by plausibly evil conspirators so we can't just lilt on the tools we have to make the entire conspirator the question hmm challenging
Speaker: challenging so so this one starts as shown in the introduction in the introduction scholars who follow the footsteps of hostella often suggest that conspiracy theories imply implausibly evil conspirators however they often equivocate between different senses of evil and sometimes use less dramatic language personally i i kind of just don't believe in evil to be honest i think evil belongs in theory store in in works of fiction i don't
Speaker: think anyone like this, oh, everybody's the hero of their own story. I don't think anyone's, you know, even even your Bin Laden's and your Al -Qaeda's
Speaker: thought they had good reasons for what they were doing. So yeah, I have no time for talk of evil pretty much in any context. And that was Josh and Addison defending Emperor Palpatine as simply being misunderstood. I did say works of fiction. And I'm sorry to break this to you, Emperor Palpatine, fictional character, not real.
Speaker: Star Wars is a documentary about a galaxy a long long time ago possibly made up of insects depending on some fan theories have you heard of the fan theory where it the stories are about an insectoid race but we we see stories because we can't do the special effects no i haven't heard that one
Speaker: No, someone actually does believe that, because it would be implausible, there's a galaxy far, far away with a dominant humanoid looking race. That the dramatisation we have of the Star Wars story is covering up the fact that Luke Skywalker is some kind of giant praying mantis. I believe it. Search in your heart, you know it to be true.
Speaker: So this painting goes and focuses quite squarely, at least to begin with, on the paper by Jo Jusinski and Joseph Herrent. Just from the bits that are quoted, it sounds like they're just a little bit flip in some of what in some of the phrasings of things, which the phrase mustache twirling mountain banks.
Speaker: comes up at one point, which I don't know if that was then just being a little bit, having a bit of fun with the language, and Curtis has taken it a bit too seriously or not, but they do. There is wording to suggest that they think that conspirators are terribly conniving and devilish, another one of their things. But the problem with all this becomes is that they then say that this can be a problem because if they're claiming that people are evil,
Speaker: who we believe.
Speaker: as they put it, good, benign or boring. So that's sort of talking about things aimed at governmental departments. We tend to, if he's saying, we like to think our elected representatives are good people or at least benign people or at least just boring bureaucrats who don't get up to anything as exciting as plotting against us. Then any conspiracy theory which says these same people are evil, we should find less plausible.
Speaker: And yes, the Witch Witch does actually sound like a bit of a dodgy claim. Curtis then sort of takes their argument and modifies a bit to make it sound a bit more generalized, and it still sounds like a dodgy claim. I still wonder a little bit about the whole is how much of this is just a stereotype that people think their conspirators are all dyed in the wool, just evil maniacs, but
Speaker: Nevertheless, in actuality, as he points out, he gives lots of examples of how conspiracy theorists, in his words, have complex views about the motives of the suspected perpetrators. And this doesn't appear to be true. People say, you know,
Speaker: conspirators may believe that what they're doing is a good thing, even if it's not what many of us would think is a good thing, like your suicide bombers and things like that. They may think what they're doing is justified and right and holy.
Speaker: People may think they're doing a bad thing for a good reason. He brings up the Tuskegee experiment, where you don't have to believe the people behind that experiment were evil geniuses cackling and clinking champagne glasses while saying, gentlemen, to evil. You could think that there are people who
Speaker: sort of said, well, okay, this is maybe morally questionable, but it's for the greater good, we're going to learn important things that will ultimately save lives. That was the argument behind the unfortunate experiment at column was that, I mean, these women are probably going to die of cervical cancer, but we'll learn an awful lot about the development
Speaker: of lesions to cervical cancer over time. And of course, the unfortunate thing is if there was the motivation for the researchers to doubt have not been useful at all, people die for no particular clinical advantage. I was thinking about this
Speaker: just earlier today, because what is interesting is that there are some conspiracy theorists who really do attribute only malign and evil conspirators. Alex Jones being a great example. If you listen to Alex Jones now, when he talks about the conspiracy to control the world with mouse mandates,
Speaker: vaccines, the great reset, etc, etc. He portrays your Bill and Melinda Gates, or these days just Bill Gates, your class swab, and people like that as being knowingly engaged in an evil project.
Speaker: What's also interesting is it's kind of not the norm. Alex Jones is an extraordinary conspiracy theorist because not only is he notable in the newsworthy sense, but actually his belief about conspiracy theories is pretty non -standard. Most people do go, oh, they probably think they're doing good, but actually they're wrong. Alex Jones goes, no, they know they're doing evil. They're knowingly worshiping Satan.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know. There seems to be a kind of conspiracy theorizing that's sort of particularly propagandistic. Yeah, you're Ex -Jones, you're Tucker Carlson's as well. They'll talk about, you know, the Democrats sort of, they're just evil. They hate you. They're doing it because they hate you and they want to destroy your world, which
Speaker: And particularly in those cases, there's always questions about whether or not the people who are saying that actually believe it, they're putting forward the thing because that they know will get an emotional reaction they're going for. And it doesn't seem to be typical of a lot of conspiracy theorists who will say, yes, maybe I'm not saying
Speaker: I'm not saying anything because I have left over COVID. I'm not saying George W. Bush was evil and wanted to invade Iraq because he wanted to kill a bunch of Middle Eastern people. He might have thought the ends justified the means and he thought he was doing a good thing.
Speaker: So this section finishes up, in some conspiracy theorists do not always posit implausibly evil intentions. Sometimes they understand that the intentions might thought to be noble from the conspirators' perspective, other times they are regarded as merely selfish. In either case, this provides little reason, if any, to regard those conspiracy theories as implausible. And so on all three counts, vastness, pretty natural effectiveness, and evil, the conflation of conspiracy theorists with the paranoid style is inaccurate and misleading.
Speaker: And again, I'm sort of reading this thing, you're preaching to the choir here, but I'm not the person he's probably preaching to. He's preaching to members, not just another church, but a different creed entirely. So let me get to the interesting section on misplaced exceptionalism.
Speaker: I now want to make two related points. The first is that there seems to be a double standard at work, namely, although certain academics are quick to accuse conspiracy theorists of exhibiting the paranoid style, even when it's not clear that they really do, official stories are almost never likewise criticised, even when the shoe seems to fit.
Speaker: It may be thought that there is a relevant difference here, at least regarding the attribution of evil motives. On the one hand, while official stories sometimes impute evil motives to people, they only do so to people who are actually evil, or at least possibly regarded as evil. On the other hand, conspiracy theorists accuse people who are presumably good.
Speaker: This leads directly to my second point, which I promised above to amplify, that the presumption of goodness on the part of Western leaders and elites is not warranted. It is an example of misplaced exceptionalism. So that's what he's saying. So he's saying that official theories, there can be a double standard here that official theories can be in the paranoid style, but they're never called out for this.
Speaker: However, it seems that believing the official account of September 11 also fits this definition. Is not Al -Qaeda a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character? I kind of thought, is it? I mean, again, there's the propaganda stick.
Speaker: mode of talking about them, where you're trying to rile up a country to accept going to war or something, but I don't think people who actually talk about, you know, people who know what they're talking about when they talk about Al -Qaeda, I don't know that anyone's ever claimed they're that vast. Well, I mean, the whole thing about Al -Qaeda was a distributed network in both the Middle East and also Africa, and it's important to note
Speaker: He's talking about the portrayal of these things in the same way that conspiracy theory theorists and social psychology portray conspiracy theorists as having this particular thing. We can say the same thing for adherents of the official theories. We can go and interview the conspiracy theorists. We can go and interview the holders of the official theories and find out what they actually believe. But if we're going to treat conspiracy theorists
Speaker: as having these kind of general views. We can do the same thing with official theorists as well, especially given the proclamations we got from George W. Bush and Tony Blair about the danger of Al -Qaeda, where they really did make Al -Qaeda out to be this very powerful spectre or hydro -like organization
Speaker: that was going to be about the existential end of the West itself unless we committed to war against an abstract concept. Yes, I don't know. I don't disagree with the fact that there can be a double standard here. I do think
Speaker: You could also reply, there does seem to be a double standard that goes the other way in that conspiracy theorists, I've never seen anyone positing a conspiracy theory put their own theory under the microscope to the extent that they do with the official ones. Using the example of September 11, people pour over every
Speaker: tiniest discrepancy in the official theory, but then when they present their own theories, they don't then sit back and ask for a peer review to the same level of scrupulousness that they just went over the official theory. I mean, isn't that true for the portion of theories generally? I mean, how many people who go on 9, 11 and 12 job theories are obviously bunk, can give you a really good account of what's going on with the official theory?
Speaker: Yeah, but I don't know if they're... Are we talking about lay people here or people who are actually...
Speaker: supposedly experts in the field because they might in that case, I don't know. But I mean, yeah, if the point is portrayal, then yeah, I think the point stands. As he says, the official story of 9 -11 attributes wicked motives to Osama bin Laden and other evildoers in his Al Qaeda network. We were told that we must have a nonsensical war on terror because these evildoers hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other, to quote George W Bush in 2001.
Speaker: I mean, it still feels like there's a distinction here, but maybe it's not a relevant one. It feels like there is this very specific propagandistic context where you're not just promoting a conspiracy theory because you believe it's true. You're using a conspiracy theory as a tool to try and persuade people to do something. But maybe for these purposes, that's not a distinction that actually matters.
Speaker: And also it goes on to point sort of from the other direction that US presidents and government agencies have done plenty of things that you could not call good, benign or boring. We know that they've got up to all sorts of dodgy stuff in other countries and in their own. I'm sure I've said this before probably more than once, but I remember having a conversation with a workmate years ago
Speaker: He basically said, yeah, he thought 9 -11 was an inside job, and his main reason for thinking so was just, it's the sort of thing they do. US government, they get up to all sorts of dodgy crap, and this would be entirely in keeping with the sort of thing they wouldn't have a problem with doing. And it certainly didn't help that.
Speaker: the second war in Iraq post -9 -11. As many people suspected at the time, as we pretty much know, these days was particularly dodgy. We know there was a whole lot of, there was lying, there was dodgy dosyas and weapons of mass destruction that never existed and so on and so forth.
Speaker: This goes back to the previous section about implying evil motives to things that are not actually that evil as well. Maybe this doesn't actually apply in some cases if you have organizations that have a history of doing dodgy things. If you have a conspiracy theory that says they did some other dodgy thing, well, maybe that's not that implausible at all. This section finishes off by saying,
Speaker: Therefore, when conspiracy theorists attribute seemingly heinous acts to people of influence in Western democracies, they should not be dismissed as positing something wholly unrealistic. At the same time, we must remember that even if some conspiracy theorists do suppose that the perpetrators are evil in a particularly strong and implausible sense, they generally need not do so, and many of their fellow conspiracy theorists in fact do not do so.
Speaker: as I've stressed those seriously interested in assessing the truth or falsicity of the conspiracy theory ought to focus on the best version, at least when it can't reasonably throw out a more plausible version on account of the existence of a less plausible one. So once again, basically, don't commit straw man fallacy. So this brings us to the conclusion section, or as this is titled, the final thoughts section.
Speaker: He says, and now a couple of further points must be made, though somewhat reluctantly. I'm quite sure why reluctantly, but there you go. I suspect because they were reviewer comments. You've talked about the whole thing before. If you see something that seems out of place, it's because a reviewer, it was to shut up a reviewer.
Speaker: Maybe you are one of these reviewers. Quite possibly. So there are two points. One of the points was that even if actual conspiracies that really are in the paranoid style, they may be relatively implausible, but they're not 100 % implausible. And this goes back to Lee Basham with his talk of malevolent global conspiracies. His paper sort of argued that even if you're talking about conspiracy theories that are massive and
Speaker: all consuming and all controlling and everything, you still can't say 100 % but they're not true.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, look at the way that the various Stasi or Securitate worked in communist regimes in the middle of the 20th century. They were vast and they really did seem preternaturally organized and effective because they really were very effective organizations for covertly surveilling a population.
Speaker: And then the second of his two points is that, as he says, at the deepest level, although my own religious worldview does not include genuinely sinister forces, I think we must admit that fundamental metaphysical worldviews are unavoidably controversial. For all anyone really knows, sinister forces, whatever that might be, metaphysically, may exist.
Speaker: Excuse me, they're well vindicated. I suppose he didn't then refer to Brian Alkely's God as the ultimate conspiracy theory paper, which you've looked at before, where he basically says exactly that, that religious views claim that
Speaker: There are these evil forces in the world acting in secret towards a goal. It's sort of conspiracism is baked into the idea of many religious beliefs. I was surprised by Brian. I didn't check the footnotes. Brian doesn't get a mention at all in this paper, which I suppose he doesn't have to if his particular points didn't come up. But I thought he was one of the ones, like you say, him and Charles, the ones who always get mentioned. But anyway, so the
Speaker: The final paragraph of this paper reads as follows.
Speaker: And so, we must admit, one must not look merely at the style of a theory, nor at controversial metaphysical presuppositions, which may or may not be genuinely implied by the theory. Rather, to really be justified in confidence regarding the truth or falsity of a particular theory regarding any historical event, one must carefully investigate the relevant empirical facts and evaluate the quality of the best arguments on a case -by -case basis. There is no dependable shortcut. The idea that each conspiracy theory ought to be judged on its particular merits, particularism,
Speaker: referring to the Bunting and Taylor 2010 paper, applies even to theories positing large -scale effective and pernicious conspiracies. Never forget, for example, the Holocaust. And yes, I mean, I agree with all of the points made in this paper. My only real problem with it was just my perspective. My incredulity
Speaker: at believing that there is a large enough body of people who believe these weird things about conspiracy theories that they're worth replying to. But if that is the case, then I guess that's just me not knowing what I'm talking about. It actually reminds me of the conversation I had with a PhD supervisor of mine back in the day, and that I was making claims about what's going on in the wider literature. And he was going, oh, no one believes that. That's a ridiculous claim.
Speaker: No, let me give you some references. Lots of people believe these ridiculous items. And I think if you come from it from the perspective of philosophy, where you're interested in conceptual analysis, unpacking to working out their extensions and the like,
Speaker: Much of the literature in the social sciences more generally adds to the question as to whether we include philosophy as a social science or a humanity or a separate discipline entirely. But a lot of the literature you find outside of say philosophy and sociology
Speaker: maybe also outside of cultural studies, and anthropology has, as Liebacher calls it, this weird pathologizing approach towards belief in conspiracy theories, which seems untenable, if only because it requires so many exception clauses to be baked into the way they talk about these things called conspiracy theories. So yeah, it's a really interesting
Speaker: look to see you as someone who hasn't done the vast reading of the non -philosophical literature to go, who believes these weird claims? And the thing is, more people than you would like to think. Well, that's just a little bit depressing, I guess. Welcome to my life. And there we have it. So that's the end of this episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theater. But we, of course, must go and refer to and
Speaker: prepare a Patreon bonus episode, which we referred to in the introduction of this very episode, will evolve. The resolution of today's sketch will be talked about in some depth, I think, this episode.
Speaker: We're also going to talk about how Alex Jones might not get away with his chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and maybe talk about some of the conspiracy theories around the Roe vs Wade leak.
Speaker: from the Supreme Court, because my God are people theorizing about conspiracies there. And they're theorizing about a lot of different potential conspiracies to explain how this leak occurred. So look forward to that, patron. And of course, if you want to hear that and you're not a patron,
Speaker: then you can go to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy portray on account and become a patron right now and that will right now or even right now or if you've already done it a few minutes ago and you'll be able to listen into this bonus content as well because you only need to pay a dollar a month and you'll get access to everything and i mean
Speaker: everything. Everything. Back to on the Patreon. There's a lot of stuff which isn't on the Patreon which you will have to get access to in more traditional ways. But the less said of that the better. So I think that's it. I think that's it for this episode. We'll be back next week assuming I don't have some sort of bizarre Covid relapse or anything like that. My
Speaker: My whole family's had it, so we're not going to get one of those chain scenarios where one person tests positive, and so you all have to isolate, and then right as the other person's at the end of their isolation period, another person in the household gets tested positive, and then it goes on and on and on. We're all done. We've done our dash. As of tomorrow, everyone in the house will be allowed out into the world again.
Speaker: I guess there isn't really anything else for me to do, but very quickly say goodbye and then wait till we stop recording and cough a lot. Durango! And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.
