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Lee Basham's "Malevolent Global Conspiracy"
26 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review Lee Basham's 2003 article, "Malevolent Global Conspiracy" as part of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre whilst Lord Morissey Morrisey and Pluddles check into a hotel.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Arrival and Confusion at Hitchings Hotel
00:00:16
Speaker
In the rush to both hail the carriage to take us to the Hitchings Hotel in Alderthrop, and, in taking care of the porter whose laborious work attending to our luggage seemed awfully staged, Lord Morrissey Morrissey and I became separated. Thus, when I caught up with him, I found his lordship in the foyer of the Hitchings, already halfway finished with the business of checking in. Yes, Archibald and Metacat. I believe we had a reservation. Ah, and here is Archibald himself.
00:00:41
Speaker
Hello, Mara... Mericat? I cleared my throat as if I had something stuck in it.
00:00:47
Speaker
Sorry, the fog outside has done something terrible to my larynx. Both Morrissey and the hotel attendant stared out the window into the crisp and clear night with amusement on the part of Morrissey and bewilderment on the part of the staff. Let me see, let me see. There's nothing under Archibald. Let me see, Meredith, Mackison, Merton. No, nothing under Maricat. Morrissey's face was betwixt concern and relief. Well, Archibald, there's a mystery.
00:01:13
Speaker
Very rum, Meriket. Very rum indeed. We shall have to have words with our company secretary. There isn't another hotel in Alderthorpe with the name Hitchings, is there? I daren't think so. We're the only hotel in Alderthorpe. Indeed, we're the only hotel in the district. This isn't a place people normally come to stay. Indeed. Well, this is dashed awkward. I blushed at Morrissey's profanity. Do you have any room, spare? We could hardly return to Manchester tonight.
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, let me see. We have two rooms on the second floor, although they're not next to one another. Ah, that will be most suitable. I took over the messy business of arranging payment for the rooms, given Morrissey's dislike of carrying coinage upon his person. Once the vile business was done, a porter who resembled almost exactly the person who'd taken so long to get our luggage off the train took us up to our respective rooms. As I set out my accoutrements from my kit bag, I heard a knocking.
Dining Decisions and Suspicions
00:02:09
Speaker
Enter!
00:02:10
Speaker
Pluddles! You aren't even dressed for dinner! Morrissey had changed into his frock coat and was burnishing his dinner cane. Dash it, Morrissey, I've hardly had time to unpack! Morrissey frowned. No time, Pluddles. My stomach rumbles, and whilst I am sure the hotel restaurant wins no awards, I am curious to see whatever local delicacies Orderthrob has to offer. Sighing, I shrugged off my other coat and dragged a jacket from my kit bag. We descended downstairs to the hotel lobby and approached the May 2D.
00:02:39
Speaker
Medicaid and Archibald for dinner. Room numbers 23 and? 27. Oh, I'm so sorry, sirs. I didn't realise you'd be dining here tonight. Morrissey raised his left eyebrow aristocratically. Hmm. It's just that we have a booking for you tomorrow night, in the Elkhorn seat, as you requested. I had to unprovide. It's not a mistake by the company secretary.
00:03:04
Speaker
Indeed, Archibald. No, no, don't change the reservation, my good man. We shall dine here tomorrow night as expected. However, if you could make an additional reservation for our friends Morrissey and Pluddles tomorrow night as well. Preferably beside them in the other alcove? Morrissey then turned to me. Pluddles, I have a feeling we have arrived just in time to discover what terrible plan is about to be hatched in Orderthrob.
Podcast Introduction and Listener Perks
00:03:46
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello, you're listening to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Denteth in Hamilton, New Zealand, or Kirikiri Roa.
00:04:06
Speaker
I see you finally got with the program. Well, let's say program.
00:04:12
Speaker
It's Tuesday night in Auckland, bizarrely, because somebody has a birthday coming up. Yes, someone also has a house guest who's coming to stay, who may be listening to this podcast even as we speak. Yes, the good Dr Dentith is keeping up the pretense of not being some sort of ageless
00:04:38
Speaker
being from the void, so we'll have to smile and nod at this talk of birthdays and aging and so on, and it'll be over again in a couple of weeks. It's true, but there'll be an episode next week, although next week's episode will be pre-recorded.
00:05:01
Speaker
So, effectively, we're taking two Thursdays off in a row because we're members of the bourgeoisie and that's what the bourgeoisie do. Yep, it's crazy messed up times we live in.
00:05:12
Speaker
It actually really is crazy messed up time. It actually not literally actually is yeah. Now once again we are live broadcasting on the discord although we only have one person listening in at this particular point in time but it is not our usual broadcast night so many people may well be confused but if you were a patron you'd be able to sit in on the discord and listen to us broadcast live
00:05:38
Speaker
and then discover all the things we cut out of the podcast before we disseminate it on your favoured podcast platform. And presumably add comment and heckle as is your want. At some stage I think we plan to take questions. We do indeed, so probably sometime in August we will do a session where we will take questions, presumably first by text,
00:06:04
Speaker
We'll see how well people asking questions in the chat works out. And then eventually, maybe sometime in September, we might even allow people to talk to us on Discord and include their dulcet tones in the podcast as they ask us questions such as, why are we so sexy? How did we get so sexy? And why are we going to be so sexy for all time?
00:06:30
Speaker
And the general level of our sexiness relative to say our shirt or possibly our cat. I do like where you're going with that friend, although I don't think you should drop dead.
00:06:45
Speaker
No, no, nobody should. Now we could also congratulate Will who has upgraded their pledge level. Normally we do an opening sketch thing, but of course this week it's been kind of taken up with the continuing adventures of Lord Morrissey and Pluddles. Will, we will get to you properly.
00:07:04
Speaker
in the course of time, but because next week's a pre-recorded episode and the week after that will be the next instalment of the Lord Morrissey Morrissey saga. It'll be a while till we get there. So I just want to say it's really great to have a member of the cabal contributing money to our small podcast. You know what's going on. We know who you are. Ipso facto, we now know what's going on as well. Thanks, Will. It's been really great. Thank you to the transit of property.
00:07:31
Speaker
Indeed. Now, it is another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. And we're going back to Lee, Lee Basham, who's already featured once. So before I guess we start going into the actual details of it, we should play some sort of a sting and start the main part of this episode proper. And the sting will go somewhere around about here.
00:08:04
Speaker
So this week we're looking at Malevolent Global Conspiracy. Much more, much a much sexier title I think perhaps than any paper we've looked at so far. Now this is a 2003 paper. There's still no mention of 9-11, but as we've discussed previously on this podcast, this is largely because the 9-11 conspiracy theories don't really start to emerge until about four or five years after the event.
00:08:33
Speaker
Which is, I don't think strictly true. I think there were people muttering things about my living being an inside job. They don't take up cultural currency until about 2004, 2005. So it's actually not unusual that it's not been mentioned here, even though in retrospect,
00:08:49
Speaker
given that 9-11 is now two years pre this paper's publication, it does seem weird now looking back on it to go, so where's the 9-11 thing? Surely that's the ur-tex of conspiracy theory. It wasn't by this particular point in time. Not yet.
00:09:06
Speaker
History is weird.
Exploring Global Conspiracies
00:09:08
Speaker
Now, this paper was published in the Journal of Social Philosophy, and it doesn't have an abstract, but the opening paragraph kind of works like one. Joshua, give us that first paragraph. Gladly. It reads, imagine we're told select members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the consortium of satellite groups are the secret malevolent masters of the planet.
00:09:31
Speaker
As properly reasoned, obsessed philosophers, we probably assume our laughter is grounded in rational epistemology. We believe that it's an easy task to show that the most ambitious conspiracy theories, malevolent global conspiracy theories, are utterly unwarranted. But is it really? Conspiracy theories expose a range of predicaments uniquely associated with the epistemic and doxastic issues of institutional ice spread doxastic properly and then stumbled on issues. Not quite sure what's going on there.
00:09:58
Speaker
Issues of institutional credibility are epistemology and social and political philosophy violently collide. This collision is real and serious. As we'll see, these conspiracy theories are unscathed by the traditional objections against them, and if true or even credible possibilities, are devastating to many of our traditional moral projects as philosophers of society and its political and economic institutions.
00:10:21
Speaker
I think I was just so excited getting to say the word doxastic, which I haven't encountered since my master's dissertation, as I recall. Now, John, do you want to tell me, explain what doxastic or dochastic is. It means pertaining to belief, basically, coming from doxos, I think, the Greek word for belief. So there you go. Epistemology to do with knowledge, doxastic to do with belief. Indeedly.
00:10:49
Speaker
Now, having read through this paper, it seemed like a little bit of a doubling down, really. It seemed to cover a lot of the same ground as living with the conspiracy, but really getting into it as though someone had said, okay, yes, living with a conspiracy, fair enough, we should live with the conspiracy and not dismiss things, but come on. What about the people who think that the whole world's controlled by the Illuminati or something? And Lee seems to be saying to those sorts of claims,
00:11:18
Speaker
Yep, even those conspiracy theories too. Is that kind of what happened, or is that just my take on it? Well, I've actually never asked Lee directly about the way in which these two papers are interrelated. I must admit that when I was working on the FID, I did kind of confuse the two papers as being the same, because yes,
00:11:40
Speaker
argumentatively Lee is making the same point as he did with living with the conspiracy with the hindsight of two more years of thinking about it so yes it does seem to be a it is the same paper in a kind of structure way
00:11:58
Speaker
but it presses the point more effectively than living with the conspiracy walls. And that's because by this particular point in time, you've got the beginning of an emerging set of literature. So you have your Charles Pigton, you have your Lee Bash and you have your Steve Clark, and thus there's a lot more work to actually delve into. And that means it's probably right to look at the issues again
00:12:27
Speaker
and restate them in the face of new argumentative evidence. So he begins, as all good philosophy does, with a bit of scene setting and a bit of definition. So he defines conspiracy theory in a way that would be entirely familiar to us. And then I suppose in the same way that Brian Elkely went into the
00:12:53
Speaker
idea of unwarranted conspiracy theories as the particular one he wants to look at. Lee identifies the particular species of conspiracy theory he wants to look at, which is the total malevolent global conspiracy theory, which is an impressive term. What does he mean by that?
00:13:11
Speaker
Well, to quote Leigh, a total malevolent global conspiracy is the extreme example, put in brackets, of a conspiracy theory. Imagine that the world, as we note today, is an elaborate hoax. A cabal of unaccountable, parasitic power elites virtually unknown to the public controls the economy, politics, popular ideology and pop culture and so on, by causal implication, the lives of the masses.
00:13:40
Speaker
These conspirators pursue a wholly Machiavellian program for the wealth, power, and challenge, perhaps even for the twisted entertainment and maniacal ego amplification it provides them. Democracy is merely a status quo maintaining media sham. And Lee's argument is a properly designed political epistemology or political culture
00:14:07
Speaker
to be on guard for the existence of these total malevolent global conspiracies. His argument isn't necessarily that
00:14:18
Speaker
a total malevolent global conspiracy is going on. His argument is more along the lines of conspiracies are going on. We should probably think there are fairly big-ish conspiracies going on off the back of that. But the best way to approach looking at those things and detecting them is to be on guard for the most extreme version of these global conspiracies, the totally malevolent ones.
00:14:49
Speaker
And he argues in terms that would be familiar to us, really. He talks about the fact that we know conspiracies occur. We know fairly large scale political ones occur. We know things like Watergate get uncovered. That's the office of the president of the United States getting involved in those sorts of things.
00:15:11
Speaker
And the fact that society is hierarchical in nature, he says, means that this sort of thing is actually possible. We talk about the cliche is that this goes all the way to the top. Well, yeah, there is a top. Things go up. There are layers upon layers of hierarchy of authority. And so conceivably, you could have one at the absolute very topmost layer, which could be
00:15:41
Speaker
so powerful as to be able to keep itself completely secret from everyone else, basically. Now the best way to probably talk about that is to look at what it takes to be the four primary objections to the rational acceptance of global conspiracy theory, which makes up the second section of the paper. So let's look at the
00:16:04
Speaker
The four kind of objections he thinks are commonly leveled against the idea that we should be thinking about these global conspiracies operating in the background. And that is talk of the unfalsifiability of conspiracy theories, appeals to the fact that the world is apparently uncontrollable, and appeal to the trustworthiness of public institutions of information, and of course, ye olde paranoia.
00:16:35
Speaker
Now, objecting to these sorts of conspiracies on the grounds that they're unfalsifiable is something that we've covered more than once. Brian L. Keeley basically said that unfalsifiability isn't a problem for conspiracy theories. Lee in his earlier paper agreed with him that unfalsifiability isn't a problem, but basically nothing's changed there. The fact that conspiracies by their nature
00:16:58
Speaker
will try to hide their existence from you means that falsifiability isn't a problem in the way as it might be in, say, the sciences, where the object of your study isn't deliberately hiding itself from you. So there's really nothing new to say there. The uncontrollability objection is to do when people say, you know, you can't
00:17:18
Speaker
You always get those claims that, oh, anyone who thinks a giant conspiracy has never been a project manager or anything like that, you can't get huge numbers of people all under your thumb while doing what you want them to do.
00:17:33
Speaker
But Lee basically says, yes, it's hard, but it's not impossible. And indeed, we've looked at things like when you're talking about controlling a large organization or something, that doesn't mean you have enforcers standing over every one of the people involved and getting them to do what you want. You can have the situation where only the people at the top know what's going on and arrange for things to filter down, but it doesn't actually require
00:17:59
Speaker
I guess fine-grained control over the entire world to have a global conspiracy? No. Although it should be pointed out that Lee does kind of take Brian to task on this by saying, you know, Brian says it's very hard to control for large groups of people. And Lee is going, well, actually, it's not as difficult as people imagine. But it's also kind of the case that Brian isn't saying it's impossible.
00:18:25
Speaker
He's simply saying it's difficult. So really it's a matter of degree here. Lee thinks it's a lot easier than Brian thinks it is. But then again, Brian's also talking about mature unwarranted conspiracy theories. So it's kind of built in that when he talks about uncontrollability,
00:18:46
Speaker
he's talking about things being uncontrollable when we think of these mature conspiracy theories which are persisting in discourse which happen to also be examples of unwarranted conspiracy theories where no new evidence has been put forward to show them then it seems reasonable to go well
00:19:06
Speaker
Given it's a mature unwarranted conspiracy theory, we can use the uncontrollability aspect here. By going, we are not providing much evidence to show there is a conspiracy, and we do have evidence that it would be hard to run such a conspiracy that's lasted this long.
00:19:25
Speaker
So it does seem like it's not just a matter of degree, but Brian's actually making a slightly separate point about the uncontrollability of conspiracy theories in this particular regard.
00:19:37
Speaker
Now, the next one, the trustworthiness of public institutions.
Trust and Institutional Conspiracies
00:19:43
Speaker
And this harks back, I think, to Lee's previous paper, where he harks back to Brian's previous paper, where if you recall, Brian's paper, he basically said that the real problem with
00:19:55
Speaker
these unwarranted conspiracy theories that they lead to such a high degree of skepticism that you wouldn't be able to trust any public institutions, basically, which Lee, as I recall, basically said, yeah, we know governments and so on lie to us sometimes. We know there are branches of governments, the sort of security agencies who are
00:20:19
Speaker
it's, how do you say, who are very open about the fact that they are very secretive and don't want you to know anything about what they're doing. And so he goes into that, he sort of goes across that, and then that kind of leads into section three, called the Epistemic Dilemma, which kind of goes further and into more detail in this whole idea of skepticism about public institutions.
00:20:44
Speaker
Yes, so in this paper he talks about this as an appeal to the trustworthiness of public institutions of information. This is now a position he calls the public trust approach. So it has a new name as he's refined this particular objection to claim of conspiracy theory. But yes, he takes it that there's a kind of dilemma here about the kind of society in which we think we live in
00:21:10
Speaker
and the kind of society in which we would have to live in to show that public institutions are not involved in conspiracies at all, which gives us the twin horns of a dilemma of trying to work out, do we live in the actual society in which we are fairly confident there are no massive conspiracies going on in the background?
00:21:33
Speaker
Or do we merely think we live in that society but there's plenty of evidence to go, well actually people are conspiring and they do it an awful lot. And so he states, well a total skepticism about public institutions may be unreasonable
00:21:49
Speaker
A total skepticism about the current existence of even one fairly involved, widespread and shocking conspiracy involving an elaborate cover-up slash disinformation campaign seems just as unbalanced.
00:22:05
Speaker
Yes, so essentially, as we've said before, we know conspiracies occur. We know they're actually relatively common, just not necessarily enormous global ones. But if we are perfectly willing to accept that smaller scale conspiracies exist, then why could it not be possible that at least one much bigger one does exist?
00:22:34
Speaker
um and so he sort of says this isn't it's it's not it's it's uh well he says the issue before us is one of degree he says it's not it's not here's one kind of conspiracy theory that's fine he has one kind of conspiracy uh that's completely unthinkable um they all exist on a scale so he says
00:22:55
Speaker
The issue before us is one of degree. A spectrum exists between the trusting and distrusting background theories of our civilization. Reasoned epistemic choice within the spectrum can only advert to empirical facts about the actual degree of conspiracy at work in the multitude of institutional relationships spanning all sectors of political, governmental, and economic enterprise. Begetting the real measure of this is something that most of us are in no reliable position to judge. I suspect that virtually no one is or can be. This is literally beyond our kin. Who's kin?
00:23:24
Speaker
We haven't encountered Ken yet. You obviously don't know your British radio variety or sitcom shows from back in the 1960s. Otherwise, you'd know that it's literally a reference to the British show beyond our Ken. Well, there we go. Anyway, so yes, a dilemma it would seem. Do we trust in public institutions or do we not? Or is that not really a dilemma?
00:23:54
Speaker
Well, here we go. So he puts the dilemma as this. Our dilemma is that there are two distinct scenarios between which we must decide. So here's the first horn of the dilemma. These basic claims, claims about the world, are largely filtered and sometimes totally fabricated through deceptive practices put in place by fairly well-developed networks of highly placed conspirators, unified or unconnected, in order to detect, to avoid detection by inquiries like our own.
00:24:23
Speaker
And here's the second horn of the dilemma. These basic claims are largely accurate because the level of conspiratorial activity in our society is fairly weak. And so conspiratorial control of such information is weak.
00:24:39
Speaker
Now one obvious objection here is that this seems like there's a missing horn here. So our claim is either things are often fabricated or they're quite reliable.
00:24:56
Speaker
you might then go but what about the other the other option which is the middle ground which is sometimes fabricated but not largely filtered now one response to that which i think the response that lee would give and i'm sympathetic towards this response because i've argued in a similar fashion myself
00:25:17
Speaker
Arguably that middle ground if you are concerned about the existence of conspiracies going on in the background actually is subsumed into the first horn of the dilemma. The idea that we live in a
00:25:34
Speaker
moderately conspired as opposed to a heavily conspired world is effectively the same towards the conspiracy theorists with their salt. So the only option is either we live in a relatively free and unconspired world or there are conspiracies going on and it doesn't really matter what the level is as long as you suspect there are conspiracies going on then you're
00:26:01
Speaker
You've got grounds to go, we don't live in a totally unconspired world, and thus we're back to the dilemma only having two horns. Well that's good. I was a little worried that we might have a three-horned dilemma then, because then our dilemma would be a triceratops. And triceratopses are extinct, Em. They're extinct. If that were the case, then I think that would have blown his entire argument out of the water.
00:26:26
Speaker
I must admit, I haven't seen the appeal to the triceratops being extinct as a response to a trilima in quite some time. I salute you for your inadequate approach towards dealing with tripartite logical structures. Well, I do what I can.
00:26:45
Speaker
So yes, it reminds me a little bit of the whole free will and determinism thing, where you can say, we have all these observations and feelings that makes it feel like we have free will, but then the determinist will say, well, yes, but that's entirely compatible with determinism as well. It could just be you are pre-programmed to feel like you have free will. And so here it's sort of saying, if the belief that
00:27:12
Speaker
public institutions are trustworthy and therefore we shouldn't believe in global conspiracy theories could actually be compatible with the existence of a large global conspiracy theory that just it's in its interest to make us believe that it doesn't exist. He says a little further down,
00:27:31
Speaker
One thing is certain, a full confidence in the uncontrollable nature of public institutions of information is exactly what an involved conspiracy would have us possess. So in other words, it's the classic reply of the conspiracy theorist when someone says, oh, you know, the world doesn't work that way. Such a thing could never happen. And they would reply, ah, that's just what they want you to think.
00:27:53
Speaker
But of course, if you are in a position of power or in a position of being able to control how narratives work, and you're engaged in conspiracies or cover-ups to maintain your control,
00:28:08
Speaker
Then if you've got sufficient power, so you are a global conspiracy, you're a total global conspiracy, you're a total malevolent global conspiracy, then of course you are going to try to structure public discourse in the presentation of information to make your role in what's going on completely invisible. And of course that gets us back to the point about unfalsifiability.
00:28:33
Speaker
If it turns out the conspirators do have that level of control, then it is reasonable to say they will be doing everything they can to make their interventions in the world as invisible as possible. OK, but hang on. Hang on here. Hang on. All right. All right. So let me stop here. Are you going to mention Traceratops being extinct again?
00:29:01
Speaker
Well, I'm not now. Okay. What I will say is that conspiracy, we know about some, right? Yep. Some big ones, they actually happened and like because of leaks. And so that's sort of the claim. You can't, the bigger something is, the bigger the chance that there's going to be a leak, surely. And surely in the world in which we live, these conspiracies will just naturally come out, won't they?
00:29:32
Speaker
Well, I mean, you might think that, but as Lee argues, there's nothing systemic in the revelation of most conspiracies. Rather, good luck almost always plays the leading role. So the argument that conspiracies are prone to leaks.
00:29:50
Speaker
doesn't actually appear to be true, given that in most cases we're quite lucky to find out about conspiracy. So Watergate being the really great example. The discovery that Nixon was recording all of his conversations in the Oval Office.
00:30:09
Speaker
was someone speaking out of turn it wasn't a leak per se it was someone mistakenly admitting to something that they weren't meant to mention that then led to people going well if that's the case then we can ask for those recordings oh look there's a weird 17 minute window where there's no recording about a conversation
00:30:32
Speaker
That seems ever so slightly weird. That was an accident. It was epistemically lucky for us to find out about that particular bit of information that led to the downfall of the Nixon presidency. So it's true that sometimes conspiracies leak because you'll get a whistleblower who will reveal what's going on. Say you're Edward Snowden.
00:30:56
Speaker
whistleblowing about what's going on with the CIA and the like. But a lot of the time what happens is that someone gets lucky, they then chase the information they get because of that luck, and then the conspiracy actually unravels because of that.
00:31:13
Speaker
which means there's nothing systematic about the discovery of these things, which conversely means that it's quite possible a lot of conspiracies go on undetected because we're not lucky enough to find out about them.
00:31:29
Speaker
And you can compare this, as Lee does basically, with the idea of the perfect crime, quote unquote, where people would sort of say, you know, the perfect crime could have been committed, but we'd never know about it, because if it really were a perfect crime,
00:31:47
Speaker
not only would the people get away, we wouldn't even know they're done in the first place to even look after them, to even look for them to begin with. So it's the same sort of thing. If a conspiracy was really the perfect conspiracy,
00:32:03
Speaker
would be able to cover its tracks perfectly and we'd never know. So you can't just, you can't say, oh, we always find out about them, they'll always out because we know that the ones that we do know about, we kind of stumbled upon. So what have we not stumbled upon? You know, we have nothing to be able to say about that. And that's why more of us should get drunk so we stumble upon things more effectively. Precisely. I stumble a lot when I drink.
00:32:32
Speaker
Well, yes, you do. As a side note, I read a thing today about a heist in the art world. Did you see that where people stole three million dollars without, but not a painting? There was a particular painting in, I think it was the Netherlands, it might have been Denmark.
00:32:49
Speaker
which was on sale by one museum in another museum, which was the painter Constable. And another museum in the same country didn't have a Constable in its collection and really wanted this one, didn't actually have the $3 million they were asking for. So then they said, okay,
00:33:06
Speaker
They worked out a deal where it's like, how about you loan us the painting to put in our museum as a fundraiser so that we can raise enough money to then pay you back for the painting so we can own it for real. And this whole thing went ahead and they raised $3 million. And then at the last minute, some hackers got in, basically spoofed the guy's email address and said, hey, now you've got that $3 million, send it to our account here, please.
00:33:32
Speaker
And obviously it was not the right account. So not quite the perfect crime because we do know that it happened, but these people managed to steal the $3 million for the sale of the painting without actually stealing
Art Heist and Conspiracy Complexity
00:33:45
Speaker
the painting. See, my first thought there is that it's the perfect example of eBay or trade me sniping, where you just get the very last second and go, no, I'll take the bid. But in this particular case, they got the very last second. Oh, you've got the money now. You need to transfer it. Oh, by the way.
00:34:01
Speaker
Here's my bank account in Hong Kong. And of course, now there's all sorts of legal things because the original museum says, well, we never got paid for it. So it belongs to us. And the other one said, well, no, it's not our fault. We got the these guys stole the money with it should be ours. And currently the painting is apparently now in storage and no one gets to look at it. So it might as well have been stolen.
00:34:25
Speaker
I mean, I can't see that they've got any legal right to the painting, given that, yes, they tried to pay for it, but at the same time...
00:34:37
Speaker
they were the ones at fault for giving the money to the wrong source I can kind of see if the gallery mislaid the money en route because we know actually you have been paid it's theirs now okay so no you you raised the money and then you got easily conned by not double checking the bank account details surely that's their fault and not the original gallery's fault
00:35:01
Speaker
But anyway, I don't mean to sidetrack our discussion. That was just an interesting thing that I happened upon today. So Lee goes on to talk about the fact that you don't even need to get too elaborate. You don't really need to come up with sort of massive layers of deception upon deception when you can just work within the systems that society already has.
00:35:26
Speaker
So he says a couple of pages later that first there is no need to erect massive elaborate decoys. Working within the visible power structures appears quite adequate to the task of inflicting conspiratorial control as well as being overall a simpler approach.
00:35:42
Speaker
Which reminds me, I saw a post on Twitter a little while ago, I'm afraid I don't remember who it was, who said something along the lines of, they say the world is secretly controlled by a cabal of global elites. And we say, no, the world is openly controlled by a cabal of global elites. You can point to individuals, Jeff Bloody Bezos owns half the world these days, it seems, and the enormous political power that comes with having that amount of money.
00:36:10
Speaker
You almost don't need to even make it conspiratorial. You don't even need the secrecy aspect of it. It's quite plainly obvious that there are individuals or small groups who have access to the levers of power in the way that we the ordinary people don't. So you don't need to add an awful lot of ornamentation onto that to come up with the sort of malevolent global conspiracy theory that Lee's talking about, surely.
00:36:37
Speaker
And indeed, depending on whose side you're on in the culture war, it becomes even more obvious what's going on with the US. So as you may well be aware, I'm talking to the listeners here as opposed to you, Joshua, although I'll pretend I'm talking to you as an unwashed pleb who knows nothing. So Facebook has been having issues with the way that it deals with statements made by prominent Republicans and likes. So Twitter has started putting
00:37:05
Speaker
fact checks on what President Trump tweets. Facebook hasn't and Facebook has basically argued that politicians can say whatever they like on Facebook because it's in the public interest to see what they say without there being any intervention to check whether what they're saying is factually correct or not. But now it turns out that a whole bunch of companies
00:37:29
Speaker
which do a lot of ad spend on Facebook are going actually until such time you start doing fact check on what politicians say we're going to suspend our ad campaigns on Facebook and Facebook suddenly is going oh actually we think we might revise that policy and do a bit of fact checking nonetheless so these big corporate monoliths
00:37:54
Speaker
and now going actually these organizations are not doing what we want them to do so we'll just cut off money to them until such time they do as we please now those of us on the liberal or left end of the spectrum are going well thank god for that it means that politicians can't lie with impunity on facebook twitter and and the like
00:38:16
Speaker
But those people who think that it's worth lying to win a culture war go, no, these corporations are acting against our good. They're being malevolent here. They've got a deliberate anti-conservative bias of some particular kind. And they're doing it openly. There's no hiding behind a smokescreen or giving away rationales. They go, nope.
00:38:40
Speaker
Nope, we're doing this openly, we've told you exactly what we want you to do, and we're going to cut off your money until such time you actually do it, and we're not pretending otherwise.
00:38:52
Speaker
So, at the end of all this, Lee basically concludes that we can't guarantee that we live in a conspiracy-free society. And so this, if you recall from Meg at the start, we looked at the falsifiability, the uncontrollability, and this was the whole public trust thing. So, he rounds things out by saying,
00:39:14
Speaker
With these points in mind, we can accept that all things remaining equal, one, the more open a society's institutions of power, the less initially warranted overarching conspiracy theories are, and two, given a particular level of openness, the greater the difficulty experienced in keeping a conspiracy theory alive, via either expanding claims or falsified evidence, medium manipulation, etc., the less warranted it is, because the conspiracy's execution would be that much more difficult.
00:39:39
Speaker
While today this may license little confidence, it points us in precisely the right direction. So he will claim that society is not currently open enough that we can say that conspiracies will definitely come out and it becomes impossible to carry on an open one. And it'll be awesome if it was though. Maybe we should move in that direction.
00:40:01
Speaker
Indeed. Now, of course, he then goes on to talk about paranoia in the final section. The fourth objection. So he argues only the paranoid or extremely inquisitive are likely to become conspiracy theorists. But this reveals more about the current complacency of the average citizen than it does about the nature of the conspiracy theorists concerns.
00:40:27
Speaker
While the details of her preferred conspiratorial account are frequently speculative, her motivating concern can be arrived at rationally and may even be rationally compelling. Now, of course, anyone who is aware of paranoia will go on that paranoia is actually, by definition, an irrational state of mind.
00:40:50
Speaker
And I think what Lee is hinting at here is actually what Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style. So Hofstadter, in his seminal work on conspiracy theories, the paranoid style in American politics, argues that conspiracy theorists are not actually paranoid, because paranoia is by definition a psychological problem where people are acting irrationally. Rather, conspiracy theorists look like they're paranoid,
00:41:20
Speaker
they're arguing in a paranoid style, but that paranoia actually might be predicated on the existence of actual conspiracies, although Hofstadter actually then moves on to go, because the paranoid style is closely related to actual paranoia, the kind of objections we have towards paranoia should probably, but not entirely, overlap with paranoid-style thinking as well.
00:41:50
Speaker
in.
00:41:52
Speaker
So that's it. He looked at these four objections that you might have to the possibility of a malevolent global conspiracy theory, that they are unfalsifiable, that they couldn't be controlled, that trust in public institutions means they're unlikely to occur, or that the problem is that thinking about them is paranoid. And basically says no, actually none of those really apply or are really an obstacle. So with that,
00:42:20
Speaker
in mind, he then moves on to his conclusion, which sounds very familiar to the conclusion of living with a conspiracy, I thought, or at least to begin with. He says, in our present civilization, I suspect the main source of popular, quote unquote, disbelief in conspiracy theory has nothing to do with epistemic warrant. It's much more pragmatic. There's nothing you can do, which, as I recall from living with a conspiracy, he sort of said you get to the end and the attitude that you kind of have is, what are you going to do?
00:42:50
Speaker
If these conspiracies exist, they're beyond my understanding, they're beyond my ability to do anything about, so whatever. Now he points out this is the popular source of disbelief. He actually then goes on to say, but there is a project here.
00:43:05
Speaker
for epistemologists and socio-political philosophers, and that project is in determining what a relatively conspiracy-free society, one that would be well justified in believing is relatively conspiracy-free, would look like.
00:43:22
Speaker
And he warned, one thing is clear, it would not look like ours, whatever the truth about our society is. As argument there is, because we live in a largely hierarchical society, the existence of hierarchy means you're always going to suspect that up the chain, someone is hiding something from you. Hmm.
00:43:49
Speaker
So he talks about the idea that there need to be a level of openness in society that does not currently exist for us to be able to claim with warrant that we live in a conspiracy-free society, that we know we live in a conspiracy-free society.
00:44:08
Speaker
Indeed, before that, he talks about imagine the example. Imagine if the Nazis had won World War II. Imagine if they actually succeeded totally in all of their goals. It might take 100 years or more, but eventually they exterminate all other races and you end up with a world that is 100% Aryan and all history told is the history of Nazis.
00:44:36
Speaker
No one knows any different. But you can still imagine then people saying, this just doesn't... Do you get the feeling that we're being lied to? Something just doesn't quite seem right about that. And that's sort of from the extreme example. So from the world we live in today, we can see more clearly that if we had more openness, more of a view into the workings of society, maybe we could say,
00:45:06
Speaker
what is and what isn't a warranted conspiracy theory. But we don't have that. But we want that. And we should work towards that. But how do we do that? Well, the way we do that, Josh, has become Rutger Hauer in Fatherland. And we chase the clues and we uncover the existence of the Holocaust, even though the Nazis won World War Two. Right. Be Rutger Hauer. I can get on board with that. Unless you mean be dead, in which case I can't.
00:45:34
Speaker
I mean, eventually you will be. Well, yes, I suppose. That's
Paranoia and Societal Impact
00:45:39
Speaker
fair enough. Maybe that should be an objection. He ends up coming back to paranoia at the very end of it. He says, the greatest danger we face in taking the risks of conspiracy seriously, as he thinks we should,
00:45:53
Speaker
is a divisive society-wide paranoia. And perhaps here is the real substance of the paranoia objection. One needn't be paranoid to explore conspiratorial possibilities intelligently, but if these possibilities become a serious part of popular understanding and expectation, the results for our civilization could be disastrous. And indeed, I think in the years since he wrote this,
00:46:14
Speaker
when we see things like the QAnon movement becoming larger and larger still, as I think we will see in the bonus content, but more on that shortly.
00:46:27
Speaker
He also talks about McCarthy era witch hunts and indeed the Salem witch hunts as being the sorts of things that we are in danger of falling into if we let this acknowledgement that large-scale conspiracy theories could be occurring sort of run our lives for us. So there's a project here, but it's a project we're going to have to be a bit careful about.
00:46:50
Speaker
Indeed, and there's a project that we'll be seeing a lot more of as we continue our conspiracy theory, Masterpiece Theatre, as we look at the papers which end up being replies to this paper, as well as the papers of Keeley, Pigton and Clark. So there you go, Malevolent Global Conspiracy by Lee Basham. So a lot there that was familiar.
00:47:15
Speaker
a lot, partly with sort of restatements of his earlier things, partly covering ground in a set-up style that we've already seen in the previous papers. But it does, I thought, at the end, take things in a bigger and more interesting way. Indeed. And got me a nice reference to Rutger Hauer as well. Now, I rewatched Split Second over the weekend.
00:47:43
Speaker
As well, you should. Looking forward to that Blu-ray release. Has it not been on Blu-ray? No, it's coming out. So they're doing a 4K transfer and then doing a 1080p Blu-ray release. I'm actually quite curious to know whether the new transfer will correct what I take to be a slight over-lighting issue with the current DVD version of Split Second. I mean, I know it's a...
00:48:07
Speaker
It's a 90s film and lighting a 90s film is never particularly spectacular but there are points in time where it looks just a little bit over lit and I do wonder whether that's a bad transfer and a new transfer might give it a slightly darker tone which would fit some of the outdoor scene slightly more effectively.
00:48:27
Speaker
Gotta be a bit careful with those high definition remasterings, though. Sometimes the cracks show a little bit, or the wires in the case of Highlander, as I recall. Yes, there are some things that were never seen in the first place that suddenly a 4K remaster goes, oh, no, you're not actually meant to see that. You're not meant to resolve to that resolution on a screen.
00:48:52
Speaker
And now, sorry, let's be clear, we have finished talking about the thing we've devolved into the pop culture discussion section of this podcast. The recent wide screening of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
00:49:03
Speaker
Oh you mean the remastering they did for TV where basically you can now see the crew in a lot of shots and a lot of shots that occurred that were shot during the day but then colour corrected to be at night are back in the day so vampires can walk around in daylight to their heart to content
00:49:24
Speaker
Anyway, yes, no, we've obviously come to the end of an episode, but for our patrons, we, of course, have a bonus episode coming up where we'll talk about the current goings-on in conspiracy theory world. We've got a bit of gold-fashioned anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Resurgence of Antisemitic Conspiracies
00:49:42
Speaker
It's been a while, I think, since anti-Semitism has had its day in the sun.
00:49:46
Speaker
But I think I've got a proposed solution as to why people, in some cases, have mistakenly jumped to an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about the whole Black Lives Matter cop abuse thing. But we'll talk about that in the bonus episode. And yes, as I intimated, QAnon just keeps on truckin'. And apparently, Pizzagate is back. It's back and it's pissed off.
00:50:10
Speaker
We'll talk about that a little bit. And then I suppose it actually continues on really from a lot of the allegations of QAnon and Pizzagate, child trafficking. Apparently it's been going on in our very own home city of Auckland. It has in your backwater, Joshua. Child trafficking in your backwater. How dare you talk about Onihanga that way.
00:50:33
Speaker
So that is the end of this episode. Our patrons, whom we love and revere more than all others. Sorry guys, we just... It is just a biological fact that opposites attract. Thank you, MC Skatcat and Ora Abdul. I got it right this time. Good old Skatcat.
00:50:54
Speaker
So for the rest of you, we'll say goodbye to you. At least you'll probably be getting this episode a little bit earlier in the week since we recorded it earlier in the week. That can be our gift to you. And indeed, I have to stay up for the next two and a half hours because I'm giving a guest lecture in Berlin tonight, which is at 2.15 central European time, which is 12.15 a.m. New Zealand time. Lovely. So I'll be basically editing this podcast tonight.
00:51:23
Speaker
OK, and for our patrons, stick around, especially our patrons who are listening on Discord, if any of you are left, stick around because you'll get to hear the bonus episode right now, and the rest of our patrons can listen to it whenever they value well-choose. And indeed, they will choose wisely. They will. But until we next hear from you, which could be in a few seconds or could be in a week, goodbye. And for me, it's the season finale of Lex.
00:51:53
Speaker
Oh.
00:52:01
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:53:02
Speaker
And remember, Soylent Green is Meeples.