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Episode 275 - Brian L. Keeley's "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition"
23 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M review Brian L. Keeley's 2003 paper, "Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! More Thoughts on Conspiracy Theory" (Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 34 No. 1), whilst his Lordship and Pluddles investigate some ruins...
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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
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
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Transcript
Morning Routines: Morrissey vs Narrator
00:00:15
Speaker
It was Morrissey's custom to sleep late, often had proclaimed that no interesting criminal procedure happens after 3am or before noon, so I breakfasted alone in the Hitchings Hotel and even took a round of golf before his Lordship rose from his slumbers.
00:00:27
Speaker
Pluddles, I hope you haven't wasted the morning. No, Marcy, I have not. If you must know, I have been scouting the area. You mean you have been golfing. You know what I think of the Scottish sport. Marcy had written up under three monographs on the dangers of golfing and how it had led to the ruin of empire. I decided that rather than listen to another lecture on how teeing off ruins the body's posture, I would impress upon him my findings.
Discovery of Pupilae Ecclesia
00:00:50
Speaker
Morrissey, in my travels I happened upon a most peculiar set of ruins. My dear Pluddles, we are here to solve a mystery, not to take in the local sites. But Morrissey, this particular site is germane to our investigation, for it is the ruins of the Pupilae Ecclesia. Morrissey frowned. Latin was not a strong suit, given either that he preferred the Konai Greek. Sometimes my lower class schooling was an advantage.
00:01:12
Speaker
Now, why does that ring a bell? The church of orphans, I believe? A ruined church? A forlorn church? A home of forlorn orphaned puddles? I may need to ask my publisher to pulp my fourth forthcoming volume on the dangers of golf. Within minutes, Marcy had finished his coffee and devoured somehow gracefully a full luncheon. Then, grabbing a cane at random from his room, he pushed us out the door into the sunlight afternoon of Alderthrop, towards the ruins of the church of orphans.
Mysteries of the Ruins
00:01:41
Speaker
Most curious, Puddles. Most curious. Morrissey was steering at what appeared to be a grass verge to one side of the ruined church.
00:01:48
Speaker
I can tell by your look, Pluddles, that you cannot see what I see. But the thing is, my friend, it is what we both cannot see, which is the real mystery. Oh, I was not sure what else I could say. Pluddles, I realise that as a recently promoted postmaster general, these things are not immediately obvious to the eye. But look at the general shape of this church. Surely you can tell what is missing.
00:02:11
Speaker
I scanned the area, taking in the ruins. The narthex was almost completely gone, exposing the nave and the aisles as they led to the altar. Only the eps and ambulatory stood, with elements of the stained glass still visible. I'm sorry, Morrissey, but all I see are ruins. Pluddles, my dear fellow, there is so much more to teach you.
00:02:28
Speaker
Did you not notice the crossing? Well, what there is of it, the North transept seems most indescript. And? And what? Dash and Morrissey stop teasing me and tell me what I'm obviously missing. The South transept, Pluddles. What of the South transept? There is none, Morrissey, obviously. Precisely. There is no evidence of one having ever existed. Yet you cannot tell me that the builder of this church never erected one.
00:02:52
Speaker
No. Someone has gone to great lengths to erase all evidence of it, to the point they've even replanted the grass where it once lay. But why, Morrissey? Who would want to hide a transept? An excellent question, Puddles. I suspect the answer to that is at the very heart of this mystery. But first, my friend, we must meet ourselves for dinner. Ourselves? Yes, Puddles. We, the impostors Archibald and Mericat, are about to spy on our very real namesakes.
Introduction to Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy
00:03:33
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denteth. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting comfortably in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Denteth sitting, I assume, comfortably in Hamilton, New Zealand. Somewhat after a bit of an adventure with security.
00:03:58
Speaker
Yes, there were swipe cards not working and so on, but we're all set up now. It's okay. You can relax. I can. And I'm going to relax with a tasty, tasty beverage. Now, oops.
00:04:12
Speaker
Ugh, a can with a pull tab held vulgar. Wow, actually so there's a reason why I'm drinking beer in this podcast Joshua. Turns out that I have looked at the exit surveys for patrons who have left the show. And it turns out that one of our patrons left the show because I showed disrespect to the listeners by podcasting whilst drunk.
00:04:33
Speaker
Mmm, which is curious because the drunk podcasting episodes tend to be the ones that we've had the most positive feedback on. So I think it just goes to show you there's no pleasing everyone. Precisely. So if you've been hurt or alarmed by the drinking or lack of drinking in this podcast, please do get in contact so that we can ameliorate your concerns by either increasing or decreasing alcohol consumption before, during and after a podcasting session.
New Patrons Announcement
00:05:02
Speaker
Now on Patreon news, I understand we have a new one. We do, we do have a new patron, patron Steve, who was actually listening to this podcast if only a few seconds ago as we will look live broadcasting, but unfortunately it's either fallen off the Discord server or requires something and has gone off to do it.
00:05:22
Speaker
But we will be introducing Steve and our other new patron more properly in an introduction next week. Of course, last week's episode was a pre-record. This week's episode's introduction was the continued adventures of Lord Morrissey, Morrissey and Pluddles, which means we haven't had a chance to an introduction introducing patrons. So next week, there'll be a grand fandango of at least two people involved in a massive conspiracy that we have uncovered the truth of.
00:05:49
Speaker
Two. That's more than one. That's twice as much as one.
Brian L. Keeley's Article Discussion
00:05:54
Speaker
I don't know if I can handle it. That's number one. But moving on, this week we have another installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. The little short and sweet one this week. I think it was only about six pages long. And yet filled with tasty nuggets of philosophical wisdom.
00:06:16
Speaker
Filled it is. Yes, we're about to begin talking about the article, Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition. More thoughts on conspiracy theory by friend of the show, Brian L. Keeley. So should we do a bit of introduction now or should we just play the sting and plow straight into it? Like some sort of drunken sailor. I say we play the sting and plow straight in. Nice.
00:06:44
Speaker
Right, let's plow in then. So we've got a bit of the old philosophical back and forth now, now that we're a few instalments deep into Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. We had Brian Elkely's first paper of Conspiracy Theories, rather,
00:07:03
Speaker
was the second one we looked at and then we had a bit of Lee Basham who at some points replied to Brian's first article and so now we have an article from Brian replying to Lee's reply to him. I think I have that right. It is conspiracy inception.
00:07:21
Speaker
So I think the first thing we have to say about this is that if you were listening when we first talked about of conspiracy theories, one of the more foundational papers on the theory of conspiracy theories. I'm sorry, you're not going to use the word seminal here as we tend to always joke about.
00:07:38
Speaker
I actually like I would happily say the word seminal and giggle giddily every time, but I was just going for a bit of variety, frankly, just try and try and, you know, broaden the vocabulary. But it is both foundational and seminal. Our one major complaint with it was that compared to Charles Pigdon's Papa Revisited, which we talked about before, which ended with a lovely reference to Robocop 2 right at the end.
00:08:09
Speaker
Brian's paper had no pop culture references in it at all. And I think the force of our criticism was so strong, it seemed to have reverberated backwards through time somehow and caused him to put a pop culture reference in the actual title of his next paper. And frankly, I wasn't aware we had that much power and influence in a philosophical or a cosmic sense. But there you go.
00:08:36
Speaker
See, I've always had confidence that our work would be recognised not just now, but in the past as well. Well, there you go.
00:08:47
Speaker
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition's subtitle more thoughts on conspiracy theory. It's another one of those ones, doesn't have a proper abstract as such, but it does have an opening paragraph that gives a good summation of things. Would you like to lead that off? Indeed. Although Lee Basham ends his article with the word, difficult theoretical work lies ahead. He has nonetheless advanced our understanding of the odd epistemic beasts known as conspiracy theories.
00:09:13
Speaker
Basham's article is one of a number that have come to my attention since I first wrote about conspiracy theories in 1999. What these articles all have in common is a concern with what might be best termed practical epistemology, the application of the often esoteric concerns of academic epistemology to everyday questions of modern life.
00:09:36
Speaker
In the end, I'm not won over to Basham's way of seeing things, but his arguments have forced me to reconsider my views, hone my original ideas, and develop new responses.
00:09:47
Speaker
Now it's one thing which I think is interesting here. So when Brian claims this is a number of articles that has come to his attention since he first wrote about conspiracies in 1999, he references Clark and Basham, an 18 article by Jones I have not read, which I should actually rectify even though it's probably now well out of date. There is no reference to Charles Picton here. What has, what,
00:10:15
Speaker
I suppose we might see this eventually but I mean Charles Pigdon got the ball rolling but how prolific has he been since? How active? Well that is a question for future episodes of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre because Charles has written subsequently but it does seem that really Bryant work is where the main trunk
00:10:39
Speaker
of philosophical work based upon the essential questions Brian asked actually developed. And Charles has kind of been brought back into that discourse by later writers, notably people like myself and David Cody.
00:10:54
Speaker
So, like I say, it's a short article, it's six pages long, and about four of those pages are sort of summaries and updates of what's come before. So it actually starts, now you'll recall Brian's paper used as its sort of central case study, I guess, the conspiracy theories around the Oklahoma City bombing. Now this paper is 2003, released in 2003, and as we've said, it's, you know, we are post
00:11:24
Speaker
9-11, but we're not yet at the point in history when 9-11 conspiracy theories become the biggest game in town. So Oklahoma City is still kind of the go-to example. And he starts with a bit of an update. So in
Timothy McVeigh Execution Theories
00:11:38
Speaker
2003, when this article was written, Timothy McVeigh had been executed by this time, and it was still Terry Nichols, they were still
00:11:48
Speaker
There were still appeals and so on as to whether or not he would be—would get the death penalty. We know he didn't in the end, but that was still up in the end. But there is—he sort of gives an update on the state of the conspiracy theories, I guess, which is that McVeigh claimed before his execution that there was nobody else involved, that it was all him, which some people would think, well, that maybe puts a
00:12:16
Speaker
puts a nail in the coffin of the conspiracy theories there. But on the other hand, a good conspiracy theorist would say, well, actually, maybe he was just, you know, he knew he'd been sentenced to death. There was no way out. He was going to die for sure. So he thought maybe he'd go out a martyr and insist that there was no one else to protect his co-conspirators. So sort of the conspiracy theory still continues apace.
00:12:43
Speaker
That's kind of immaterial, I guess, to everything that comes next. It's just sort of an interesting update because from then on, he goes into a bunch of summary of the arguments around. He summarizes his arguments, he summarizes Lee's arguments, he summarizes Lee's arguments against his arguments. So I guess we should get summarizing. We should.
00:13:04
Speaker
So basically, Brian restates the premise of his original paper, which is he's interested in looking at a particular class of unwarranted conspiracy theory, the mature conspiracy theory, to see if there was any kind of mark of the incredible that we can apply to particular conspiracy theories and go, actually, these are ones that we have grounds to be skeptical about prima facie.
00:13:33
Speaker
And as argument is, there is no inherent mark of the incredible. Simply, there are wacky conspiracy theories which are the kind of things which are so necessarily vague that no evidence has ever been amounted towards them with time, and thus they kind of mature in that kind of stinky cheese way I've talked about maturity in previous episodes, because no adequate evidence has amounted over that time.
00:14:02
Speaker
That is a good reason to go, well look, you've had a lot of chances here to amount evidence to show a conspiracy actually occurred. No evidence is forthcoming. So on those grounds and those grounds alone, we are allowed to look askance at this particular conspiracy theory.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yes, now he does conclude this bit by saying, eventually, at some necessarily vague point, the degree of global skepticism required to hold the theory becomes genuinely nihilistic. It can be rejected on the same grounds in which we reject globally skeptical worries as that the world came into existence only five minutes ago.
00:14:38
Speaker
And that, as I recall from when we've talked in the past, this necessary vagueness that he mentions was kind of one of the things that I thought was held against him a little bit, in that he's talking about these mature conspiracy theories without giving a good conception of when a conspiracy theory has become mature. He says it's necessarily vague when that might happen, but that seems to be dodging the problem rather than solving it.
00:15:07
Speaker
Now I've had thought about this subsequently for the sheer fact that I do think there are points for and against the vagueness in this kind of criteria. So it's true that we kind of pinged Brian in our previous discussion for jumping on the Oklahoma City bombing example as being an unwarranted conspiracy theory, given how little time had occurred between the writing of the paper and the event being described in that paper. It doesn't seem that
00:15:37
Speaker
It was a particularly long time and you can imagine in a situation where you have a federal investigation, six or seven years later a new lead is discovered and actually it turned out that there was something more to the story after all. Conversely, I've been thinking about COVID-19 conspiracy theories and I think it's fair to say that on this podcast
00:15:59
Speaker
We have characterized a lot of COVID-19 conspiracy theories as being examples of unwarranted conspiracy theories given little time in their development notwithstanding. So I think it's right that actually this time period is necessarily vague. You can't simply put a timestamp on it and say three weeks, three months,
00:16:27
Speaker
three years, three decades, because we're actually looking at the contents of particular theories and asking, look, given the amount of investigation that's going into these claims, claims which are being investigated furiously, we might think of as maturing in that bad sense quite quickly, because a lot of work has been done and still there's no evidence of a conspiracy.
00:16:53
Speaker
whilst other claims which rumble along in a really, really slow way, we might think of as taking a lot longer to mature, because there isn't as much investigative activity going on there. And maybe that's a good point to bring in his analogy with archaeology.
00:17:12
Speaker
Yes, he makes an interesting point. He draws the analogy with the case of human occupation of the American continent. Now, most archaeological evidence says that humans first occupied the Americas around 11,000 BC. But there is occasionally some evidence pops up that humans had been there a lot earlier than that. Now,
00:17:40
Speaker
this, the problem with these theory, you know, some people say, well, hang on. So if you have evidence that comes earlier, then surely that proves that they had to have been there earlier. But the argument is, it's quite like there's a lot of evidence that says humans colonized the Americas around 11,000 BC, very little evidence is ever being found saying it's earlier and
00:18:07
Speaker
that in places where we know humans were around a lot earlier, it's quite easy to find evidence of that. So this one little piece of evidence in the same way that you can have these little bits of evidence that conspiracy theories find themselves grounded on, he will say, well, actually, you can disregard that simply by the fact that there's lots more evidence contrary to it in the particular area
00:18:35
Speaker
And in areas where we know that sort of evidence can be found, it's quite easy. So he will say he applies this to conspiracy theories by saying, it is generally true that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but this maxim is misapplied in cases in which evidence is actively sought and is not discovered in spite of its discovery in other parallel situations.
00:19:01
Speaker
As time passes and evidence in favour of a particular conspiracy theory fails to manifest, in spite of the diligent efforts of many, and in spite of the discovery of such evidence and other prima facie similar cases, a downward adjustment of that theory's credibility ought to result. Wise words.
00:19:18
Speaker
and nicely put.
Epistemology and Conspiracy Theories
00:19:20
Speaker
But again, we're still basically summarizing the view that he's already put forward. So then he moves on to looking at Malevolent Global Conspiracy by Lee Basham, the last paper that we looked at in the series. And I think at the time we said that it seemed to be a little bit of a doubling down by Lee of taking the view he'd put forth in his earlier paper and really sort of taking it to the extreme. And this seems to be how Brian sees it at least. Give us the quote.
00:19:48
Speaker
Bashim has taken the bull by the horns. He has taken on the most extreme version of the conspiracy theory, the one that might seem prima facie to be the least plausible, and instead argues that it has, in fact, a far stronger epistemic standing than one might imagine.
00:20:07
Speaker
So he goes on to summarize what Basham said and then his reactions to it, although before he does that, he brings up an important point, which is one that comes through the rest of it, I think, which is that
00:20:21
Speaker
He's interested in whether or not conspiracy theories are warranted. Not simply, are these conspiracy theories possible? Is it possible this conspiracy theory is true? He's interested in, are we warranted in believing that the conspiracy theory is true? And those aren't really the same things, are they?
00:20:40
Speaker
No, in fact, actually, this was a discussion I had with Brian earlier today. So Brian, Martin Orr, Jen Hosting, and sometimes Lee Basham, when he's able to get to the computer, we have a kind of fortnightly to tri-weekly conspiracy theory reading group where we're reading recent papers in the literature and passing comment upon them. And in a paper we had read
00:21:06
Speaker
just last week there was a discussion about Brian's work in that particular paper and that led on to a discussion the fact that Brian likes to use practical examples in his talk about conspiracy theory in part because he does a lot of a lot of work elsewhere in the philosophy of the sciences which is actually quite important to talk about what scientists actually believe
00:21:34
Speaker
And so Brian is actually very interested in actual conspiracies and the way that evidence amounts towards or against them, as opposed to the logical possibility that there are conspiracies abounding in the background.
00:21:50
Speaker
So when Brian's talking about warrant, he's talking here about a notion of justification in the epistemic literature, which is saying, look, we're looking at the possibility a conspiracy has occurred with respect to the evidence there actually is a conspiracy. So he kind of states this in a quote from page 107.
00:22:15
Speaker
I still feel it is important to keep the metaphysical and epistemic issues separate. The metaphysical issue is a question of truth. Is it possible that a given conspiracy theory is true? The very fact that we give conspiracy theories any credence at all reflects our belief in their logical possibility.
00:22:35
Speaker
Even the most extreme malevolent global conspiracies, i.e. that our sentry experience is being manipulated by Descartes' evil demon, are logical possibilities. However, this issue is separate from that of the warranted believability of such claims. There is much in the world that is possible that is nonetheless literally incredible.
00:22:59
Speaker
What makes the issue of conspiracy theories one for practical epistemology is this latter epistemic issue. Should we accede to the kind of conspiratorial thinking Basham describes? So basically Brian here is concerned with the idea that yes, we can say it is logically possible that there are massive conspiracies going on in the background. But we need to say slightly more than that.
00:23:25
Speaker
If we're actually going to admit to the existence of a malevolent global conspiracy, we need something in the way of evidence to go, look, people don't just conspire, people have or are conspiring in a very particular way.
00:23:43
Speaker
And I think this is the second time after the introduction that he brings up this idea of practical epistemology, which he mentions as being similar to practical ethics. You can debate ethical theory at length, and people do in philosophy, but then there's another branch that's like, how do we actually apply that to the situations we find ourselves in in real life? And so this is the similar sort of thing for epistemology.
00:24:11
Speaker
Now, having made that little disclaimer there, he then goes to look at Basham's arguments and then responds to them. So as he summarises, and as you'll remember from when we talked about this two weeks ago,
00:24:28
Speaker
Basham considers and rejects four different alleged grounds for undermining the epistemic warrant of conspiracy theories. They are a. unfalsifiability b. uncontrollability c. appeal to the trustworthiness of public institutions of information and d. paranoia. So in other words,
00:24:45
Speaker
Some people will say conspiracy theories are unwarranted because they're unfalsifiable. Some will say they're unwarranted because at that level of conspiracy theory it's uncontrollable. It's not possible to manage that number of people or keep a lid on things. People will say you shouldn't believe these conspiracy theories because of what we believe about the trustworthiness of society.
00:25:12
Speaker
that wouldn't allow these things to happen. And some people will say you shouldn't believe these things because people who say them are paranoid. And Lee says actually, I don't buy any of that. Now, Brian says as far as unfalsifiability goes, he's completely on board with Lee. He also thinks it's not a problem that conspiracy theories can be unfalsifiable.
00:25:33
Speaker
He also agrees that the paranoia grounds is not grounds for undermining the warrant of conspiracy theories. Although he says, he makes a point of saying, it's not sort of an ad hominem, he's not saying it's bad because it would be an ad hominem attack to say, oh, you're just paranoid. That's why we shouldn't believe your conspiracy theory. He says it's basically question begging.
00:25:59
Speaker
The point of paranoia is that it's an unreasonable belief in some sort of persecution. But what we want to establish is whether or not it's unreasonable in the first place. So if you're saying conspiracies are bad because they're paranoid, you're essentially saying conspiracies are unreasonable because they're unreasonable, and you're not actually adding anything to it. These sort of things are saying to label a conspiracy theory paranoid is merely to restate the claim that it is unwarranted. It is not evidence for rejecting it.
00:26:28
Speaker
So, okay, fair enough. So, Brian and Lee are two peas in a pod when it comes to falsifiability and paranoia, but the other two, uncontrollability and appeal to public institutions' trustworthiness, that's where he disagrees, does he not? Yes. So, and this is kind of the grunt of contention between Brian and Lee. So, Brian's much more of the opinion that, yes,
00:26:53
Speaker
We can show, quietly, that there is an awful lot of conspiratorial activity going on in the background, and no one denies that conspiracies occur, and no one denies that quite sophisticated conspiracies occur all the time.
00:27:10
Speaker
But as he states, the controllability and trustworthiness of human institutions is exactly what is at question here. So it's one thing to say there are lots of conspiracies. It's another thing to say that there are conspirators out there who have a kind of perfect control over things such that they are able to hide their conspiratorial machinations in a way that cannot be detected.
00:27:39
Speaker
So you might think that this is an unfair characterization of what Lee is trying to get across, because Bryan's construal of what Lee is claiming is that these malevolent global conspiracies are such that they should be constructed in a way that no one is able to ever detect them.
00:28:01
Speaker
at which point Brian says well there's actually this allows us to apply Hume's analysis of miracles to these conspiracy theories after all so thank you Lee for actually showing there is a principle demarcation that we can use Hume for. Arguably you could say that actually that's not what Lee is saying at all. Lee is not saying that these large-scale malevolent conspiracy theories are things which are
00:28:26
Speaker
completely invisible and thus there's no rational way to ever develop belief upon them. There is going to be some evidence there with what Lee calls the triangle of crime, motive, opportunity and... No, hang on, you just said opportunity. Means. That's thank you kindly. This is why you're such a good co-host, Josh. You remember things that I don't.
00:28:53
Speaker
And so Lee's argument is actually even these malevolent global conspiracies are going to be detectable in some way, shape or form due to elements of the triangle crime and persevering investigators doing these particular things.
00:29:10
Speaker
But of course, Brian's response to this is going to be, well, that's precisely the question we're looking at when we're trying to analyze the warrant of these particular claims. I'm saying that actually it's not possible to control these things in a particular way.
00:29:29
Speaker
And you're saying actually it's much easier for people to control these things in a particular way. It's not really a difference of opinion per se, it's a difference of degree. Lee thinks it's a lot easier to control conspiracies and keep control of information. Brian thinks it's a lot more difficult.
00:29:52
Speaker
And that then steps into the worry about the trustworthiness of public institutions of information. Because li is of the opinion that actually these systems of control means that you can't really give a prima facie reason for trusting public institutions. And Brian's going, well, actually, we have to have some level of trust
00:30:20
Speaker
to be able to operate as social animals in epistemic communities. So once again, it's not a difference of opinion, it's another difference of degree. And as you said before, Brian's interested in the actual concrete real cases that people bring up.
00:30:42
Speaker
So one of the examples that they both talked about was the conspiracy to hide the details of the D-Day landings in World War II. They'd say, you know, look, that worked, right? They, you know, they were able to keep the exact location and timing of the landing secret. And that was a massive undertaking, how many hundreds of thousands of people were involved.
00:31:07
Speaker
But Brian replies, well, OK, yes, the exact details might have been kept secret, but it was no secret at all that there was going to be a big push and it was going to be coming from the British Isles. I mean, you can't hide the fact that that that number of troops were messing there.
00:31:25
Speaker
And even then it sort of becomes easier because this was in wartime when there's a lot more, there was a lot more control. There's wartime end in the 1940s when there was a lot more control over media and the spread of information.
00:31:41
Speaker
And then he also talks about, you know, and then also there are these government agencies that are very secretive and and, you know, do a very good job of hiding what they're up to. But we still know they exist. We still know the NSA exists. We still know area 51 exists. You know, it's their actual things. So the idea that these cases illustrate that you can keep tight control on things, he doesn't actually find that convincing.
00:32:11
Speaker
Now once again this is probably a matter of degree and also a matter of description. So one debate that those of us in the conspiracy theory theory community engage in all the time is challenging the way that we describe particular conspiracy theories.
00:32:27
Speaker
as a fairly standard adage in the literature that people will say oh no no but that's not a conspiracy theory that's an official story so you basically take something which would be a conspiracy theory by any other name and go oh it doesn't quite fit
00:32:42
Speaker
And the other version of this is describing particular stories to make them more or less conspiratorial. And I think the D-Day Landings is a kind of interesting example here, because depending on how you tell the story from the perspective of the allied powers or the Axis powers, it becomes more or less a cover-up.
00:33:06
Speaker
So the Axis were aware that the Allies were amassing tropes. But the Allies were also aware that the Axis were looking at what they were doing. So the secrecy that the Allies engaged in was confusing the Axis as to which day the invasion would be and the location of that invasion. And that required a massive amount of work and a disinformation campaign.
00:33:34
Speaker
to make sure that the exes, even if they got the Vegas hint, it was going to be D-Day, not A-Day, B-Day or C-Day, and the Normandy location. They would still be distracted by other information that would make them go off in a completely different direction. So depending on how you describe the story,
00:33:57
Speaker
you can go well actually wasn't that secret or or well yeah they gave the appearance of it not being that secret but actually that was part of the cover-up itself to actually hide the extent of the secrecy that was going back months if not years of preparation hmm
00:34:18
Speaker
Furthermore, the malevolent global conspiracy theories that Lee is talking about are sort of another level on top of that anyway. As Brian characterizes them, they seem more akin to keeping secret a D-Day invasion in which not only is the invasion itself a secret, but even the existence of the would-be invader is unknown to the victims. Again, it's sort of the perfect crime thing, the perfect
00:34:45
Speaker
molecular and global conspiracy theory would be perfect or near perfect in covering up its existence. Which as I said may not be a fair characterization of what Lee is actually meaning.
00:35:00
Speaker
And so he sort of, he, Brian characterizes Lee as appealing to a sort of a lottery paradox, which I assume is just the fact that it's incredibly rare to win the lottery and yet people do win the lottery all the time.
Global Conspiracies Debate
00:35:16
Speaker
so that while no individual global conspiracy theory is warranted, we nonetheless have evidence that it's very likely or even certain that at least one global conspiracy is in operation. And this, I guess, comes back to Lee's talk in his papers about what would a world in which we know there are no global malevolent conspiracy theories present look like, certainly not the world we live in.
00:35:46
Speaker
But Brian, and now we're basically down to the last, the final two paragraphs of this paper, in which Brian actually gives his responses to Lee's views. And he has two of them. Do you want to take the first one?
00:36:03
Speaker
First, it is a long way from adultery and insider trading to the kind of all-encompassing world-controlling global conspiracies that are the focus of his argument. What Basham's historical record proves is that there are certainly groups of individuals who are nefarious enough that they would love to pull off a malevolent global conspiracy if such a thing were possible.
00:36:24
Speaker
What marital infidelity and business skill degree does not show, I believe, is that such a feat could be pulled off or that we have a warranted grounds for fearing that such a conspiracy is currently in operation. So this is once again the warrant versus possibility distinction.
00:36:44
Speaker
Now what do you like? I was a little bit I wasn't quite sure reading this, whether it's a mischaracterization or not, he sort of seems to be saying all these arguing for the possibility of these conspiracies, and I'm more interested in the warrant, but it seems like
00:37:02
Speaker
I kind of feel like Lee might want to say, no, actually, I'm saying they're warranted, not just possible, but warranted. Do you think it's a mischaracterization or a fear thing here? Well, the thing is, I mean, I've played around with versions of this argument in my own works. I mean, it does seem obvious that prior incidents of past conspiracies
00:37:25
Speaker
tells us something about the common placeness of conspiracy generally in our society. And so I think that allows us to at least entertain their existence now. So that is kind of a possibility claim. Given that we know conspiracies have occurred, it is not just logically possible that conspiracies are occurring now, but we've got some evidence to think that actually they probably are occurring now at the same time.
00:37:55
Speaker
So I do agree with Lee that we can move from the logical possibility move to the warrant move here. Just for the sheer fact, we are also adding evidence to that mix. We're not just saying it's logically possible. We're saying, look, we've got history on our side as well.
00:38:11
Speaker
But I do think Brian's also right that we can't just move from the fact that people conspire to the notion that there is at least one large scale conspiracy going on in our civilizational complex. And that's in part because, as Brian points out, the kind of
00:38:32
Speaker
global malevolent conspiracy that Lee wants to talk about probably doesn't resemble things like the D-Day landings and the like. It's something bigger and grander than that claim, at least the way that Lee describes it in malevolent global conspiracy.
00:38:51
Speaker
So if we're then going to infer that such a thing exists, we don't just need the conspiracies occur clause. We also then need to bring in and here's some evidence to show the conspiracy is bigger than you think.
00:39:06
Speaker
which is basically posterior probability of bringing in evidence about this particular claim. And then we have to assess the relative probability of this claim being true over some other claim, also explaining the same phenomenon. And so in that particular speech, I kind of agree with both of them.
00:39:27
Speaker
But that's also kind of the point of my article when inferring to a conspiracy might be the best explanation. And we'll be getting to that paper eventually, or at least you will be, and the plan as to who was going to be replacing me in that episode.
00:39:42
Speaker
Hmm. So that's, that's Katie's, Brian's first response to Lee. His second response is, as he puts it, the historical record cuts both ways. It can be read as Basham does as an endorsement of the hypothesis that small groups of individuals secretly control large segments of what we take to be the free world.
00:40:03
Speaker
However, it should also be noted that when it comes to committing large-scale evil, secrecy is often largely unnecessary. There have been horrible, horrible things that have happened in the history of the world that people have been able to perpetrate, and they haven't actually needed to invoke a giant global conspiracy to do it. As he says,
00:40:26
Speaker
six million european jews gypsies and homosexuals can be rounded up and systematically murdered without a global conspiracy the witches of salem can be tried and burned to death without a global conspiracy and as the monty python comedy team quoted in my title correctly points out events such as the spanish inquisition are entirely unexpected um and he um he he concludes if one wishes to be malevolent on a global scale why waste time and energy maintaining a conspiracy when history shows one can get away with it in the open now i don't know
00:40:56
Speaker
I don't quite know enough about the examples he puts forward to see how good they are. I mean, how secret was the Holocaust? Because you hear stories of people saying they are being shocked and horrified when they found out about the concentration camps and so on and never realised this is how far it went. I don't know how much of that is sort of self-serving, how much of it is willful ignorance.
00:41:22
Speaker
Was that sort of stuff? How much conspiracy was involved in things like that? So see, the Holocaust does seem to be an example of it was secret to a certain extent, but willful ignorance also played an awful role in maintaining that secrecy.
00:41:41
Speaker
So in the kind of society in which National Socialism was rampant, people weren't liable to ask questions about exactly what was going on behind the scenes, and thus were willing to at least on the face of it accept the official pronouncement that people were simply being relocated to camps outside of the German border to happily live out their lives.
00:42:06
Speaker
but at the same time there were also cattle trucks of people going off to camps, in locations that weren't as far away from cities as you might actually expect. So yes, there was some cover-up there, but not as much cover-up as maybe we would like to think the Holocaust would have required.
00:42:30
Speaker
And I believe as a pedantic point, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition was the joke from the Monty Python sketch, because it was based on the common expression when you're being questioned saying, geez, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition. I've been told that in actuality, people received notice when they were going to be brought in by the Spanish Inquisition. So in fact, everyone
00:42:53
Speaker
expected the Spanish Inquisition. But no, I mean, this is an interesting point. It actually reminded me of more recent claims that the sort of weird transphobic claims people make, saying that trans women are actually just men who want who are dressing up as women so they can sneak into safe places like women's bathrooms and assault women or something. And people have replied,
00:43:19
Speaker
Why would—in the world in which we live, in which it is vanished—the chances of, say, a rape case being successfully brought in the first place and then a guilty conviction being acquired, when we know how low that is, when we know how often men get away with assaulting women all the goddamn time,
00:43:41
Speaker
Why would a man go to the lengths of insisting that he's actually a woman and to sneak in the furious plan? It just seems completely unnecessary. It's not a hard, logical argument, but it is an interesting argument that if you are as Lee is appealing to sort of the state of the world in which we live,
00:44:08
Speaker
Then probably you can say, yeah, maybe if we actually look at the world, we can see that it shows you don't need a global malevolent global conspiracy theory after all. It's an interesting point. Well, it's kind of a counterpoint to the warrant point. So if we're simply talking about logical possibility, then yes, large scale malevolent conspiracies are possible.
00:44:32
Speaker
if we're considering the point from what parent so to be to use a kind of broad generalization whether we think these things are practicable then you end up going well if you've got two rival hypotheses here either you have people conspiring in the background to get what they want or you've got people
00:44:53
Speaker
operating in the open to get what they want. And actually, it turns out people operate in the open all the time to achieve these terrible means that we sometimes think are actually the domain of conspiratorial activity. So why think that little global malevolent conspiracy is the issue? Why not simply go, actually, we live in a terrible world where people do these things openly and don't have to keep things secret.
00:45:24
Speaker
So there you go. I mean, at the end of the day, this was a very, very brief little piece that we've managed to talk about it for the same amount of time we usually do any of the
Conclusion of Episode
00:45:35
Speaker
others. So I think there's some
00:45:37
Speaker
uh it was it was nicely distilled i guess the points there were were were nicely substantive i mean it is a great example of a very succinct philosophical paper that still contains within it an awful lot of very interesting information
00:45:56
Speaker
So there you go. That's another another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre out of the way. And we still haven't left 2003, have we? No, we have not. There's plenty more to come, but that'll do for now. Now our patrons, including those who may still be listening in on Discord or not, good for you if you still are. Our patrons will, of course, get a bonus episode this week because they're lovely people and they deserve it.
00:46:26
Speaker
So this week's episode, we've got a bit of the usual QAnon-y stuff, the various people who are supposedly trafficking and stolen children and all of that business. We've got, I think possibly the most significant
00:46:42
Speaker
thing that I've seen happen in the last week is that I heard a person pronounced Ghislaine Maxwell's name out loud. I'd assumed Ghislaine, but no, everybody says Ghislaine, so let's go with Ghislaine. So we're talking about her, obviously. And a bit of the Trumpy stuff, bit of the political stuff.
00:47:01
Speaker
Bit of a conspiracy business as usual, I suppose. Yes, there's an awful lot of news because we basically missed a week. And our patrons are going to hear about all sorts of wackiness, including some local news, which isn't so much conspiratorial, except maybe it is.
00:47:21
Speaker
So strap in patrons you've got that to look forward to but for the rest of you thank you for listening anyway because you're our audience and without you we don't actually have any good reason to exist. And remember if you are concerned about the drinking or lack of drinking this podcast please do get in contact we need your feedback.
00:47:39
Speaker
We do, yes. The alcohol content of the show should be carefully calibrated. I mean, if it turns out that more drunken podcasts means more patrons, then more drunken podcasts? Yeah, I think that seems to be the only logical inference. Well, at the same time, if less drunken podcasts means more patrons, then there'll be less drinking.
00:48:00
Speaker
Which is probably good for me long term. Well, yes, yes, overall. But anyway, we'll let you decide. So until next week, or until patrons you put on the bonus episode, we will say to you, goodbye. And I'll say, totally pip. And why not?
00:48:27
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster'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.
00:49:28
Speaker
And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.