Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Stigmatised Knowledge (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
72 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M review Michael Barkun's 2016 “Conspiracy Theories as Stigmatized Knowledge” as published in Diogenes.
—
You can contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
The Role of Jesus in Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's episode is all about Jesus, notable historical character with the ability to rise from the dead. Sorry, say what? Jesus N. Also, Jesus M. We're finally getting to the heart of all major conspiracy theories by looking at the role the Christian Messiah plays in conspiracy theories. Are we? Sorry, that's all the reading I took away from this week's article in our Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre series.
00:00:22
Speaker
Well, to be honest, I just read the title, and then immediately went to the books the article must be relying on.
Exploring Michael Barcon's Influence
00:00:28
Speaker
I thought I'd let you guide us through the work of Michael Barcon, and I'd reveal the sources. Okay, I think we need to step back just a little bit. Which sources are you talking about? Uh, Holy Blood and Holy Grail, Messianic Legacy, you know, you've read them.
00:00:42
Speaker
Maybe that was the wrong question to ask. You said you just read the title of the article before going on, well, whatever you've decided is the journey of this episode. What's the title of the article? Conspiracy theories as stigmata knowledge. Gotta say it's a bit clumsy as titles go, would make more sense grammatically if it was conspiracy theories as knowledge or stigmata. Stigmatised.
00:01:03
Speaker
Well, it would have been if I'd had my suggested title, I don't know. No, no. The article's titled, Conspiracy Theories as Stigmatize Knowledge. Ah. Yes. Ah, indeed. So it's not about the wounds Jesus had upon the cross. No. It's not about how Stigmata have played a central role in hiding the Jesus bloodline over the course of the last two thousand years? No. No Priory of Style? No. See?
Meet the Hosts
00:01:31
Speaker
the podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and M. Dinteth. Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Edison in Zhuhai, China. They are Dr. M. Dinteth. Together we fight
00:01:52
Speaker
I thought it was crimes against conspiracy theory theory, but if you want to fight cancer as well, I mean it's probably a more laudable goal than talking about conspiracy theory theory. How goes your fight against tooth decay Joshua? How goes your fight against dental depravity and cavities? Well I don't floss as much as I should have, but I don't lie about it to the dentist.
00:02:15
Speaker
He asks how to floss and I say not much to be asked. I told my students they should floss daily last night and they didn't believe me. She was a salient divider in the course I was teaching on reason and argument but I'm afraid I did not get
Introducing 'Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre'
00:02:30
Speaker
through to them.
00:02:30
Speaker
It's a bit of a shame. So we have a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre. We do indeed. Part of our moving away from philosophy for a period of time in order to allow us to have a bit of a lull between the old pieces in philosophy and the current crop of work.
00:02:51
Speaker
since it turns out there's sporadic moments of frequent publication early in the history of the philosophy of conspiracy theory theory and then it starts to rapidly accelerate around about 2014 and 2014 onwards is getting awfully close to the present which makes it harder to say these pieces are masterpieces no matter how good the papers are.
00:03:14
Speaker
a masterpiece which has been considered over time to become a classic of its genre. And I just don't feel that seven years or so is enough time to get into masterpiece status, which means we may need to either redefine what we mean by masterpiece, or reconsider the entire direction of conspiracy theory, Masterpiece Theatre.
00:03:37
Speaker
or just give it a new title. I mean, I mean, yes, of course, you could do that. You could do the boring thing and just read the second. But I think grander thoughts, Joshua, grander thoughts. Yes, yes, you generally do. OK, Ian, have you forgotten to say? OK, we've we've both not silenced our phones. Professional, professional. Behold, behind the scenes of the podcast is guide to conspiracy, utter professionalism. This is how the sausage is made.
00:04:06
Speaker
Yes, so we'll just edit this bit out. I guess I'll just let me check, make sure it's not important. Same, after the year I've had, any text message I get always seems just slightly ominous. Ha! Yeah, this looks like a group text to both of us. Yeah, that was what I was about to say. Now, hold on, it's a link. Yeah, it's the same link. Same link?
00:04:35
Speaker
Oh, sorry, I never forwarded you those emails. It's the same shortened link I got in all those emails a few weeks back. Weird. Weird. Well, I don't like creepy texting us both when we're recording. Oh, it'd be someone like Drew or Georgia or Nick are numbers, and they also know when we record these episodes.
00:04:56
Speaker
Yeah, Nick, with his timing, your outing, so you're drunk when it comes to recording. We haven't actually had a drunk podcast recording in a while, though. We need to get onto him about that.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, well, when I was back in Auckland, it really wasn't appropriate to get drunk in the middle of the day and report podcast whilst also being a care giver. But when I'm back in January, no caregiving going on. Get drunk to my heart's content. Drunken podcasting can resume in January of next year. Exciting times. We also may lose
Podcasting Antics and Humor
00:05:28
Speaker
listeners. We've lost listeners in the past due to drunken podcast. We could lose listeners again in the future.
00:05:34
Speaker
Well, if they're not the kind of listener that can handle a bit of drunk philosophising, they're not the kind of listener I care to retain, quite frankly. It's true. I mean, we actually, I mean, ideally, in an ideal world, all podcasts, and I mean all podcasts, not just our podcasts, all podcasts would be conducted whilst people are drinking and getting drunk.
00:05:55
Speaker
So anyway, we can deal with all of this later. Shall we masterpiece the Conspiracy Theory Theatre? Something like that. Find a sting and play it. Shall do. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
Understanding Stigmatized Knowledge
00:06:15
Speaker
Right, oh, so we have a name that has come up before, but we've not looked at papers by this person before as far as I'm aware. Today we are looking at conspiracy theories as stigmatized knowledge by Michael Barkan, published in Diogenes in 2016. So Barkan's come up with it. Barkan, he's the guy
00:06:35
Speaker
Who you see when you… It didn't have to take somebody guy. Yeah, yeah. Event super and systemic conspiracies. Well, it's actually event systemic and super conspiracies. So it's not the view that event conspiracies are probably okay to theorize about because conspiracies do occur. But as soon as you move to systemic conspiracies involving multiple groups trying to achieve an end,
00:06:59
Speaker
And superconspiracies, where the conspiracy theory explains everything, he takes it that those are the bad conspiracy theories. And a lot of social scientists like to rely on Bakun's taxonomy to go, well, look, we're focusing on systemic and superconspiracies. They're obviously bad and irrational beliefs. So let's now analyze those. Bakun is not treated so seriously by the philosophical literature.
00:07:27
Speaker
in part because his definition of event versus systemic versus super conspiracy just isn't particularly tenable when you actually start considering the kind of things that fall under those categories, given so many different conspiracy theories, when described just slightly differently, move from event to systemic or from super to systemic or sometimes event all the way to super.
00:07:52
Speaker
Yes, but this is not a paper on taxonomy. No, it's not. It's about conspiracy theories themselves. So right now I'm not masticating into the microphone like some sort of godless barbarian. So I am actually in a position to be able to read the abstract this time. So I shall.
00:08:12
Speaker
I mean, maybe we should just make it a general rule. You always read the abstract because you always read the abstract and you always claiming I've read the abstract. If you were to actually go back and itemise and enumerate all the conspiracy theory masterpiece theatres, you would find that I read the abstract
00:08:32
Speaker
fewer times than you've said that I've read the abstract. Well, I'll see you in court. But first, I'm going to read the abstract. It goes, most conspiracy theories exist as part of stigmatized knowledge, that is, knowledge claims that have not been accepted by those institutions we rely upon for truth validation. Not uncommonly, believers in conspiracy theories also accept other forms of stigmatized knowledge, such as unorthodox forms of healing and beliefs about Atlantis and UFOs.
00:08:58
Speaker
Rejection by authorities is for them a sign that a belief must be true. However, the linkage of conspiracy theories with stigmatized knowledge has been weakening because stigmatized knowledge itself is growing more problematic. What was once clearly recognisable as the fringe is now beginning to merge with the mainstream. This process of, quote, mainstreaming the fringe, unquote, is the result of numerous factors, including the ubiquity of the internet, the growing suspicion of authority, and the spread of once esoteric themes in popular culture.
00:09:26
Speaker
Only a permeable membrane now separates the fringe from the mainstream. Thus, conspiracism is no longer the province only of small, isolated coteries. It now has the potential to make the leap into public discourse. This, of course, is not applied to every conspiracy theory, but it happens enough to suggest that we are at an important transition point.
00:09:44
Speaker
recent controversy in the United States over whether a conspiracy existed to hide President Obama's alleged foreign birth, a claim that years earlier would have never emerged beyond small radical groups, suggests the nature of the change. That also suggests the dangers that political cultures may face in the future. You're a permeable membrane. I sure am. As is your entire family line.
00:10:06
Speaker
I've never denied it. So the paper, the paper begins, although the year is filled these days with talk of conspiracy theories, it is necessary to be clear about what conspiracy theories are and what they are not. So even though this isn't a philosophical paper, it starts with a good bit of good bit of definition. Good bit of good definition. It's just a good bit of definitional work. And it's
Defining Conspiracy Theories
00:10:30
Speaker
even good. It engages in definitional work.
00:10:32
Speaker
Whether it's good definitional work or good definition is another matter entirely. Well, we'll get to that in a sec. Yeah, so the first thing he does make a point of saying conspiracy theories aren't conspiracies. They are a different kind of thing there. They're intellectual constructs, Josh. They're intellectual constructs. Yep. Or as he puts it, modes of thinking, templates imposed upon the world to give the appearance of order to events.
00:10:58
Speaker
And so the closest he gets to his taxonomy is saying that at this point is they can seek to explain a single event or they can apply to a much wider phenomena. Now, this is one of these situations where on one level, I agree, conspiracy theories are not conspiracies because conspiracy theories, as the title suggests, are theories about conspiracies. But when he says they're a intellectual construct, templates imposed upon the world to give the appearance of order to events,
00:11:28
Speaker
He's bringing in or sneaking in the pejorative notion of conspiracy theory here, because obviously if they're imposed upon the world to give the appearance of order to events, then they're not explaining events with respect to actual conspiracies, they're explaining events with respect to what people think
00:11:49
Speaker
is the right way to explain these things, these perfidious and obviously unwarranted conspiracies, the conspiracy theories that people think of as mad, bad or dangerous. Yes, and he goes on to say, these mental constructs assert that some small and hidden group has through special means, powers or manipulations brought about visible and evil effects of whose true cause most people are unaware.
00:12:14
Speaker
So again, building in the idea that they're sort of by nature malign, and yes, also building in the idea of these small, small hidden groups. But he goes on, then talks about the relationship the conspiracy theorists then have with us.
00:12:29
Speaker
It's only the conspiracy theorists who know the real truth. They have special or privileged knowledge that the rest of the public doesn't have. And he says, it is indeed the sense of possessing knowledge that others lack, which constitutes a buffer that partially protects believers against the potentially disastrous effects of disconfirming evidence, which is getting a little bit done. It sounds a little bit like the philosophical discussion about falsificationism.
00:12:53
Speaker
Except, of course, as philosophers have pointed out, there's nothing prima facie wrong about a conspiracy theory being unfalsifiable, because conspiracies will in some cases, and the stress here is in some cases, be putting out disinformation to make it look as if the conspiracy is not going on.
00:13:12
Speaker
And so he finishes up this section by saying, in most cases, conspiracy theories are at odds with official or prevailing explanations. Consequently, they represent alternative or deviant views. As such, they conflict with whatever the orthodoxy is on the subject at hand. The greed to which they diverge from that orthodoxy determines the extent to which they are considered unacceptable, invalid, irrelevant, outdated, or dangerous.
00:13:36
Speaker
This separation from orthodoxy may result in conspiracy theories being ignored, but more often they are actively rejected. So obviously the idea that conspiracy theories are necessarily in opposition to an official theory is something that we've looked at a lot and some philosophers think it is a decent part of the definition and others do not. Yeah, but where Bakun is going to differ from people like David Cote and Curtis Hagen, who of course think that yes, conspiracy theories
00:14:04
Speaker
have as part of their definition, they're contrary to some official story or official theory, neither Cody nor Hagen actually think that that means anything epistemically about the value of the thing labeled as a conspiracy theory. So the philosophers who by and large in the particular
00:14:22
Speaker
can adopt the yes they must be defined with respect to being in opposition to official theories don't think that tells us anything useful. Bakun however is going to go well look if they're contra official theories then they're stigmatized knowledge and they deserve to be treated as stigmatized knowledge because they are contra to what the authorities believe as we see in the next section entitled stigmatized knowledge.
00:14:50
Speaker
Indeed, he gets right into it saying, because most conspiracy theories contradict some form of orthodoxy they lie within a domain that I refer to as stigmatized knowledge. Again, that's not part of the definition we generally use, but it is part of his. So I guess he's at least being consistent.
00:15:17
Speaker
He goes on to explain, by stigmatized knowledge, I mean knowledge claims that have been ignored or rejected by those institutions we rely upon to validate such claims. These institutions include, although they're not limited to universities, the medical and scientific communities, government agencies, major mainstream media, and in some cases religious authorities.
00:15:36
Speaker
So if a claim isn't accepted by whatever the relevant authority happens to be, then it acquires this sort of a stigma. And he goes on to say that conspiracy theories, they're not the only sort of stigmatized knowledge. There's stuff like OBC back in the abstract pseudoscience, alternative healing methods, Atlantis and UFOs, he keeps bringing up. Part of which, again,
00:16:02
Speaker
These are things that are stigmatised knowledge but aren't conspiracy theories, although as we've often seen they do tend to lead to conspiracy theories when people try to explain why it is that this knowledge has been suppressed or is not more widely known. Yeah, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that UAPs or UFOs are alien spacecraft.
00:16:21
Speaker
or that the earth is flat, but it certainly does help to be a conspiracy theorist if you're being challenged on why do people not agree with you that the lights in the sky indicate the aliens flying over the flat earth. The thing which is interesting to my mind about this argument
00:16:39
Speaker
is that it's an argument based upon the appeal to authority. So conspiracy theories under the definition being offered here are stigmatized knowledge. They stigmatize knowledge because they go against what experts believe.
00:16:53
Speaker
We're not given an account as to why we should trust experts, which means that this account kind of glosses over some of the known problems of appeals to authorities. It ends up being a kind of an appeal to the authorities of authorities argument.
00:17:12
Speaker
And that authorities have said that institutionalized knowledge is good. We should trust what the authorities say. Therefore, we should trust the institutionalized knowledge produced by the authorities. It's kind of pushing back the, but why do we trust the experts to a kind of second or third layer?
00:17:31
Speaker
Yeah, so he then goes in a different direction saying that besides lack of institutional validation, another critical characteristic of stigmatized knowledge is the manner in which its believers are linked. Believers in one form of stigmatized knowledge are likely to also believe or at least be sympathetic to other forms of stigmatized knowledge as well, which
00:17:51
Speaker
Sounds familiar to me. We've looked at stuff before where they talk about how people believing in some conspiracy theories makes them more likely to believe in other conspiracy theories, although the exact papers escape me at the moment. Yeah, this has been a recurring theme, particularly in the social science work. We're referring to the work of the two Goetzals. They talk about what's called the monological belief system, the idea that if you believe one conspiracy theory, you probably believe lots of others as well.
00:18:19
Speaker
And this is now being questioned, particularly in the psychological literature, because people are becoming increasingly aware that actually, under tests and surveys, it is not the case that belief in one conspiracy theory predicts belief in a range of
00:18:36
Speaker
others, what you tend to find is belief in one conspiracy theory may predict belief in a related conspiracy theory. But believing that JFK was assassinated by the Cuban mafia doesn't mean you suddenly start endorsing UFO conspiracy theories, or thinking that Obama's birth certificate is being hidden from the American public.
00:18:59
Speaker
Now, admittedly, this reappraisal of the Monological Belief System material has been occurring rather recently, although I should point out that philosophers have been arguing against it for quite some time now. This paper is from 2016. As usual, we give authors kind of the grace period that was probably written either 2014 or 2015. So maybe Bakun is not aware this reappraisal is going on. But papers that rely upon the and also
00:19:28
Speaker
People who believe one conspiracy theory believe another are now going to be questioned for those claims when you go, yeah, but the literature doesn't seem to support that claim particularly well these days. Yes, we've moved on. You're living in the past.
00:19:44
Speaker
But that's fair enough. You order them in the past with your love of the 90s and grunge. Yeah, yeah. But Michael Barkun, who may or may not like the 90s and grunge, I just have no idea, goes on to say the reason believers in one form of stigmatized knowledge are likely to accept other forms lies in their common skepticism about institutions. So he's wanting to say that they have these beliefs which are rejected by authorities, which makes them distrust
00:20:11
Speaker
at the very least, the one authority that rejected them, but then because they believe all authorities are connected, they end up distrusting all authorities, which is quite a sweeping claim about sort of all conspiracies or conspiracy theories.
00:20:27
Speaker
And I mean, it's a weird claim when you think about it. And maybe the example I'm about to use, because it's a relatively recent one, wouldn't have occurred to Bakun at the time. But when you think about the QAnon adherents or the supporters of Trump who believe that storming the Capitol on January 6 was a good idea, they obviously distrust chunks of the American government.
00:20:50
Speaker
But they also have high levels of trust in other parts of the US governmental system. So it's true that some extreme conspiracy theorists, we want to use that kind of term, who may have a kind of stigmatized knowledge conspiracy theory in Bakun's perspective, they distrust some authorities and they kind of viciously distrust those authorities.
00:21:15
Speaker
But that doesn't actually mean that they suddenly distrust all institutions. They're not suddenly, when you become a Trump supporter and you believe there's a deep state, you don't suddenly become an anarchist. And it's one of the few times in the world I'm going to say, maybe it would be better to be an anarchist than belong to Class X. So it might be better to be an anarchist than to be a Magna Trump Republican.
00:21:40
Speaker
But it seems that in many cases, that loss of trust doesn't extend to all institutions. And yet he's making the claim that all these authorities are somehow connected. So a loss of trust in one is a loss of trust in all of them. And that just seems like a really weird claim to make.
00:22:00
Speaker
Yeah, well, we're going to see more of these sort of sweeping claims as we go. But at the moment, it continues, indeed, the skepticism with which believers in stigmatized knowledge regard knowledge validating institutions is itself a rudimentary form of conspiracy theory, since it implies that there may be a large scale plot to freeze out all the beliefs in the stigmatized knowledge domain, whether they concern Atlantis, Bigfoot, free energy, or other fringe ideas, which is the thing that occurred to me a minute ago when they were talking about other
00:22:29
Speaker
conspiracy theories being just one kind of stigmatized knowledge and the other ones do tend to lead to conspiracy theories and then he ended up saying it for me so I could have just kept my big mouth shut. Now this section finishes up saying their view of knowledge validating institutions is therefore that it is a web of mutually supportive power centers with their individual mysteries, secrets and deceptions that they seek to protect. Conspiracy theories claim to unmask some fraction of these interwoven deceptions. So yeah a lot of
00:22:56
Speaker
A lot of sweeping claims about what conspiracy theories are and what conspiracy theorists think. I guess the generous interpretation would be to say that, well, he's just making generalisations there, although he may have stuck a disclaimer on it saying, obviously, this doesn't apply to every single conspiracy theorist. Maybe we can assume that that's what he means, because without it, it does seem to be much too strong of a claim, a lot of the stuff he says.
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's as if he's talking solely about his systemic and super conspiracies. You know, look, the event stuff we're just going to ignore, because that seems plausible, but as soon as people start believing that the conspiracies they believe in are linked to other institutions, then you have to become a wholesale skeptic of the world in which you live.
00:23:44
Speaker
And it just doesn't seem very tenable, and also it doesn't seem to reflect the kind of examples you might use. He has quite a few examples in this very short paper. Yes, which we'll get to shortly. The next section is a short section called The Social Structure of Stigmatised Knowledge.
00:24:06
Speaker
And so basically, this section essentially just says that stigmatized knowledge used to just be a fringe thing. And stigmatized knowledge was kept at the fringes by, as he puts it, numerous gatekeepers in the form of curricular authorities and educational institutions, editors of major media and others who had the responsibility of making decisions about what content wasn't included and what was excluded.
00:24:31
Speaker
And while he points out that occasionally something would go more mainstream, the JFK assassination being the example he uses.
00:24:38
Speaker
Generally, they stay to the fringe, which means that they're not just stigmatized in terms of knowledge claims, but there's also a sort of social stigma attached to them as well. And he then finishes this section by saying that this started, this all started changing, according to him, sometime in the 1990s. Although I think we're going to start getting into areas where, say, Joe Youcinski would argue that, no, this stuff hasn't really changed. Well, yes, we looked at saying,
00:25:08
Speaker
American conspiracy theories by Joe and also Joe Parent, they will go, well, look, this is very ahistorical because you can look at periods of so-called stigmatized knowledge being talked about very openly in the press in the early 20th century. And Cathy Olmsted, who wrote the book Real Enemies, which was a history of conspiracy in the United States over the 20th century, conspiracy has been a large chunk
00:25:36
Speaker
of American politics since year dot, but the 20th century, quite massive. Also, I'm just thinking about there's this little event that occurred in the 1930s in the Weimar Republic, where a political party swung into power on the basis of conspiracy rhetoric and ended up threatening the world in what is called a world war, the second one they had that century.
00:26:03
Speaker
So the idea that this started changing in the 90s seems so ahistorical. Nevertheless, he's going to double down on it, or at least continue as he started, in the next section. Even though I've read the paper twice now, it's almost as if he's going to make the claim the internet is actually the source of all of our woes.
00:26:29
Speaker
which is the same as people who said that nationally broadcast television was the beginning of the end of society, like the people who said that radio broadcasts would bring about the dissolution of good and moral society, as did people who said that actually having newspapers or teaching people to read would make society go downhill very quickly.
00:26:50
Speaker
There's a class of person who ends up going, oh, this new technology is terrible. I'm going to blame everything which is wrong about the world now on the advent of that new technology. Well, we'll just have to see. So yes, the section, The Erosion of the Boundary, says beginning in the early 1990s. That is a good 1970s prog rock album type. Erosion of the Boundary. I'm fairly sure that's Jess Rotel.
00:27:16
Speaker
There's more to come. So beginning in the early and mid-1990s, the clear boundary between the fringe and mainstream began to erode with significant consequences for conspiracy theories.
The Internet's Role in Spreading Conspiracy Theories
00:27:27
Speaker
This erosion has been a function of the combination of technological and socio-political factors.
00:27:33
Speaker
He says the technological factors have become so clear that they need little elaboration, but nevertheless doesn't matter. And also he's going, you know what I'm talking about, but just in case you don't, I'm going to say it's the internet. And again, to be fair, it's not a lot of elaboration because it's not a very long paper, although it does make up a decent chunk of it. But yes, so by technological factors, he's mostly talking about the internet. And he says the internet
00:27:58
Speaker
First of all, it started to provide an alternative to mainstream knowledge sources. It had little barriers to entry, so anyone could just get on there and start posting, and it's eliminated the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge that he had before. There's no editors, there's no one to tell you not to print stuff. But the problem is, if he's dating this to the early to mid-90s,
00:28:22
Speaker
Actually, there are great barriers to entry to the internet at that time. Well, that's where it started, yes, as it has moved on. And eliminating the gatekeepers of knowledge things is actually a lot more recent when it comes to dissemination of information. For a very long period of time, due to the way the internet worked, actually, there were massive gatekeepers of knowledge online. So, I mean,
00:28:48
Speaker
Well, I don't know. As he talked about gatekeepers before, he was talking about things like editors of newspapers who would say, no, no, you can't publish this, whereas on the Internet there was
00:28:59
Speaker
If you were posting on a forum, perhaps there'd be moderators saying, no, you can't say that here. But if you had your own website or what have you, there was no one to tell you not to. So there may be something to what he's saying, but I don't know. We'll see as he continues. He says that thanks to the internet, conspiracy theories could, first of all, reach wider audiences than perhaps they had before. Although, again, that's something Joe might disagree with.
00:29:21
Speaker
And it also, there was now the possibility that things could migrate from the internet to the mainstream media, much as the way as anyone with young children knows how when your kid first starts going to daycare, they just sit there and soak up all the diseases from the other filth children that they're around with and then incubate them until they're strong enough to infect you when had you encountered them normally, your immune system would have been able to fight them off. Children are filthy.
00:29:50
Speaker
That's what I'm saying. That's why I don't have any. Although I do teach in a university which is filled with with with filthy older children. So basically, I'm in front of a petri dish every time I teach. The other thing to point out, this is one of those classic papers where someone who is terminally online assumes that everybody else is terminally online. There's some really interesting survey work
00:30:15
Speaker
as to where, I'm going to use a terrible political phrase, ordinary people get their information from. And it turns out, actually, was a lot of people who are online think that everybody gets their information from the internet. There's still a huge chunk of the population that only gets their news from television broadcasts and reading the papers.
00:30:38
Speaker
So it's true that technically via the internet, conspiracy theories can reach a wider audience. But there's a base rate problem we need to talk about here, which is actually how big is that audience compared to traditional media and the conspiracy theories we find in it. And spoilers, we're going to be talking about a conspiracy theory spread by traditional media in the bonus episode.
00:31:07
Speaker
But not right now. Because now we need to look at the phenomena of multiple posting. He's very interested in this idea of multiple posting. By which he basically means one person posts something and then another person also posts that and they read it. He says this migration from internet to mainstream media
00:31:25
Speaker
was often enabled through the process of multiple postings in which an idea moved about from site to site. Not only did multiple postings supply pseudo-confirmation, if an idea appeared in so many places viewers sometimes believed it must be true, multiple postings could gradually legitimize a fringe belief. That happened if, in the process of reposting a message, eventually came to be picked up by more visible or better-known sites.
00:31:48
Speaker
Once this happened, the taint of its origins was scrubbed off, and this in turn allowed it to be moved to mainstream media. Thus the chain ended with the message finally reappearing in a major newspaper television news account or some comparable report. So that is the sort of mechanism he's proposing, I guess, by which things can go from being weird from stuff on the internet to appearing on the nightly news in front of quote-unquote ordinary people.
00:32:11
Speaker
Although this, this is also something which happened before the internet, the old adage, it must be true, I read it in the papers. But so after that's, that's kind of it for the technological factors. But he also mentioned these socio political factors. So he says that that around the 1990s, there was there was building a growing distrust of the authorities, I think I was
00:32:37
Speaker
things I've read. Go back to the Nixon administration and the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate affair as being a thing when American people really started to lose trust in their authorities. I don't know, I'm not next, we're there.
Pop Culture's Influence on Conspiracy Theories
00:32:49
Speaker
But he also talks about the penetration of conspiracy theories into pop culture. I think this was a thing.
00:32:53
Speaker
I think things like the X-Files and the works of Dan Brown really did start to make conspiracy theories popular, culminating in, of course, the film Conspiracy Theory in 1997. When you have major, major studios going, hey, this conspiracy theory is the other thing, let's make a movie and call it conspiracy theory, I think that shows that it was obviously, there was
00:33:18
Speaker
something in the zeitgeist at the time where conspiracy theories did sort of become a thing, or the concept of conspiracy theories. I'm not saying conspiracy theories themselves became more or less common, but people started using the term in the mid-90s. I know a lot of people say the X-Files was a big breakout hit for conspiracy theories on American TV, and maybe for American TV that is true.
00:33:43
Speaker
But conspiracy-related programming in the UK, for example, has been around for a while. There have been all sorts of TV shows using conspiracy theories as plotlines, predating the X-Files. And I'm just not entirely convinced the X-Files is kind of the zeitgeist moment that some people make it out to be. Certainly it was a surprise hit.
00:34:06
Speaker
And maybe the other conspiracy theory media that had been going on on TV, like the War of the Worlds TV series from 1989 to 1991, weren't big breakout hits. But it was always bubbling away in the background. Just The X-Files was the one that became super successful and became water cooler. TV instead. Yeah, I mean, I still think of that film, Conspiracy Theory, which I've never actually seen.
00:34:35
Speaker
but I have no real desire to, so that's okay. It does contain Mel Gibson, which is the reason why you don't watch things like this. Concentrated doses of Mel Gibson, yeah. But I mean, that seems, it's the, I don't know, it's the Saturday Night Fever, it's the, what was the Jazzercise one with Jamie Lee Curtis in it? Perfect, no, whatever it was, you know the one. It's sort of, when you see the,
00:35:00
Speaker
the big movie studios say, hey, it seems to be a mark of this is a social phenomenon of the moment that it's enough to be just the theme of a movie. Obviously, as you say, conspiracy theories have been around in movies, in American movies, for a long time. But the fact that you have something that's specifically calling it out, I guess, seemed like a thing to me.
00:35:29
Speaker
But the thing he wants to say is, yeah, these things they appear. He also talks about the works of Dan Brown, which were there and popular. And like you're saying, against the X-Files, sometimes surprisingly popular.
00:35:43
Speaker
I mean, not to kind of keep beating a dead horse, but I mean, the 1970s was massive for conspiracy theory films in the United States with the adaptations of, I'd say, For All the King's Men. That's not the film version of The President's Men.
00:36:02
Speaker
There were lots and lots of conspiracy theory films, and then there was kind of an over-saturation of conspiracy theory films in the United States in the 1970s, which meant there was a lull in the 1980s, and then it came back in the 1990s, which is, I think, my issue with the X-Files thing. It's not that the X-Files is the start of this. It's just that there was a period of time for about 10 years where that wasn't a popular genre to work with.
00:36:31
Speaker
but it had been popular before and it probably will be popular again in the past.
00:36:36
Speaker
Is this because I'm really disputing the notion that this all starts in the 19th century? It's an arbitrary date and it's not a particularly historically sound starting date for this phenomena. I have to say, I went and looked up the Wikipedia page for the conspiracy theory film just to see the release date and exactly what the conspiracy theory it was in the end that it talks about.
00:37:04
Speaker
It's a strangely written synopsis, I have to say. There are a few bits where like Jerry, which is Mel Gibson's character, and Alice is Julia Roberts. Jerry tells Alice that he had promised to watch over her before her father was killed by another assassin. Jonas's men capture Jerry, kill Alice's hierarchical superior, and attempt to kill or capture her without success. Hierarchical superior? I assume they mean boss.
00:37:27
Speaker
Later on you have the sentence. Spoilers, where are we? Jerry attempts to drown Jonas but is shot by Jonas from underwater. Ellis, who has regained consciousness after being knocked out, then shoots Jonas 11 times.
00:37:40
Speaker
of detail doesn't matter at all in any way no i mean wikipedia is sometimes too much detail such as the what's the infamous dumping human waste over a bridge i can't remember which band it was
00:37:58
Speaker
There was some band who, due to an accident, ended up dumping a whole bunch of human waste onto a cruise boat that was moving beneath a bridge when their RV released all of their septic tanks. And the Wikipedia page for it goes into stunning detail on an almost minute-by-minute description of the event in question.
00:38:20
Speaker
And then you go to another web page and it's only three lines long description of an important historical event. You go, yeah, Wikipedia doesn't have a kind of consistent standard. No, it does not. One other bit from this paper that stuck out to me was the section, they have clearly tipped into some need or receptivity in the general public. If one thinks, for example, of the Dan Brown novels,
00:38:45
Speaker
Thousands, even hundreds of mass market books are published each year by relatively unknown writers with no claim to literary excellence. Very few achieve real success. That Brown has achieved his success not once but several times is a tribute, not so much to his skill as a writer, but to the fact that he responds to something in the minds of potential readers.
00:39:02
Speaker
Which made me think, A, ooh, you bitch. And B, it's kind of fair. I mean, I will give Dan Brown and his former wife, she was Blythe Brown. I actually don't know whether she's Blythe Brown anymore. Very good. Up until recently. And recently, I mean, his last book was released five years ago.
00:39:24
Speaker
very good at cliffhangers, which I think is actually the real success of Dan Brownsburg. It wasn't the conspiracy theory that he would always end a chapter on, this isn't very good, but I do need to see how does he get out of this particular travail.
00:39:43
Speaker
Nevertheless, the paper continues, or this section concludes. This combination of technological and socio-political factors has resulted in the erosion of what was once a clear and firm boundary between the fringe and the mainstream. Where fringe ideas were once segregated and insular subcultures, they now pass through that boundary and become part of the mainstream, a process I term, mainstreaming the fringe.
00:40:05
Speaker
The boundary has obviously not become wholly permeable. Many fringe ideas remain where they were, with little possibility of migrating into the mainstream. But enough have done so that the once-firm distinction between the two realms is now blurred. A considerable and ever-increasing amount of what once would have been considered fringe motifs are finding their way into channels that reach mass audiences. As a result, material from the stigmatised knowledge domain has entered mainstream culture, becoming destigmatised in the process. Wasn't mainstreaming the fringe the sequel to that?
00:40:33
Speaker
Christian Slater, 1989's skateboarding action film, Gleaning the Cube. Josh, Gleaning the Cube is obviously the title of a pornographic film.
00:40:41
Speaker
It does sound, maybe mainstreaming the fringe with some sort of hairdressing film. I'm sure it's from somewhere, but maybe not. Doesn't matter. Next section, which is the last section before the conclusion, he starts talking about the political consequences.
Political Impact of Conspiracy Theories
00:40:56
Speaker
For that is the title of the section, Political Consequences. He says, these developments might be dismissed as merely trivial were it not for the potential impact on politics. The word potential sounding positively quaint. I think now I'm here seven years into the future.
00:41:10
Speaker
Yeah, it does make you realise, as I've actually teased Brian, you should have mentioned 9-11 when you wrote your paper, despite the fact it was written well prior to that event. It is interesting how there are certain conspiracy theories now you go, I mean, it might be the case that actually fewer conspiracy theories are believed now than there were when this paper was being written. But the kind of conspiracy theories we can use as examples now
00:41:40
Speaker
really do make these ones seem you know yeah right yeah there's some good ones but yes now the two examples he gives of of the political consequences of conspiracy theories are the obama birtherism business and operation jade helm 15 15 and then we have mentioned in quite some time but since 2015 i think yeah yeah pretty big at the time so he talks about how birther
00:42:05
Speaker
Bertha conspiracies in one form or another had been around at least since Obama was a senator. But Bakken cites the migration of theories, these Bertha conspiracy theories that were around on the internet eventually showed up on a website run by the National Review. And then from there went on to the mainstream media and then eventually even say at the time he had written this paper, Trump had already who
00:42:32
Speaker
I can't remember at the time it was written he was just the um he was just the i can't remember what's the word nominee he was just a republican nominee i think he wasn't actually there but yeah so so but but he had he had started um there we go uh among these subsequently suggesting that there might be some merit to it was donald trump later to emerge as a serious contender for the 2016 republican presidential elimination there we go
00:42:58
Speaker
pop back into the nodes there. So yeah, that's him giving an example of the thing that he was talking about in the previous section there. Bounced around on the internet a little bit, made its way onto more credible sites and from there to more credible ones and then eventually into the mainstream media. Then he talks about Operation Jade Helm.
00:43:15
Speaker
Now, if you don't recall, I remembered the name. I couldn't actually remember what the hell it was about. I had to go back and lock it out. It's an invasion of Texas, Joshua, or at least a simulated invasion of Texas to make sure that people will not realize the real invasion is happening or something of that kind. Yes, yes. It was the name, Operation Jadehound was the name given to a military operation, not just in Texas, but in a few of the southern states in the US in 2015. And in theory, I'm going around that it was either
00:43:42
Speaker
an actual sort of military takeover of Texas or somewhere, or yes, like you say, it was some sort of a psy-op designed to get people used to the idea, the site of troops in the streets so that when Obama really did declare martial war,
00:43:58
Speaker
he'd be able to get it over quicker. And that one was remarkable because Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas at the time, actually took these conspiracy theories seriously enough that he directed the Texas State Guard to go and monitor what the military was up to, to make sure they ain't doing nothing that would threaten this here good state of Texas. So either he believed in these conspiracy theories, or at the very least,
00:44:26
Speaker
knew enough of his constituents believed in these conspiracy theories that he needed to at least be seen to be taking them seriously. Now, I do have to apologize. I remember when we first talked about it, I said that Jade Helm just sounded like a stripper name, not that there's anything wrong with being a stripper, of course. And I have to say on further on more detailed reflection, I now think that Jade Helm sounds like a description of a Ninja Turtles penis from some sort of Mills and Boom romance novel.
00:44:56
Speaker
He slipped out of his robe. His jade helm became very apparent, and Princess Margaret went,
00:45:27
Speaker
I can't wait to put that in
00:45:37
Speaker
Alex Jones. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. But in both cases, the point is he maintains that had these things been around at an earlier time, he's saying that they would have remained in the fringe and only had sort of a small subculture of believers they wouldn't have been able to break into the mainstream.
00:45:54
Speaker
the way that they did. Which again makes me wonder, well hang on, what's different then between between now and then? And if he thinks it was all because of Greg Abbott mainstreaming the Jade Hound stuff, what was different between then and earlier times?
00:46:10
Speaker
I don't know, I'm not sure. It seems a little bit shaky. Yeah, once again, this 1990s date for the current crisis just doesn't seem tenable. So this leads us all to the conclusion, where he says, conspiracy theories now diffuse more widely than perhaps at any earlier time, while there are potentially significant, sorry, politically significant examples, such as the Bertha and Jade Helm cases discussed above, that it's not yet clear what the overall impact will be from the mainstreaming of the fringe.
00:46:39
Speaker
The increased purring ability of the boundary separating the fringe from the mainstream may have two quite different consequences. On the one hand, the more frequent presence of conspiracist motifs in mainstream culture may serve merely to trivialise them. This might well be the result of their movement into films, television and popular literature. If they come to be seen as little more than entertaining plot devices, it is possible they will be less incentive to take them seriously. They may be seen as little more than clever devices to enhance improbable stories.
00:47:05
Speaker
On the other hand, their association with mainstream cultural platforms also confers a kind of respectability that makes their articulation socially acceptable even if they are not explicitly endorsed. That may lead to conspiracism emerging as an accepted mode of explanation, a way of both understanding the world and construing the political environment. The many variations on conspiracy that the internet affords provide an endless menu for reconfiguring the world.
00:47:28
Speaker
It is the second alternative, of course, that is the more troubling. For if mainstreaming leads in this direction, more people may think of the world not in terms of change that can be accomplished by themselves, but as something that is the province of a mysterious they. The cabal whose hidden power supposedly exercises all real control. By implication, both individuals and organised groups are thus rendered powerless and politically irrelevant. They become their passive objects to be manipulated by the conspirators.
00:47:54
Speaker
The shift from active agent to passive object may also be accompanied by a search for scapegoats, those believed to be the conspirators' allies, henchmen, or collaborators. This is one of the most troubling aspects of past conspiracy theories, and if it becomes linked to more modern electronic communications, it will only spread more widely and more rapidly. If the conspirators are believed to be hidden and invisible, as most conspiracy theories suggest, then the anger of those who believe themselves to be the conspirators' targets is easily diverted to those who are visible and set to do the conspiracies' work.
00:48:22
Speaker
All of this suggests that as the fringe seeps more and more into the mainstream, with stigmatised knowledge becoming cleansed of its stigmas, we may face a more dangerously volatile and polarised politics. Shut the internet down, Joshua. Shut the internet down. I mean, I have to say, in the time since you wrote that, we do seem to have a more dangerously volatile and polarised politics. If all of the things you've said have come to pass, I mean, the idea that
00:48:48
Speaker
Certainly, I don't think people are out there thinking that everything's pointless because you can't fix anything in a secret. Power controls the world. People invaded, you know, mobs went invading places because they thought that secret people control the world and they wanted to do something about them. So I don't know if that side of it has certainly come to pass, but maybe some of it has. Yeah, I mean, I'd say
00:49:15
Speaker
Some of the policy prescription isn't necessarily terrible, but the dating of when it started and what caused the decline seems problematic. Yeah, and I think overall it makes it speaking in very general terms, but it never
00:49:35
Speaker
Yeah, like I said, to give the benefit of the doubt, you can say, okay, these are all just generalisations that he's saying, but he never explicitly says these are just generalisations and they don't apply in all cases. So if you did not want to be that generous, you could say that, yeah, it makes claims that are much too broad and unsupported.
00:49:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean you get lines like, if the conspirators are believed to be hidden and invisible, as most conspiracy theories suggest. Okay, so how big is the most there? It's one of the few qualifications you've actually put into the paper, and it would be quite nice to have a bit of discussion about the most in most conspiracy theories.
00:50:11
Speaker
So yes, an interesting one. Does it still have much sway in this day and age? I mean, it gets cited to a certain extent. I mean, the reason why we're looking at Bachoon here is that it was either that or forced you to read an entire book. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. Precisely. So I thought we'd sneak in our Bachoon with this 2016 piece. So I mean, Bachoon gets cited a lot, particularly in the social science literature. People really like his taxonomy. And the argument he's putting here
00:50:41
Speaker
In his book, there's just more focus on the internet as being the source of all of our woes in this very short paper. So there you go. It's an interesting read and a short read, which I'm thoroughly in favour of. Even though he's still done a standard link. Well, I think because it was shorter, it was possible to go into it in a bit more detail and have more things to say than just simply summarising what was there.
00:51:07
Speaker
We sure did. It's not a proper episode if you don't get to mention Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle genitalia. So with that in mind we're going to record a bonus content and who knows what sort of genitalia we'll be talking about in that. Could be anything. We might be talking about the genitalia of Winston Peters. We might be talking about the genitalia
00:51:28
Speaker
of Richard Preble, we might be talking about the genitalia of Cam Slater. I mean, these are all possibilities. We might even mention the genitalia of all of the fictional characters who appear in seasons three and four of The White Vault. Who knows? Who knows? By genitalia, we probably mean conspiracy theories, or do we? Well, I mean, it stigmatized knowledge either way, Josh. It stigmatized knowledge either way.
00:51:57
Speaker
But if you want to find out, you'll have to be a patron and listen to our bonus episode. And if you already are one, congratulations. You are literally the best people in the world. If you'd like to become one of the best people in the world, just go to patreon.com and search for the podcast.
00:52:12
Speaker
you might be religious and think that the best way to achieve enlightenment utopia and a pleasant afterlife is through being shriven of your sins but actually it's a lot easier you just pay us a dollar a month become a patron and you become by definition one of the best people in the world which means only good things will happen to you eventually eventually on average in the long run yeah yes so
00:52:40
Speaker
I don't think we can endorse it any higher than that, so we better quit while we're ahead. I have literally nothing more to say, except, of course, for goodbye. I'm going to put my jade-helm away. Probably best that you do. The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, Associate Professor M. R. X. Dantas.
00:53:03
Speaker
Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, nothing is real, everything is permitted, but conditions apply.