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A mature discussion about conspiracy theories with Brian L. Keeley
26 Plays4 years ago
M interviews Brian L. Keeley (Pitzer College) about conspiracy theories, maturity, and conspiracy theorising in the Age of COVID-19.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Conspiracy Theory Sommelier
00:00:00
Speaker
Ah, here comes the conspiracy theory sommelier now!
00:00:03
Speaker
Ah yes, a true pair when it comes to selecting only the finest, maturest of conspiracy theories. What have for you for us today? I think you'll find this one particularly intriguing. The Tale of Charles W. Hmmm, minty. Let's see. Oh, I see Charles used to work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Corporation, looking specifically into how to miniaturise cell phones and inject them into people's necks.
00:00:30
Speaker
Ooh, and he worked for the Lancet during the retraction of the Andrew Wakefield article. Advised to be rejected due to some issue over semicolons, I see. This all looks very standard, though. I think you'll find the more mature stuff starts on page 23. Ooh, I meant page 42. Ah, yes. Charles would appear to be a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, a Bilderberger, a Grandmason and...
00:00:56
Speaker
Oh! And a founding member of the Priory of Sion! No, this child's character looks to be the full Sticky Wicket. This is fine work, Brian. Yes, Charles seems to be the product of a set of some of the most mature conspiracy theories around. Now, can I interest you in, as a digestive, a series of false flag events, some of which have been endorsed by Alex Jones. Mainline them straight into my cerebral cortex, my good man!
Meet the Hosts: Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dentith
00:01:30
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:39
Speaker
Hi everyone, and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Tamaki, Makoto, and they are Dr. M. Denteth in Kiriura, both of us in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Kiriura! Pretty sure it's Maori Language Week, so have a bit of that. Yes. Yes, it is. You are quite right. I'm afraid that's basically what I've got for you. Now, I think we shouted out
00:02:07
Speaker
to Charles our new patron last week but I don't know if we actually mentioned his name because we were saving it for the sketch so now you've been officially introduced as the latest member of the Grand Conspiracy whose threads we are still unraveling.
00:02:22
Speaker
Somehow, even though we're trying to uncover your dastardly plot, you are financing the investigation. This conspiracy runs very deep, and we still don't know exactly what the end goal is, but we will find out, Charles and Co., if that is indeed your set of real names, which
00:02:43
Speaker
It may well be or maybe it may not. It may not be. I mean, we don't know whether people use real names on the Internet at all. I mean, is your name really Josh Edison or is it Ash Jodison?
00:02:55
Speaker
You know it is Josh Addison. Literally, that's it. No middle name. I suppose Joshua. There we go. If we're going to be... See, your entire life is a lie. Yep, my life is a lie now. This is a week of the month in which we would normally do a conspiracy theory masterpiece theatre, but we're not going to for two reasons.
Interview Teaser: Brian Alkely on Conspiracy Theories
00:03:15
Speaker
One, M has recorded a very interesting interview with Brian Alkely, and two, I started reading the paper that we're going to be discussing in this week's Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, and it's quite something. And I realised I was going to need a considerably greater run-up, I think, to give it the full attention.
00:03:36
Speaker
So we'll do that maybe next week, unless we do the news next week. Maybe. I mean, so because of the way that we've been playing around with our schedule, technically next week should be the news episode. And we didn't do a news episode last month.
00:03:52
Speaker
So we probably should do an episode this month about the news, but at the same time, it kind of feels like the news is kind of always the same. It's poisoning from Russia. It's COVID-19 conspiracy theories. It's Trump doing what Trump does best, to the point where news episodes don't seem particularly exciting in the age of COVID-19. Not simply newsworthy, no.
00:04:17
Speaker
Or at least they would be in any other time and place. But we don't live in another time and place. We live in this time and this place. Unfortunately, that is the case. Time and space is the place that we are stuck in. Unfortunately. So we might as well make the best of it. And I think the best we can do at this time.
00:04:35
Speaker
is a thoroughly delightful interview featuring our own Dr. N. Dentith and of course Brian L. Keeley, who again, I don't know,
Introducing Brian L. Keeley
00:04:44
Speaker
is he a doctor? Is he a professor? I know the titles work differently in the States anyway. Brian has a professorial role at Pitzer College in The Lovely LA. Although I say The Lovely LA, I believe it's currently on fire.
00:04:57
Speaker
I feel I should just make up my own title anyway. So Lord Chancellor Brian L. Keeley spoke with with Dr. Denteth. I don't give a special title, just Brian. Fine. Oh, what should you be? I already said Lord Chancellor. Chancellor of the Exchequer. That's a good one. Oh, that's the role that Stickel had before his unfortunate demise in Glasgow.
00:05:21
Speaker
Although the best ones, of course, are the shadow ministers, really. You really should be sort of, you know, the shadow minister for stuff. The shadow minister of the privy closet. That'll do. Whatever that was, you were it. Brian was also a different thing. You spoke. That sounds like an intro to me. Yes, I think we'll just play a chime now and let the interview unfold in real time.
00:05:55
Speaker
This week I'm talking with Brian Alkely, who not only has made a number of appearances on the show, but is also a long-term patron of it. Brian and I have known each other since 2015, when we met at the University of Miami's Conspiracy Theory Conference, and have become good friends since. Brian is also, along with Charles Pigdon, one of the first philosophers to talk about conspiracy theories post-Kyle Popper, and recent events along without episodes of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre,
00:06:22
Speaker
have made me revisit Brian's seminal 1999 paper of conspiracy theories. Brian's discussion of mature unwarranted conspiracy theories is something I think is ripe for reintroduction into the discourse. So let's start there. Hello Brian, how are things in the city of angels?
00:06:39
Speaker
Hello, Em. Thank you for having me on. Always enjoy the podcast, and I'm happy to be on today. And it's actually a little bit post-apocalyptic here in Los Angeles. I'm out in the eastern part of the area, and we're having not only fires, but also Santa Ana winds blowing. So as I speak to you, kind of a fine ash is falling along outside, and the sky has got a nice reddish kind of
00:07:08
Speaker
post-apocalyptic sunset look to it, so it seems appropriate enough to talk about conspiracy theories in the midst of the climate meltdown that we seem to be having this week.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yes, 2020 has turned out to be a very interesting year. There was that brief moment where you also had murder hornets on the agenda, but luckily that seems to have gone away. Now we've got our respective elections to look forward to. Yes, and something tells me that the elections won't be the end of whatever they bring about. So, at least in our case, the post-election will probably be as interesting, if not more interesting, than the pre-election.
00:07:48
Speaker
Yes, as I've been pointing out to a lot of people recently, the issue for those of us who live outside of the United States of America is that if your election is contested, which I think it's going to be, what do jurisdictions do when there's a president in the North and a president in the South? Especially when if one of those presidents is Donald Trump, he's not going to be very kind to any nation-state
00:08:14
Speaker
that doesn't automatically recognize him as the preeminent, the best, and the biggest president of the people of the United States of America. And the last time we had two presidents, that went so well, so, you know, not much to worry about there at all. No, no, I mean, the history of the Confederacy, no one knows about that. It had no effect upon American history in any way, shape, or form.
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's a disturbing thought. Let's not go there.
Impact of Brian's 1999 Paper on Conspiracy Theories
00:08:44
Speaker
Let's go all the way back to the past and talk about your 1999 paper of conspiracy theories in which you were interested in the class of unwarranted conspiracy theories, which continue to persist and good evidence, what you call the class of mature conspiracy theories. Now, would you care to give us a gloss on what these are and why they matter?
00:09:08
Speaker
Yeah, the original motivation for writing that paper was this idea that it seemed like there were
00:09:16
Speaker
conspiracy theories that did not merit much consideration. They were, you know, call them unwarranted, call them, you know, by many other names, most of which were pretty pejorative that, and it seemed that that's the pejorative terms that were used to describe them kind of reflected particularly the kind of academic approach to these things that they really just weren't worth our time. And
00:09:44
Speaker
And what struck me about that was this idea that it's not really clear how to distinguish them from one another.
00:09:55
Speaker
unwarranted conspiracy theory series that we shouldn't give much credit to at all against the background that we know that conspiracies do in fact happen, right? And that there are also theories about conspiracies that seem to be the sorts of things we should believe in, you know, be it, you know, classic examples of Iran, Iran Contra in the United States or the Watergate break-in.
00:10:20
Speaker
the Tonkin Gulf incident at the beginning of the Vietnam War for the United States, not to mention examples that you very much like to talk about, pretty much any, most of our coup d'etats and certainly all of our coup d'etats, but also a lot of our political assassinations typically seem to be carried out by groups of people inspiring. So there are all these cases of theories about conspiracies that seemed
00:10:47
Speaker
to be good theories. And then there were also these theories about conspiracy theories, about theories about conspiracies that turned out to be the sorts of things that seemed to be laughable or should be treated with derision. And being a philosopher interested in distinctions as philosophers are, I'm like, oh, well, how do you distinguish between those two?
00:11:09
Speaker
And the original paper was an exploration into like, well, can we separate out the wheat from the chaff? Can we separate out the warranted ones from the unwarranted ones? And to a large extent, the first paper suggested that
00:11:26
Speaker
That's not certainly it's not as easy of a problem as you might have thought it was, or at least academics seem to think it was given how little attention they gave to it. But it turns out to be, you know, particularly problematic. And, you know, I ended up with a position that.
00:11:41
Speaker
I think later scholars, you know, put a nice spin on it, this idea of particularism versus generalism, right? The idea that there is no thing generally that you can say about conspiracy theories that puts them into the unwarranted category or warranted category. But you can look at a particular conspiracy theory and say, this one, yeah, this one's good. Whereas, nope, this one, this one's bad.
00:12:07
Speaker
And I think one of the nice things that came out of, actually I enjoyed listening to you and Josh talking about the earlier papers, your Masterpiece Theater series, because in some sense it's caused me to go back and kind of rethink those papers, including my own papers. And I think the kind of emphasis that you've put on it in terms of making it clear that the
00:12:29
Speaker
the account that I'm giving has to be one about mature theories as opposed to less mature theories. I think it's something I wasn't completely cognizant of as I was writing that paper, just the same as I think you two have also pointed out ways in which when you're talking about these things, you have to be really careful with your language and make sure that you don't just end up using the word conspiracy theory to refer to the unwanted conspiracy theories that if you're going to be careful and say, okay, I want to
00:12:58
Speaker
take that general class and talk about the unwarranted ones and the warranted ones, you need to be really careful to always use those modifiers when you're talking about one group or the other. And again, I was not always completely clear and consistent with that usage as well. So if I were marking my own paper like one of my undergraduate papers, I would probably say inconsistent language use here. Be careful about not slipping back and forth between these different senses. So
00:13:27
Speaker
But yeah, that's the interest is to figure out, you know, what do we do both with theories that have been around for a while and how we should treat them? And it seems like we should treat them differently or come at them differently than ones that are brand new that have just shown up two weeks ago.
00:13:42
Speaker
In your defence, we'll get back to the discussion of maturity in just a second. This is one of two papers post Karl Hopper in the discipline. So, I mean, the first question is, were you aware of Charles's paper when you were writing of conspiracy theories, if you can recall back to
Philosophical Interest in Conspiracy Theories
00:13:59
Speaker
that state? I think so, because I'm trying my best.
00:14:01
Speaker
thought I cited it in that first paper. I see. I think it's actually subsequent scholars who are citing you and not Charles. Yes, that has happened. Yeah. So when you know, the way the paper came about is I had, you know, I had this idea for a paper about conspiracy theory. So of course, I did what any, you know, as a graduate student, you do what graduate students do, you go to the library, you go, okay, let's find out who else has written about this.
00:14:24
Speaker
And actually, I think what I discovered, I'm pretty sure the first thing I discovered was actually Charles's paper, because it has the word conspiracy theory in the title. And then from Charles's paper, that then led me back to Popper, because in Popper, it's just a, you know, a short discussion in a book about something apparently completely different. And so it was really through Charles that I actually find the
00:14:50
Speaker
uh the reference back to Popper and and then that's about it I mean there just there wasn't a lot of other things out there um that uh and then yeah so I was careful to to cite Charles and it was kind of striking to me too that nobody else had picked up on Charles's idea uh and you know and followed it along um and uh
00:15:14
Speaker
And I try to at least chastise people who come after me to like, if you're going to talk about the history, right? It's really, you know, Charles was the one who got there after quite a long time, if you consider Popper being the first one to get there.
00:15:27
Speaker
I mean, I suppose this is a question which is a bit hard to answer, but why has there been a lack of philosophical interest in these things called conspiracy theories between Popper and the open society and all the way to the mid to late 90s, do you think? Yeah, I think, well, I mean, I think there's, I mean, there is
00:15:47
Speaker
always I think a general worry about elitism in, particularly philosophy, but I think in academia more generally, that academics are kind of living in their rarefied world and they're not always down with the common person, even though some of them make much noise about the importance of doing that. But I think in practice, you see that often that doesn't happen. I mean, you see similar things of,
00:16:16
Speaker
gossip being a, you know, it's a human phenomenon, right? And it's a human epistemic phenomenon. But interestingly, you don't really see much people in philosophy picking up until the feminist philosophers come along. And they point to it not only being something that's maybe considered lower class or whatnot, but also gendered as well.
00:16:39
Speaker
that can't be used as an excuse for what happened with conspiracy theories. But I think a lot of it is just simply, you know, like I said, I think the attitude that I felt I was coming up against is this idea that it's just not worth your time. You know, it's just obviously
00:16:57
Speaker
wrongheaded. And I think the reason I didn't fall into that in particular was because I'd come out of a background in philosophy of the sciences and in particular in philosophy of science around philosophy of biology with debates within evolution, natural selection, creationism, what later then becomes intelligent design and so forth.
00:17:20
Speaker
that there was this tradition within philosophy of science, particularly philosophy of biology, that said, hey, we need to take common sense theories seriously. And in particular, one of my professors at UCSD was Philip Kitcher, and he had written the famous book, or at least famous, you know, within our circles, abusing science, which was his attempt to like, let's actually look at creationist theory
00:17:45
Speaker
as a theory. Let's take it seriously as a scientific theory. And, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's wrong, Kitcher wants to say, but you got to say more than that. Like, what does it get wrong? Where does it go wrong? Can you show me, you know, show me exactly where that theory zigs when it should have zagged and so forth. And where, you know, show me the actual flaws. Yes, you got to, and if you're going to be intellectually honest, you need to do that.
00:18:10
Speaker
And I've been really impressed by that book by Phil because I, I mean, I liked the idea of like, yeah, let's take these things on and, and, uh, and, you know, don't just turn up your nose at, you know, the kinds of theories that people on Sunday morning in, you know, parts of the country where people don't have as many college degrees and just say, Oh, these silly people, they don't, you know, they don't know what they think and they're incoherent and, and whatnot. Uh, and instead say, no, let's.
00:18:36
Speaker
You know, they're they're trying to reason through things. So let's see if we can reason with them and see even if we want to say in the end of the day, it's wrong. Why it's wrong. Let's spell it out. And so that's I think I also cite that at the very beginning of my paper saying that I offer this.
00:18:52
Speaker
paper about conspiracy theories in the spirit of Philip's book on creationism. Like, let's take these things seriously and try to show what's wrong with them. And of course the kind of punchline was that I wasn't able to necessarily show what was wrong with them. It's like, wow, okay, unlike the case with creationism, it's not clear exactly how to answer these in such a way that makes a nice clean
Evolutionary Biology's Influence on Conspiracy Analysis
00:19:15
Speaker
distinction.
00:19:15
Speaker
Um, and, and then, and they're there and you get a bunch of other people kind of going to come along and show me that I was wrong that no, no, you really can do it. And you get Steve Clark and you get, uh, other people who come along after who want to say, you know, you know, step aside Keely, step aside, Pigdon, we got this. And then, uh, and then we've got that kind of debate going on.
00:19:38
Speaker
Yes, I think it's actually quite interesting drawing that comparison between intelligent design theories and conspiracy theories, because I think a lot of people do conflate conspiracy theories with your wacky pseudoscientific theories. And when it comes to the investigation of it, well actually, no, it doesn't seem that it's that obvious that we can just be condemning of them sui generis. Because if we accept that conspiracies occur,
00:20:07
Speaker
and people have theorised about conspiracies, and some of them have turned out to be right, then we've got a problem if not of labels of the actual thing being investigated. Now what I find fascinating about your 1999 piece, which Josh and I have been joking about,
00:20:24
Speaker
So many of the pieces don't mention 9-11 up until around about 2003, 2006. And I think it's unfair to chastise you for not mentioning 9-11 when you publish a paper two years prior to that event. Although I still think you should have had these... It's very terrible of you, I have to say. You should have had the forbearance to realise that event was going to occur just like the CIA.
00:20:48
Speaker
You do use, as a rather interesting example, the big conspiracy theory of that time, the Oklahoma City bombing, which had occurred, I mean, so that's, that is back in 1995. Now I'm assuming, I mean, the publication date of conspiracy theories is 99, but I'm assuming given the way the academic publishing works, you're probably writing it about 98.
00:21:14
Speaker
Yeah, actually, probably a little earlier than that. I wrote it, I mean, I think I really seriously started writing it in about 96 or so. I started drafting it. And I don't know, I mean, I don't know if I've told you the story of how I came to write it, but it, it
00:21:35
Speaker
Uh, cause that was not my area of study, right? I mean, well, there was nobody's area of study. Nobody was studying the philosophy of conspiracy theories. Then I was in, I was doing philosophy of neuroscience. So I mentioned I had this background in philosophy of science. I was, uh, mainly kind of philosophy of biology, but I was really focused in on neuroscience and the philosophy of neuroscience. And I was working in a.
00:21:54
Speaker
a neuroscience lab at the Scripps Institution Oceanography. I was studying electric fish and animals with weird sensory modalities and whatnot. And in the late 1990s, philosophy of neuroscience was also a kind of an edgy sort of thing. And it was not clear at all that I was going to be able to get a job in philosophy using philosophy of neuroscience as my area. And part of the
00:22:20
Speaker
worry seemed to be when you would send off your job applications and then you wouldn't get any nibbles and then you would kind of
00:22:26
Speaker
use your sources and your boss's sources to figure out why didn't they pay attention to you is that one of the knocks against people that was doing work like I was doing was that, well, you're not really a philosopher. You're really a neuroscientist. Go get a department. We'd love you to be in our local neuroscience department because you sound like you'd be great to talk to, but we don't want to hire you in our philosophy department because you seem to have split allegiances. You're not a full-on philosopher. You're more of a neuroscientist.
00:22:54
Speaker
And especially given particularly neuroscience and philosophy, there's a big difference in terms of the amount of funding that gets thrown at these things and the number of faculty at schools and so forth. You know, it really seemed like they were like, well, why don't you just go be a neuroscientist? There's a lot more money in that and there's a lot more jobs in that. And that seems like the smarter thing to do. And I kind of wanted to be a philosopher.
00:23:15
Speaker
And so I decided it's like, okay, I need to write a paper that has nothing to do with neuroscience and a paper that might get published in a mainstream philosophical journal and doesn't mention neuroscience at all.
00:23:28
Speaker
Uh, and so I went back through my dissertation notebook, my little notebook where I would jot things down. And I noticed that a couple of different places I had jotted down this stuff about maybe, you know, can you do an analysis of conspiracy theories the way that David Hume did this analysis of miracles that showed that, you know, by their very definition, miracles are the sort of things that are just literally incredible that they are. Any explanation that involves a miracle is always going to be unwarranted because
00:23:56
Speaker
There's going to be a more plausible non-miraculous explanation of the same thing, particularly with the case of historical miracles, you know, where all we have is testimony of various individuals about what they saw this person do or this event that happened.
00:24:11
Speaker
And, and I kind of got onto that, it is like, okay, let me see if I can work up a paper or not. And that's what sent me to the library and, and found Charles's paper and go, okay, at least one other person has written and published the paper on this. So it's not completely, uh, you know, out of the blue, but it also has nothing to do with neuroscience. And, um,
00:24:32
Speaker
And so that's what I set out to do. And then all the while I'm sending out job applications about philosophy of neuroscience. And then when I got that paper published, it turned out it's like, great, I've got a paper about philosophy of biology and a philosophy of biology journal. And now I've got a paper that has nothing to do with biology, nothing to do with neuroscience. And it's published in journal philosophy, which is a mainstream
00:24:59
Speaker
you know, you know, nothing sciency about it kind of journal. So really, see, I'm really a philosopher, and I want to do these things. And, and I at the time, I thought it was going, you know, and then I got a job, finally took me five years. But after bouncing around a couple of postdocs, and other positions, I landed a job where they seem to want me to do philosophy and neuroscience, it did eventually pan out. But
00:25:25
Speaker
But then other people started picking up on this idea and you know Lee and Steve and other folks that were like wanting to tell me why I was wrong or why there was something more interesting going on here and Charles got back into the game as well.
00:25:39
Speaker
And so it's, it's still kind of my, you know, not my day job, as it were, I can still consider myself a philosopher of science, philosopher of neuroscience is my main thing. But it does seem like there's still plenty of mileage to be had in, in the study of the philosophy of conspiracy theories. So I don't know if I actually answered your question. Yeah, no, no, no, it's a great answer. But especially given the current moment, whether or not you accept the polling data, which indicates that maybe
Interest in Conspiracy Theories During COVID-19
00:26:07
Speaker
conspiracy theories are no more common than they've ever been. It's certainly with everyone talking about the same conspiracy theory at the same time, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, everyone is suddenly very interested in what any academic has to say. Yeah, and that's certainly that things have blown up in terms of that interest.
00:26:28
Speaker
But no, I now realize the other thing I was going to say when you're asking specifically about the Oklahoma City bombing. Yeah, so I end up, you know, the thing I always cringe about the most when I read that paper now is I make that claim, which was a true claim that this was the largest act of or the greatest death toll from an act of terrorism on American soil ever, which in 1999, it was, you know, soon to be eclipsed, unfortunately. But
00:26:56
Speaker
But because I was coming at it from this background of philosophy of science and philosophy of neuroscience, one of the things that I have as a kind of general rule of how I want to do philosophy is that whereas philosophers like to work a lot with thought experiments often, fantasy fictional stories that they can use as an intuition pump to use Dan Dennett's views.
00:27:17
Speaker
I was one of those philosophers who thought, well, when you can, if you can use a real case, right, even though it's often messy and it's not as clean as a nice thought experiment might be, that there's some value to kind of really looking at actual cases of things when you're looking at them. So look and see what actual creationists say about their theory. If you're going to critique creationism, don't kind of make up a fake creationist who has fake creationist ideas in order to draw some distinction.
00:27:45
Speaker
And so in 96 or so, when I'm looking at this, as you point out, it's like just the year before there had been this bombing. And I would see books, you know, black helicopters over America, and I would see different, the internet was still pretty young then, but you would see people writing about this particular event in these kinds of conspiratorial sort of ways. And so not coming from a background, you know, I was not a JFK,
00:28:13
Speaker
you know, assassination person more than the average person I knew about Iran Contra, but you know, didn't, you know, just wasn't there. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't interested in the landing as a moon hoax sort of thing. So this was like, okay, I just got to go out and find out about something. So then I pick this because hey, there's lots of people publishing about it right now. It's a topical thing at the moment. And so that's why I kind of latched on to
00:28:37
Speaker
Uh, I think it was Jim Keith was the person who had published a number of books and then published a book about particularly the Oklahoma city bombing. And then I'm like, great, now I've got, I'm not going to be making stuff up. I'm actually gonna, you know, let's look and see what, you know, the Turner diary say, let's look and see what, uh, Keith has to say about, uh, this, uh, this event. And then that way I can, you know, you know, engage with it the same way that say David Hume engaged with what
00:29:05
Speaker
people actually said about miracles, and what miracles they actually attributed to people. Although, as we were noting before, it had the effect that it's a weight that's not a mature conspiracy theory at the time. And I think that was because I wasn't thinking so clearly about mature versus new, and that's why I ended up, you know,
00:29:28
Speaker
probably should have made it a little more clear in the paper that this is an example, but maybe I should have picked something like JFK assassination. Maybe I should have picked something
00:29:38
Speaker
like the Tonkin Golf or something where it was further back in history such that then I could analyze it but, you know, that's the case I picked. He's actually on a side note and this is going to be one of those snide comments that you and I will get. The idea of making up a conspiracy theorist to discuss a conspiracy theory a la what Kessam Qesem does in his work. Seems like the wrong way to approach it. Why not actually look at what people say
00:30:05
Speaker
and analyze that rather than make up fictional conspiracy theories. Go, well, look, my fictional conspiracy theories is absolutely irrational. Thus belief in conspiracy theories must be irrational as well. Okay, so that...
00:30:18
Speaker
doesn't follow that just because Sherlock Holmes was a bad detective, that doesn't make all detectives bad. So, yeah, so, you know, I mean, focusing on the kind of maturity aspect, because yes, there is that worry that, especially if you say you wrote the paper in 96 one year after the Oklahoma City bombing,
00:30:38
Speaker
it's quite hard to think of those theories as hitting maturity there. And yet, this is the point where I find myself going, I kind of agree with you, I find myself thinking a lot about COVID-19 conspiracy theories, because many of them seem like mature conspiracy theories,
00:30:58
Speaker
despite that most of them are barely over six months old at best. And this is because, as I keep on commenting with people in the media who ask me about these, most of these theories don't feel new. They simply feel like older conspiracy theories in which the crisis has been replaced with what's going on with COVID-19, and that they are theories that are relying on
00:31:24
Speaker
archetypes, whether they are New World Order conspiracy theories, false flag event conspiracy theories, and the like. So what's your take on the crop of Covid-19 conspiracy theories? Because I want to describe them as being mature, and the same respect that I want to go you were too quick to describe the Oklahoma City,
00:31:44
Speaker
bombing conspiracy theories as being mature. Am I getting something wrong here? Or is there something else going on? Yeah, I think I mean, I definitely see the motivation for that, for your move, right? That this is old wine and new bottles in a lot of ways. And I mean, I guess the reason I pushed back is I think partly it's part of what we're dealing with is, is
00:32:11
Speaker
The COVID-19 case is interesting in a lot of ways. It's a lot more complex than say something like JFK assassination or the Oklahoma City bombing.
00:32:21
Speaker
where, you know, if you think about, you know, the least the way that I originally defined conspiracy theories, I wanted to put it in terms of explaining a particular historical event or events in, you know, in conspiratorial ways. And where there is a kind of a punctate event, like why did that bomb go off in Oklahoma City that morning? Why did JFK end up with the bullets in him on that afternoon in Dallas?
00:32:47
Speaker
There's a singular event and then there's the explanations of it. In the case of COVID-19,
00:32:56
Speaker
It's not really an event as much as it's kind of a phenomenon, right? It's like, you know, it's a pandemic, right? It's happening over the entire world. And when you look at it that way, it's all these different bits and pieces to it. So it becomes rather amorphous, which means that I think we can't give a singular analysis, I mean, you know, particularist or not, right? We can't even get a singular analysis. So what's the event that's being described?
00:33:21
Speaker
So in the case of COVID-19, however it got into the environment, so either you have these theories that it was either purposely introduced, there's a my hop, lee hop thing going on there as well. Did somebody intentionally create, first of all, did they intentionally create this virus?
00:33:45
Speaker
And then if they, whether or not they intentionally created it, did they intentionally release it, or did they perhaps accidentally release it? And then there's, you know, and then if you got that, there's theories of like, well, I think the Chinese did it, or the Americans did it, or somebody else, maybe the North Koreans did it, right? There are these kind of like, punctate events where you can say, okay, was it, you know, first of all, is it a bioweapon?
00:34:11
Speaker
Is there an event at which this thing was created in a particular location in time and then we can have theories about that? Was it introduced intentionally or not in Wuhan near the wet market or not? And there's a specific event that you can point to.
00:34:31
Speaker
But then there are these other aspects of it, things like, oh, and 5G technology is breaking down our immune systems such that once any kind of pathogen is out there, it's going to make it easier for it to be passed along. And it's like, OK, that's less of a particular event.
00:34:52
Speaker
than it is a kind of like there are these cell towers all over the place that have this technology that that may have this interaction in a very diffuse sort of way. And I think it's those things are the things that often I think fall under your proposed analysis where it's like wait a minute 5G.
00:35:11
Speaker
We've been worrying about 5G as—there have been conspiracies around 5G for the last several years, right? And there's even reason to think that, you know, if you look at the stories about the possible role of 5G propaganda coming out of RT and some of the propaganda wings of Russia and other
00:35:34
Speaker
non-Western sources, is that they were trying to gin up worry about 5G, and then when the pandemic came along, they just kind of pivoted and go, oh yeah, this thing is actually connected to that thing. And kind of made this connection such that it really is an old theory, and at least it's more mature, it's older than the pandemic. It's something that people, and then of course you look at the 5G and you look and you go, well, people had very similar things about 4G. And if you look back, there were actually people who had worries about 3G.
00:36:04
Speaker
The area that I live in, they want is an area that does not have cell phone coverage. And it's a recreational area where people get lost. And so the local volunteer fire department and other entities would like, hey, it'd be great if we had a cell phone tower in here, because that would then mean people could dial 911 and call for emergency services.
00:36:26
Speaker
And other people fighting back against it going, we don't want a cell phone tower. We've heard cell phone towers have all these negative effects on health and so forth. But this was five years ago that we were arguing over this well before 5G, well before even 4G. People didn't like cell phone towers and had theories about what was causing it. Some of those aspects, I think you're right. It's like, wait, when you start wrapping that into it,
00:36:52
Speaker
Or if you say the person behind is really George Soros, it's like, okay, we've been hearing conspiracy theories about George Soros forever. That is old wine just being repackaged in the new bottles. But I think it's because this is such an amorphous
00:37:07
Speaker
thing that we're trying to describe, some aspects of it are, as you say, can be treated as in many ways mature conspiracy theories. We've investigated a lot of things, at least investigated a lot of things very much like this. Maybe they're different tokens of the same type, but we can make use of what we've learned about the general type in this particular case.
Complexity of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories
00:37:28
Speaker
But I worry that other aspects like
00:37:31
Speaker
Was it a bioweapon? Was it released in Wuhan either on purpose or on accident? It's like, okay, that's a much more punctate event. And I think that is not, it still is a possibility, right? It could have been an accident in Wuhan. I'm less likely to think of it as being an intentional thing, but it's certainly the accidental thing. It's like, yeah, we all know accidents happen all the time.
00:37:58
Speaker
Not just because I've seen the movie Outbreak, right? It's it's like, no, it's in general, you can find again, you can find real cases where pathogens have gotten out of their lockdown. So so I think it's a mix of things, but I think it's partly in, you know, bring in QAnon, boom, that's in here, too. And that's like things, you know, now it's connected with American politics and whatnot. And it's so
00:38:22
Speaker
So I think you're on to something, but I'm worried that this particular phenomenon is kind of the perfect storm of a lot of different conspiracy theories, some mature, some new, all kind of being brought together.
00:38:35
Speaker
I absolutely agree. There is something quite interesting about the origin conspiracy theories, where it is plausible to think, well, I mean, maybe there was a cover-up of exactly what the authorities knew in Wuhan, and now they're having to cover up the fact that what they knew at the time, if they had acted upon it, they would have done something about it. I mean, I've always taken one of the most plausible JFK conspiracy theories to be, what if it turns out the security services
00:39:05
Speaker
had all the information they needed to go, actually, Lee Harvey Oswald is going to try to assassinate the president on this particular day. But they underplayed it. Oh, we don't think that's particularly likely. I mean, he's on our watch list, but I mean, he's not a serious threat. And you go, oh.
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah, that's a bit awkward. Maybe we should have done something about that. Let's just make sure that people never find out that actually we could have connected the dots. It's probably best to keep that under wraps. And that seems like a fairly plausible claim of a cover up there of people going, oh, we've been a bit incompetent. We don't want people to know we've been incompetent. So just keep that on the down low. And you can imagine the same situation occurring in Wuhan.
00:39:52
Speaker
We've got quite a bit of an outbreak here, but we can get this under control, and the world need never know, and everyone will sleep easier at night. Yeah, it turns out it's a bit of a pandemic now. Maybe we shouldn't have sat on that information after all, and they seem like plausible particular conspiracy theories.
00:40:14
Speaker
as opposed to the archetypes we're seeing, which are your standard false flag event conspiracy theories or new world order conspiracy theories, bringing about the glorious socialist revolution. Long may that occur. So yeah, I think there is, you say it's a perfect storm. There's a variety of different
00:40:33
Speaker
types and tokens of types here, and some of them are plausible and need to be investigated, and others can go, that just feels like the same old theory. I mean, someone should still investigate them just in case they turn out to be true.
00:40:49
Speaker
If Bill Gates is actually trying to inject microchips into the back of people's necks, someone should check that and tell Bill Gates it's not going to be a very particularly effective way of tracking human beings because the radius of that signal is going to be really, really small. So maybe develop a cell phone instead. It's a much more effective way to track individuals in the wild. Yeah, Steve Jobs is the real conspirator here, not but Bill Gates is
00:41:17
Speaker
Steve Jobs was the one that figured out how to get all of us to put a GPS tracker on our bodies. And the greatest trick that Steve Jobs ever pulled was to make us think that he's dead. I mean, that Tim Cook person. I mean, it's quite obviously Steve Jobs wearing a different shirt. Yes, yes. Now, one thing which has come up quite a bit, looking at the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre stuff, and just knowing the work in general,
Trust in Mainstream Media and Law Enforcement
00:41:44
Speaker
is that you've been accused by Lee Basham in particular, and me to a lesser extent back in my book, The Flossy of Conspiracy Theories, but I've kind of resiled myself from this view, as having the best defense of what Basham calls the public trust approach. The idea that mainstream media and law enforcement would cover and conduct investigations leading to public arrests, trials and convictions when it comes to momentous conspiracies.
00:42:13
Speaker
which he takes it are examples of these mature and unwarranted conspiracy theories. Now, what is your take on this? Has Basham got you right here? Yeah, I think so. That was one of those cases where I, you know, when a number of different people misread you
00:42:30
Speaker
then, or at least you feel that a number of people have misread you, then that might mean that you should have written more clearly to begin with. What I feel like I was, the way that a number of people have read me, and I think Lee is one, and you and a couple of other people, so it's not just one person, is this idea that we shouldn't really poke too much at
00:42:57
Speaker
conspiracy theories and start to expose the dark underbelly of what's really going on, because that would undermine the public trust. That being too skeptical about conspiracy theories has this downside, which is just the same as
00:43:19
Speaker
trust in public institutions in the United States after Watergate dropped considerably. Trust in the media went up a good bit, but certainly the trust in the FBI, trust in federal authorities and so forth went down. That was a result of Watergate, such that if we hadn't uncovered Watergate, people would continue to trust those institutions, presumably. There was also the Vietnam War, a few other things that were going on there that were eroding people's trust.
00:43:48
Speaker
But that there's this way of reading what I did in that first paper that suggested that being too skeptical about conspiracy theories is bad because it's going to erode the public trust and that's a bad thing.
00:44:06
Speaker
took myself to be doing was kind of the, not the opposite of that, but it's like, you know, philosophy, we have modus, one person's modus ponens is another person's modus tollens. I think it was the inverse of the argument, which is that I was wanting to say that in order to take certain conspiracy theories seriously,
00:44:25
Speaker
you must already have discounted the amount of trust that you have in public institutions to some significant degree. That the only way you could take on certain conspiracy theories, particularly the mature ones, as being even vaguely plausible is if you thought that
00:44:44
Speaker
the FBI was corrupt and that all law enforcement was corrupt and that the newspapers were corrupt. And everybody's in on the conspiracy and nobody is in it for truth and beauty and all the things they're supposed to be. That the only way that you can take these conspiracy theories seriously is if you already have a pre-existing low public trust. And part of the reason for pointing that out was to say, well,
00:45:12
Speaker
That then should lead you to say, okay, wait a minute, I've got this theory that I'm trying to figure out whether I want to consider it warranted or not. In order to say that it's warranted, I'm going to have to throw a lot of things that maybe I'm not comfortable
00:45:27
Speaker
showing distrust in. Why don't I trust my local newspaper? Why don't I automatically think there's much more Woodward and Bernstein's out there that are seeking the truth and they're on the job and they're going to uncover these sorts of things, as opposed to thinking that, well, they must be in on it.
00:45:47
Speaker
And so, as a way of not saying that you shouldn't study conspiracy theories because it's going to erode your public trust, but recognize that to take the certain conspiracy theories seriously presupposes a high degree of distrust, and we'll first just acknowledge that, and then second of all go, well,
00:46:05
Speaker
Are you really willing to go there? And the example that I brought up that's been kind of interesting, when you look at a paper and you're like, what are the bits that have been cited later? What are the things that people have picked up on? One of the things that I was most proud of in that paper that almost nobody has picked up on was the little discussion about Robert Anton Wilson, where he makes this point that, you know,
00:46:31
Speaker
Think about what it takes to really take seriously Holocaust denial. What sorts of things would you have to throw into doubt in order to believe that the Holocaust just didn't happen? So all those videos or those films were faked.
00:46:48
Speaker
Uh, all those people that gave testimony are lying. Uh, all the, uh, you know, even the, you know, the stuff behind Project Paperclip, where we were secretly, you know, bringing former Nazis into work on various programs, right? Those were all, that was even ginned up. We didn't really need to do that because those people hadn't actually done anything bad that needed to be covered up in, and have a big program in order to make sure that we could erase the history. They didn't have to erase the history. The history wasn't there to begin with.
00:47:16
Speaker
The number of things that you would have to call into question, according to Wilson, in order to really take seriously that the Holocaust didn't happen, Wilson goes, why do you think World War II happened?
00:47:28
Speaker
I mean, what's your evidence for thinking that the entire war happened? And what's your evidence for thinking that Marilyn Monroe existed? Or any of these other things? I mean, if you're, you know, what's, you know, if you're gonna be consistent, right, if you're gonna throw all those things into doubt, just to show that, you know, hey, this Holocaust denial thing is really plausible, you really ought to be a much broader skeptic than most people are. Most people go like, yeah, World War II happened, but the Holocaust didn't.
00:47:57
Speaker
It's like, wait, what's the separate set of evidence that's supposed to make me believe one of those things did happen? Whereas the first one, Walter Konkite didn't lie to me about one, but he did lie to me about the other. And the FBI lied to me about one another.
00:48:15
Speaker
be clear that there's a much broader kind of skepticism that might be involved when you want to make certain really broad sweeping claims about big historical events, especially again, and I think you're right to point this out, especially when we're talking about the mature cases, because there's going to be a lot less of that in the case of a new brand new conspiracy theory. There's going to be, you know, you can
00:48:38
Speaker
much less trust needs to be invoked if it's a new thing. But if it's an old thing, then lots of people must have been involved. And that's what I thought I was making, the argument that I was making back then. The way in which it's kind of come around is, even though I didn't think I was making the Lee Basham public trust argument back then, these days I wonder maybe I should have.
00:49:02
Speaker
Uh, and it has to do with more of these kind of issues about the ethics of belief. And, and now we're seeing that one's belief in conspiracy theories now have these, you know, used to, when I, in the good old days in 1999, when I'm writing about conspiracy theories, there was something very kind of, uh, it was a lovely time. You could just hold a view and it was, you know, you could argue about it. What now, now, now, at least to whether or not you vaccinate your kids or not, or whether or not you wear a mask in public or whether you burn down, um,
Real-world Consequences of Conspiracy Theories
00:49:31
Speaker
uh, 5G towers and so forth. Now there seem to be real consequences to holding certain kind of conspiratorial views, uh, that, and also you harass, uh, reporters, you harass, uh, crisis actors and so forth who, you know, who, who claimed that their children had been murdered in mass shootings when, you know, you were convinced that they hadn't, or at least you just want to ask them a bunch of questions about it. Uh,
00:49:57
Speaker
Back in 1999, I didn't think that that was a really valid argument. I didn't think that was the argument I was making. These days, I'm actually tempted to, like, maybe I should just, like, take it on board and go, I wasn't, like, arguing it then. But maybe an argument could be made now that there are consequences to entertaining, even, certain conspiracy theories, that there's a downside that just, I think, just wasn't there as clearly in 1999 or 1969 or before.
00:50:22
Speaker
But I'm still not even sure I'm willing to make that argument. It just seems to me to be more plausible now or more interesting than it was in 99.
00:50:31
Speaker
Yes, it's actually quite interesting. That's the kind of argument that Pat Stokes has been making with respect to his so-called reluctant particularism. And I think it is interesting bringing in that kind of weird disjunct between the conspiracy theories that kind of motivated the literature back in the late 90s versus the conspiracy theories we're routinely asked about now.
00:50:55
Speaker
Because, I mean, the project I'm involved in at the moment, the disinformation project, looking at COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories going on in the build up to our election. It turns out there actually isn't much COVID-19 disinformation or conspiracy theory out there in our local body politic, which is good.
00:51:16
Speaker
But the problem is it only requires a few people to take those conspiracy theories seriously, at which point they don't wear a mask on public transport, they don't engage in social distancing when they're at the supermarket, maybe they don't even wash their hands properly because it turns out none of us knew how to wash our hands up until COVID-19. I mean a minute in the bathroom, that's unbelievable.
00:51:40
Speaker
uh and it just requires a few people to change their behavior and suddenly they are a vector for COVID-19 and that you get community resurgence and transmission and you end up going like see there are there are some notably bad consequences to belief in these conspiracy theories and we do need to be
00:52:06
Speaker
cautious about how we talk about them. That doesn't mean we change our analysis, but it does mean we do need to bring in the ethics that goes along with epistemology. Now, I know Lee in particular will go, no, that's not the case, because he's a free speech absolutist. I'm not a free speech absolutist. I think there are rights and duties that go along with speech.
00:52:30
Speaker
And so we do need to have those discussions. I don't think you're obliged to be an advocate of the public trust approach. I also think that the way that you spell out the story indicates that, you know, I mean, there's a much more nuanced discussion to be had about this.
00:52:49
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, back in the old days, it was all just fun and games, but now conspiracy theories might kill you. Also, I think there's another thing which I think is, which kind of motivated my adoption of accusing you of engaging in public trust skepticism, what Lee calls a public trust approach, which is there are actually two senses of unwarranted that exist in the philosophical literature. There's unwarranted in the sense of it is not true.
00:53:17
Speaker
and there's unwarranted in the sense of it is implausible. And I think the kind of warrant you're talking about in of conspiracy theories is the latter kind. What should someone believe given the available evidence at time t? You're not obliged to say the theory is false. You're simply going, look, if this theory has persisted in discourse for a really long period of time,
00:53:44
Speaker
and evidence has not amounted in favour of it, it's mature and unwarranted, and that means we should treat it as being implausible. It doesn't mean it's false, new evidence could come to hand, but it does justify your dismissive attitude towards it at that snapshot in time.
00:54:03
Speaker
Do I have you write that? Yeah, and I think that's, I mean, that's basically Hume, right? Or at least that's Hume on miracles. I mean, Hume had his own reasons for putting the argument this way, particularly having to do with attitudes about atheism and skepticism in the time that he's writing.
00:54:19
Speaker
But there's a sense in which Hume, when he's talking about miracles, wants to be very distinct about the epistemology and the metaphysics. Is he making a metaphysical claim? Is he saying that Jesus did not do these miracles? Whether he did it or not, in some sense, it's a historical miracle. It either happened or it didn't, I can't say.
00:54:43
Speaker
Now, the question is whether now in, you know, 1720 or 2020, should I assent to agree that this happened, right? Should I think that this is the best explanation of what happened in the desert 2000 years ago?
00:55:03
Speaker
He says, there I do have an answer. It's literally incredible, especially given what a miracle is. It is never going to have sufficient evidence to be something that should be believed. But that just means metaphysics and epistemology are separated. There's no reason why everything that is in fact true is going to be in the class of things that we are in a position to believe.
00:55:27
Speaker
There are going to be plenty of things which are, you know, I mean the example I always give my students right is you know the, the number of hairs on the head of Julius Caesar's great great great great great great paternal grandfather on the day that he turned 16.
00:55:43
Speaker
Right. 4,362. Well, maybe. But, presumably there's a number that is true that we have reason to believe that person existed. We have reason to believe that there was some countable number of errors on his head. Zero to some other high number.
00:55:59
Speaker
Um, but are we ever going to be in an epistemic situation to be able to say, you know, yes, this is the right number. It's like, no, it's just going to, it's beyond our can. It's, it's not something we can can answer, but that's not to say that there wasn't an answer, right? It's not saying, you know, it's just saying that we're never going to be in a position to make that kind of claim.
00:56:20
Speaker
And I think in the case of conspiracy theories, I mean, I think often we – and I think this goes back to this thing that a lot of people have pointed to, that conspiracy theories – there are conspiracy theories about really big events, right? There are conspiracy theories about the assassination of JFK. There are relatively few conspiracy theories about the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
00:56:42
Speaker
Uh, although I guarantee you, if he had been successful on that day and had killed Reagan, we would have lots of conspiracy theories, because that would have been an earth-shattering event as opposed to being, you know, a blip in history, a footnote in history about how Ronald Reagan almost got killed.
00:56:57
Speaker
on a day early in his administration. But we want big events to be explained. I mean, it's a natural thing to want to have. And so it's something that we want an answer to and want to have a warranted theory about. And we don't always have them. Nature does not oblige us in that way all the time.
00:57:22
Speaker
No, and I mean, this kind of goes back to a salient point you make in of conspiracy theories, which is, unlike nature, which doesn't tend to lie to us about the position of electrons, people lie all the time, and a really effective conspiracy
00:57:39
Speaker
is going to be very well hidden indeed. I mean really the Moscow trials only came out because Khrushchev was going, I don't want to be associated with the stuff that Stalin did in his regime. So now that Stalin's did, it's safe for me to go, oh Stalin did bad things, like this thing I was totally not involved in,
00:58:02
Speaker
So yeah, you get a whole bunch of things like that where, you know, it might be the case there are these massive conspiracies going on. We just have to cope. Which is a disturbing thought when you actually think about it. But you know, unfortunately that is our epistemic limitations in a nutshell.
00:58:23
Speaker
Yeah, the only other thing I'd bring up, particularly going back to your concerns about COVID-19 and this kind of perfect storm, another connection back to the creationism and evolution debates is that you're probably familiar with, there was this phenomenon called the Gish Gallop.
00:58:42
Speaker
where in debates, and I've forgotten his first name, was it Daniel Gish? There was a creationist who would get in debates with people who wanted to argue the evolution side of things. And there was a particular debating technique that he would have, which is he would do the Gish gallop, which is he would just trot out in his two minute part of his debate, all these different things that were
00:59:09
Speaker
elements that were supposed to support his creationist side of things but they would be just a whole bunch of different ones just thrown out there and then the debater you know the debate moderator would turn to the the person on the other side and go okay now you're two minutes and that person would be in this situation where it's like okay he you know gish just galloped out 15 different things in two minutes each of which would take me 15 minutes i could show you how each and every one of them is wrong-headed
00:59:35
Speaker
not the way that you've been led to believe, but I can't do it in two minutes. It's just impossible. Then there would be, as a debating technique, it's a pretty effective debating technique because it does end up leaving your interlocutor looking like, wow, you just can't deal with my issues.
00:59:54
Speaker
And the reason that comes up for me is that I think particularly with covered 19 and and what's been going on in just 2020 is that we've kind of gotten a gish gallop at the, at the cultural level, you know between QAnon and, and the American election and covered 19 and it's just like
01:00:12
Speaker
It's like it's hard for us to, you know, even if you want to be a debunker of conspiracy theories, there are so many that have just come up and are connected together in all sorts of interesting ways in just the last year that there's this kind of cultural-gish gallop of conspiracy theories going on.
01:00:30
Speaker
That then, you know, it's like, you know, these don't have enough time in the day to try to like, okay, let me explain how 5G works and how even though 5G has a higher frequency than 4G, that actually means it has less power. I know it says
01:00:46
Speaker
You know, higher frequency sounds like it's a bigger thing, but actually it's the opposite. And, you know, let me explain some physics to you and, and, okay, now let me go explain some other things about like how microchips don't work that way. Okay.
Cultural Impact of Conspiracy Theories
01:00:58
Speaker
Let me also, you know, it's like, there's just too much to deal with, uh, the, just the same way an audience member.
01:01:05
Speaker
who maybe even as an honest member of the audience, hears Duane Gish, jot out a bunch of things, trot out a bunch of things in his two-minute part of his speech and go, wow, those are a lot of interesting ideas I haven't heard before. And the person on the other side isn't really adequately refuting them. Maybe you can't adequately refute them, but the interlocutor isn't. And then at the end of the day, you're left, well, maybe Gish is on to something.
01:01:31
Speaker
And I feel like, you know, that's kind of the, you know, the situation we're in, at least in the last. I mean, I'm going to be very interested. I know Joe Yosinski has argued that we are not at peak conspiracy theory, that, you know, the numbers were better in the height of the Cold War and so forth. But I'm very curious to think it's like, it's going to be interesting in 10 years from now when we look back.
01:01:55
Speaker
Are we experiencing this spike? I generally don't like presentism. I don't, I mean, I distrust whenever I think my view of the current moment is different from what has come before, especially when it's a time before even I was alive or paying attention. But I'm gonna be very curious to see what the sociological and political science studies of the prevalence of conspiracy theories in 2020 are relative to 1999 or 1969.
01:02:23
Speaker
Yes, I must admit, even though I spoke with Joe just yesterday about the polling data, and his polling data does seem quite robust and that we're not really seeing any particular growth, I still have that kind of weird anecdotal response of
01:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, but things look very different now than they did 10 years ago. And I accept that Joe's theory that actually there might be a bit of confirmation bias going on there. And I think also, to a certain extent, we might end up being the wrong people to have opinions upon this because we look into these things. So we have Google searches that pop them up on our screen every single day.
01:03:04
Speaker
So it looks really prevalent to us because we've become really highly trained to find this stuff, and maybe it turns out that members of the general public aren't suffering from this, but I do find it interesting that a year ago, if I mentioned QAnon to people, they'd go, QA what?
01:03:26
Speaker
Now, when I mention QAnon, they sigh and go, oh, that particular theory. And there's a litmus test, which I keep on asking people, at what point do your parents ask you, what is QAnon? Now, I have not got to the point where my mother has asked me about QAnon yet, but I'm fairly sure
01:03:46
Speaker
that day is coming and it's coming soon and I don't want to have to explain QAnon to my mother because I know she's just going to say that just sounds ridiculous or at least I'm hoping that's what she's going to say I'm dreading a situation where he goes well maybe it's true that explains a lot
01:04:08
Speaker
Yes, scary thought, scary thought. And with that scary thought, I think we shall bring this delightful interview to a close. Thank you very kindly for being on the show once again, Brian. Oh, thank you very much, Em. Give my best to Josh. He's always, always like his, his analyses of things. Yours are great, but I know you, but I never get to, never get to compliment Josh on his. I enjoy the, enjoy the podcast and look forward to your new papers as well.
01:04:37
Speaker
Unfortunately, Josh is a poor working schlub and was in a meeting at this time, so he was unable to join us. But one day, one day, we'll get Josh involved as well. So yes, enjoy the rest of your post-apocalyptic afternoon in LA and we'll talk again soon. Sounds great. Thank you very much.
01:05:03
Speaker
As is fast becoming a tradition with the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, I had an interview with someone and Josh gets to provide commentary and colour after the fact. So Josh, what did you think of that discussion with Brian Elkely? Well, first of all, thank you for the kind words, Brian.
01:05:20
Speaker
A bit of positive feedback always strokes the old ego. I'll keep this quick because it was a decent length interview and we don't want to go too over time. One thing actually kind of almost unrelated to conspiracy theories in general, but the talk about intelligent design and the comparison between conspiracy theories and intelligent design theories sort of struck home for me because in a
01:05:44
Speaker
In an earlier time, when I had a different job worth not enough to do and too much spare time on my hands, I did used to spend a fair bit of time reading sort of intelligent design versus evolution stuff on various websites. It didn't help that at the time I was working
01:06:03
Speaker
for a company that actually had a couple of honest-to-goodness creationists on the payroll, and they did have a couple of interesting discussions with them. But the one thing that was kind of depressing when it came to looking at the intelligent design versus creationism was how the same disproven arguments just came up again and again and again. It didn't matter how many
01:06:25
Speaker
even if you actually managed to convince a person to get through to one person, the next one would still be rehashing the same things. I remember the one of my workplace creationists gave me this DVD to watch to see what I thought of it. And it was like all these arguments that had been already thoroughly given a working over like 10 years previously old old Michael Behe's irreducible complexity and William Dempski's specified complexity. And these were, you know, there was nothing actually new there. And so it was a little bit depressing. And it did make me wonder,
01:06:55
Speaker
you know, it does actually, relating back to conspiracy theories, seem to be that this is a, this is a, possibly a feature of them as well. You see the same talking points popping up over and over and over, and it doesn't matter that these have been, you know, there's been actual proof that these things aren't true, has been out there. They just keep going and going. And I don't know if that's
01:07:19
Speaker
When it comes to what it is we want to do about conspiracy theories, you know, how much of a problem is that? Or is it just the way things have always been? I mean, it's an issue which I've been thinking about a lot, especially given the way that we covered Brian's 1999 paper of conspiracy theories, and that I'm actually quite curious about the notion of the mature unwarranted conspiracy theory.
01:07:44
Speaker
In part because, as I said to Brian, I think Lee and I did him a dirty with the way that we portrayed his work in our subsequent work, and also for the sheer fact that as someone who is now working on responses to COVID-19 conspiracy theories in Aotearoa, I'm fairly interested in the way that certain archetypes or conspiracy narratives keep on reoccurring or reappearing in the discourse.
01:08:13
Speaker
And it doesn't seem to be easy to quash them or slam them down. And so I've got this tension between wanting to treat conspiracy theories seriously and also going, look, some of these conspiracy theories are unwarranted. They keep on reappearing. And there's a worry, particularly around the COVID-19 conspiracy theories, that if people believe them or entertain them, they may well engage in behaviors which lead to the spread of COVID-19.
01:08:43
Speaker
and that seems like a clear and present danger at this time. So I'm quite curious to explore this and indeed there's a New Zealand Association of Philosophy conference down in Otago in December of this year. And in a seminar in our staff seminar series this afternoon I got the inkling of a paper I might want to present which actually goes back to Keeley and Clark's work
01:09:11
Speaker
and says, look, maybe we should reappraise the approach that says, look, there's a class of conspiracy theory where we're allowed to at least be somewhat dismissive or skeptical of them because of their unwarranted status due to them being mature or examples of archetypes that keep on reappearing in the literature.
01:09:34
Speaker
and trying to reconcile that with a purely particularist notion, and maybe even bringing in the work of Patrick Stokes, who has the notion of reluctant particularism, something we'll be getting onto in Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre relatively soon.
01:09:51
Speaker
The other thing that stuck out to me listening through your interview was Brian talking, as he does in his paper, about the erosion of the public trust and how, as he puts it, the problem with some of these conspiracy theories is
01:10:08
Speaker
when you boil down to what they're actually really saying, how much you have to give up.
Erosion of Trust in Institutions
01:10:14
Speaker
He talks about, you know, so you believe they faked the moon landings. Well, that means, you know, so much of the government, so much of the scientific community, so much of the media must have been in some way in on it, that you end up being ridiculously skeptical. And yet, I look especially these days at
01:10:33
Speaker
the sorts of conspiratorial thinking, especially the pro-Trump side in America, when the whole fake news thing appears to have thoroughly taken hold, and people are entirely willing to say, actually, yeah, the whole media, the whole media, write them off completely. The anti-science stuff around COVID, people seem to be quite happy to throw away just about anything
01:11:02
Speaker
other than the words of the people who they have chosen to believe in no matter what.
01:11:24
Speaker
Big news. Precisely. And so yeah, so when people have sort of, in some of the papers, we've seen people have taken issue a little bit with some of the stuff Brian said, and like, you know, people, you know, okay, okay, maybe for the really weird existential conspiracy theories, you would technically have to give away a lot of stuff, but surely not for all of them. But that point seems to be a little bit moot when there do seem to be people who are just fully willing to throw anything out. But they don't feel like indeed,
01:11:54
Speaker
I mean, I was reading, reading, I think it must have just been something on Twitter or something, an excerpt of interviews, people that were doing with Trump supporters, where they, like, truth just doesn't seem to be in it anymore. They're talking to these people like, oh, you know, Trump, he's done more for this country than any other president, you know, than the last 10 presidents. He built the wall. He fixed health care. He did all these things that he didn't actually do.
01:12:21
Speaker
The truth just wasn't, you know, was whatever they chose it to be. Or actually a good example of that was the interview with Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Yeah, yeah. And the way that she was confronted with these are things the president has said.
01:12:38
Speaker
which are not true and her response was I actually don't think he said that at all okay so no literally I mean that's literally on the record we've got recordings of this you are now denying that your candidate or your employer said things that he did because you'd rather go well you know what is truth what is truth Joshua I'm telling you what it is it's fake news put forward by the fake news media fake news fake news fake news oh
01:13:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I think possibly the possibility for starters of the complete sort of erosion of trust in any major institutions
01:13:21
Speaker
it seems like, you know, more and more plausible by the day and therefore the sorts of harms that can come out of that also seem more plausible. So I wonder if the world is proving Brian right in that regard. And then I suppose tying those two things together, the amount of giving up people have to do to hold on to their beliefs with the intelligent design stuff.
01:13:48
Speaker
I never really wanted to get into it with these people that I worked with, because I worked with them, and they were lovely human beings, you know, but I did, like, get told that I was the credulous one for believing that, you know, a hundred odd years of evolutionary theory was in any way valid.
01:14:10
Speaker
And there's essentially one of the guys was the tech guy. One is the guys with the dude who's actually designing circuit boards and stuff like that. And I just, sometimes I did actually want, feel like saying, if I really, if I wanted to get into it with him, which I didn't, just do you, do you understand that the views that you're saying, like, means we have to take all of science, we just have to take all of science and bin it to the science that the technology that you're working on right now is underpinned by. There's not compatible with these views of yours, but
01:14:40
Speaker
I never did that. I probably should have. Would have been interesting to see what they came up with. So there's a famous geologist, I'm actually should say geophysicist in Australia, who works on uranium deposits. And the uranium deposits in Australia are massively old. And this guy is a young earth creationist.
01:15:02
Speaker
And so there was a book called Telling Lies for God written by Ian Plimmer, who turns out to be a bit of a problematic individual because Ian Plimmer turns out to be a climate change denier. But he writes a really interesting book in Telling Lies for God about the fact that you have a practicing geophysicist who goes around dating mineral ore deposits based upon geological strata and various dating mechanisms.
01:15:29
Speaker
in his day job, but by night is a young earth creationist promoting the idea of young earth creationism. So not just someone who believes that the earth is about six to 10,000 years old, is someone who is involved in promoting this. And the fact that he doesn't seem to see there's a problem between what he does in the geophysical sciences and what he does as an advocate of young earth creationism, because he goes, well, look, I have to subscribe.
01:15:59
Speaker
to the notion of an old earth to do my job professionally. But I think the dating mechanisms are wrong and the earth is a lot younger, but I can't say that in academic publications because I'll be laughed out of court. But I don't believe what I say there. I believe what I say in this line over there. And I had a similar thing when I taught at the med school at the University of Auckland. You would meet
01:16:26
Speaker
intelligent design advocates or young earth creationists who would talk in such a way that you'd go if what you say is true you can't really believe in the germ theory of disease because the germ theory of disease requires some understanding of evolutionary biology to understand how these things adapt and change over time
01:16:52
Speaker
but you're going to pretend to believe it for the purposes of getting through a mid-degree, even though from what you're saying you actually don't think that's the way the world works at all.
01:17:03
Speaker
Yes, no, it's very strange. But anyway, those two things were what I found most interesting in your talk, but overall it was just a nice interview to hear, basically, talking about the history of his works that we've already looked at. So yeah, I have no more to say. And so no more shall be said, except
01:17:29
Speaker
for those people who are our patrons, because we have an exciting patron bonus episode coming up for you. We have an update on the leader of the Russian opposition, who would appear to be alive and grammar. We've got warnings about Kiwis being targeted in a grand scale by a Chinese big data firm. There's the fun and excitement of a Facebook whistleblower who claims to have blood on her hands.
01:17:58
Speaker
We have Roger Stone arguing for armed insurrection, which doesn't really sound particularly unusual. He does that all the time. And an update on New Zealand citizen Peter Thiel, who supports white supremacy. Only that, yes. So if you'd like to hear about that and you're a patron, good luck, because you can.
01:18:19
Speaker
If you'd like to hear about that and you're not currently a patron, it's also fairly lucky because you can become a patron quite easily just by going to patreon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Actually, I want to throw a wrinkle in that. One of our recent patrons discovered that her bank does not allow giving money to Patreon.
01:18:42
Speaker
really yeah so it turns out that the cooperative bank in this country has blocked patreon due to a history of fraudulent activity which we assume as we've had a conversation about exactly what went on there
01:18:57
Speaker
is due to say the children of parents deciding to subscribe or give money via Patreon and parents then asking the bank to block those transactions leading to the bank deciding that actually they're not willing to support Patreon at this point in time. So it is possible
01:19:20
Speaker
that as a potential future patron, you may run into issues. But luckily, there are ways to get around this, such as using PayPal to pay for your Patreon subscription, et cetera, et cetera. But it turns out it's not as easy as maybe we thought. Oh, well, watch out for that then. But at any rate, and if you don't actually want to hear about any of that stuff and don't want to be a patron at all, well, that's just fine as well. Thank you for listening in any case.
01:19:49
Speaker
So, I believe we're done for this week. Next week we'll be back with something. And if it's an episode of Conspiracy U-Theory Masterpiece Theatre, it will be quite something, I think it's fair to say. Do you think we should contact the author and ask whether we can do the Shakespearean stuff?
01:20:08
Speaker
as a kind of live performance. Oh, I don't know. That might be that might be. I mean, it actually does require at least three people, unfortunately. Yes. So maybe maybe not. I don't know. We can we can investigate. But yes, things get Shakespearean. Perhaps that's all we should say for now. And that is perhaps all we should say for now and simply leave these good people with a fond goodbye. And I will say Bill Shakespeare was Bill Shakespeare. True.
01:20:39
Speaker
Oh.
01:20:46
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 account, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
01:21:47
Speaker
And remember, they're coming to get you, Barbara.