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What is a 'conspiracy?' (Redux)
26 Plays5 years ago
Join Josh and M (or is it Josh and M?) as they go back to the future and discuss what counts as a 'conspiracy!'
—
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:
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Transcript
Entering the Void
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello? Hello? Hold on, I'm over here. What's happened? I don't know, but I think something has gone wrong with the space-time continuum. We don't seem to be in sync with our own podcast.
00:00:16
Speaker
That would explain why we appear to be in this featureless void, but not the clown shoes. Indeed. What year is it? Do you know? 2014? 2019.
00:00:30
Speaker
In 2021, I kind of feel like it's every year in this eternal chasm of psychedelic greys. Weird. So what's the last thing you remember? The re-election of Andy the Shigo as President of the United Nations of Earth. Admittedly, it's all anyone can remember. It's been going on for months.
00:00:48
Speaker
Hmm, that hasn't happened in my timeline, or maybe it has, but not in my particular reality. No, you're missing out. The Shigo time is the best time. Even the Russians agree.
Restoring Normality
00:01:01
Speaker
Okay, obviously you're not my Josh, but I guess you'll have to do a little rude. What do you want to do then? Well, maybe we should start from first principles and see if we can get back to some semblance of normality, or at least some semblance of our own respective normalities. Maybe rehash a classic episode and see if that puts us back in sync. Sounds like a plan? Theme? Theme? Theme!
00:01:31
Speaker
The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor.
00:01:44
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting next to me as Dr. M.R.X. Denton. We're going back. Back. You're feeling sleepy, Dr. Denton. I was hoping you'd go for one of your wonderful music motifs from back from the first few years. Go on, give us something. Oh gosh, you've put me on the spot now. Now I have to pick a song out of all
Defining Conspiracies
00:02:06
Speaker
of the songs in the world to fashion into a musical reference.
00:02:13
Speaker
Dr. Denteth and me, we got a thing going on. No, that doesn't work. I need to have your name come afterwards. No, done. You should have prohibited me.
00:02:25
Speaker
I thought you would have been naturally prepared for someone to go, boom, boom, boom. Naturally unprepared. It's my nature. So we're basically going back to the very beginning. To where it all began. 2014, episode one, the conspiracy conditions. One of our shortest episodes. Given that it was one of our, we used to be brief. We used to be concise.
00:02:46
Speaker
we certainly tried to be succinct back in the old days and every so often we have an attempt to be succinct again and then we basically achieved that for about two to three weeks and then yeah and then it just slips it slips
00:03:02
Speaker
So we're going right back to the very beginning where the very first thing we had to do when we first started this podcast was define some terms. Because we're good philosophers and that's what you do in philosophy. You define your terms. Well, it's good analytic philosophy. So basically the first question, you can't talk about conspiracies without answering the question, what is a conspiracy?
The Plotters Condition
00:03:23
Speaker
Also, this is the point in time where we should mention them. At some point in the distant or recent past, we did record an episode of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy on international talk like a pirate day. We did.
00:03:39
Speaker
And the one thing we didn't do is say, you can't spell conspiracy without piracy. Which we really should have. So we're bringing that up now. We apologize. It was an obvious joke. We should have made the joke. And frankly, we are ashamed we didn't make the joke. So we're sorry. We're very, very sorry. Yes.
00:04:04
Speaker
uh but not so sorry that we're not going to carry on doing what we're doing anyway no no let's just talk about what is a conspiracy so dr denteth hello yes that's me what what's a conspiracy well it's a kind of piracy which is a con
00:04:21
Speaker
Right. But it's a plural con, so it's a con's piracy. Is it like Kanye, the Nicolas Cage film? Kanye and conspiracy are related in that I'm fairly sure there will eventually be a Nicolas Cage Johnny Depp film.
00:04:37
Speaker
As they're not already. Not that I'm aware of. It's one of those things, I mean, in the same respect that when Escape Plan came out and Schwarzenegger and Stallone were both co-starring in a film case of... Surely that must have happened before now. And yet, no, it had not. So, yeah, so a conspiracy is...
00:04:56
Speaker
according to the various bits and pieces I've written academically, is made up of three conditions, what we might call the plotters condition, the goal condition and the secrecy condition. And that to conspire, you need two or more people working together with a plan, which of course must be kept secret. So there are three conditions when it comes to something counting as a conspiracy. And as I recall, way back in the mists of time, I think we actually devoted an episode to each
Self-Conspiracy and Personal Interests
00:05:26
Speaker
condition. So initially, the first one, the plotters condition, to be a conspiracy, there has to be more than one person. I remember when we talked about the time we expressed slight reservations, it seemed odd to me at least, that you could have a person engaging in activities
00:05:49
Speaker
that if they just happen to have got another person involved would have been conspiratorial. But because they're doing it by themselves, doing the exact same thing counts as not a conspiracy. I mean, sort of, you know, if you had someone's planning to blow up a government building, and this guy, I'm assuming it's a guy based on the entirety of human history. And every 80s action film?
00:06:14
Speaker
He wants to blow up a government building in America, which has happened, and does acts in secret and has this plot and carries it out towards a specific end. And it seems odd that it's only had he even told someone about it and someone else had to keep the secret or something, then it would be a conspiracy. But without them, it's not.
00:06:35
Speaker
It almost seems that it's the etymological fallacy of the fact that conspiracy means, what is it, to breathe together, to aspire as in respire, so conspire as breathing together. That means we insist on the conspiracy condition, not the conspiracy condition, the plotters condition,
00:06:59
Speaker
Has your thinking changed on this at all? Yes and no. So I was having a conversation with a colleague just the other week about the notion of can you conspire against yourself? So can you be involved in a conspiracy where you conspire against yourself? Because that's something that people do kind of say, you know, you kind of ruined your own life, you conspired against yourself to cause this calamity to occur. And it does seem to be a situation where you can at least
00:07:28
Speaker
act in a way which appears to be on your own against your best interests. So you can imagine a situation where you're a university academic, you really want a promotion, but you also really, really want to keep your really plush office. And so you're in the situation where the administration
00:07:51
Speaker
has decided that actually they're going to make everyone live or work in open plan offices. It should be a terrible administration. You will now live in an open plan office. It's full communism in this academic department. You'll work in an open plan office. And if you go along with us, we can guarantee that promotion to associate professor. And so you end up going, well, my interests are open plan offices.
00:08:17
Speaker
also my interest is in guessing that promotion and so you have two
00:08:25
Speaker
different wants, one trumps the other and you effectively engage in a conspiracy against yourself. So you're not actually joining in with the conspiracy by the, well sorry, there is no actual conspiracy by the administration, they just have a straightforward plan, but you keep secret the fact you're working for them to achieve this one thing you want,
The Role of Secrecy in Conspiracies
00:08:50
Speaker
your associate professorship was at the same time actually also acting against your own interests. So you're involved in what appears to be a conspiracy, but it's actually kind of a conspiracy made up of you. You are working with others, but they're not actually keeping what they're doing secret. You're keeping your involvement in their plan secret.
00:09:15
Speaker
I think that kind of allows you to talk about a person conspiring on their own because you're still working with others. It's just that the secrecy in this case refers to a singular plotter. And that possibly brings in also examples we've looked at in the past where
00:09:34
Speaker
people can be involved in a conspiracy without knowing it and that was some of the claims about things like the the the the Volkswagen emissions testing conspiracy. There were claims which some of which seem to be more plausible than others that certain people involved in the conspiracy didn't actually know that they were working to defraud or to to defraud or to cheat these emissions tests because
00:10:03
Speaker
No one person or not everyone had an overview of the whole thing. Could you imagine a situation where you have a single person working towards a goal, drafting others into it, but not letting them in on the true goal behind what they're doing? So you have a bunch of people working together, but only one of them actually knows
00:10:40
Speaker
the details of
00:10:42
Speaker
Very few people. There might be few people at the top. I don't need to put the very in front of them. A few people at the top who actually know what the point of the conspiracy is. And yet there might be a lot of patsies or dupes who have been roped into an act of the conspiracy without ever being aware they're actually doing the conspirators.
00:11:06
Speaker
bidding, and given the secrecy condition we'll talk about later on, it seems quite plausible to go that not everyone knows that they're involved in a conspiracy.
00:11:23
Speaker
I think it seems kind of helpful to put the condition that there needs to be more than one conspirator, just for sort of, I don't know, taxonomic purposes, just for making things easier to classify. But it seems to me that there are barriers there.
00:11:40
Speaker
It is meant to distinguish between, say, mere secrecy of you keeping a secret that you're trying to do with this particular thing, such as trying to kill me every time I look away from you, versus cooperative secrecy where you rope in, say, Richard looking outside the door. So to distract me to make sure that I look away so you can stab me. And it seems that conspiracy is a special kind of secrecy
00:12:08
Speaker
that relates to cooperation. And that's why it requires two or more people for it to be conspiratorial, as opposed to merely secretive. Well, there we go. Okay, well then moving on, the goal condition I think seems much less controversial. Yeah.
00:12:23
Speaker
precisely. You can't really be conspiring if you're not working towards some particular goal. And again, maybe not all the people involved in the conspiracy actually know what the goal is. They might even be competing goals. I mean, the example that I used in my thesis, and like to bring up at almost every single opportunity, because it appears that I'm obsessed with the assassination of Julius Caesar,
00:12:47
Speaker
is that the assassins of Caesar appeared to have competing goals as to why they wanted Caesar to be killed. So Marcus Brutus
00:12:57
Speaker
As we can tell from the letters he sent back to his supporters in Rome after he was exiled because of the failure to capture power after Caesar's death, really did think that the Senate would vote to make him the next dictator. He couldn't understand why having defeated one dictator, he wasn't the obvious person to lead Rome out of its political chaos.
00:13:22
Speaker
chaos, and that seems to be at odds with some of the wants of the other conspirators to kill Caesar who just wanted to return power to the Senate and return things back to their somewhat democratic system away from one person having sole charge of the Republic at that time.
00:13:43
Speaker
So you can have the situation where conspirators have different goals, and actually quite possibly goals which are at odds with one another, but they're still working together towards some more general aim. So the assassination of Caesar, the conspiracy was to kill Caesar
00:14:03
Speaker
And also, and whether that also is make Marcus Brutus the next dictator, or return complete
Competing Goals and Contextual Secrecy
00:14:09
Speaker
power to the Senate, at least they agreed on one part of the goal, if not all of the goals were shared. And an important thing to say about goals, I think, which has come up also when we've discussed the whole quibono thing where people will insist that you can you can work out who's behind something by looking at who benefits from it. Or removing their sunglasses. Indeed. Is that
00:14:32
Speaker
It's not a requirement for the conspiracy that that goal be realised. They're working towards a goal. They may be thwarted. The conspiracy may be uncovered. They may just fail completely. The goal isn't a condition that the goal has to be achieved. It just has to be there to be being worked towards.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yes, and I mean one of the things which comes out a lot in discussion of criminal conspiracies is that a lot of criminal conspiracies are nipped in the bud before the conspirators can do anything.
00:15:05
Speaker
because either they've been infiltrated by security forces or the police, or they make really elementary mistakes which make people go, those people are meeting up in that house an awful lot. We should probably listen it up. All right, they're planning to rob that bank. Let's arrest them now whilst they're planning to do it before they actually get round to doing it.
00:15:30
Speaker
Merely wanting to achieve an end means you can be part of a conspiracy as long as you're working together and trying to keep things secret. At this year's film festival I saw The Day Shall Come, which is a new film by Chris Morris. Oh yes, I do want to see that.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, so it's very good. It's very depressing. It's funny in the thick of it sort of way. But at the same time, it has a very jaded cynical view of law enforcement. And it's sort of, it's all basically about these people trying to entrap.
00:16:04
Speaker
people into conspiring to commit acts of terrorism. It's sort of like they throw the opportunities at this person. And as soon as they can be talked into saying, yes, I'll do it, then they're like, aha, there we go. He's he's sure, sure, we set up everything. And it was never actually going to happen if we hadn't done anything. But we showed that he would have done this terrorist act had he been given the the
00:16:29
Speaker
the opportunity to, for real, and use that as an excuse to justify imprisoning these various people who haven't actually done anything wrong anyway. Yeah, which actually is a recurrent issue in law enforcement, which is if you encourage someone to commit a crime by giving them opportunity and motive,
00:16:51
Speaker
and go, oh, well, that just shows they would have done it otherwise. You end up going, yeah, but they might not have done because you actually may have encouraged them to think about committing a crime. They may not have ever thought about it in the first place until you put the suggestion in their head. Yes, so that sign of things gets a little bit dodgy. But I think certainly if we're talking about conspiracies, there's got to be a goal. Otherwise, what are you even doing? Yes, and that's because
00:17:20
Speaker
When you're working together and you've got a goal, you're trying to keep what you're doing secret. Unless you've got a goal, why you keep what you've got? Now I'm thinking about how children actually do secrecy without any goal condition whatsoever.
00:17:38
Speaker
Children being secretly, what are you up to? Nothing. Literally, they were up to nothing. They just didn't want you to be nosy. And so they were going to make it look as if they were actually up to something. But no, we take it that when you are conspiring,
00:17:56
Speaker
you have a goal and you're keeping what it is you want to do secret from someone. Because if there's no secrecy involved then it's not really a conspiracy it's just a plan. Yeah and you can plan in the open and those plans can be problematic or unproblematic but there's nothing conspiratorial about saying we're going to invade Iraq unless of course
00:18:22
Speaker
you hide the rationale as to why you're going to invade Iraq by claiming there are weapons of mass destruction there. Yes. Yeah, so the secrecy condition, it's got to be there to count as a conspiracy. That doesn't seem conspiratorial. But then there are there are lots of different angles to that. Who does it have to be kept secret from everyone who isn't an on the conspiracy or just the target of the conspiracy or, you know, some people not others?
Secrecy's Influence on Perception
00:18:49
Speaker
how long does the secrecy need to be maintained? And it seems that, you know, that can vary if you look at things like, say, a terrorist attack like 9-11 or whatever, the planning of it is done in secret, but the execution they want everyone, you know, once their goal is reached, they want everyone to know about it immediately. Whereas other acts, the idea is that no one ever find out about them ever.
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, secrecy is interesting because in the thesis and the first book, the philosophy of conspiracy theories, I just talk about secrecy generally must keep your
00:19:24
Speaker
your plot a secret from others. But as Marty and I discuss in secrecy and conspiracy, actually secrecy is a really interesting concept here because some conspiracies do require you to keep what you're doing secret from everyone. And some conspiracies arguably only require you to keep what you're doing secret from the target of the conspiracy. So going back to the assassination of Caesar,
00:19:53
Speaker
Technically, the Assassins really only had to keep their plot secret from Caesar, and maybe some of his close friends who weren't in on the conspiracy, because of course one of the interesting things about the assassination of Julius Caesar was a lot of his friends decided he had to go. But obviously some of his friends didn't, had to keep it secret from them, but it was really only a small cohort of Roman citizens. The Assassins had to keep the secret from.
00:20:22
Speaker
And in fact, as soon as they kill Caesar, they quite openly announce what they've done. As soon as Caesar is dead, secrecy is no longer necessary. In fact, secrecy would be bad, because the Assassins want to be celebrated as the liberators of Rome.
00:20:38
Speaker
So they don't want it kept secret that they were the ones that did it. And so secrecy, when it comes to conspiracy, is a very flexible concept. You might keep a secret forever, like Stalin tried to do with his various purges, making people disappear in the Moscow trials, or you might stop being secret immediately as soon as Caesar is dead. And then there's a question of who are we keeping this secret from at this particular point in time?
00:21:08
Speaker
Because if you look at a smaller scale conspiracy theory, say, you know, someone cheating on their spouse or partner, obviously, it needs to be, you know, counts as a conspiracy because you've got at least two parties involved.
00:21:25
Speaker
That definitely needs to be kept secret from the person who is being cheated on and then it sort of You can get cases where it just kind of branches out a little bit so you don't want them to know You also don't want anyone who if they found out about it would tell the partner or spouse so it's sort of kind of not them and then
00:21:45
Speaker
And then maybe you want to make sure that no one who knows someone who knows someone can stay small. And certainly a situation like that, the vast majority of the human populace does not give a shit if you happen to be cheating on your spouse or partner.
00:22:02
Speaker
But exactly how much secrecy is required kind of depends on context and possibly time. Like the longer something goes, the more chance there is people might know about it, the more opportunities there might be for people to find out about it. So the more secrecy might end up being required.
00:22:21
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, secrecy ends up being quite an interesting concept to explore because it has a lot of very interesting philosophical extensions. Then when you start going, oh, oh, so actually this large conspiracy, we have to keep the secret from one person. I mean, so the Truman Show is a great example of that massive conspiracy.
00:22:44
Speaker
to keep secret from one person, Truman, that he's actually in a TV show and not the real world. So the rest of the world knows it's a TV show. They're only keeping this massive conspiracy secret from one person.
00:23:01
Speaker
And the secrecy condition I think is the one that people appeal to the most when they want to say that a conspiracy isn't warranted. Often I hear people say, well, look, for 9-11 to have been an inside job, there's sheer number of people who would have had to have known about it because
00:23:19
Speaker
it couldn't have been kept secret from them so therefore if no one spoke that means that they were in on it and agreed to stay quiet of it and that number of people when you really look at things is just too vast you couldn't keep that many people quiet and some cases
00:23:34
Speaker
What appears to be that case isn't really so much because, as we talked about, you can have a conspiracy involving a lot of people, but a lot of those people might not actually know that they're in on it. Yeah, precisely. So you might be keeping secret people's involvement in the conspiracy. But nevertheless, I think when people have
00:23:56
Speaker
problems with a conspiracy that go beyond the straight sort of implausibility angle of, well, this requires us to have technology that doesn't exist as far as we know. Well, this requires the existence of aliens or mind control or what have you. That aside, I think the thing that people tend to pick at the most in conspiracies is the idea that you can't keep big things secret.
00:24:17
Speaker
Or at least not for long enough. And then there's an associated notion, so Karl Popper famously thought that the conspiracy theory of society, the notion that conspiracies are at the root of everything, was nonsense in part because conspiracies are never ultimately successful, because we know about conspiracies.
00:24:38
Speaker
So there's no perfect secrecy here, and some people do use that claim that the only successful conspiracy is one that nobody even knows about, which then leads to an epistemic issue of if you know about a conspiracy it's unsuccessful. Thus it's not a real conspiracy, thus any theories about that conspiracy must be prima facie false.
00:25:00
Speaker
Now of course that's a really weird notion of secrecy, once again because you don't have to keep your secret forever, you just have to keep it secret until such time your plot has been achieved, and in some situations
Essence and Misconceptions of Conspiracies
00:25:15
Speaker
you might not need to keep it secret afterwards, or like Starling, you might go, I don't want anyone saying bad things about me, so let's just keep this hush hush for as long as possible. But insisting upon perfect secrecy seems like a way of defining conspiracies as being irrational to believe in.
00:25:34
Speaker
when actually, no, and also knowing that someone has tried to conspire but failed to either keep what they're doing secret or failed to achieve their end, doesn't tell us they haven't conspired, it just tells us that their conspiracy failed in some way.
00:25:56
Speaker
And it just seems like a non-productive definition to define secrecy in such a way that anything you can point to as a conspiracy therefore becomes not a conspiracy by definition. And yet some people want to engage in these non-productive things.
00:26:12
Speaker
So those are the three conditions that we take as being necessary for something to count as a conspiracy. And sufficient. What though are some things that are not conditions of a conspiracy, at least in our minds? Things which are often thought to be a condition of a conspiracy that we would disagree with. I would say, for instance, it's often held that conspiracies must be malicious.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yes, and actually this is something I go into in quite some depth in the first book, the philosophy of conspiracy theories. I think it's fair to assume that if you find out about a conspiracy, you've found out about a suspicious state of affairs, because people, unless once again their children,
00:26:58
Speaker
don't keep secrets for any old reason. You keep things secret because you want to hide something from someone. And if you are that someone, I think it's quite natural to go, this is a little bit suspicious. Why are you keeping the secret from me? But we should never mistake suspiciousness with sinisterness.
00:27:23
Speaker
Because there are lots of legitimate reasons to keep things secret. They can be from political things. If you're trying to negotiate a trade deal between two nation states, you need to keep your bottom line secret, not just from the negotiating partner overseas, but also from the public.
00:27:45
Speaker
Because if you go around broadcasting in the media that our bottom line is X, Y or Z, that foreign nation state is going to be able to look at your media and go, ah, we now know exactly what they're willing to give away or not give away. We can play hardball. So you keep that secret from the public to achieve a greater good. It's suspicious because we should always be suspicious of people acting secretively.
00:28:12
Speaker
But it's not necessarily sinister, although as we sometimes discover, looking into trade deals, it actually is sinister because they're keeping things secret because they don't want the public to know you're about to give away your healthcare system.
00:28:26
Speaker
And on sort of smaller scales, we keep secrets at times, sort of rightly or wrongly, to protect people. There can be things that we believe if a person found out about it, it would cause them distress or similar. And so we conspire to keep that information from them, quote unquote, for their own good. Or, and this is an example that I know you've brought up a bunch of times in the past, the most sort of
00:28:54
Speaker
almost counterintuitive example of a conspiracy theory would be a birthday party, a surprise birthday party. Yeah, precisely. So, and as I like to point out to people when I give talks, no one's ever done this for me, and it's becoming almost amusing by the fact I use it as an example.
00:29:11
Speaker
If someone organizes a surprise party, to make it a surprise party, the person you're organizing the party for can't know you're organizing the party, which means you are keeping that secret from them. And because you're organizing a surprise party, you are bringing other people in on the organization. So suddenly you have two or more people
00:29:36
Speaker
with a goal running a party, which you're keeping secret from the victim slash target, it looks like it's a conspiracy.
Benign Versus Malicious Conspiracies
00:29:48
Speaker
And unless the victim hates surprise parties,
00:29:52
Speaker
It's not sinister. No. Yeah, so the secrecy in that case is to make the final reveal all the better when the conspiracy is finally unveiled. Yeah, it appears to be a conspiracy of goodness. And so yes, that's one of the features that people want to bring into discussion of conspiracy, is that these things are malevolent or sinister.
00:30:16
Speaker
But there's no reason to think that, and indeed, part of the other problem is most conspirators don't think they're up to no good. Most people aren't mustachioed villains who cackle wildly as they freeze a lamb to death and part of their sinister plot to take over the world.
00:30:35
Speaker
Most of the conspiracies we know, people are motivated either by trying to achieve some greater good. This is going to be a horrible thing to say, but the Nazis did think the world would be better off without the Jewish nation being there. They were wrong. That's not bad about the bush. They were completely wrong about that.
00:30:53
Speaker
But they actually were keeping what they were doing secret because they knew people would protest but the Nazis thought the world would be a better place in the end. It's terrorists who blow out buildings and hijack planes. They think that they're doing a greater goal. Yeah.
00:31:08
Speaker
So yeah, certainly in the minds of conspirators, you could argue conspiracies are almost never malicious. They recognize the suspiciousness of what they do, but they do think they're aiming towards something which at least within their own perverted moral compass with respect to the Nazis, they think is a greater good. Another thing I've heard a little bit is the idea that
00:31:33
Speaker
Well, one thing I've heard the idea that it's not a conspiracy if it's actually true, which I think we wouldn't know. I mean, that just seems like a weird definition. Yeah, I think it's partly a little bit the whole confusion over the usage of the word theory. I mean, we're talking about theory in a fairly sort of academic scientific sense.
00:31:53
Speaker
As in the theory of evolution, the theory of gravity. Whereas a lot of people think a theory is something you just reckon. And once you know it to be true, it's not a theory anymore. So therefore, anything that's a conspiracy theory is something that we don't think is true or don't have evidence to believe. But so there's that. But there's also a slightly less shaky version of that is the idea that theories are inherently, I guess, alternative.
00:32:20
Speaker
that a theory is an alternative to the official theory. The official theory is not a conspiracy. The conspiracy is something that's offered as an alternative to the official theory. But official theories can be just as conspiracy-laden as unofficial ones.
00:32:37
Speaker
Yeah, and that's the thing. So people will say official theories can't be conspiracy theories because the officialness tells you that its proper knowledge and conspiracy theories are not. But once again, that's a really weird distinction to make there. Yeah, and it's something that I know you've brought up a bunch of times.
00:32:58
Speaker
September 11, if you believe that, say, the Bush administration orchestrated the entire thing to give them a pretext for bringing in the Patriot Act and invading Iraq, whatever, that's definitely a conspiracy theory. You believe the Bush administration acted in secret to frame Al-Qaeda for this act.
00:33:17
Speaker
On the other hand, if you believe that Al-Qaeda conspired to carry out a terrorist, carried out this terrorist attack on US soil, that's a conspiracy too. So the official theory is a conspiracy theory because it's a theory and the actions behind it are definitely a conspiracy.
00:33:35
Speaker
Yeah, because terrorist activity typically is conspiratorial. People work towards a goal, and they keep it secret, because terrorists by and large don't advertise what they're going to do in advance, apart from sometimes, yeah, back in the old days, would give warning that a bomb's going to go off in Brooklyn Street.
00:33:57
Speaker
Yes, I think all of which goes towards, I suppose, what's sort of been your project a little bit, is to possibly rehabilitate the idea of conspiracy theories, or at least to push against the notion that conspiracy theories are inherently irrational or inherently flawed, or that we should be suspicious of conspiracy theories simply because they're conspiracy theories.
00:34:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, basically, by looking at the concept of conspiracy and conspiracy theory and kind of breaking them down into their constituent parts and going, well, what do these terms actually mean? And what are their extensions? You end up going, well,
00:34:40
Speaker
Conspiracies actually seem to be a fairly normal thing in human interactions, in that if we agree, and some people don't, some people don't bite the bullet on surprise parties as being conspiratorial, but if we agree that surprise parties are conspiratorial,
00:35:00
Speaker
of shows you how common conspiracies actually are. They're kind of all around us in a natural part of how humans operate.
Rational Evaluation of Conspiracy Theories
00:35:09
Speaker
Whether you're back chatting about a colleague at work, because you know the boss is trying to get rid of them, and you're aiding and abetting by passing information on, or you're organizing a surprise party for a colleague,
00:35:23
Speaker
or you're engaging in a coup within your political party to change Prime Minister, conspiracies seem to be everywhere. Business practices seem to rely heavily on conspiracies. I like the idea. Business practice is conspiracy. Well, it kind of is a lot of the time. Precisely. We see them in the political world, in the business world, and just in everyday life.
00:35:49
Speaker
And I think the, I guess the point of it, what you've talked about plenty of times before is the danger of seeing conspiracy theories as being inherently irrational is that it allows the powerful to conspire and then write off any accusations against them as being just conspiracy theories and therefore inherently nonsense. And that's not a good thing.
00:36:15
Speaker
Yeah, it really isn't because the last thing we want to do is to give powerful conspirators the ability to make it hard to believe that they're engaging in conspiracies. So, I don't know, to people who haven't been listening to this podcast from the very beginning, it might feel a little bit strange because we do spend most of our time finding against the conspiracy theories we look at. I mean, we've looked at plenty of historical things that actually really did happen and they were conspiracies, but
00:36:44
Speaker
All the big ones, I mean, we're not 9-11-truthers. We don't think Kubrick faked the moon landings. Not 100% certain about JFK, but the wackier sides of magic bullet stuff doesn't seem to be true at all. And the Jeffrey Epstein stuff, I think we're mostly on the side of saying the most likely story was suicide.
00:37:10
Speaker
I mean, there are oddities to the story which makes you go, it is convenient, but at the same time, it also seems given the balance of probabilities, suicide should be our most likely candidate whilst we explore the others.
00:37:26
Speaker
knowing what we currently know. It'd be terrible if this gets broadcast after a point in time. And that's being conclusively proved that Jeffrey Epstein has indeed been killed by conspiracy. By an actual conspiracy. Not people. Just the weight of the oppressive atmosphere of a conspiracy. Because of the way politics is going in the US, conspiracy actually incarnates as an amorphous blob that goes around killing conspiracies, killing people everywhere.
00:37:56
Speaker
God, there's a conspiracy in every home! So yeah, it seems a little bit odd to say that the sort of, you know, official
00:38:05
Speaker
The ethos behind this podcast is that conspiracy theories are not inherently irrational and do deserve to be evaluated on the merits. When you do, when you look at the sorts of conspiracies people are interested in, you do find that most of them are kind of nonsense, but you find that out by investigating them on the merits, not by looking at them and saying, well, these are obviously just... As I like to point out...
00:38:27
Speaker
There may be an awful lot of unwarranted conspiracy theories out there, compared to a small cohort of actual warranted conspiracy theories we ought to believe. In the same respect, that's true for every single theoretical domain. There are a lot of scientific theories being generated on a day-by-day basis, most of which will not survive testing.
00:38:51
Speaker
And we don't think that's a problem in the sciences. But apparently having a lot of theoretical constructs, and only some of them being true, is a problem in the field of the conspiracy, when it isn't a problem in the field of psychology, physics, chemistry, history, and life.
00:39:12
Speaker
we shouldn't have this double standard.
Conclusion and Future Explorations
00:39:15
Speaker
But we'll be moving on to that at some point in our next Strange Featureless Void episode. Yes, we will. And because we're in a strange featureless void, it's a bit hard for us to tell
00:39:27
Speaker
What patrons are going to be able to experience after this particular episode? Because we are not only completely outside of space and time, but Josh and I come from different divergent realities. So I've got something here.
00:39:44
Speaker
giant sandworm mates with Aardvark, but I'm fairly sure that's not an actual story. I think that's just a fetish of mine. Josh, what have you got? Something about the Pope and an Anaconda or possibly the Pope and a woman called Anna driving a Honda. I'm not sure. Interesting. I've also got
00:40:13
Speaker
defenestrating artwork discovered to start World War 3. Well, that's just common sense. I mean, it had to happen eventually, but I would love to know the details. Here's patrons, you'll get to find out about something of that particular time. And if you want to, of course, come patron, why not join our Patreon campaign by going to patreon.com?
00:40:37
Speaker
or go to conspiracism.podbean.com, where you'll find details of our Podbean patron system, where you can give us just a dollar a month of access to bonus episodes like De-Fenestrating Artwork Courses World War Three.
00:40:54
Speaker
And who wouldn't want that? World War 4? Ah, probably. Yeah, precisely. I was reading a thing today. Must have been on Twitter, because that's where people post pithy comments. It's going to be strange if aliens ever visit and we have to explain to them why we required a numbering system for our world wars.
00:41:12
Speaker
Ooh, yeah. That's actually chilling when you think about it. That's quite, quite chilling. Anyway. Oh well. See you all next time. Whenever that time may be. Wobbly, wobbly, timey, wimey.
00:41:31
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and InDenteth. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or Podbean.