I believe the moon landing happened just as it appears to have happened. That one is easy. Less easy by far are other conspiracies.
Or are they?
Organized crime, for example. For decades the foremost expert on American crime, J. Edgar Hoover, told the country that there were local gangsters, sure, but they did not operate in concert with one another. That blew up in his face in 1957, when a hundred top members of La Cosa Nostra met in Appalachia, New York to sort out organizational issues and drink chianti. The FBI worked hard for a decade to reverse course and grapple effectively with LCN. Hoover appears to have acknowledged once, late in life, that he had been misled by a couple of FBI "authorities." It took several decades for the FBI to blunt the force of the Mob and during that time, in the early 1970s, I was lectured by the editor in chief of a major newspaper about how OC was a myth.
The implicit question involves more subtle "conspiracies" that really do exist but which are often dismissed because they are unpleasant truths. LCN was one. The whole Watergate mess involved several conspiracies, in the White House, FBI headquarters, the RNC and elsewhere. Partisans on either side of any political question can cry foul to dismiss a deeper, more complicated truth. Yes, the Nixon Watergate conspiracy did finally collapse for ineptitude but it almost held up long enough to be successful.
As a reporter for decades in my early life, I constantly ran into situations that seemed to involve conspiracies. But I lacked the ability to unravel them myself. Or if I did unravel them, my findings were dismissed by the gatekeepers of my newspaper. That may make me sound a little nutty but as I have grown older, I have found that there are real "conspiracies." Sometimes they get penetrated. Great investigations by media outlets, police detectives, or intelligence agents can and sometimes do provide information that throws light on conspiratorial politics, diplomacy or crime. A recent example that caught my eye: Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist connected some fascinating dots involving the behavior of Zelensky at the White House last week. The Ukrainian apparently was taking his cues from Obama acolytes who wanted to thwart Trump's plans for a shift in Middle European policy. That analysis/explanation became the talking points of the White House.
So, was that a real, full-blown conspiracy, was it a complete fiction, or was it at least partly true. History may be able to tell us which to believe but I can assure you there will be those who will dismiss Hemingway's reportage as conspiracy mongering for at least the next decade.
We live in a very complicated world. Jason's discussion deals with extreme examples of wrong-headed beliefs and God knows there are plenty of them. I look forward to his next installment because defeating "disinformation" and "misinformation" are crucial in today's contentious environment. I really hope that we all can find the stability to dismiss clearly whacko conspiracy theorists. I also hope that stability will allow us to dig more deeply, using plain old reason, as he did, to dismantle beliefs like the moon-landing explanation. Reason, sometimes called common sense, is the best defense against psychodrama. And sometimes, if we use it to dig deeply enough, reason can reveal linkages which come damn close to conspiracy. Sherlock Holmes dug more deeply than his contemporaries and uncovered guilty parties. We all can dig and reason together to find out how the real world works. And sometimes it works by deviousness and planning.
Thanks as ever for all your sensible observations, Evan! Maybe this is a topic you and I should get into if we do a project together. I find the psychology of all this fascinating and you clearly have a lot of insight into the area. Maybe you have access to some information that I can't seem to find, about two linked conspiracies - to do with the psychology Sleep Room at (I think it was) McGill University, and Manson's link to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic... Those are conspiracies that happened. I think. Probably.
Every serious book about the psychology of conspiracy theorists acknowledges, often at some length, that there are in fact real conspiracies that are documented, and presumably others that we don’t know about because they were more successful. But that in itself is not a serious argument for accepting the mammoth amount of flapdoodle that circulates.
I was once observing a Facebook flat earth group, and someone was circulating a list of conspiracies that you needed to believe in if you were serious about conspiracy belief. The list had about 50 different absurd things. I think that observers inclined to say, hey wait a minute, maybe there’s something in that one— would be wise to recall the psychological motivation for these beliefs. This motivation— which I assume Jason will talk about— doesn’t mean every conspiracy is nonsense, but that’s more because they spring up like mushrooms after a rain. There are hundreds and hundreds of conspiracy theories.
I’d recommend caution when assessing any conspiracy theory touted by Mollie Hemingway. She’s not exactly a disinterested objective commentator when it comes to reporting on unproven liberal conspiracies. I should add that I’m not unbiased here, but I’m also not inclined to drink the liberal koolaid on something forever; clearly there was a conspiracy to keep Biden’s health issues secret, and while I wish that weren’t the case, Tapper’s journalism is pretty convincing. He doesn’t just allege something, he interviewed 200 people. I know people who continue to believe that Tapper’s book is nonsense, and malevolent nonsense at that. There is also a growing conspiracy theory that Trump stole the 2024 election. I hate to even mention that one, because I don’t want to give it oxygen.
This is fascinating. Now that I think about it, I know people who believe some of these conspiracy theories, and none of them look like Andy. Some are well-educated people, reasonably-well off financially, and otherwise seemingly reasonable people. Yet somehow they have an unshakeable belief (or suspicion at least) that Barak Obama wasn't born in America and that there's a "deep state", or harbor dubious beliefs like the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. There's usually a lot of emotion involved in those beliefs, too, which makes it difficult for them to step back and take a critical, unemotional look at the probability of those beliefs being true. I know I've fallen into the trap of letting my emotions influence my beliefs--I'm trying to be better about this--so I do try to give these folks a little grace.
Thank you for your comment, Meredith! You are quite right, many people who are not Andy believe many conspiracy theories. I don't think I'm Andy, for instance, but I believe some myself. It would be strange not to, in a world in which, as we know, conspiracies definitely do happen. There is the UK Post Office scandal, just to pick a recent one, which The Doc Maker mentions below, and then there is the whole Volkswagen scandal, of recent memory, just to mention the first two that come to mind. What a weird world it would be if there were no conspiracies! I think you are absolutely right to mention the emotion that is invested in these beliefs. Perhaps they can become as it were part of people's identity, such that losing them would be a bit like losing part of themselves. Don't be hard on yourself, though: we all do it! It is vital for our sanity and even survival that we should inhabit a safe and predictable world - indeed it's more important psychologically that our worldview should be predictable than that it should be correct - and one has to wonder whether we all want to become Mr Spocks anyway! More on Andy's personality next week, by the way!
I spent a few years observing flat earth Facebook groups and a few similar groups. Everything you wrote here is consistent with my anecdotal observations, and with the books I’ve read by Michael Shermer on or around this subject. “Why People Believe Weird Things” was a big influence on my thinking, and he has a more recent one specifically about conspiracy theories.
Thanks, Karl! Always good to hear from you. I too joined some Facebook flat-Earth groups. In my case I did it because I was preparing a lecture on conspiracy theories and wanted some first hand details. I got some interesting slides out of it. I am a fan of Michael Schemer’s book The Believing Brain but didn’t know he had written about conspiracy theories. I’ll add it to the ever-growing list.
Jason, I think I know of some coverage of the Manson thing. Will try to track down. Also noodling on conspiracies. How do we know what we know? That’s the second part of my present book project. Not always easy in a world full of professional liars. Could be a good topic. How do you prove something didn’t happen. Much harder to do than proving it did.
One of my brothers loves conspiracy theories, the more outlandish, the better. He pretends to go along with them and makes up wild stories, like about the time the aliens kidnapped him, or the time he reached the ice wall.
The chap I know who truly believes the stuff he sees online gets rabid if you question certain things.😀 He's highly educated and not poor though.
How do you feel about 'conspiracies to pervert the course of justice' ? Or conspiracies of silence?
I think the problem is now the word "conspiracy" people automatically think of tin-hat wearing Bigfoot aficionados, but as Evan states below the more" subtle conspiracies" do exist.
Here in the UK we not only have historic cases of miscarriages of justice caused by the conspiratorial actions of certain police forces and the wider justice system(the cases of the (Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Bridgewater 4 etc. etc) but even today we're seeing these conspiracies continue to play out - the recent Post Office scandal where 800 postmasters were falsely accused of theft in order to protect the 'brand' of the Post Office was a 'conspiracy' propagated by senior management. the recent conviction of the nurse Lucy Letby is looking more and more likely to be a conspiracy to protect a failing NHS hospital, propagated by its senior management.
And the case of course, of Jeremy Bamber, was a conspiracy created by a handful of corrupt police(a typical MO in the UK) that then became a wider 'recruitment' of prosecution friendly lawyers, judges and forensic scientists.
I go into detail on these cases in my Substack : https://thedocmaker.substack.com/ - after 4 years of investigation into this case the truth is really stranger than fiction.
So conspiracies do exist, often as Evan states to hide "unpleasant truths" .
Thank you for your thoughtful message. You are absolutely right that conspiracies do happen. Indeed, I made that point explicitly at the start of the article. I tried to be very careful not to imply that conspiracy theorists are always wrong. Indeed, it would be a weird world - wouldn't it? - if they *were* always wrong! Let's say there was even a 5% probability of any given conspiracy theory being correct. There are hundreds of them, so the probability of all of them being wrong must be tiny. Indeed, you'd be on firm ground to argue that the *lack* of conspiracies was itself suspicious. 'Why are there no conspiracies? How come the conspiracy theorists are *always* wrong? Can that really be the case?' The whole case becomes very interesting when we remember that dismissing something as a 'conspiracy theory' is a very easy way to stop people talking about real conspiracies. That's a tactic we've heard Keir Starmer employ more than once in recent months. It is also possibly the explanation for the weird lights in the sky around Area 51: dismiss the whole thing as a 'conspiracy theory' and you can test-fly as many weird new aircraft as you like. On the other hand, there exist certain people (you've met them and so have I) for whom a 'conspiracy' is the first stop on their train of thought. 'Why did Princess Di get killed?' 'Why did Team 1 win the first game and Team 2 the second - doesn't it set up a lucrative third game?' 'Why do the pyramids have such straight edges?' There is a lack of complexity to that kind of thinking that I plan to address in Part 2 of this article next week.
Have a read of this post - a government department setup to propagate misinformation and secure convictions. If this isn't proof of a conspiracy in action I don't know what is. https://thedocmaker.substack.com/p/the-red-under-the-bed
A friend of mine told me that his father (who lives in a rather rural area) became a member of a very odd group. Even before the covid pandemic he had already been against vaccination (mainly because he thought it to be 'unnatural' and unhealty) but during the pandemic this opposition against vaccination developed into a conspiracy theory. He started to believe, dor example, that the covid vaccine was designed to control peoples minds and stuff like that. At that time, he started to regularly meet with a bunch of other people who were 'against all that'.
What my friend found most surprising was that the members of that group, while sharing the attitude to be against the system, had very different beliefs concerning the nature of the problem. My friend's father believed that the pandemic was real but that the political elites im Germany wanted to use vaccination as an opportunity to control the people. But another member believed that the pandemic itself was planned by a world elite in order to reduce the world population by a third, and that the vaccination campagne was part of that plan (vaccine = poison). Under normal circumstances, these beliefs would be mutually exclusive. But during the pandemic, the common attitude to be against the rigged system was apparently enough to ignore the fact the different world views were not compatible with each other. I thought that to be very interesting from a psychological point of view.
I believe the moon landing happened just as it appears to have happened. That one is easy. Less easy by far are other conspiracies.
Or are they?
Organized crime, for example. For decades the foremost expert on American crime, J. Edgar Hoover, told the country that there were local gangsters, sure, but they did not operate in concert with one another. That blew up in his face in 1957, when a hundred top members of La Cosa Nostra met in Appalachia, New York to sort out organizational issues and drink chianti. The FBI worked hard for a decade to reverse course and grapple effectively with LCN. Hoover appears to have acknowledged once, late in life, that he had been misled by a couple of FBI "authorities." It took several decades for the FBI to blunt the force of the Mob and during that time, in the early 1970s, I was lectured by the editor in chief of a major newspaper about how OC was a myth.
The implicit question involves more subtle "conspiracies" that really do exist but which are often dismissed because they are unpleasant truths. LCN was one. The whole Watergate mess involved several conspiracies, in the White House, FBI headquarters, the RNC and elsewhere. Partisans on either side of any political question can cry foul to dismiss a deeper, more complicated truth. Yes, the Nixon Watergate conspiracy did finally collapse for ineptitude but it almost held up long enough to be successful.
As a reporter for decades in my early life, I constantly ran into situations that seemed to involve conspiracies. But I lacked the ability to unravel them myself. Or if I did unravel them, my findings were dismissed by the gatekeepers of my newspaper. That may make me sound a little nutty but as I have grown older, I have found that there are real "conspiracies." Sometimes they get penetrated. Great investigations by media outlets, police detectives, or intelligence agents can and sometimes do provide information that throws light on conspiratorial politics, diplomacy or crime. A recent example that caught my eye: Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist connected some fascinating dots involving the behavior of Zelensky at the White House last week. The Ukrainian apparently was taking his cues from Obama acolytes who wanted to thwart Trump's plans for a shift in Middle European policy. That analysis/explanation became the talking points of the White House.
So, was that a real, full-blown conspiracy, was it a complete fiction, or was it at least partly true. History may be able to tell us which to believe but I can assure you there will be those who will dismiss Hemingway's reportage as conspiracy mongering for at least the next decade.
We live in a very complicated world. Jason's discussion deals with extreme examples of wrong-headed beliefs and God knows there are plenty of them. I look forward to his next installment because defeating "disinformation" and "misinformation" are crucial in today's contentious environment. I really hope that we all can find the stability to dismiss clearly whacko conspiracy theorists. I also hope that stability will allow us to dig more deeply, using plain old reason, as he did, to dismantle beliefs like the moon-landing explanation. Reason, sometimes called common sense, is the best defense against psychodrama. And sometimes, if we use it to dig deeply enough, reason can reveal linkages which come damn close to conspiracy. Sherlock Holmes dug more deeply than his contemporaries and uncovered guilty parties. We all can dig and reason together to find out how the real world works. And sometimes it works by deviousness and planning.
Thanks as ever for all your sensible observations, Evan! Maybe this is a topic you and I should get into if we do a project together. I find the psychology of all this fascinating and you clearly have a lot of insight into the area. Maybe you have access to some information that I can't seem to find, about two linked conspiracies - to do with the psychology Sleep Room at (I think it was) McGill University, and Manson's link to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic... Those are conspiracies that happened. I think. Probably.
Excellent comment. I've come across the same on the case I've been investigating for the past 4 years https://thedocmaker.substack.com
Every serious book about the psychology of conspiracy theorists acknowledges, often at some length, that there are in fact real conspiracies that are documented, and presumably others that we don’t know about because they were more successful. But that in itself is not a serious argument for accepting the mammoth amount of flapdoodle that circulates.
I was once observing a Facebook flat earth group, and someone was circulating a list of conspiracies that you needed to believe in if you were serious about conspiracy belief. The list had about 50 different absurd things. I think that observers inclined to say, hey wait a minute, maybe there’s something in that one— would be wise to recall the psychological motivation for these beliefs. This motivation— which I assume Jason will talk about— doesn’t mean every conspiracy is nonsense, but that’s more because they spring up like mushrooms after a rain. There are hundreds and hundreds of conspiracy theories.
I’d recommend caution when assessing any conspiracy theory touted by Mollie Hemingway. She’s not exactly a disinterested objective commentator when it comes to reporting on unproven liberal conspiracies. I should add that I’m not unbiased here, but I’m also not inclined to drink the liberal koolaid on something forever; clearly there was a conspiracy to keep Biden’s health issues secret, and while I wish that weren’t the case, Tapper’s journalism is pretty convincing. He doesn’t just allege something, he interviewed 200 people. I know people who continue to believe that Tapper’s book is nonsense, and malevolent nonsense at that. There is also a growing conspiracy theory that Trump stole the 2024 election. I hate to even mention that one, because I don’t want to give it oxygen.
This is fascinating. Now that I think about it, I know people who believe some of these conspiracy theories, and none of them look like Andy. Some are well-educated people, reasonably-well off financially, and otherwise seemingly reasonable people. Yet somehow they have an unshakeable belief (or suspicion at least) that Barak Obama wasn't born in America and that there's a "deep state", or harbor dubious beliefs like the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. There's usually a lot of emotion involved in those beliefs, too, which makes it difficult for them to step back and take a critical, unemotional look at the probability of those beliefs being true. I know I've fallen into the trap of letting my emotions influence my beliefs--I'm trying to be better about this--so I do try to give these folks a little grace.
Thank you for your comment, Meredith! You are quite right, many people who are not Andy believe many conspiracy theories. I don't think I'm Andy, for instance, but I believe some myself. It would be strange not to, in a world in which, as we know, conspiracies definitely do happen. There is the UK Post Office scandal, just to pick a recent one, which The Doc Maker mentions below, and then there is the whole Volkswagen scandal, of recent memory, just to mention the first two that come to mind. What a weird world it would be if there were no conspiracies! I think you are absolutely right to mention the emotion that is invested in these beliefs. Perhaps they can become as it were part of people's identity, such that losing them would be a bit like losing part of themselves. Don't be hard on yourself, though: we all do it! It is vital for our sanity and even survival that we should inhabit a safe and predictable world - indeed it's more important psychologically that our worldview should be predictable than that it should be correct - and one has to wonder whether we all want to become Mr Spocks anyway! More on Andy's personality next week, by the way!
I spent a few years observing flat earth Facebook groups and a few similar groups. Everything you wrote here is consistent with my anecdotal observations, and with the books I’ve read by Michael Shermer on or around this subject. “Why People Believe Weird Things” was a big influence on my thinking, and he has a more recent one specifically about conspiracy theories.
Also— good line about soufflé-insulting.
Thanks, Karl! Always good to hear from you. I too joined some Facebook flat-Earth groups. In my case I did it because I was preparing a lecture on conspiracy theories and wanted some first hand details. I got some interesting slides out of it. I am a fan of Michael Schemer’s book The Believing Brain but didn’t know he had written about conspiracy theories. I’ll add it to the ever-growing list.
Jason, I think I know of some coverage of the Manson thing. Will try to track down. Also noodling on conspiracies. How do we know what we know? That’s the second part of my present book project. Not always easy in a world full of professional liars. Could be a good topic. How do you prove something didn’t happen. Much harder to do than proving it did.
One of my brothers loves conspiracy theories, the more outlandish, the better. He pretends to go along with them and makes up wild stories, like about the time the aliens kidnapped him, or the time he reached the ice wall.
The chap I know who truly believes the stuff he sees online gets rabid if you question certain things.😀 He's highly educated and not poor though.
How do you feel about 'conspiracies to pervert the course of justice' ? Or conspiracies of silence?
I think the problem is now the word "conspiracy" people automatically think of tin-hat wearing Bigfoot aficionados, but as Evan states below the more" subtle conspiracies" do exist.
Here in the UK we not only have historic cases of miscarriages of justice caused by the conspiratorial actions of certain police forces and the wider justice system(the cases of the (Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Bridgewater 4 etc. etc) but even today we're seeing these conspiracies continue to play out - the recent Post Office scandal where 800 postmasters were falsely accused of theft in order to protect the 'brand' of the Post Office was a 'conspiracy' propagated by senior management. the recent conviction of the nurse Lucy Letby is looking more and more likely to be a conspiracy to protect a failing NHS hospital, propagated by its senior management.
And the case of course, of Jeremy Bamber, was a conspiracy created by a handful of corrupt police(a typical MO in the UK) that then became a wider 'recruitment' of prosecution friendly lawyers, judges and forensic scientists.
I go into detail on these cases in my Substack : https://thedocmaker.substack.com/ - after 4 years of investigation into this case the truth is really stranger than fiction.
So conspiracies do exist, often as Evan states to hide "unpleasant truths" .
Thank you for your thoughtful message. You are absolutely right that conspiracies do happen. Indeed, I made that point explicitly at the start of the article. I tried to be very careful not to imply that conspiracy theorists are always wrong. Indeed, it would be a weird world - wouldn't it? - if they *were* always wrong! Let's say there was even a 5% probability of any given conspiracy theory being correct. There are hundreds of them, so the probability of all of them being wrong must be tiny. Indeed, you'd be on firm ground to argue that the *lack* of conspiracies was itself suspicious. 'Why are there no conspiracies? How come the conspiracy theorists are *always* wrong? Can that really be the case?' The whole case becomes very interesting when we remember that dismissing something as a 'conspiracy theory' is a very easy way to stop people talking about real conspiracies. That's a tactic we've heard Keir Starmer employ more than once in recent months. It is also possibly the explanation for the weird lights in the sky around Area 51: dismiss the whole thing as a 'conspiracy theory' and you can test-fly as many weird new aircraft as you like. On the other hand, there exist certain people (you've met them and so have I) for whom a 'conspiracy' is the first stop on their train of thought. 'Why did Princess Di get killed?' 'Why did Team 1 win the first game and Team 2 the second - doesn't it set up a lucrative third game?' 'Why do the pyramids have such straight edges?' There is a lack of complexity to that kind of thinking that I plan to address in Part 2 of this article next week.
Have a read of this post - a government department setup to propagate misinformation and secure convictions. If this isn't proof of a conspiracy in action I don't know what is. https://thedocmaker.substack.com/p/the-red-under-the-bed
A friend of mine told me that his father (who lives in a rather rural area) became a member of a very odd group. Even before the covid pandemic he had already been against vaccination (mainly because he thought it to be 'unnatural' and unhealty) but during the pandemic this opposition against vaccination developed into a conspiracy theory. He started to believe, dor example, that the covid vaccine was designed to control peoples minds and stuff like that. At that time, he started to regularly meet with a bunch of other people who were 'against all that'.
What my friend found most surprising was that the members of that group, while sharing the attitude to be against the system, had very different beliefs concerning the nature of the problem. My friend's father believed that the pandemic was real but that the political elites im Germany wanted to use vaccination as an opportunity to control the people. But another member believed that the pandemic itself was planned by a world elite in order to reduce the world population by a third, and that the vaccination campagne was part of that plan (vaccine = poison). Under normal circumstances, these beliefs would be mutually exclusive. But during the pandemic, the common attitude to be against the rigged system was apparently enough to ignore the fact the different world views were not compatible with each other. I thought that to be very interesting from a psychological point of view.
Interesting and important these days.
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it.