Carrol Cox makes an interesting distinction "between those conspiracy theories which originate "among the people" as it were and those which are deliberately engendered by some state or organized group with definite political purposes in mind..."
This fits nicely with Michael Perelman's list of US government spawned conspiracy theories:
>The assassination of the Pope,
>the Sandinistas drug smuggling operation,
>rumors about capitalism in Indonesia prior to the coup,
>Judy Bari's self-inflicted bombing
So conspiracy theories can be top down or bottom up.
t byfield sez:
> conspiracism is, first and foremost, a search for the
> origins of a given phenomenon; only last and hindmost does it
> address the CONSEQUENCES of the phenomenon, if it bothers with
> them at all.
I would offer a different formulation. Conspiracism in a public setting is a narrative form of scapegoating. It justifies the blaming of societal problems on a stigmatized "Them" who are demonized as wholly evil for plotting against the good "Us." Meanwhile, the scapegoater is acclaimed as a hero for revealing the plot against the common good.
So conspiracism starts with a grievance, those with the grievance blame a scapegoat, then write a narrative to justify blaming the scapegoat.
t byfield also sez:
> an imaginary social
> formation can serve just as well as a real model for present
> and future activities.
This is critical to understand why scapegoating and conspiracism is such a poewrful historical process.
Carrol Cox argues: "I've never encountered an "irrational belief." I've only encountered very wrong beliefs based on inadequate informatio and/or training. Granting their premises, they are always quite rational."
Conspiracy theories sometimes use irrational leaps of logic, but that does not make them a result of individual pathological behavior. Once you grant the irrational Kierkegaardian leap, then, as Carrol points out, internally conspiracist theories often have an attractive and consistent kind of logic. If Jews are evil manipulators of the economy, then why not smash them and resolve the problem? The leap leads to the logical conclusion. This is why I am always carping that the logical result of conspiracism is the expulsion or elimination of the named scapegoat...sometimes to the point of genocide.
Here is an excerpt from an encyclopedia entry I wrote:
"Conspiracism serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in America and elsewhere," writes Mintz, "it identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power," (1995:199). Conspiracism can flourish in a mass movement, be used as a tool in a power struggle between competing elites, or as a justification for state agencies to engage in repressive actions against alleged subversives.
Most of the conspiracist allegations in Western culture are variations on the themes propounded in the late 1700's by Robison in Proofs of a Conspiracy and Barruel in Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. Both books claim that a society called the Illuminati worked through the Freemasons to undermine church and state as part of a global conspiracy to create a one-world government. In the early 1900s many of the same charges concerning the Freemasons were incorporated into allegations of secret plots by international Jewish bankers, an idea spread by the hoax text, The Protocols of the Secret Elders of Zion.
Conspiracist thinking is an action-oriented worldview which holds out to believers the possibility of change. As Blee has observed through interviews with women in White racist groups, "Conspiracy theories not only teach that the world is divided into an empowered 'them' and a less powerful 'us' but also suggest a strategy by which the 'us' (ordinary people, the non-conspirators) can challenge and even usurp the authority of the currently-powerful," (1996:98) Thus conspiracist scapegoating fills a need for explanations among the adherents by providing a simple model of good versus evil in which the victory over evil is at least possible.
Fenster argues that conspiracism is the way some people construct a theory of power, albeit a way that fails to recognize how real power relations work. He sees it as related to a particular form of populism that seeks to mobilize "the people" against a "power bloc" of secret elites. According to Fenster, "just because overarching conspiracy theories are wrong does not mean they are not on to something. Specifically, they ideologically address real structural inequities, and constitute a response to a withering civil society and the concentration of the ownership of the means of production, which together leave the political subject without the ability to be recognized or to signify in the public realm," (1999:67).
So instead of aiming criticism at institutions or systems, the conspiracist points the finger at individuals or groups portrayed as malicious. Groups at various times named as part of a sinister conspiracy include Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, the Illuminati, Arabs, anarchists, communists, civil rights activists, Black militants, environmentalists, secular humanists, gay rights activists, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg banking discussion group, and the United Nations.
The conspiracist often employs common fallacies of logic in analyzing factual evidence to assert connections, causality, and intent that are nonexistent. This manifests itself in degrees. "It might be possible, given sufficient time and patience," writes Davis, "to rank movements of countersubversion on a scale of relative realism and fantasy," (1971:xiv). The distance from reality and logic the conspiracist analysis drifts has a wide range. Some are more successful at passing off their contentions than others.
Billig, who has studied conspiracism in Britain, has observed that "Not all conspiracy theorists express their ideas in the same way, and on occasions they criticize each other. Sometimes the basic assumption of a world conspiracy is expressed with crudity which embarrasses some of the more sophisticated theorists," (1989:156).
Social scientists following Hofstadter usually divided the phenomena he described into discrete yet related components: apocalypticism, demonization, scapegoating, and conspiracism. They also moved away from the idea that conspiracism was tied to a pathological psychological condition.
Davis observed that collective "beliefs in conspiracy have usually embodied or given expression to genuine social conflict," Thus conspiracism needs some indigestion in the body politic for which the conspiracist seeks causation so that blame can be affixed. As Davis observes sympathetically, many persons who embraced conspiracy theories in earlier historic periods "were responding to highly disturbing events; their perceptions, even when wild distortions of reality, were not necessarily unreasonable interpretations of available information" (1971:xiv ). The interpretations, however, were frequently inaccurate and occasionally created havoc.
Those who suspect a conspiracy to subvert society often build a countersubversive apparatus in public and private agencies to battle the perceived threat. Donner argued there was an institutionalized culture of countersubversion in the United States "marked by a distinct pathology: conspiracy theory, moralism, nativism, and suppressiveness."(1980:10) This countersubversion worldview, itself a form of conspiracism, is linked to government attempts to disrupt and crush dissident social movements in the United States. This is certainly the case with the illegal campaigns against dissidents carried out in secret by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover; and later exposed in congressional hearings in the 1970s.
While there are sometimes real forces at work trying to subvert authority, Davis points out that. "genuine conspiracies have seldom been as dangerous or as powerful as have movements of countersubversion. The exposer of conspiracies necessarily adopts a victimized, self-righteous tone which masks his own meaner interests as well as his share of responsibility for a given conflict. Accusations of conspiracy conceal or justify one's own provocative acts and thus contribute to individual or national self-deception. Still worse, they lead to overreactions, particularly to degrees of suppressive violence which normally would not be tolerated," (1971:361).
Conspiracism, since it is a form of scapegoating, can damage society, disrupting rational political discourse and creating targets who are harassed and even murdered. Dismissing the conspiracism often found in right-wing populism as marginal extremism or lunatic hysteria does little to challenge these movements, fails to deal with concrete conflicts and underlying institutional issues, invites government repression, and sacrifices the early targets of the scapegoaters on the altar of denial.
An effective response requires a more complex analysis that considers the following factors:
All conspiracist theories start with a grain of truth, which is then transmogrified through hyperbole and filtered through pre-existing myth and prejudice,
People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, and this has concrete consequences in the real world,
Conspiracist thinking and scapegoating are symptoms, not causes, of underlying societal frictions, and as such should not be ignored,
Scapegoating and conspiracist allegations are tools that can be used by cynical leaders to mobilize a mass following,
Supremacist and fascist organizers use conspiracist theories as a relatively unthreatening entry point in making contact with potential recruits,
Even when conspiracist theories do not center on Jews, people of color, or other scapegoated groups, they create an environment where racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of prejudice and oppression can flourish.
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