It’s a common enough saying (and at least one of the CT collective, whose blushes I’ll spare, has endorsed it):
“If you have to choose between explaining something as a cock-up or a consipracy, choose cock-up every time”.
I’ve searched high and low for empirical evidence supporting this, but found rigorous studies to be surprisingly thin on the ground. Some people even go a bit further, suggesting that cock-up explanations rather than conspiracy explanations are correct 99 per cent of the time; I’ve found nothing to support this point estimate, still less any idea of what the confidence bounds on it are. What if the cock-up explanation was only right 75% of the time?
These thoughts and more were motivated by David Brooks’ recent column in the New York Times. I’m not going to link to it because I worry that the NYT editors might get the idea that Brooks is “wildly popular on the Net”, or “the columnist you love to hate – but can’t stop reading”, rather than a very mediocre pseud. In any case, I ended up concluding that I didn’t want to argue against him directly; anyone who thinks that
[..] Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria. Web sites appeared detailing neocon conspiracies; my favorite described a neocon outing organized by Dick Cheney to hunt for humans[1]. The Asian press had the most lurid stories; the European press the most thorough. Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an exposé on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators.
The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles […]
is an honest or even a decent piece of political journalism, is unlikely to be convinced otherwise by anything I might have to say.
The heart of the issue is this; as Robert Anton Wilson noted, the English language is amply stocked with words to describe paranoia and irrational fear, but doesn’t have one single concise term to describe a rational fear of political persecution. Similarly, the journalistic lexicon is well stocked with phrases like “conspiracy theorist”, “moonbat” “tinfoil hat brigade” and so on, but if we were to want to turn our conversation toward discussion of the facts that people have political views, that people with similar political views tend to flock together, that groups of people with political views tend to want to influence the direction of policy, and that the process of influencing policy is usually most efficient if carried out in an organised manner … well then we would already find it powerfully difficult to describe our discussion to a third party without using terms which implied by their ordinary usage that we were in some way weird. If we then took the further step of noting that often people have political views which are unpopular enough with the general public that it is prudent for them not to publicly express those views, then we are certainly in the realm of consipracy theory.
Brooks appears to want to move the agenda further; he appears to believe that to explain organisational structures by drawing boxes and arrows is in some way a weird thing to do. I think he’s unlikely to recruit many people to the idea that good graphic design is a veiled form of anti-Semitism, but it is clear that he is right there with the general project of creating an environment in which it is impossible to express certain points of view without being undercut by the very words which you use to express them. Which, by the way, was the original point of Orwell’s NewSpeak, not the double-talking euphemism which people now use it to mean.
And so I offer a couple of suggestions as to how people of good will might help to avoid contributing to the hellward speed which of the handcart which appears to be carrying the English language as a tool of honest political debate:
a) First, let’s drop the lazy proverb about conspiracies and cock-ups. We have no idea how many political events are the result of consipracies and how many of cock-ups, and the definition of a conspiracy suggests that we don’t have any good way of finding out. I’d always invite anyone to consider how well this proverb would have performed in explaining the dataset “Changes of Government in African Countries, 1960-88”. Since the vast majority of these changes of government were coups d’etat, and a coup is by definition a conspiracy, it would seem on the face of it that a blanket estimate of 99% cock-ups is a poor choice of Bayesian prior.
b) Second, could I enlist the help of CT readers in rehabilitating the word “Tendency”? A “tendency” within a broader political group is like a conspiracy, but with less of an ontological commitment; if one says that there is a “Neoconservative Consipracy”, one is implicitly asserting the existence of an organisation, co-ordinated actions, a party line and intentional covertness. A “Neoconservative Tendency” within the apparatus of the US government might be a conspiracy, but might just be a group of people with similar beliefs, who appeared to be pushing things in the same direction. For analytical purposes at the level of political science, one can treat a tendency and a conspiracy in roughly similar ways, but asserting the existence of a tendency is a weaker claim (and usually all that it justified by the evidence anyway. It is perhaps ironic that the term was brought to fame by the “Militant Tendency” within the Labour Party in the 1980s, which was a conspiracy if anything was, but there ye go.
Remember, the history of the world is not the history of a small number of self-interested cliques, but it is often a useful analytical tool to treat it as if it were. Mind how you go.
[1] If you’re interested, the “Dick Cheney hunting humans” story almost certainly refers to David Icke’s website, to which I am also not going to link. Icke believes all sorts of things about Cheney, mainly because Icke is in the habit of assuming that everything he reads in print is true.
{ 51 comments }
mikem 01.06.04 at 7:41 pm
As I recall, one of Murphy’s laws is “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I think that your second paragraph is just a corollary to this law.
Joe Carter 01.06.04 at 7:42 pm
Please excuse my dumb American question but just what the heck is a “cock-up?”
Kieran Healy 01.06.04 at 7:45 pm
In other circumstances, Brooks would probably be quick to quote Adam Smith as the epitome of obvious good sense: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Jeremy Osner 01.06.04 at 7:46 pm
Thanks for the reminder about “Newspeak”.
Simon Kinahan 01.06.04 at 7:56 pm
I’ve always taken the proverb about cock-ups and conspiracies to refer to conspiracies in the sense of “conspiracy theory”, where a conspiracy theory generally proposes that some set of apparently unconnected events were coordinated by some unseen agency in order to acheive a predetermined outcome.
In this sense “cock-up, not conspiracy” captures a truth about human nature. Whenever we gain a good view of what goes on at the highest levels of business and government (the documents placed on the web by the British Hutton enquiry, for instance), we see people acting pretty much how they do elsewhere. Unencumbered by any special foresight, having trouble coordinating disparate interests and comparing divergent advice, and most of all striving to coordinate different agents in anything resembling a coherent policy. Given that, “cock up, not conspiracy” captures the fact that, barring miracles, large scale, secret, effective coordination of large groups of humans is virtually impossible.
The USA and most European countries are blessed with systems of government where, if you want to wield significant power, you have to do it in a very public way. Any tendency that actually wants to be effective therefore has to be public, and therefore technically not a conspiracy. There is, after all, nothing secret about the existence of PNAC, or the views it promotes, or the high placement of some of its members in the Bush administration. The original article is as barking as David Icke, but this does not, I think, reduce the usefulness of the aphorism it is based on.
The trouble with considering the history of the world as the history of “interest groups” and their actions is it tends to lead to the kind of woolly, holistic thinking that tends to accompany genuine conspiracy theories, by supposing that merely because someone is powerful and has interests, those interest are within their power to promote.
richard 01.06.04 at 8:14 pm
all the conspiracy chatter will probably be dying down now
Skinny 01.06.04 at 8:14 pm
UK “cock-up” = US “screw-up”; the way the idea is usually phrased is “never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity”. This is sometimes called “Hanlon’s Razor”, but the “Hanlon” in question is probably a misheard “Heinlein”; an early Robert Heinlein story whose title escapes my memory presents a similar idea.
“I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.” – Teresa Nielsen Hayden
Matt 01.06.04 at 8:16 pm
I think you’d have more luck sorting people into ‘conspiracy theorists’ or ‘statisticians’ rather than sorting events into ‘conspiracies’ or ‘screw-ups’.
Keith M Ellis 01.06.04 at 8:21 pm
As I see it, the problem with conspiracy theories is that they assume causal relationships and competency, and discount coincidence and fortune. This is a mistake because the latter govern human affairs at least as much as the former. On the other hand, there’s a lot of terrain between the cold, lofty heights of clockwork conspiracies and swampy, organic chaos. It’s equally a mistake to completely discount covert action and motivation.
But there’s something about “conspiracy” that requires “secretiveness”. In the case of the neocons, there really isn’t any. The neocons are an easily identifiable faction within the Bush administration, they’ve been forthright about their views, and they’ve clearly been influential. So, “neoconservative” means something even though its meaning has been diluted by misuse. Its misuse undoubtedly includes antisemitic motives or tendencies from some critics…but so what? Brooks is setting up a strawman.
“Neoconservative” has a definite meaning, and that meaning is related to a particular view about American foreign policy. Some of the prominent neocons are Jewish, and their foreign policy views are strongly pro-Israel. But the pro-Israel slant of neocons is a product of their view on American foreign policy, not its raison d’etre, as the more conspiracy-minded may contend. Furthermore, they’re not that terribly effective of a conspiracy—the neocon vision for a post-war Iraq is substantially different from the reality. This is because the neocons formed only the nucleus of a coalition of fairly divergent interests within the Bush administration that, nevertheless, favored an Iraq invasion. Yes, understanding the neocons and their influence is centrally important in understanding the Bush administration’s foreign policy—but they’re only part of the story.
That I write so much in this context about the neocons is because A) writing about them is the example that apparently precipitated Daniel’s post; and B) they’re a fine example of how reality is neither quite like the paranoid imagine it, nor is it 100% conspiracy-free. If you have to choose between a cock-up and a conspiracy, don’t. Reality is usually a cock-up that results from people acting discordantly in accordance with their sometimes undisclosed motivations. Simplistic explanations are the bane of comprehension.
John 01.06.04 at 8:51 pm
This reminds me of a famous speech by the Russian Liberal politician Paul Miliukov during the First World War. He went through a litany of various cock-ups by the Tsarist government during the war, asking after each one “Is this incompetence, or is it treason?” The obvious lesson to be drawn was that it was treason. As it turned out, it was just monstrous incompetence. I think this tends to be true for most historical events when they’re looked at closely.
Mithras 01.06.04 at 9:02 pm
What’s a pseud?
due torre 01.06.04 at 9:14 pm
I’m surprised to have read this far without one reference to the granddaddy of conspiracy theory: William of Ockham. that can’t be pure chance, can it?
Jeremy Pierce 01.06.04 at 9:31 pm
Ockham’s Razor has an interesting application here, because people will use it in different directions. Some will say that the simplest theory is the one that allows one cause for everything. Why postulate more causes than you need? So we get a conspiracy theory. Others will say not to postulate too hefty a theory relying on something you don’t otherwise know about. This would count against the conspiracy theory. My impression is that the first use is closer to how Ockham’s Razor is usually put, but that ignores whether the things you’re postulating are warranted by the evidence. If you have reason to postulate something, then it’s better to do so rather than having one thing explain everything inadequately. Thus the second use is better in these cases.
Dan 01.06.04 at 9:38 pm
So I gave up on conspiracy theories a few years ago, when I learned that a shadowy bunch of Islamic extremists had created a diverse network of followers around the world and, directed by a guy who lived out of a cave, simultaneously hijacked four airplanes.
The fact that this one turned out to be true means that saying “conspiracy theory!” really doesn’t eliminate the credibility for me.
Brian Weatherson 01.06.04 at 9:42 pm
I’ve always loved that old proverb – I’ve probably even endorsed it in places. So I probably should say a little in its defence.
I think the dataset chosen somewhat tilts the playing field. For one thing, many of those coups were both conspiracies and cock-ups, sometimes by the same people. More importantly, a fairer data set would include all the attempted coups, many of which were by anyone’s measure cock-ups.
More importantly, the kind of conspiracies that Daniel is (rightly) drawing attention to are not the ones meant to be given low priors by the proverb. One doesn’t invade a country like Iraq by mistake, so it’s not like there is any cock-up explanation in the offering. The kinds of cases it is meant to apply to are ones where a cock-up is prima facie plausible. E.g. there was no conspiracy to do virtually nothing about anti-terrorist defence in the first 9 months of 2001 so as to allow devastating attacks that somehow led to political gain on the part of those who’d been so negligent, there was just a giant cock-up.
As a rule, I’d say the proverb should be applied to omissions not commissions, which is admittedly a bloody big exception.
mallarme 01.06.04 at 9:52 pm
It’s interesting to see this “there are no neoconservatives” meme slowly getting propagated. Especially when publications like Christian Science Monitor provide such handy guides to who the neocons are and what goals they’re after.
I guess CSM is just another anti-semitic, wacko, conspiracy-theorizing tabloid.
Andrew Case 01.06.04 at 10:31 pm
Why is “tendency” better than “faction?”
The latter seems to me a much better description of the neocons and most other conspiratorial groups.
jason 01.06.04 at 10:43 pm
anyway you slice your knee deep in a hucklebuckle.
Decnavda 01.06.04 at 10:53 pm
I agree that “faction” is better than “tendency”. I have one I think even better: “Network”
The Neoconservative Network is made up of people who share similar beliefs and goals, frequently discuss these ideas with one another, and sometimes coordinate the activities designed to advance these goals. But it has no organizational structure, no formal members, and participation in any specific coordinated activies is strictly on an ad-hoc basis.
cn 01.06.04 at 10:56 pm
Ya’ll we don’t have to decide an either or here. It is possible to be a cocked-up conspiracy. I’m really tired of trying to figure out if the Bush Admin is evil or incompetent.
Dan Simon 01.06.04 at 11:24 pm
“the English language is amply stocked with words to describe paranoia and irrational fear, but doesn’t have one single concise term to describe a rational fear of political persecution.”
People describe the rational fear of political persecution all the time–in totalitarian countries, for example–without being denounced by anyone sensible as nutty or paranoid. It becomes a little trickier, of course, when people living in open democracies use their free speech rights to express completely unfounded fear of political persecution.
“if we were to want to turn our conversation toward discussion of the facts that people have political views, that people with similar political views tend to flock together, that groups of people with political views tend to want to influence the direction of policy, and that the process of influencing policy is usually most efficient if carried out in an organised manner … well then we would already find it powerfully difficult to describe our discussion to a third party without using terms which implied by their ordinary usage that we were in some way weird.
No, people describe, say, political parties, factions, and organizations all the time without imputing any kind of weirdness to themselves. What’s more difficult is describing such parties, factions and organizations as loci of monstrous, life-threatening evil and esurient malice, without imputing any kind of weirdness to themselves.
“If we then took the further step of noting that often people have political views which are unpopular enough with the general public that it is prudent for them not to publicly express those views, then we are certainly in the realm of consipracy theory.”
Indeed we are. Perhaps, then, if one is interested in positing an “evil neocon conspiracy”, it might be wiser to invent such a secretive clique with hidden views and motives, and a clandestine leader–say, one Immanuel Goldstein–rather than point to a bunch of rather widely-read public figures with well-known, oft-debated views, regularly making their case as best they can in the public square, and shout, “conspiracy!”
Matt Weiner 01.07.04 at 1:05 am
Yes, well, every time someone describes the neocons in a calm rational manner they’re accused of fomenting conspiracy theories–see David Brooks’s drivel for an example. So why not postulate a conspiracy while you’re at it? Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.
boo 01.07.04 at 1:52 am
“as Robert Anton Wilson noted, the English language is amply stocked with words to describe paranoia and irrational fear, but doesn’t have one single concise term to describe a rational fear of political persecution.”
Actually we do. We just call it fear, just like our concise phrase for “rational belief that the earth is round” is “the earth is round.” Are you familiar with Donald Davidson’s discussion of the principle of charity? He has argued persuasively that in order communication to occur at all, we must assume that most of what other people believe and say to be true. Hence there is no need to specify that a person’s belief is rational; in ordinary discussion we just assume our interlocutor to be rational. Otherwise, what point would there be in talking to them?
If, however, we do not accept a belief as rational then, we have to explicitly label it as such or single it out to be stigmatized in general. Theories of political organzation are not stigmatized in general. Uncompelling theories might get labelled “paranoid” or “conspiracies”. Their recourse is to become more compelling. See Dan Simon’s post above as for why many regard neocon conspiracies as uncompelling.
“Brooks appears to want to move the agenda further; he appears to believe that to explain organisational structures by drawing boxes and arrows is in some way a weird thing to do.”
No he only thinks it’s a weird way to describe neoconservativism. It would be a weird way to describe feminism too, though a not such a weird way of describing an actual organization. So the question then boils down to this: is neoconservativism an organized faction or an ideology, or a disorganized one for which an organizational chart would be odd or innappropriate? Your post would have been more interesting if it had given any reason to think one way over the other.
I agree with Dan Simon on all of his points. Good post Mr. Simon.
globecanvas 01.07.04 at 3:17 am
I for one think Dan Simon’s contrary post is exactly “right there with the general project of creating an environment in which it is impossible to express certain points of view without being undercut by the very words which you use to express them.”
Point of view: A strong ideology is steering the policy decisions of the US. Said ideology is not shared by the majority, or even a plurality, of citizens.
Words used to describe point of view: Paranoid, conspiracy theory, unfounded fear of persecution, anti-semitic (my current favorite in its utter orthogonality to the issue), pessimistic, fatalistic, freedom-hater (viz today’s NY Post), etc.
In other words, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t really a minority view running the world. And just because there’s a minority view running the world doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. And just because there’s not a conspiracy doesn’t make it right!
JRoth 01.07.04 at 5:06 am
There was a very good thread in Josh Marshall’s work about how any discussion of the neocons goes through this loop. During the early lead-up to Iraq, he wrote a piece (Wash. Monthly, I think) describing the neocons, who they were and what kinds of things they proposed. Based on published work, as well as plenty of legwork, Josh being essentially a journalist. He was accused of all of these things by the Brookses of the world (including, as a Jew, of anti-semitism).
About 6 months later, when we had just taken Bagdhad and there was a lot of threatening talk about Syria, he gently pointed out that everything he had suggested, and been called a conspiracy theorist for printing, had been officially stated in public by people he had identified as neocons. Yet the cycle continues, bizarrely.
And yet Mr. Simon insists that no one clamly stating reasonable facts could ever be called a conspiracy theorist, and that somehow that term can only be applied accurately – that it is self-regulating, and that when partisans such as Brooks use it, they are always correct.
I don’t know why people are so hyper-defensive about the neocons. In the fairly mainstream left blogs I read, discussions of the neocons are rarely in tin foil hat territory. They focus on things such as the fact that the same group of administration officials and advisors who said in ’91 that the US should defend itself pre-emptively and in ’98 that the US must invade Iraq also said in ’00 that the US must invade Syria. That’s a reasonable sort of thing to keep track of, right? But Brooks says it’s anti-semitic and looney. So which is it, dan simon? Are we allowed to talk about it, because it’s a normal description of a group of powerful people, or are we imputing weirdness to ourselves, as Brooks says we are?
JRoth 01.07.04 at 5:17 am
Another counterpoint to simon’s argument that, apparently, only benevolent groups ever achieve political power. Do you recall the focus group, run by a news org (ABC?), that was presented with the post-9-11 tax package proposed by the Republicans? The bill that, literally, proposed to refund every dime of federal tax paid by a number of profitable US corporations over the last 10 years – $800 million to GM, for instance. So the reporter says, here’s the proposal, what do you think? And the people say, Don’t lie to us, that can’t be an accurate description of the proposal. They literally treated an accurate statement about “widely-read public figures with well-known, oft-debated views” as a nutty conspiracy theory, because these widely-read figures (DeLay, Hastert, etc.) had proposed something utterly unconscionable.
It is possible, Mr. Simon, for public figures to propose outrages, and even to achieve them (fortunately, at the time, Democrats held the Senate, and eliminated this particular item from the bill – but there was no public outcry). There is no need for Goldstein or secrecy, as you claim. But what is necessary is for people to insist that the only source of bad, minoritist policy is “secretive clique[s] with hidden views and motives.”
Zizka 01.07.04 at 2:24 pm
Well, conspiracies which fail are screwups pretty much by definition. They failed, after all. Whereas if a conspiracy has been successful, then to the degree that that conspiracy was important, the world order is compromised. A significant degree of wrongness is pretty much in the definition of “conspiracy” — the shadowy groups which end up slipping arts funding into various budgets here in Portland are pretty sneaky, but it doesn’t seem to rise to the level of conspiracy (except to a few fundamentalists and reight-wing libertarians).
A pretty well documented conspiracy was the one which started the Spanish-American war. Hearst, Hay, and several others agitated for the war as part of a concerted plan, and the it seems clear that, however the Maine was destroyed, it wasn’t by the Spanish. Hearst bragged about his dishonesty.
Once you call something a conspiracy, you have to either oppose it (often at great personal cost) or live with it (seeing evil triumphant — as I said, if it’s not evil, it’s not a conspiracy). So the Murphy’s law explanation is a convenient fudge. It offers an out for people.
The US Declaration of Independence is a conspiracy theory. George III wasn’t as bad as that.
I tend more toward the Straussian view that government is by definition a conspiracy, and that it’s not formally possible for government to be transparent. The losers have to be deceived. From this point of view government becomes a struggle between different conspiratorial groups (the competing-elites theory of government),
Kennedy? I can’t believe the official explanation. Loose ends all over the place. Either th conspirators, whoever they were, got what they wanted, or they didn’t.
jamie 01.07.04 at 4:12 pm
In reference to Henry’s post below, if the term neoconservatives is considered unacceptable, how about “violent entrepreneurs?”
dsquared 01.07.04 at 4:26 pm
Dan Simon wrote:
What’s more difficult is describing such parties, factions and organizations as loci of monstrous, life-threatening evil and esurient malice, without imputing any kind of weirdness to themselves.
To which I can only restate my point about Brooks above; if anyone thinks that this is an honest or decent way to describe what I wrote, I really don’t know what to say to them.
Merkin 01.07.04 at 4:32 pm
Cock-up my ass!
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to finally use that line.
Geoff Dutton 01.07.04 at 5:22 pm
So then, what would you call the the so-called “Bilderberg group” which meets in posh, well-fortified, unrecorded meetups annually to discuss the state of the world, and which the press rarely bothers to investigate or even report? Cock-up, Conspiracy, Community, Cabal, or Collective?
dsquared 01.07.04 at 6:09 pm
Well, I don’t know what to call it, precisely because it’s secret. This is a perennial problem of parapolitical research, btw.
John Isbell 01.07.04 at 7:20 pm
“in ordinary discussion we just assume our interlocutor to be rational. Otherwise, what point would there be in talking to them?”
Someone should say that this disses the insane. People have discourse with them, rightly.
I’ve very rarely seen either conspiracy theory or anti-semitism in attacking the neocons, but I believe I finally saw just that in all its glory: a pamphlet called “Children of Satan” shown me by a slightly uninformed kosher-keeping friend who really hates Bush, with Cheney, Rumsfeld and three Jews on the cover, Perle, Wolfowitz and I think Adelman. It is Larouche 2004 campaign literature. I think Larouche offers a handy bat to swing to indicate that yes, loony anti-semite paranoiacs exist: they’re Lyndon Larouche. We are not they.
Jeremy Osner 01.07.04 at 8:00 pm
It is a great shame to me that I voted for Lenora Fulani in the ’88 primaries (I think it was ’88, or maybe ’92).
Kathryn Cramer 01.07.04 at 8:24 pm
I’ve been thinking about another alternative to the conspiracy vs. cockup dichotomy: PR campaigns. PR campaigns are not conspiracies, since they are mostly public. But the advocay of the interested party is designed to fade into the background, leaving only the message which then appears to be objective truth.
Dan Simon 01.07.04 at 8:56 pm
DSquared–methinks the blogger doth protest too much. Did I say that I was describing what you wrote?
In fact, I found your posting a tad ambiguous, and wasn’t sure quite how much your discussion of evil conspiracies was meant to be taken as referring to neocons. I’m glad you’ve clarified matters by explicitly denying that you consider the neocons to be evil conspirators. Feel free, then, to consider my comments to be directed at others (including several commenters on this posting, for instance) who do, quite openly, identify neocons as evil conspirators.
Of course, I understood Brooks to be doing exactly the same thing, and I’m frankly baffled as to why any of the calm, rational critics of neoconservative views, who would never dream of foaming at the mouth about evil neocon conspiracies, would understand Brooks’ comments to be directed at them, rather than at their more paranoid fellow neocon opponents.
By the way, JRoth, I read Marshall’s article some time ago. For the most part, it was a thoughtful, serious, interesting critique of neocon ideas. I doubt it would have raised the slightest concern, had it not been given the title, “Practice To Deceive”, and an irrelevant few paragraphs given over to implausible conspiracy-theorizing.
More here….
Bob 01.07.04 at 9:29 pm
In my experience, parties to conspiracies are wont to attribute failings in their conspiracy to achieved the intended results to cock-ups, which is is probably true but which doesn’t mean there wasn’t a conspiracy in the first place. As someone famously said recently in another context: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Rob Levin 01.08.04 at 3:52 pm
In my opinion, the reason that there is very little terminology in English for rational fear of conspiracy, in particular, lies in the nature of language. Informally put, language is used to convey information from one person to another.
As a general rule, only successful conspiracies are dangerous. A successful conspiracy provides no proof of its existence. If you know of a conspiracy, it is entirely rational for you to want people to know about it; but it is not at all rational to expect people to believe in its existence without proof. Once you set the bar that low, anyone can tie up our attention with unprovable assertions. The way to tell people about a successful conspiracy is to provide tangible, verifiable proof, thus turning it into an unsuccessful one. If one cannot do that, the best one can do is to describe verifiable problems and try to work on correcting them, ignoring the issue of whether they have been caused by some sort of unprovable conspiracy.
Matt Weiner 01.08.04 at 6:03 pm
Did I say that I was describing what you wrote?
What was the purpose of the italicized quotations from his post, then? As for calm and rational, Wesley Clark discusses the neoconservative agenda calmly and rationally–they say, openly, that they’d like to attack Syria next–and for his pains is the only person David Brooks bothers to attack by name. Shadowy conspiracies, indeed.
Jazz 01.08.04 at 7:37 pm
My family has been in the business of aircraft part manufacture for years, and I remember vividly when, years ago, my father came back from an industry meeting. He told me that he’d been out to dinner at a club for the people that have always owned almost all the wealth that can be owned in that area of the country. And that they discussed, while they were there, ways to make certain that the money stayed with them.
“It isn’t a conspiracy,” he said. “It’s a concerted effort.” Nothing really secret, just a loosely-joined network of people with common interests, the insight to understand what their best interests are, and the power to work toward them.
That’s how I’ve characterized a lot of the activity recently, in the privacy of my own head: a network, acting in a concerted effort. The difference, I think, is that a conspiracy is centrally planned, and that has to be kept secret, while a network just functions. Like, say, the web, or USENET.
Dan Simon 01.08.04 at 10:18 pm
Matt: I italicized DSquared’s quotations to distinguish them from my own words. Brooks made fun of one class of people, DSquared defended another, and I was pointing out the distinction. Which class DSquared belonged to, I left to him to clarify–and happily, he did.
As for Wesley Clark–well, it took me a while (and a bit of help from Matthew Yglesias), but I finally figured out that this whole riot was really about him–or rather, Brooks’ treatment of him in his column.
Now, as best I can understand it, Clark has said a few loopy-sounding things about neocons, but probably doesn’t deserve to be lumped among the tinfoil-hat folks Brooks is mostly talking about. On the other hand, Brooks’ offhand partisan jab at Clark was sotto voce enough that I didn’t even notice it at first–nor did Oxblog’s Josh Chafetz, it seems.
So my verdict is that Brooks’ little jab at Clark was perhaps a bit below the belt, but hardly justifies the barrage of vitriol that has been directed at him for what, taken as a whole, is essentially a justified condemnation of a real, and disturbing phenomenon.
Anthony 01.08.04 at 11:04 pm
Read Them by Jon Ronson, it is fantastic. He follows David Icke, Ku Klux Klansman (who complain their capes get slashed at the dry-cleaners), Ian Paisley, and an Islamist around before going off in search of the Bilderberg Group. Very amusing.
AndyB 01.09.04 at 3:34 am
Daniel plugs Robert Anton Wilson. My admiration has just gone off the scale…
Guerilla Ontology anyone?
dsquared 01.09.04 at 9:53 am
. I’m glad you’ve clarified matters by explicitly denying that you consider the neocons to be evil conspirators
You’re absolutely addicted to putting words in my mouth, it seems. No. I do think that the neocons are a conspiracy (in the dictionary definition of being a group of influential people, acting in concert, and not being forthright about their aims), and I do think that their aims are harmful to the human race (I don’t really understand what the word “evil” means outside of comic books). I realise that it could be argued both ways (as it’s been pointed out above, there is something oxymoronic about claiming to be able to prove that something’s a conspiracy), but that’s my view. I’m being clear here to separate what I regard as a fact from my own conjectures, by the way, a practice I’d recommend to anyone else in the conspiracy business.
What I was objecting to was the description “loci of monstrous, life-threatening evil and esurient malice”, which was clearly attempting to make me out to be a loony for holding that view, when I’m not one. It’s the use of language to imply something without actually allowing yourself to be pinned down to any specific claim; I don’t like it.
dsquared 01.09.04 at 9:57 am
Jst to clarify the above: I think that the neocons are actually imperialists, who want to see the Middle East either explicitly under American control or Finlandized. I’m not aware of any of them ever having said this in a public speech or presentation, which is why I think they’re not being forthright about their aims, adding the necessary element of secrecy to the charge.
Dan Simon 01.09.04 at 8:34 pm
So much for giving people the benefit of the doubt….
Okay–you believe that the neocons are “a conspiracy”, that they’re “harmful to the human race”, and that they’re “actually imperialists, who want to see the Middle East either explicitly under American control or Finlandized.” You admit that these are just “conjectures” on your part, make no pretense of having any evidence to support them, and freely concede that a perfectly benign, perfectly rational, perfectly satisfactory alternative explanation exists–i.e., that the neocons are, believe and do precisely what they say they are, believe, and do (and what to any neutral observer they would appear to be, believe and do).
And you’re annoyed, dammit, that someone might “make [you] out to be a loony for holding that view.”
Well, I suggest that you learn to deal with your annoyance, as you’re no doubt going to experience it quite often in the future. Then again, you probably shouldn’t listen to me–I’m most likely in cahoots with David Brooks and the rest of “them”.
Randolph Fritz 01.10.04 at 3:34 am
“st to clarify the above: I think that the neocons are actually imperialists, who want to see the Middle East either explicitly under American control or Finlandized. I’m not aware of any of them ever having said this in a public speech or presentation, which is why I think they’re not being forthright about their aims, adding the necessary element of secrecy to the charge.”
IIRC, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz have said things like that (though not in those words) and there have been the occasional scary paper leaking out of their offices. They’re fairly forthright, if one allows for the obscurity of their day-to-day language.
Referring to the neocons–it’s clear that there are people who have timetables and are seeing them implemented (2010 for the budget debacle) and people who have plans (Wesley Clark talks about planned invasions in Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and the Sudan. http://www.msnbc.com/news/969671.asp )
So there’s a bit more than a tendency, I think.
dsquared 01.12.04 at 7:13 am
Then again, you probably shouldn’t listen to me—I’m most likely in cahoots with David Brooks and the rest of “them”.
One of the pieces of evidence that makes me most uncomfortable about the neocon tendency is the observable fact that nobody connected with it appears to be capable of even basic standards of honesty and/or decency in discussing the issue.
Jeremy Leader 01.21.04 at 6:26 pm
I loved how a character in one of Robert Anton Wilson’s novels explained the Kennedy assassination. According to him, there were several conspiratorial groups, all of whom had marksmen in Dallas that day, all attempting to kill Kennedy. They were the cause of the the various mysterious reports by eyewitnesses who saw gunmen or heard shots from all over the place, providing fodder for generations of conspiracy theorists.
In the end, though, some lone wacko named Oswald, conspiring with no one, stole a march on all of the conspiracies, thanks to his almost supernatural luck and/or skill with a mail-order Italian hunting rifle. Thus, the anti-conspiracy-theorists are right about “who killed Kennedy?”, and yet also completely out of touch with the reality of what happened in Dallas that day.
Perhaps the funniest fictional account of a real event I’ve ever read.
kyles 02.03.04 at 8:12 pm
The very nature of a large conspiracy is that, at the lower echelons, the pieces of the conspiracy are not aware of it, but their motivations and passions play into it. It is orchestrated from somewhere above where a very few are “in the know”, but are adjusting, manipulating and using variances in the different sub-plots to bring “it”, overall, to the desired conclusion.
Since the root players at the very top are the only ones who can see all the strings being pulled, those in the sub-plots only become aware of the orchestrated outcome if the cover is blown off at the top.
Any of this going on is, of course, completely undiscernable by the public. It is all, by its very nature, intrinsic and invisible.
Dana Lovering 02.09.04 at 12:15 am
Here is my standard answer to anyone I “foolishly” try to “save” by informing them of the prison we no only live in, not only that we helped to create, but that ALL of us unfortunately are dependent upon, and that in the end, we will each fight to protect it, or must be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to destroy it utterly. There are no two ways about it. you do not get “a little bit pregnant”, you cannot “sort of” fall from a cliff. Black and white, left or right, truth or lies, whether any of us like it or not, NOTHING is as difficult as we make it. So, I lean in close and say, “…listen(insert name),” then I kind of glance about, looking over my shoulder, like I’m concerned about being overheard, “…a little later on, we’re going to get some lunch.” then I go on to explain to them that we have just CONSPIRED to eat lunch. If more than one person is making decisions about this or that, IT IS A CONSPIRACY, that is the nature of it. D.L.
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