" ... This phrase is among the tireless workhorses of establishment discourse. Without it, disinformation would be much harder than it is. "Conspiracy theory" is a trigger phrase, saturated with intellectual contempt and deeply anti-intellectual resentment. It makes little sense on its own, and while it's a priceless tool of propaganda, it is worse than useless as an explanatory category.
"Theory" is a term from Plato, derived from the Ancient Greek theorein, "to see." From it we get the word "theater." Theory is a conceptual overview of the way something works. In science, the word refers to a guiding set of concepts derived from testable hypotheses about a domain of facts in nature or procedures in an art.
When the evidence is gathered together, some observer sees it in such a way that it configures an hypothesis.
When that hypothesis is verified by induction and experiment, it can be gathered together with similar hypotheses from analogous cases.
If we say, 9-11 was orchestrated by the bin Laden organization, the Pakistani intelligence agency, and elements of the neoconservative group that seized power in 2000, that's an hypothesis, derived logically from a set of documented facts that constitute evidence. It isn't a theory. It can become part of a theory if it's joined with other hypotheses into a coherent descriptive pattern that can help to predict future events in general terms.
For instance, the amply demonstrated hypothesis that the 35th President of the United States was murdered by a consortium of interests including the CIA, Cuban exiles, organized crime, and the military. 11-22 and 9-11 are examples of premeditated murder by more than one person - in law, they are cases of conspiracy to commit murder (and fraud, and perjury, and treason). Taken together, they imply a theory whose greatest expression is the work of Peter Dale Scott, who coined the term deep politics: "the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government." Deep politics is a robust theory, a powerful explanatory account of demonstrable phenomena; it applies to myriad cases and offers a unified understanding of their causes and meanings. Like Goethe's conceptual account of color, and like Newton's rival account which refuted it, Scott's deep-political theory applies uniformly to the domain it describes.
Conspiracy, on the other hand, is a hypothesis about a particular case at hand. The only rigorous meaning that the phrase "conspiracy theory" can have would be that political crimes involving more than one actor are usually exceptional episodes unrelated to one another - rather than the ongoing, systemic and unacknowledged relationships between authorities and the criminals they are paid to hinder and to punish.
The appeal of the phrase "conspiracy theory" lies in the slang meaning of "theory": unproven and even unprovable claims about the way things get done in government and business. But there are two problems here.
First, a theory is still rightly called a theory long after it has been proven, even to the limits of human understanding. Einstein's theory of Relativity and Darwin's theory of evolution are incomplete, like every product of human thought. But they are as certain as any grounds we can give for them, as certain as the palpable facts on which they rest. The public imagines that this word "theory" implies confusion and controversy. It doesn't.
The second problem is this: in order for a theory to be worthy of that name, it must be falsifiable. This is a term invented by Karl Popper; it means that your description of events has to be demonstrably true based on valid experiments - or genuine evidence - that might otherwise have proven it demonstrably false. Like the hypotheses that form its bones and flesh, a theory must turn out to be either true or false, or it's not a theory. For instance, consider the beautiful claim that the world is governed by a God who rules by reward and punishment. Nothing observable counts as evidence for or against the claim. If I say "show me a sign," an immediate lightning bolt on my head is not evidence of a God any more than the absence of a sign is evidence against it. Nothing can count as a test, so theism is not a theory; it can be something too wonderful to describe, but - true, false, or paradoxical - it isn't theoretical. Relativity, however, is a theory of the natural world, verified by experiments like Michaelson-Morley which demonstrated its conformity to observable facts - and had the experiments turned out differently, the theory would have been falsified. The public thinks falsifiability means that the theory can already be disproved and is therefore wrong. It actually means that the theory is either right or wrong, but not meaningless.
- In a criminal conspiracy, Arthur Anderson and Enron defrauded investors and employees of billions of dollars. But they also compromised the S.E.C., the Congress, the executive branch, and the duck-hunting judicial branch in order to make part of this activity technically legal. That's deep politics.
- In a criminal conspiracy, a core group of Secret Service personnel (Roberts, Greer, Boring, etc.) conspired with elements of the CIA (Phillips, Angleton, Dulles, etc.) to murder the 35th President of the United States. But they also collaborated with organized crime figures (Trafficante, Giancana, Marcello, etc.), paramilitary groups, and international heroin traffickers. That's deep politics.
Because so much of America's real business gets done at a politically deep level, any discussion of it tends to be part of a psychological tug-of-war. The person who brings the undesirable story to the public is "peddling" a conspiracy theory; if the story should happen to be any more complex than "lone gunman does really bad thing for no apparent reason," then it's a "grab-bag" or a "hodgepodge" of such "theories." In response, the critic is forced to point out that all this hysteria is the byproduct of dangerous levels of denial in the public and in the media.
But I'd like to make a different gesture for a moment, the kind that was often made in response to President Nixon's criminal behavior (and is being made today by authors like Mark Crispin Miller and Robert Jay Lifton). Dumbfounded at the sight of his murderous and self-defeating hypocrisy, many critics approached Nixon as a walking museum of mental ailments. While G.W.B. has none of Richard Nixon's intellectual resources, his conduct is so irrational that it cries out for analysis in Freudian terms. As the instrument of elites he can't understand, Bush needs to convince himself that the decisions he pronounces are in fact his own. He is the kind of figurehead who really believes that he is steering the ship. Unlike his homicidally clever father, this man has no real-life achievement on which to base an identity of his own. Having never won a fair fight in his life (to borrow a phrase from John Judge), terribly uncomfortable with the failed self he had on his hands "when I was a drinkin' man," Bush became "born again." That's always a radical move to make, and at its best it quiets down a person's inner noise so he or she can hear the wisdom of some sacred text or other. But Bush is not listening, and I suspect his transformation was actually a fool's golden ticket to un-earned self-esteem: in other words, deficit spending. ... "
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