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Skepticism and Conspiracy

It is entirely appropriate that, in its role as a process by which to sift truth from falsehood, skepticism has over time accumulated a body of "negative knowledge" concerning specific claims that are either unproven or demonstrably false. It is likewise reasonable that claims fundamentally related to other assertions which have themselves never managed to pan out be dismissed without investigation. One need only look into so many "inventions" making use of healing crystals before dismissing each additional device, even if the latest crystals are especially pretty or draw upon novel terminology in the course of pursuing their mystical functions. And if one fellow asks me to spend a few days watching him conjure a homunculi, I may dismiss the fellow with a clear conscience, no homunculi ever having come about despite centuries of efforts to that end and the very concept going against a great preponderance of established science and even plain horse sense.

Let us pretend for a moment, though, that we live in some alternative universe in which the raising of homunculi not only refrains from violating any scientific principles, but is also known to have been successfully achieved on some occasions. In that case, I would be very much remiss in stating flatly that the claimant is definitely incapable of producing a homunculi, such a thing being possible and sometimes done in this universe, so more entertaining than our own homunculi-free one in which we are forced to live. I need not accept outright that he himself will be successful on this particular occasion, of course, but to have an educated opinion on the matter, I would have to investigate the fellow's record in homunculi birthing, while to be absolutely certain one way or the other I would have to see the results for myself. In a universe in which homunculi are known to be created, only a fool would run around denouncing all claims of specific instances as absurd on their face.

Back in our own universe, there exists a situation comparable to the hypothetical one described above, one which is unfortunately attached to some portion of self-described skeptics, although not at all unique to it: the dismissing as prima facie absurd all assertions that may themselves be characterized as constituting a "conspiracy theory." Bearing as it does strong connotations that do damage to its status as a useful concept, I will first take the seemingly unnecessary step of noting that a conspiracy theory is merely an assertion to the effect that two or more parties have collaborated with some degree of secrecy to pursue a particular end. To the extent that we take the language for what it means, then, and to the extent that we keep in mind the obvious fact that two or more parties will indeed sometimes collaborate outside of the general view in order to accomplish a shared goal, a conspiracy theory describes any number of things that we know to occur and which the laws of nature obviously do not prevent from occurring. Despite the demonstrable truth of this description, a great deal of inattentive and sloppy thinking has polluted the concept and in doing so done great damage to the ability of the public and even many particularly intelligent individuals to make accurate judgments about the workings of human society.

Sufficiently pressed, an intelligent person would likely acknowledge that conspiracies are not supernatural phantoms but are in fact part and parcel of everyday life. On the playground, several girls quietly collude to spread rumors about another for the purpose of defaming her amongst her classmates, even as they effect friendship on the surface. Elsewhere, the executives of two firms providing similar products meet in secret to fix their prices and thus avoid competition that would cut into the profits of each. And in some or another failed state, a dissenter who recently called for protests is arrested and charged with the possession of narcotics that were placed on his person by police at the direction of a tyrant who intends to remain one. The individual who comes to suspect that any of these things occurred is a conspiracy theorist by definition.

All of these occurrences, I think, are so common and well-documented as to be uncontroversial even among those who most ardently ridicule conspiracy theories in general. But they might object, quite accurately, that the ranks of conspiracy theorists also include those whose suspicions are incorrect; they might note here, as they do elsewhere, that some of those who detect conspiracies do so in manner that is unwarranted by the facts, linking together aspects without care and tending to see some single force behind a great number of things that may be more easily explained as unrelated occurrences perpetrated without any clandestine direction. This is entirely true as well, and certainly constitutes a good reason why one must be careful when attempting to determine whether something has occurred with or without the covert prompting of two or more parties.

Nonetheless, these considerations do not provide a rationale for the haste with which many otherwise intelligent people laugh off any assertion of a conspiracy that extends beyond what I suppose is some uncertain barrier of normalcy, or which happen to relate in some way to other assertions that are themselves clearly untrue. The fellow who will readily concede that little girls and executives and secret police will conspire in service to their shared goals will often resist even a fundamentally comparable conspiracy if some form of it is believed by any number of clearly deranged people, citing the apparent wrongness of some in thinking a certain thing as evidence enough of the wrongness of all who think something similar.

For instance, suppose I told you that over a decade ago, intelligence operatives of a certain world power perpetrated acts of terrorism against its own citizens in order to provide a pretext for the desired invasion of a Central Asian country while also facilitating further control of the state by the faction then in charge. In fact, you need not suppose, as I have made this assertion a number of times in print and on television. For a few weeks in 1999, Russian cities were devastated by a series of apartment bombings which were promptly blamed on terrorists hailing from Chechnya, which was promptly invaded. The final bombing attempt, which was conducted in the city of Ryazan and which made use of the same sort of explosives as the others, was foiled when citizens called police after seeing suspicious activity around a basement apartment. The bomb was defused and examined by local police equipped for the purpose, and thereafter three people were arrested - all of whom turned out to be agents of the FSB, the post-Soviet KGB, and all of whom were released the next day on orders from Moscow, which congratulated the city on having succeeded in passing a drill. That the basement apartment in which the bomb was planted had been rented months before the bombings had begun, and that the bomb squad detected the same military-grade hexagan comprising the explosives as had been used in the other bombings despite assurances from the national government that it was merely sugar, would be suspicious on its own. That at least two respected foreign journalists had warned of a government plot to carry out false flag bombings well before the incident, and that former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko was among several who confirmed the same plot later on (before himself being poisoned with polonium in London in a crime pursuant to which the British authorities still seek the arrest of another FSB member, incidentally) would certainly seem suspect as well, as would the rest of the evidence that has been put forth by a number of parties since.

Of course, it is possible that there are fine explanations for these and other irregularities, including the later murders of several people who were assigned by the Duma to investigate the matter. Let us say for the moment that this is the case and that the bombings were in fact carried out by Chechnyans without the participation of that FSB of which Putin was the director before becoming a national hero during the grisly but wildly war that came next. Even under such circumstances, we are faced with a dynamic that ought to be troubling to all who shall admit at least that men will sometimes do great evil and may even go so far as to lie about it: Despite the fact that this case has been put forward by such people as David Satter of The Hudson Institute and John Hopkins, and that my own account is cited in an upcoming book by former CIA Directorate of Operations and author Barry Eisler, many who've encountered our common position have rejected it as prima facie absurd even before learning of the most basic evidence by which we have come to it. I myself have conducted two written debates on the subject with colleagues who seem to find it laughable that a Russian government might kill its own people in order to achieve some political end. Both of these are intelligent men with decades of work in investigative journalism to recommend them, yet neither saw fit to learn even the basic facts of the case before coming to a firm conclusion. And both made this decision based in large part on the fact that there exist other people who ascribe to similar conspiracies that are likely to be untrue.

Why this is a problem should be evident in a world in which a great many parties have lately conducted a great number of reprehensible actions that they themselves now admit to - and which in many cases were laughed off as crazed myth despite evidence that came about even prior to the revelations that they were indeed fact. He who lives in such a world as ours - one in which MK-ULTRA, COINTELPRO, Mockingbird, Operation Ajax, Operation Gladio, and a myriad of other duplicitous and sometimes murderous undertakings have been carried out and then cheerfully acknowledged, but whose reaction to claims of further measures along these lines is not to examine the evidence but rather to ridicule those who have is not a skeptic, but rather a pseudo-skeptic. Skepticism, after all, is not the easy process of laughing off anything that may be phrased in such a way as to sound bizarre; rather it is dedicated examination of demonstrable facts coupled with dedicated adherence to intellectual honesty. And to the extent that men take the satisfying route of confirmation by avoidance, they facilitate a world in which a great deal of evil may be perpetrated under a small degree of scrutiny. Liberty and decency are the perpetual victims of such laziness.

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Regards,

Barrett Brown
512-560-2302