Sorry for the delay on this. Let me know if this works for
you.
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.
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302