Superking wrote: I am a fan of Conspiracy Theories, although I'm never sure what to believe. Perhaps you could say I am Agnostic regarding such things, or at the very least open-minded.

Mr. Binary wrote:So what's the difference between:

a) a theory that the government, or someone else with an element of power/control, is doing something wrong and not telling, and

b) a conspiracy theory?

* What characterizes conspiracy theorizing?

Any conspiracy theory may or may not be true. Auto, oil, and tire companies did conspire to undermine the trolley system in California in the 1930s. Israeli agents did secretly attack Western targets in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt to prevent a British withdrawal. The CIA did fake a shipload of North Vietnamese arms to justify U.S. aggression. Conspiracies do happen. But a conspiracy theorist is not someone who simply accepts the truth of some specific conspiracies. Rather, a conspiracy theorist is someone with a certain general methodological approach and set of priorities.

Conspiracy theorists begin their quest for understanding events by looking for groups acting secretly either in a rogue fashion, or to fool the public. Conspiracy theorists focus on conspirators’ methods, motives, and effects. Personalities, personal timetables, secret meetings, and conspirators’ joint actions claim priority attention. Institutional relations largely drop from view. Thus, rather than seeking a basic understanding of U.S. foreign policy, conspiracy theorists ask, “Did Clinton launch missiles at Sudan in 1998 in order to divert attention from his Monica troubles?” Rather than examining the shared policies of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson vis-à-vis Southeast Asia, as an examination of institutions would emphasize, they ask, “Did a group within the CIA kill Kennedy to prevent his withdrawing from Vietnam?”

* What characterizes institutional theorizing?

An institutional theory emphasizes roles, incentives, and other institutional dynamics that compel important events and have similar effects over and over. Institutional theorists notice individual actions, but don’t elevate them to prime causes. The point is to learn something about society or history, as compared to learning about particular culpable people. The assumption is that if the particular people hadn’t been there to do the events, someone else would have.

There are, of course, complicating borderline cases. A person trying to discover a possible CIA role in 9-11 could be trying to verify a larger (incorrect) institutional theory—that the U.S. government is run by the CIA. Or a person might be trying to demonstrate that some set of U.S. institutions propels those involved toward conspiring. Someone studying Enron may be doing so not as a conspiracy theorist concerned with condemning the proximate activities of the board of Enron, but rather to make a case (correctly) that U.S. market relations provide a context that make conspiracies against the public by corporate CEOs highly probable. The difference is between trying to understand society by understanding its institutional dynamics versus trying to understand some singular event by understanding the activities of the people involved.

Mr. Binary wrote:It seems like using semantics to discredit people who we don't want to include in our discourse about society. ie. "I have read Marx, Althusser, Foucault, and Hardt and Negri, and whoever the fuck else, and I only want to debate about society with other people who have read this shit too."

It's elitism, which is all this kind of talk ever comes to.

Mark Fenster (author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture) wrote: Above all, conspiracy theory is a theory of power. As such, it deserves attention for its understanding of the uneven distribution of resources and coercive power. Conspiracy theory perceives the power of the ruling individual, group, or coalition to be thoroughly instrumental, controlling virtually all aspects of social life, politics, and economics. The singularity of its instrumentalism is its belief that although power has real effects and creates traces that can be discovered by those aware of its existence, the "truth" of power-the identities and motivations of actors who actually wield power-remains hidden to the "naked" eye of those who dismiss or are ignorant of the conspiracy. Secrecy, in short, constitutes conspiracy's most egregious wrong.11 Yet, unlike "vulgar" or "plain" Marxist instrumentalism, conspiracy theory does not claim that the state is used by "the ruling class for enforcing and guaranteeing the stability of the class structure itself."12 Although economic control plays a role in many conspiracy theories (e.g., international bankers based in New York who control the Federal Reserve and who are often, but not exclusively, identified as Jewish), analysis of hierarchical structures based on economic class, race, and other antagonisms does not. Like the state and everything else under the dominance of the conspiracy, economic control is simply another instrument of the conspiracy. Conspiracy theories seek to explain the power of ethnic, social, or even supernatural elites over "the people" rather than focus on the systematic exploitation of the oppressed through control of the relations of production and ideological structures of domination.


Conspiracy theory thus seems a rather disabling theory of power. If the conspiracy is in complete control, and if those who are controlled are utterly unaware of the conspiracy's existence, then effective resistance is unlikely, or it at least requires the most desperate of measures. Indeed, conspiracy theorists spend most of their time collecting and interpreting information rather than in the traditional politics of movement building and forging alliances with other groups. At particular conjunctures, however, such as the tenuous association between the John Birch Society and parts of the Republican Party in the 1960s and the mobilization of the Christian Coalition on behalf of Republicans in the 1990s, conspiracy theories can have important effects on major political parties.13 More typical types of conspiracy theorists' political activism, which often appear in conjunction with each other, are vanguardism, in which small groups attempt to bring about political change by leading the masses in a particular direction, and radical separatism. Both of these tendencies are at work in the rise of the diverse "militia movement," in which groups and individuals simultaneously attempt to separate themselves from what they see as a dangerous federal government encroaching on their rights and land, and to evangelize the unconverted about the reality of the current political situation. Yet, conspiracy theory has also had a remarkably productive role in American history in the development of a secular Enlightenment rationality that perceived power in the hands of humans rather than of a divine entity, among colonists in the years leading up to and during the American Revolution, and in the construction of an American national identity.14 The notion that conspiracy theory is disabling therefore needs both further investigation and historical contextualization.


Let me declare my own position clearly: There are elements of secret treachery in the contemporary political and economic order. Foreign covert actions that employ economic exploitation of native populations, political assassinations, and subversion of democratic and revolutionary movements, as well as domestic policies of covert surveillance and "countersubversion" such as the FBI's COINTELPRO program, have played important roles in twentieth-century history. Secretive alliances between private individuals and groups with shared class interests do enjoy power over seats of public and private power that is greater than their numbers would allow them in a participatory democratic state. Yet, totalizing conspiracy theories suffer from a lack of substantive proof, dizzying leaps of logic, and oversimplification of the political and economic structures of power. Structural, institutionally based inequities in the distribution of power, capital, and resources do not constitute conspiracy; rather, they help to define capitalism. Thus, the existence of governmental secrecy neither proves the existence of all-encompassing conspiracies nor provides a rationale for them. Although conspiracy theories are certainly resistant to dominant political discourses, they rarely enable effective political engagement and often are related directly or indirectly to virulent forms of scapegoating, racism, and fascism.

Cranius wrote:As regards politics: people should pay more attention to what politicians actually say and do--I mean, it's not as if their agendas are that hard to decipher.

clocker bob wrote:You don't need to to pay attention to politicians to learn about conspiracies. Politicians are dogs on leashes. They exist to promote agendas favorable to conspiracies, but they're usually just PR people- they don't draw up the plans. The people who do draw up the plans have no wish to operate in public view, so they tend to more important issues, like killing people.

Cranius wrote:I don't agree with this. Most of the pertinent information needed to comprehend world events are in the public domain, if you're prepared to do the leg work.

Cranius wrote:But if you want to leap to hasty conclusions and get pedantic about insignificant detail, that's up to you.

Superking wrote: I mentioned that it seemed a bit strange that considering all the talk about this aspect of 9/11, and considering that it happened at a place where there are surely as many security cameras as in any place in this country, that there is nothing more than this measly five frames of video.

He countered that (and this is another layer on this onion) if people focus on this missing video, and the plane going into the Pentagon, then all the gov't has to do to crush the conspiracy is finally release the videos of the plane hitting the Pentagon. In other words, he believes more or less that there was a conspiracy, but believes that a commercial plane did hit the Pentagon (he has a friend who witnessed the event), and that 'they' have been holding back this evidence so that -- when it is finally presented -- the other (perhaps more troubling) aspects of the conspiracy theory will crumble.

That's all.

Very interesting stuff, folks!

nihil wrote:You are missing the point. Who are you helping? Yourself? Good for you. Put that in perspective, and you might just understand.

nihil wrote:Wonder Woman called...she wants her belt back.

Think about those who are suffering in the world. Then think about why.

nihil wrote:You are wasting your time and energy on something that means nothing. Good for you Super Boy. You are so brave.

nihil wrote:Think about the things that really matter. If you need my help, I'll gladly volunteer.

nihil wrote: But please stop wasting time. The time that has been courageously spent by so many people around the world...excluding you.

nihil wrote:People who have an unselfish compassion and a realistic understanding of the world. People who are dedicated to change.

oh yeah...

fuck you, you selfish prick.

i mean that in the nicest way.

clocker bob wrote: Dude, I've got mileage on my feet and on my mouth that you can't understand from the work I've done trying to change this system peacefully. What do you think- once you become a conspiracy theorist you just sit all day in front of that same slot machine hoping for cherries?

Once again you don't know all that I do, but you're sure that you don't like how I do it.