In todays day and age there’s a wide variety of conspiracy theories. I have always took issue with the possibility of conspiracies involving more than a handful of people - especially the ones with morally questionable goals.
I will base the following on the premise: “A conspiracy is maintained by one group (the conspirators) by lieing to the remainder of society.”
Lets take two situations
A) The goals are not morally wrong to the group and there is nobody externally cares about what is going on.
This case might be the only case where a large scale conspiracy is feasible. No press hounds, nothing. You have nobody in the conspiracy gaining a conscience and squeel.
b) The goals are not morally wrong, but people on the outside are paying attention
Any lie must be covered by a cover story, a fictional account of the truth that must account for what’s perceived. A conspiracy of increasing size, even without morally ambigous goals, will be plagued by inconsistancies in the stories of the conspirators. In this case, under enough scrutiny at a certain threshold size inconsistancies arise and eventually the thing is blown open.
c) The goals are morrally wrong
In the case of morally wrong ends, as the size of the conspiracy increases the probability increases that an ambitious individual within the conspiracy will gain fame by standing up to it in a public forum. If there are people “caring” like in case b, this increases that probability.
Hence, IMO the only way a large scale conspiracy is feasible if the members agree that the ends of the conspiracy are morally feasable and nobody outside the conspiracy pays any attention. Otherwise its very unfeasible and impractical. Ive had enough trouble keeping secrets between a handful of people in playing a practical joke. Granted that the US military, or any equally disciplined organization, could probably be relied on more to keep state secrets, however, as the conspiracy approaches a certain size in any organization with politically ambitious members (which can certainly include the military) the conspiracy is blown apart.
There’s a quote from the movie JFK that sums it up well, it goes something like this:
“how do you expect a conspiracy to happen between the Mob, the FBI, the CIA, Army Intelligence and who knows what else, when you know for a fact that we can’t keep a secret between 12 people in this room?”
And of course, there’s the Simpson’s parody of the prosecutor from JFK:
**Milhouse: The government, along with reverse vampires and UFOs, are working to make parents go to bed earlier, in a sinister conspiracy to eliminate the meal of dinner.
Slightly off topic:
Speaking of conspiracy theorists, NASA is about to try to debunk the so-called “moon hoax”.
They’re going to have a look with an earth based scope and see if they can find the debris left behind by the Apollo landers.
I am somewhat skeptical of this, simply because I do not believe their scope has the neccessary angular resolution.
Hopefully, however, they will finally provide incontravertible proof that the “moon hoax” nutballs are wrong.
-Oli
It won’t. Even if and when they find the clear pictures of luner landers on the surface, the “moon hoax"ers will just say " So, what? We know they can land ummaned landers on the moon. That’s all that is”.
Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy are all huge conspiracies, you know. I always remember those whenever I think about the feasability of large conspiracies.
Would you say those all fall under “A”? I guess they do. Still, they are counterexamples to the stronger claim that no large conspiracies can exist at all.
I remember in Sundiver, one of David Brin’s books, Earth has to hide the fact from the alien community that they killed off all the whales. The conspiracy was successful to the point that eventually only a hundred people or so knew the truth - then again, the price of failure was the extinction of mankind. The method was not discussed - I’m assuming government-sanctioned destruction of all literature, media, and physical evidence at minimum.
The other key point is that the composition of any large organization, be it a government agency or a corporation, reflects the composition of society in general. So, if X% of all people are morons, roughly X% of the employees of Agency Y are also morons. As a result, no large organization can hope to plan, execute, and maintain the level of secrecy necessary to pull off some grand conspiracy.
The Federal government that I knew and loved for so many years (hell, it was paying me - how could I not love it?) couldn’t successfully conspire to organize a luncheon.
If Nixon (arguably the most powerful man in the world at the time) could not cover up a break in that was known by maybe two dozen people…
If Clinton (again one of if not the most powerful men in the world) could not cover up a sex scandal known by a handful of people…
Then how are we supposed to believe wide ranging conspiracies involving hundreds (or thousands of people) such as the faked-moon-landing with not one scrap of credible evidence or witness… Hell ANY witness for that matter.
I’d like to point out that the American Revolution was a conspiracy. A bunch of men got together to conspire to break off all ties with the British Crown.
SHHHH! There are British people on these boards! If you spill the beans, it’ll ruin it for everyone!
Also, as for taking pictures of moon lander wreckage: We have miles of movie footage of people getting into the rocket, blasting into space, landing on the moon, walking around on it, picking up moon rocks, taking off from the moon, and landing back on Earth. We have corroborating evidence from scientists from every other industrialized nation on Earth, even ones who we were violently opposed too, that they saw us do this and that we could not possibly have faked it. We have all those moon rocks they brought back. We have the testimony of literally thousands of individuals who were intimatly involved with the moon landing who swear that we really went there. I don’t think it’s possible to find any more ironclad proof that we went to the moon than we already have, and yet people still insist it’s a hoax. Somehow, I doubt more pictures of the moon lander, in addition to the thousands we already have, is going to prove anything to anybody.
And I think the same goes for most conspiracy theories. It’s like arguing religion with these people. If someone really thinks that JFK was really killed by the Bavarian Illuminati so that he would be prevented from telling the world the truth about water flouridation, there really isn’t any sort of argument that’s going to change their minds. It’s not a matter of evidence to these people, despite their supposed interest in evidence-gathering; it’s an article of faith.
Conspiracies can easily be accomplished if you have a large body of righteous followers, intense conflicts of interests, lax supervision and powerful monetary incentives. Combine these with powerful discincentives, and this kind of tableaux will self-organize into collusion, conspiracy, and back-scratching corruption, where the hurdles fall ever lower as the corrupt powers decimate whatever supervision remains. One could look at the current administration, corrupt police states, or any number of Templar orders, crip gangs, Tobacco companies, what have you. After a certain tipping point, this kind of conspiracy can spiral upwards with growth unchecked from revelation – if knowing about the conspiracy is of no use then what check is there?
Still, the largest conspiracies result from the righteous followers, and media control: If you have a group of people who believe the end justifies the means, and the channels of information ignore revelations, the conspiracy can grow quite massive indeed – even whistleblowers, like David Brock, may not be enough to bring the mountain down.
The distinguishing points between these verifiable conspiracies and the grand paranoid complexes are the observed motivation, track record, and obvious conflicts of interests.
If this sort of thing interests you, you might check out, for instance, which companies own the electronic voting machines, and who sits on their boards. Quite eye-opening – I’ll be posting something on Thursday if you choose to wait, instead.
I think that one of the only places a conspiracy can be succesful is if everybody actually beleives the lie. Take, for example, 1984. History is constantly being rewritten and people are forced to beleive in the lie. The lie is an ideology, violating it means violating the group.
In countries like Iraq “everyone beleiving the lie” works fine. Except, those outside the nation dont believe it and can disrupt the ideology. In the US, there are certainly groups with enough zeal to fool themselves into such an illusion, however, there are enough groups outside that group to influence their world view. ‘Preacher Joe is NOT a child mollester’ might be a good example. Everyone convinces themselves that that fact is true. Anybody with evidence to the contrary is shunned because everyone is loyal to preacher Joe. However, external powers are available to house the dissidents of teh church that know that preacher joe is doing evil things. One day perhaps the police crack the case, and preacher joe is arrested. Conclusion - even in a large enough group of rightcheous followers there can be dissidents or there can be non-rightcheous folks one interacts with that might catch on. And the larger the conspiracy, the more “wrong” it is, the easier it is to catch on.
Didn’t it take until towards the end of WWII for the world to realize that there were mass extermination camps?
I doubt Hitler and his cronies announced to the entire German Republic (which would leak out to the rest of the world) that they were murdering as many Jews as they can.
What about MK-ULTRA? The CIA had a mind-control program involving experiments on unwilling subjects which it kept secret for 25 years. Once the secret was finally out, they managed to destroy most of the MK-ULTRA papers before Congress got to them, so even now we only know the tip of the iceberg. So at the very least, a large-scale conspiracy can be kept completely hidden for 25 years, and even after that you can keep maybe 90% of it hidden indefinitely, once the conspiracy is no longer active. And, as has already been mentioned, if a conspiracy is truly successful we never hear about it, so it’s hard to establish a benchmark for conspiracies that are never, ever revealed at all. But almost-total successes like MK-ULTRA help define the parameters of what is possible.
Comparisons of conspiracies to the Monica Lewinsky affair always annoy me because, well, Clinton’s affair wasn’t a government conspiracy.