In light of the event in Las Vegas, I am seeing quite a few theories that don’t seem to be supported by given facts. “Multiple shooters.” “ISIS involvement.” Stuff like that. Do we immediately classify these types of theories as “conspiracy theories” or do they require debunking like the “explosives in the World Trade Center” conspiracy theory?
I think by definition when the person espousing the theory is arguing that there is a conspiracy to prevent their idea from being recognized as valid.
and anyone who doesn’t hold their idea is part of the conspiracy to hide this.
and to a lesser extent, the person holding the idea ignores or dismisses evidence to the contrary of their theory.
This is based on 30 seconds of thinking, so I’m happy to modify based on better arguments.
I am not sure there is a hard and fast rule, but to me, a theory is just an idea espoused about a situation.
i.e. My theory is that he was in way over his head in gambling debts and decided to take out a lot of people knowing he was about to die. (I do not believe this, just giving an example).
But a conspiracy theory is given to show that any thinking person would easily see the inconsistencies and arrive at that conclusion, but the police/government/etc are clearly lying to us to cover it up and the dumb masses just accept the official answer.
i.e. A 64 yr old man carried 400 lbs of guns and ammo to the 32nd floor of a hotel and broke out hurricane proof windows and expertly targeted and killed dozens and injured hundreds, all without any training or motive. And if you believe that ridiculous story… (I have seen similar posted about this).
The second example of course acting like there is no plausible explanation for how someone with enough money and time to plan could not easily load multiple bags on those hotel carts and get them in his room and get set up and then with thousands of people standing in very close proximity, shoot a lot of people and end up with around 10% lethality.
I think we can pretty well call the second a conspiracy theory because they are either suggesting or saying that some government official is covering it all up and while the sheeple are fooled, they themselves have seen past the deception and know the “truth”.
In my experience most conspiracy theories are designed to support a pre existing narrative of the person espousing them. That is why gun rights advocates like Alex Jones are more likely to think mass shootings are fake, leftists more likely to think Bush was involved in 9/11, tea party conservatives more likely to think Obama was born in Kenya. Each theory elevates or demonizes selectively to support the president existing agenda of the person espousing the theory.
So if the theory is not only baseless but supports the ideological agenda of the believer (to either elevate or demonize certain people or ideas) it is probably a conspiracy theory.
Having said that, I don’t know why conspiracy theories are always just written off. Mkultra, operation Northwoods, operation gladio, iran contra, etc were meant to remain secret. Who knows what other projects have happened we didn’t find out about.
When it relies more on lack of evidence than it does on evidence.
Editorial: I like these guys. They remind me of the more astute of the Doper population, right down to the snarky style. Are any of y’all contributors there?
Anyway, good article. It points out that some conspiracy theories are plausible, even to the extent of being provable in a court of law. (E.g., the Watergate conspiracy.) But also gives some hallmarks of the kind of CT we’re talking about, and a sample of definitions. (Including the proposal in academia to calling the non-batshit-woo conspiracy theories “Theories of conspiracy”, and reserving “Conspiracy theory” for the batshit-woo ones.)
I particularly like their Conspiracy Theory checklist, addressing some important questions about logistics, benefits, exposure, and plausibility.
My take? The acid test, like most woo, is falsifiability. CTs are unfalsifiable because every potential counter-evidence is neutralized by another element of the conspiracy (or the general thought-terminating cliché “that’s what they want you to think”.)
“An Australian man was in the next room and heard multiple voices In the shooter’s room. The mainstream media won’t tell you this because they want to control gun legislation.”
That is a conspiracy theory.
When any and all evidence counter to the theory is dismissed out of hand, or is absorbed into the theory as part of the conspiracy. Unfalsifiability is a helluva drug.
Particularly when the alleged “lack of evidence” arises solely because the person “just asking questions” refuses to accept the answers they’ve been given, especially when those answers come from those with the best access to the events in question, and the best training relevant to the events.
Those are all bad examples because you know about them. And you can’t give a good example because any real conspiracy that is successful is unknown. The common (and rational) counter to any suspicions about massive conspiracies is that they always fail. Any major conspiracy will be revealed eventually.
It’s an impossible paradox. You can never prove a successful conspiracy because once it’s revealed it is no longer a successful conspiracy.
I remember a thread not long ago here in GQ where someone wanted an example of a major conspiracy theory that was later proven to be true. If I recall correctly there were one or two suggestions that didn’t really match the request.
Anyway, bottom line is that there’s a really good reason why they’re written off.
The belief that the US government was engaged in massive spying was a conspiracy theory until recently. Didn’t the US government first respond to Snowden by ridiculing his claims?
Either way, just because we’ve discovered some conspiracies doesn’t mean they are impossible because we’d never find out about a successful one. Who knows. I’m sure some involved small groups of highly trained people under criminal penalty for talking. The conspiracies I listed involve highly unethical or immoral behavior, so people were incentivized to leak for ethical reasons.
When does a theory become a “conspiracy theory”? When the government and mainstream media call it that in order to discredit it.
Bletchley Park had thousands people employed in their WWII codebreaking operation, yet it did not appear in the press until decades afterward:
The difference is, most of these projects were not the subjects of these popular sorts of conspiracy theories prior to them being revealed.
It’s been incorporated into all sorts of CTs after the fact, but can you find anyone who was publicly discussing this prior to the original revelations?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair#Discovery_and_scandal
These are all part of the now-current CT narrative, but there’s little or no evidence that any of the Alex Jones type CT mongers had any role in bringing them to light. In fact, most of these revelations support the notion that you couldn’t keep such things secret forever, as they were mostly revealed by leaks from those in the know.
I think that was one of the “this might qualify” suggestions in the previous thread. I think one of the objections was that while it was a great example of a massive successful conspiracy, it wasn’t the subject of conspiracy theories. Which again supports the idea that conspiracy theories just never pan out.
To Wesley Clark, the idea that the US has spies wasn’t a conspiracy; we have a well-known public spy agency. And of course they do secret things that they hide and lie about, that’s what spies do. I’m not sure how relevant that is.
The closest I can come up with was the NSA phone tapping thing. The idea that the US government is spying on average citizens without discretion is the long-term subject of conspiracy theories and it ended up being (infamously) true. But I think that one was so astonishing simply because it was true while almost all other theories turn out to be fantasy.
They get a lot of hurricanes in Vegas, do they?
This secret was kept because everyone was on the same team. The participants were cleared and all correctly believed this was a matter of critical national security. You could never find enough people, to name another popular CT, to kill thousands of people in the World Trade Center who would believe such an operation is in the best interests of the nation such that not a single one would ever talk.
I would say a theory becomes a conspiriacy theory when, in light of all available evidence, it badly fails Occams razor relative to other explanations .
So ISIS involvement wouldn’t be a conspiracy theory when the shots were first fired and no one knew anything about the shooter. It would just be one of many theories that could fit the lack of evidence. But once it became clear that the suspect was a retired white male, with no middle eastern or Islamic connections, it became much more likely that an alternative explanation was correct.
Aw. Someone got to mine right at the end.
Because, yeah, both of the examples mentioned in the OP wouldn’t seem like conspiracy theories at first. But, at this point, they’re pretty much debunked. The overwhelming evidence was one shooter, and he had nothing to do with ISIS.
Maybe you can argue it’s not yet a “conspiracy theory” until they claim someone is covering those things up. And that would technically be correct. But, in common parlance, I would call them conspiracy theories at this point.
Well, if they are insisting that there was second shooter, or some ISIS involvement, then there would, of necessity, be a “conspiracy” involved, so it would be a “Conspiracy Theory”. The cover-up (presumably by the police on scene) would make it a “Government Conspiracy Theory”, which is a subset of the larger class of CTs.
Along these same lines, I continue to be surprised at the wide range of “Area 51” CT. Unusual new technologies and aircraft being kept secret at a test facility is a conspiracy? (I’m excluding the “we have an alien spacecraft and are studying it” CTs. Which, BTW, I’d still prefer to have kept secret.) In fact, I’d be plenty upset if this stuff WEREN’T being kept secret. If my taxes are going to fund secret defense research, I damn well want it kept secret. The same goes for our spies.