Let me start by saying that this is a poorly thought out and presented blog post. Also that on one of the subjects in the title I am woefully under informed. This will mainly be a ramble to get some thoughts out there and to clarify my thinking and hopefully spark some discussion that will inform us all. With those caveats, I shall now plunge into the abyss of Conspiracy Theory versus Conventional Wisdom!
Having grown up embracing the Leftiest of the Left and rejecting the Conventional at every opportunity (who knew I would end up a blogger and need to know this stuff???) I am sorely lacking in the understanding of how “most people” think….Conventional Wisdom. However! In the atmosphere and reality that I have lived and learned in, the Leftie fringe of San Francisco Values, I have been exposed to nearly every Conspiracy Theory to come down the pike. I would be lying to myself if I did not admit that this sort of information has shaped my thinking about the world and politics….but through some stroke of luck or circumstance I was never fully ‘assimilated’ into the world of CT. I like to think that I can look at any piece of information or pattern of events independently and objectively and make a reasoned, rational judgement.
This is of course, Bullshit.
No human can truly do that, we are after all is said and done, ruled and influenced by many factors, not just reason and rationality. Though Conventional Wisdom SEEMS to want to deny it….human thought patterns and belief systems are influenced hugely by emotion. Hugely. We believe what we want to believe and reject that which we don’t want to believe. Many factors play into this, mostly education and family environment/upbringing. Studies have shown that we absorb most of the information that will stay in our brains and influence our thought processes…. before we are eight or nine years old! This includes stuff like language and basic math and all of the other parts of our thinking that we take for granted. And taking things for granted seems to me to be the essence of Conventional Wisdom. Things we have learned that are ingrained (like chilhood religion, fr’instance) in our very process of cogitation. Part of our hardwiring, so to speak.
Of course these things can change, and often do as we learn and grow, but still they form the very basis of our thought processes. undercovercalico’s current essay about rejecting nationalism is a good example. But, they only change if we are willing to accept new information to replace the old.
And that is where the question of CT vs. CW comes in! (finally!)
The key question seems to be….what amount of new evidence and information can make us change our minds from thinking of our familiar world in one way and change to thinking of it in a new and different way?
On Daily Kos I have seen many people say that the actions of Bushco made them look at the world differently and change their thought process to include new levels of what humans are capable of. (A change that the Dem Congress hasn’t been able to make apparently!) But how far does this change go and how unwillingly do we give up our old thoughts? How are the new thoughts and info processed into a new coherent world view? What is the tipping point?
This becomes relevant for me when I think and write about what is going on in our world today. We talk about the Military Industrial Complex…is that a Conspiracy? We are down to five major oil companies, all posting huge amounts of billions in profits per quarter…is that one? What, exactly, constitutes a Conspiracy Theory these days?
The Libby pardon is a good example, I would suppose that CW included the ‘fact’ that if one committed a crime…especially one that seems (obviously?) to shield other crimes, investigations would be pursued and the person found guilty would be punished. Nope. Bush got together with his buds and pardoned him, thus effectively ending the investigation into the Plame case. Then there is the strange and wild case of Sibel Edmunds, someone who has put forth what can only be objectively called a wild conspiracy theory….but apparently one that is so credible or dangerous or inconvenient that she has become the only American citizen to have been placed under a permanent gag order! Aren’t these examples what would be called CT? But there they are.
So….how far does “it” go? Where is the line between CT and “reality?” What level of proof and evidence and information is necessary to move something from CT into the gray area in between, and then finally into CW? The line seems to get blurrier everyday.
Who decides?
And of course when you get deep into it, if you believe there is a conspiracy, then you are forced to believe there is a cover up….and that disinformation is part of that cover up….so then you are forced to parse which “facts” are disinformation and which are real, a dangerous thought loop….potentially leading to the trap of paranoia where you can’t believe anything, and are left with just the thought and feeling of some massive malevolent force controlling the world. And one of the most pervasive themes of CT thinking is that some secret cabal “runs the world.” The CT that certainly gave CT’s their bad name and thus the very potent dismissive force that is contained in just labeling something a Conspiracy Theory, was the whole Protocols of Zion BullShit. Though the idea of a secret organization of Jews or Jesuits or Masons or Zoroastorians or Hamsters seems to go far back into the annals of history….that theme seems to be hardwired into the dark recesses of the human psyche.
IF, lol, it is not true! (Do you know where your Hamster is???) A die hard CT’r would ask the question that is sort of at the heart of that level of CT…is that thought of a secret group controlling the world part of the (paranoid?) hardwiring of our brains, or is it true and we have been convinced by that very conspiracy, through disinformation and manipulation, that it is merely paranoia?
Ok after mentioning the above theory it is time to talk about MY beliefs and CT’s, so that I am not accused of any of the more heinous varieties! First I am a pattern person, I see patterns everywhere, not malicious patterns, necessarily…just patterns. I try very hard (after having been wrong….once) to NOT tie them together into some web of conspiracy. I do not think of myself as a conspiracy theorist.
To deflect the worst of any possible accusations, I hereby swear that I do not believe that the Jews control the world…..I think it’s The Protestants!!!!
(That’s a joke, folks….except the first part!)
I also don’t think, based mainly on the level of competence that would have to be involved, that Bush and Cheney were directly involved in 9/11…no MIHOP here.
I mostly believe in what I call ‘unconscious conspiracies.’ A group of people/entities whose members interests and goals are so similar and intertwined that their actions LOOK like a conspiracy. To go to the next level and actually brand something a truly conscious conspiracy would, for me, take a LOT of evidence. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about it! I think this way of looking at things is a rational starting point when talking about what LOOKS like the biggest conspiracy going on right now….the relationships between the MIC, the Oil Corporations and Bushco. I can’t dismiss it, but I don’t have the hard facts to prove it either.
It is AWFULLY tough to think that those entities, knowing what we do about the characters of those involved and their obvious commonality of interests (hi Dick!) don’t talk on the phone occasionally, lol. And if they do…
Well then we get to the crux of the problem of believing in conspiracy theories!
What to do about it!
If…and again, it is pretty hard to not think this is true with what we have learned, especially about Bushcos amazing interest in/lust to invade Iraq….IF they did talk on the phone and decided that the USA would invade Iraq to secure it’s 30 Trillion dollars worth of oil, thus putting hundreds of billions of taxpayers dollars into the MIC’s (including Halliburton’s) pocket…that would be quite an important CT, no? But…
Then what?
It IS after all, quite possible that it is just a commonality of interest and a set of circumstances all coming together to give the appearance of a conspiracy.
So, which is the more believable scenario?
IF this is a conspiracy, they will obviously go to great lengths to cover it up, spread disinformation, and subvert or quash investigations….hmmmmm….
OK WAIT!!!
I am a responsible blog owner with a certain duty to not spread my own form of disinformation and speculation!!! And I certainly don’t want to appear to be some paranoid lunatic!!! I have my credibility and more importantly the credibility of DD to think about!!! I take back and retract and jump back from that obviously untrue CT!!!
I hereby state for the record that it is just pure coincidence that George Bush’s family has been in the MIC and Oil business for generations and that Dick Cheney has worked in both and that it is just happenstance that they decided to invade Iraq after getting attacked by Saudis based in Afghanistan! ….Really! No conspiracy here, move along!
I am, as I have said, weak on knowing what the Conventional Wisdom is….so I assume that that is the CW on all of this mess we find ourselves in….just a series of coincidences. If it ever became CW that they did conspire….well it would pretty much shake a LOT of very basic belief systems and worldviews to their core, wouldn’t it? Especially considering everything that has happened as a result of the decision to invade Iraq. So I doubt that will ever cross the line into CW……
But isn’t CT fun and interesting to think about, lol? And where IS that line these days, between CT and CW?
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I am not always fully aware of the process of how I think. At times I am aware of my line of logic and at others random ideas will assert themselves at weird and often inappropriate moments.
I am saying this because I am not always certain when conventional wisdom is shaping me. I think most of us are flooded and shaped by CW before we are even old enough to appreciate the long term impact.
At the same time, I often resist conspiracy based ideals not because I trust authority figures or the system or any of that crap what bothers me about CT is the fatalism that often gets attached to it. On the other hand, I don’t trust authority figures because I suspect they do have vaguely conspiratorial goals.
So, I am fucked. I don’t feel comfortable in either camp, I don’t even know how my brain works most of the time or if it even does and I can be way too easily diverted from all of this by a nice little piece of chocolate or a nice robust red wine.
You forced me to think and my neurons are tired.
huh! but i will.
conventional wisdom is itself the conspiracy, isn’t it? to define norms and thereby keep us from playing out ideas… extending scenarios from the sublime to the ridiculous.
it is the conventional wisdom we need to unseat. the doors need to be left open.
mwaaaaaaaaaaaa for your ramblings!
Inseparable I think.
Thinking is often described in terms of having two “components” or “aspects”: Right Brain Thinking (non verbal, creative, seat of emotion, artistic), and Left Brain Thinking (verbal, analytical, seat of logic and problem solving).
For myself, I often find it useful to figure that Left Brain emotion sets our goals (wants, desires, etc.), and Right Brain logic and analysis is for figuring out how to achieve those goals, i.e. get (left brain) what we want right brain).
How that relates to the rest of your essay I haven’t a clue at the moment. Maybe I need a third brain, or maybe I just need to concentrate and read it again a little slower… except that CT seems to me to be an emotional generated thing or a “feeling”, and that we can use logic and analysis to justify or provide evidence for a CT generated by right brain thinking.
Manly’s Maxim says that “Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence”. In other words, starting from a false premise logic can be use to systematically and infallibly lead to a bullshit conclusion, even if the logic used to arrive at it is perfect….
Meanwhile, right now I’m downloading “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” so that later I can turn off my brain, turn on my Windows Media Player, and escape all this thinking for a little while, because I’m completely losing my mind here, my brain hurts now, and I have no clue where I’m trying to go with this comment.
Why do you have to ask such hard questions anyway, Buhdy? 😉
Aren’t you suppose to wait for readers to give you ponies, instead of showing up already sitting on one???
Heh!
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man.
Wont you please, please tell me what we’ve learned
I know it sounds absurd
But please tell me who I am.
Now watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal. (the CT part of the song…)
am an avid attendee of flea markets and car boot sales. That is why i have glommed on to the blogosphere as part of my daily brain stimulation, the other is red red wine. That allows me to intrude with permission into the cobwebs, clarity and vision that is the detritus of people’s brains, especially one that has lived an exceptionally examined life.
However, one thing i never really want to know in this brave new world is anyone’s real name or real appearance. Totally ruins the illusion, so I shall ignore the two photos and pretend they may be you or on the other hand may not.
Call me coward, call me disillusioned, call me an illusionists, just don’t call me to deal with reality. I prefer my own.
my mind set free to wander knows knocking your ruby slippers together doesn’t take you home and that home isn’t Kansas unless that’s where you live. The left seeks definition in so called logic, rationality?. Damn those Greeks they broke everything down into little segments and called it reality.
CW has been stood on it’s head and spun until it resembles nothing more then the propagandist points of a CT. Me thinks it’s the same on both sides. The web of what’s happening here snares us all. Were all staggering around in the dark seeking a light or a map. Meanwhile the real culprits cash out on the chaos and call it inevitable or reality. Who did it and how or when is irrelevant, the aftermath is paramount. It’s chains of Karma, or ripples in the pond, light and dark.
Conspiracy is what? The definition is as murky as conventional wisdoms. Both are vast, reality is vast and layered. Me I rule out nothing and nothing rules me out.
has the benefit of taking the conventional out of conventional wisdom and adding wisdom instead. The deal is a two-fer, as you are not only removed from everything you grew up with and are familiar with you have to learn how “these other people” you are now living amongst deal with life.
My return to the US however turned out to be a larger culture shock. I found people rude, crude, arrogant, stupid, greedy…insert your own disparaging adjectives here.
In any case my awareness, perceptions on things did in fact change. I stopped sending my son to church after my wife had a run in with one of the CCD co-ordinators. Six months later the police raided a certain Sunday school teacher’s home and found all sorts of child porn. Very shortly after the entire Catholic church plunged into a worldwide scandal. I might regret my son never found God yet I know (and he was the right age) he never had to endure anything else either.
I also came to finish a BS in business and even back then American decline was already in the works. If there was a CT I wanted to know about it. Much of it started from researching the truely Satanic nature of globalism and the wonders of “free” trade.”agreements”.
Conventional wisdom after my expat assignment was missing. I had become a man without a country, rejecting the place I was brought up in and seeing most of today’s popular culture as destructive, Satanic, retarded (again insert your own negative adjectives).
Wisdom? This country? You have got to be kidding me right?
… conventional wisdom can be helpful.
For example, you’re living in a village of, say, 50 people. You’re primitive, this is a long time ago.
Someone discovers fire and somehow it becomes part of the prehistoric village. Ok, so one day someone thinks it’s just so beautiful, the fire, that they stick their hand in the blaze to touch it. Ouch!
That person’s experience … and maybe a few more, because folks don’t usually catch on very quickly … soon becomes conventional wisdom of the village — don’t touch the fire! Not a good idea!
That kind of conventional wisdom takes the experience of the few and applies it to the many. In the case of fire, it’s not a bad idea, because there’s no one who won’t get burned sticking their hand into a fire.
‘Course most conventional wisdom doesn’t change with the times (oven mits!) and so we’re stuck with ideas and theories, especially in the social and spiritual sphere, that keep us back, keep us down.
From what I’ve seen, it usually takes a personal experience, not words or TeeVee or movies, to make a person realy change their view. We can think we are being unconventional after reading an unconventional book or watching a movie about an unconventional person.
But then look at how often we don’t really act unconventionally at all – we’re allowing that removed description of someone else’s experience to trick us into thinking we’ve transcended our own conventionality. Most of the time, I think, that’s not the case.
But when we have a real experience that shows us in no uncertain terms that what we thought was true is in fact not true at all, it tends to change our behavior almost immediately. We don’t always change in a positive way, either, unfortunately.
So sure, emotions play a part in our continuing to obey conventional wisdom (i.e., acting like “normal citizens” when we’re out in societey). But I think actual experience is what really makes us break out of conventional thinking in a much larger way.
And by the way, I would say what happened in 2000 was an actual experience that changed many of us. We experienced that directly.
is a conspiracy theory.
First of all, I wonder if anyone else has ever read the book Women’s Ways of Knowing or Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I’ve read the former and saw the author of the later on c-span. I think both books ask us to give more credence to what we call “intuition”.
For a long time I’ve thought we need more words for the verb “to know,” kind of like Alaskan Natives have so many different words for snow. Language does limit our options sometimes.
Lately I get a bit confused about all this because I don’t trust the “truthiness” that Colbert has been so good at satarizing. And yet, my feminism tells me that women and people of color have been marginalized partly because we tend to be more focused on an intuitive way of knowing something. I do not believe that linear logic gets us to truth all the time. Our new sciences in biology and physics are learning that these days.
And finally, on CT, I think we all terribly underestimate the power of “groupthink.” My best guess would be that accounts for what looks like CT most of the time. Nothing to be dismissed, but not always consciously on the table.
CT …CW. I feel a mental wedgie coming on. Conventional Wisdom would have it that it is very difficult to get multiple minds to synch into a conspiracy. Most times it occurs that separate minds are traveling in parallel pathways towards the same hoped-for outcome …no interaction, interdependency and/or collusion involved. Conversely, it is not uncommon for people, who appear to be in a collaborative effort to reach some goal, are in fact on parallel paths but traveling to different goals, different outcomes. Of course, the animal kingdom’s tendency to herd is characteristic in the human animal world as well. I doubt that a herd of cattle would be convicted of barnyard conspiracy as they band together foraging for food, mutually swatting flies, etc. So why believe that peoples’ collaborative actions are any more than a collection of thoughtless people just dumbly following the leader of the herd.
is another’s CW.
I don’t want to start a thread about the ten impossible things that I’ve believed before lunch today, but I spent the morning at Google Video watching Sumerian/Alien videos, Area 51 videos, and 911 CT videos.
CT is very entertaining , and you and I will never know the truth that is out there, but damn, I loves me some Rense.
And the best explanation for Bush’s rule is reptilian overlords.
And you gotta check this out. Truly amazing.
(A disclaimer:As I told my wife yesterday, “I believe for every drop of rain that falls,
a raindrop falls. I believe in what I can hold in my hand. Yes, Virginia, I believe in my penis.)
… do not accept that the establishment is a system, and systems tend to do what they tend to do, until they evolve, and start tending to do something else …
… at which point that is a new system that tends to do what it tends to do.
The myth in the Grand Conspiracy Theory is that we are all deciding to do all this, so that when things happen that we can’t see people deciding out in the open, it must be decided behind closed doors.
But complex, self-reproducing systems always have emergent characteristics … that is not only true of the personality of a person as distinct form the individual characteristics of their individual cells, but also true of the personality of a society as distinct from the individual characteristics of its individual people.
It is just so rare to encounter anyone thinking about anything, even in a confused way. Thank you at the very least for bringing us inside your thinking.
As to your subject, I don’t know. I’m not even sure I know what you’re talking about. I think you want to believe in conspiracy theories, because they’re fun, in the same way that I want to believe that the magic on Bewitched was not just camera tricks.
I think you are asking what is a conspiracy theory. No, you are asking what is a conspiracy. And I think you are asking what is so wrong about postulating a theory of conspiracy to explain some situation in the world. A conspiracy is a secret agreement by some group to take some action together, like throwing a surprise party (I hate surprise parties). What is so wrong about attributing some event to the actions of a secret conspiracy? Perhaps just that in the context of a rule of law type society, we are not supposed to be blaming people for things unless it can be proved, with evidence. Conspiracy theories, by definition, involve accusations and speculation about supposedly secret, and unknown activities. If the activities become known, and if they are illegal, then there could be a criminal case. If there is nothing illegal, but just embarrassing or disappointing, such as when kids sneak a peak at the hidden Christmas presents, there is maybe just moral question. So a conspiracy theory is just a waste of time, because until it leaves the realm of the hidden and unknown, there is nothing that can be done. It might just make people fearful without reason.
…but a long quote from “antiwar.com” on this confusion!
Please excuse my redundancies:
Hornberger’s Blog
Saturday, December 31, 2007
Hornberger’s Blog Index
Bhutto, JFK, and Conspiracies
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Oh, I don’t know, it’s all so confusing. But I believe in conspiracy! Can’t help it! Took a long time, but…!