Let me state at the outset that I would never speak of anything I happen to lend credence to as a “conspiracy theory”; for I do not reckon myself a “conspiracy theorist,” but a skeptic. Skepticism is, as most will concur, a prerequisite for doing empirical science, and it is in that spirit that I try to reserve judgment on assertions which are not grounded in demonstrable evidence, corroborated by independent sources and couched in a careful and precise methodology. Alas, I am, as are we all, not always successful in separating out the wheat from the chaff. And this is no doubt the major hurdle, especially when you venture into areas where you lack expertise. It is imperative to practice due diligence, or you may regrettably end up being snookered.2

When it comes to extraordinary or unobvious claims, one would be foolhardy indeed to base one’s judgment solely on trust of the provenance of an endorsement or the apparent believability of the source. Such a move is precisely what critical thinking is supposed to avoid. In the words of the legendary physicist Richard Feynman, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”3 As the conventional history of ideas would have it, before the 17^th century, truth was largely a matter of auctoritas [authority]—in the sense of the canonical prestige accorded through written tradition4—and not of direct and reproducible observation; but the scientific revolution supposedly changed all that (though there is an undeniable filigree of traditionalism running through many strata of contemporary culture, which on the whole one would be hard-pressed to call scientific, if we can draw any inferences from the worldviews held by most of those born into it).5

That being said, the skepticism I speak of here differs from that of the scientist in one crucial way: it is directed not so much at the observation of nature as at institutional and corporate power. Einstein is quoted as saying that God is subtle but not malicious. But if nature does not act by design, people do. It is not enough to question what is orthodox or taken for granted, to doubt the capacity of people to see things accurately and clearly, or to reject what may strike one as a facile explanation of complex events; one must also distrust the pronouncements coming from those who have a vested interest in coloring information one way or the other. Those people are in fact liable, indeed could be said to have fostered the tendency, to label such mistrust of their intentions precisely as “conspiracy theory.”

Which leads me to my first point: what does that expression really signify? What is it meant to refer to? The fact that its use is so pervasive in today’s parlance is already a sure sign that something is out of joint. For very often one does not even know why what is called a “conspiracy theory” actually entails the notion of conspiracy. I will have occasion to return to this point toward the end of this essay.

As Robert Shetterly notes in the article from 2007 mentioned in the preface, the etymological derivation of ‘conspiracy’ [< Latin conspiratio] consists of the prefix con- [together] joined to the stem spir- [blowing, breath], meaning literally, “a blowing or breathing together, in unison.” As such, the term was often employed in various Latin contexts to signify unanimity, concord, or harmony, and not just to denote a plot or intrigue (the latter usage being synonymous with another Latin term, coniuratio [lit., taking a joint oath]). In English, the verb ‘conspire’ can in fact carry such positive or neutral connotations of “coming together,” not unlike instances one can find of its Latin counterpart conspirare.6 But let us leave historical linguistics to one side, adhere to the more commonly negative meaning of the noun, and simply define it as “the decision of two or more individuals to cooperate in secret in some way, usually illegally, in order to further their own ends or interests.” This is fairly close to the legal definition, for conspiracy is in fact a functioning juridical concept (for example, conspiracy to defraud a client), and if simply invoking it constitutes a conspiracy theory, then every criminal prosecutor in the U.S. at some point in his or her career can be accused of being a conspiracy theorist. Of course, when the term is used at large, its import usually transcends that of a case, say, where several people planned to rob a bank. And that is the heart of the matter, for it is only in a much broader context—one whose dimensions subsume the fate and fortunes of societies, nations or economies—that accepting the reality of conspiracies has become such a stumbling block, the poison apple that many are reluctant to bite into. The purely legal implications of conspiracy therefore bring us no closer to addressing that question, namely, why conspiracies whose ramifications are of some magnitude or which have to do with institutional or class power are held to be illusory. (Henceforth it should be assumed that this is the kind of conspiracy under discussion.)

Now one might immediately object that I have exaggerated the degree of antipathy to this idea, for it would seem that even in the U.S. media some claims of conspiracy at this level incite controversy while others are accepted without demur (e.g., Russian hackers). I would respond that this fact in and of itself is telling, and we will have more to say about it later. But one path toward a fuller understanding of the discomfort induced by this subject is to explore how historiography has been challenged by notions of conspiracy, for it is in that forum that a thorny theoretical issue has been explicitly raised: Does conspiracy ever offer a sound hypothesis for the modeling of momentous events? It can in fact be argued that the conceptual and evaluative boundaries delimiting today’s debate were first drawn in reference to this question by the social sciences after World War II.

This is, grosso modo, the thesis set forth in “Conspiracy Denial in the Social Sciences,” the third chapter of Lance deHaven-Smith’s Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas, 2013) [76-105]. In the chapter just preceding this one, the author seeks to elucidate how the designers of the U.S. constitution were guided by a fundamental suspicion of secret factional agendas—in other words, conspiracies—that threaten to subvert the democratic basis of governance. As we move into the 20^th century, however, this optimism about how the politico-legal system may serve to check corruption and collusion was challenged by the way monopolistic capitalism and the State had joined hands. The historian Charles Beard addressed this state of affairs by proposing that economic class interests had from the beginning motivated constitutional language (this view became known as the “conspiracy theory of the 14^th amendment,” for Beard maintained it was specifically crafted in order to extend personhood to corporations, not just that it was twisted to mean this after the fact). Beard’s view of sociopolitical progress continued to be optimistic, positing movement in the direction of ever-increasing democratization, where governance would finally become fully divorced from wealth and property. For him, it was precisely elite conspiracy that represented the antidemocratic counterforce threatening an authoritarian backlash by the privileged. The task of historiography was then to expose these antidemocratic ploys.

But the early decades of the 20^th century also rearranged the gameboard: the rise of totalitarian regimes drew impetus from ideologies which blamed calamities on ethnic or racial groups; most notably, Nazism took as one of its tenets the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy (also identified with Bolshevism). Not only did this open a substantially different window on the character of conspiracy, but argument for its existence now facilitated authoritarianism rather than serving to unmask it. It is during the period immediately following WWII, and in reaction to this phenomenon, that social historians began to speak critically of a “conspiratorial worldview.” deHaven-Smith focuses on two figures who were instrumental in shaping subsequent thinking about this topic, Leo Strauss and Karl Popper.

Both of these scholars work from the same assumption that the historical trajectory followed by a society is from closed to open: the foundational myths and religious principles that are unshaken in its primordial state become loosened by contact with other cultures as well as by the rise of philosophy and science. But, as deHaven-Smith argues, Strauss’s assessment of this trend is diametrically opposite that of Popper’s, even though both are concerned with how regression toward totalitarianism might arise within it.

A forebear of neoconservatism, Strauss accepts as given the hierarchical organization of society wherein elites have the duty to govern the masses, but he views the undermining of the belief system through philosophy and science as an avenue whereby that ruling class may lose respect for the law, ending in something like a gangster state.7 Like his philosophical precursor Plato, he therefore countenances the “noble lie” in order to camouflage the license necessary on occasion to break the established codes of conduct by assassination, fomenting war, framing opponents, and so forth, all in the interest of preserving the overall rule of law and of shoring up national piety and social cohesion. Strauss does not, as deHaven-Smith points out, use the word ‘conspiracy’, but nonetheless warns against exposing this reality, because divulging it would have the same destabilizing effect as science and philosophy; the author characterizes this as Strauss’s ban on “dastardly truths.”

For Strauss, then, elite conspiracy would fall under the class of violations marked by a Machiavellian necessity, condoned and kept concealed for the sake of preventing strong-man dictatorship.8 Such arguments do have an uncanny ring; think of how conspiracy theories are credited today with having eroded public confidence in government to the point of having enabled the seizure of office by obstreperous and deviant personalities. Yet more than Strauss, it is really Popper whose views have been most influential, whether directly or indirectly, on the contemporary conversation.

Taking the same point of departure in the way a society’s traditional beliefs get liberalized, Popper claims that the collateral effect of this process is to dislodge the privileged classes from their position of authority; threatened by this loss of power, these classes manipulate superstition, fear and ethnic prejudice in order to gain authoritarian control and return the society to its traditional praxes. In The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper presents this strategy of conspiratorial blame as a secularization of religious superstition. He offers the machinery of ancient epic, for instance, in which wars are the result of the scheming of the gods, as a prototype, with the gods prefiguring powerful social groups. He goes on to use the term “conspiracy theory” pejoratively to refer to the precept whereby social phenomena are explained through the “discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence … and who have planned or conspired to bring it about” [quoted by deHaven-Smith, 92]. Popper is at pains to demonstrate that, even though conspiracies may occur, they mostly fail, thwarted by the institutional lines of resistance they may encounter, or simply by circumstance; the planners’ intentions are thus more often than not uncovered or left unrealized. Popper would argue then that because this method is not generalizable, it is invalid. Seeking out conspiratorial causes for social phenomena is further said to resemble the larger fallacy called “historicism”—the notion that history is working toward some goal, guided by some principle or intention, whether it be Hegel’s Absolute, Marx’s Class Consciousness, or Christianity’s Fullness of Time. “Conspiracy theory” thus forms the middle ground between tribal magical belief and abstract teleology. To see social history as the playing out of conspiracies is as faulty as historicism, he maintains, inasmuch as every event that occurs must then be taken as the outcome of design, not via impersonal forces, but through planning by groups or classes of individuals. And since human plans fail, so does the conspiratorial explanation in general.

We can certainly appreciate why Popper sees in the hunt for conspiracies a hazardous potential to underpin totalitarianism—we need only consider the supremacist movements that have recently been on the upsurge, and which repurpose some version of the same ethno-ideological pseudo-history as the National Socialists of 1930s Germany. Popper’s theory is nevertheless not unproblematic. Not only does the grouping together of vague ethnic or racial conspiracies with intrigue on the part of power brokers seem skewed and under-analyzed, but, as deHaven-Smith rightly points out, there is also a logical flaw in Popper’s reasoning, for belief that some events have conspiratorial causes does not by necessity lead to the conclusion that all events do, and just because conspiracies often fail does not mean that they never succeed. Furthermore, and ironically enough, Popper’s etiology of conspiratorial belief paradoxically appears to postulate its genesis in nothing less than a class conspiracy to delude the masses.

It is deHaven-Smith’s opinion that the shift in perspective represented by theorists like Popper (along with a refocusing of the social sciences toward behaviorism) left historians and social critics unprepared to resist the wave of anti-conspiratorial sentiment that ensued during the 1960s. Whether this is true or not, we must agree with him that

deHaven-Smith’s chapter omits a development which also has, in my opinion, a non-negligible bearing on the attitude that prevails in the U.S. today within the walls of academia. The decades after the 1960s witnessed the ascendency, particularly in the humanities, but also in the social sciences, of a very different tradition of thought, one molded by post-war European thinkers whose philosophical pedigree not only traces back to Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger, but whose paradigms were also filtered through structural anthropology and linguistics. The impact of “post-structuralism” has been as profound as it has been heterogeneous, but from the perspective of methodology, one of its principal effects can be pinpointed in the privileging of system over subject, of impersonal, material and cultural determinants over individual agency or intentionality.9 It should for this reason come as no surprise that students trained in those disciplines which practice this genre of criticism would be less preoccupied with gauging the reality or appraising the efficacy of hypothetical conspiracies than with unearthing the conditions and factors which lead individuals to think in terms of conspiracy and to behave as if they existed; in other words, they would be less predisposed to see conspiracy as an actual motor of history and more inclined to treat it as a construction—or, to use Foucault’s terminology, as the enunciation of a particular cultural discourse.

Regarding the role of the subject in political history, analogous sociological premises that take freedom of thought or action to be constrained by formative environment or restricted by systemic rigidity can also come to preside over deliberations about conspiracies (particularly assassinations). For instance, the idea that individuals rarely act counter to the norms or outside the value parameters of their class or social milieu has been used to argue away any motivation for the removal of John Kennedy from office by his establishment peers.10 Conversely, some assume the power structure to be ultimately impervious to the fluctuations which any single individuals in positions of influence, however non-conformist, might generate, and thus would downplay the momentousness of their actions (and thereby of their elimination). To return to the JFK assassination: it is curious that mainstream historiography on both Right and Left has been reluctant to take stock of how that event did indeed affect the political and economic landscape as well as the balance of power (see further at n. 40). The strategy on both sides has been to deny that anything essential was altered by it. But resorting to a lack of change in order to certify that there was no conspiracy only makes sense if one accepts that conspiracies could in fact have systemic repercussions; otherwise, one is caught in self-contradiction. If such were not the case, the reputed continuity of the status quo could indicate either conspiracy (in spite of the evidently misguided expectations and superfluous actions of the conspirators) or its absence, so it ends up indicating nothing at all. One last, purely theoretical remark in this regard: Putting “conspiratorial” exegesis into stark opposition with “systemic” analysis skirts or oversimplifies the dilemma posed by the interaction at a given point in time between concrete instances of elements in a system and the structure of the system as an abstract whole, a problem recognized (but left largely unsolved) by the early structuralists as the intrinsic puzzle of how to unify the two orthogonal views they designate as synchronic and diachronic.11

Of those whose politics would, according to the customary classification, fall on the left, I would estimate that most are inclined to advocate for such systemic understandings of socioeconomic reality and are thus also prone to be dismissive of the search for conspiracies past or present. Not all proponents of progressive or radical viewpoints, however, step into this trap. One of my favorite exceptions is the long-time labor activist, prolific critic of militant imperialism and corporate hegemony, Michael Parenti. (You can search for him on YouTube and listen to any one of scores of talks he has given over the past three or four decades.) Responding to the tendency to treat the social order as the product of abstract forces alone, Parenti has openly disagreed with his colleagues on this count:

In one of the talks available on YouTube, Parenti has this to say about how anyone attributing organized planning to the upper classes automatically is accused of believing in a “conspiracy theory”:

Beyond the obviously parodic drift of the second passage, Parenti is merely voicing a commonsense precaution, one reminiscent of Beard. But his words are also consonant with those of another luminary of U.S. social history who speaks largely the language of system. In his seminal work, The Power Elite (Oxford University, 2000 [1956; Chp 12]), C. Wright Mills differentiates between, on the one hand, the reality of a thorough-going interlocking of military, corporate and political elites into a single power structure, and on the other, any conspiratorial explanation of its nascence:

But then he immediately qualifies:

In chapter 1, entitled “The Higher Circles,” Mills characterizes the “no conspiracies” version of history as one which attributes everything to “impersonal drift”, and anticipates the conclusions I have just cited by asserting: “To accept either view––of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift––is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful.” [27]

It is noteworthy today how much energy the mainstream continues to devote to repudiating the idea that history in its sweep and outline is a conspiracy. No serious scholar I know of actually entertains such a notion, so plainly such refutations are aimed at the putative convictions of a wider audience. Yet more often than not, framing the question this way impresses me as an attempt to set up a straw man rather than to establish an archaeology of shared belief. It serves as a more or less willful distraction from the real issue at hand: in Hofstadter’s words, “locating conspiracies in history.” In sum, I think it safe to say that any theoretical framework which categorically excludes from its purview the possibility of collusion, specifically among the power elite, not only risks appearing politically ingenuous; such self-imposed blindness may incur the danger of enabling the very thing it so adamantly refuses to see.

Having broached the question of political ideology, I would like to remain on this topic for just a moment longer, even at the peril of appearing unduly bent on disparaging one end of the spectrum, but pleading as justification the fact that it is only natural to be most anxious about putting one’s own house in order.

One of the interesting contradictions that inhabit the bosom of the contemporary Left in the U.S. is its relation to and outlook on populism. In the 19^th century, agrarian populist movements in the U.S. were in fact progressive in some of their social and economic aims; they shared with the labor movements a common platform on a number of causes. But more recently, due to the emergence of a brand of popular protest often joined at the hip with a racism, xenophobia and virulent nationalism reminiscent of its European predecessors of the 1920s and 30s, and particularly in light of the fact that some of this “populist” foment is really the creature of moneyed special interests (remember the Tea Party?), the Left has come to regard this label with suspicion, and has sought to dissociate its own grassroots activism from it.14

It is my further contention, however, that the anti-populist strain on the Left equally derives from a desire to be associated with enlightened social critique.15 At its worst, such an attitude inadvertently breathes new life into the view of the masses, of whom the Left has supposedly cloaked itself in the mantle of guardian, as an uneducated rabble, spurred on only by instinct and impulse—a characterization found in nearly every conservative elitist historian from antiquity to Gibbons and beyond.16 But the urge to distinguish protest guided by reason and fact from one mobilized by ignorance and fear may likewise drive the Left to eschew the conspiratorial, insofar as the latter comes to epitomize for them the same surrender to the irrational.

That the Left would adopt, though perhaps fortuitously or not fully consciously, a position on conspiracy redolent of Popper is unsurprisingly coherent in this light. This solidarity is reinforced by Popper’s perhaps most well-known philosophical contribution, his definition of the scientific method as one grounded in falsifiability (i.e., there must exist a way to demonstrate a given hypothesis is wrong for it to be workable),17 a feature which conspiracy naysayers never tire of pointing out is conspicuously lacking in much of conspiracy theorization. And doubtless we have all been on occasion subjected to someone blathering on about current events, pretending to reveal “what’s really going on” and serving up a gloss which reminds us of that old joke about the beatnik standing at the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, snapping his fingers and claiming thereby to be keeping the tigers away. (A passerby dissents, “But there aren't any tigers around here” and the would-be public guardian, in rejoinder: “See what a good job I'm doing?”) Yet however sensible in principle it may be to have misgivings of this sort about uninformed and glib theorizing, we would nonetheless be remiss not to acknowledge that scientific theory itself can fall short of Popper’s requirement, and that over the past few decades within the field of the history and philosophy of science the usefulness of this formula has been substantially reassessed.18

To be sure, the desire to distance oneself from the readership of the supermarket tabloid is not solely a trait of those on my side of the political fence. Many, I would venture, do not ally themselves with “conspiracists” simply because they have concluded, without knowing Popper’s arguments or having recourse to any special theoretical apparatus, that seeking out invisible agencies that act with a purpose to control our destiny (Darwinian evolution or the laws of physics are thus disqualified) is an inferior mental habit akin to belief in superstition or magic, or that it just represents lowbrow or lower-class resentment. From there, it should be simple enough to see how being called a “conspiracy theorist” is tantamount to being tainted with the odor of the peasant.19

Or of the mentally ill.20 It is hardly necessary to point out that equating belief in conspiracy with paranoia is a cultural meme. Their interchangeability has become a conceptual tic, a sclerosis of the intellect; it is nearly obligatory in any discussion of conspiracy, serious or humorous as it may be. (A few more remarks on this follow in the fifth section below.) But has this coupling merely emerged from within our collective imaginary,21 or has it to some degree also been weaponized? The larger question—how much of our anti-conspiracy posturing is the result of a common intuition that conspiratorial explanations are by nature fragile, and how much is actually the product of provocation or manipulation—deserves to be asked. For while this posturing may rely on and perpetuate a number of faulty assumptions about class distinctions, or make a leap to the pathological which is unwarranted, what is more appalling is the fact that there has indeed been a concerted effort to drive people away from a critical examination of oligarchy by preying upon these prejudices. That effort comprises some of the most egregious examples of duplicity that our mass media has been guilty of.

Like many others, I am sure, my spouse Antonia and I relax in the evening by watching videos. Much of the time (though not always), we will choose for this purpose items of little substance, what I would call Hollywood junk-food. One such example we recently viewed again is the film Sneakers, in which the lead role is played by Robert Redford. As it happens, the film contains several clever jabs at the U.S. political Right and at the National Security State. For instance, as the final credits roll, we are led to infer, thanks to the microchip which he secretly withheld from the NSA, and which was supposedly capable of doing RSA decryption without a private key (this is before Peter Schor’s 1994 proof that David Deutsch’s model of the quantum computer could in theory solve prime factorization efficiently), that Bishop (Redford’s character) then managed to break into the Republican National Committee’s account and transfer the money to Greenpeace and the United Negro College Fund. Or when the NSA nabs his team of security hackers but is then blackmailed into paying for their silence by granting each one a wish, the non-sighted telecommunications wizard Whistler (David Strathairn) requests “Peace on earth, good will toward men,” and the NSA officer (James Earl Jones) replies, “We’re the U.S. government; we don’t do that sort of thing.” But the film also caricatures the “wacky conspiracy theorist” in the figure of Mother (Dan Aykroyd). In one scene, the ex-CIA agent Crease (Sidney Poitier) asks him, “Are you saying the CIA caused the earthquake in Nicaragua?” and Mother replies, “Well, I can’t prove it ….” Quite a bit of water under the conspiratorial bridge for Redford between this film and Three Days of the Condor.22 Another example, this one from the Disney studios: National Treasure, part 2, which invokes the JFK assassination in the same breath as Area 54, and makes fun of “inside job” conspiracy theories by having a history-literate Wunderkind (such researchers are all childish obsessives, aren’t they?) confront Nicholas Cage’s character Ben Gates with the (as I understand it, now mostly discredited) theory that the Lincoln assassination was a plot that originated inside Lincoln’s cabinet.23

Why, you may ask, am I wasting your time with Hollywood fluff? Because it is representative of nearly everything that flows through our waking consciousness from the media today concerning conspiracy. The engines of pop culture constantly churn together all conspiracies as if their factual basis and truth content were all the same. Any reasonable person, given just a little pause, can grasp that there is a world of difference between believing aliens are walking among us, controlling our thoughts or sending messages through the Dewey Decimal System, and holding that John Kennedy was assassinated by extremists in the National Security State. Yet that is one of the more effective ways serious questions concerning the secret conduct of policy in a supposedly democratic republic get squelched. You make the dirty truth look incredible by association with what most would judge to be fatuous and worthy of ridicule. It is powerful conditioning.

This happens in several different arenas. One is through playful mockery in films such as those cited above. Another is through television programs or YouTube videos which purport to be educational. About nine years ago, freelance author Frank Cassano penned several essays on Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, and his attempt to prove how gullible people can be, how easily they can be deceived.24 Here is an excerpt from Cassano’s first foray into the subject:25

Cassano goes on to opine:

Cassano’s cry of indignation over the sleight of hand which wantonly confuses intemperate credulity with justified circumspection is uttered on behalf of the entire community of serious investigators. Yet there sadly do exist those among the critics of official narrative who start off on the straight way but then get lost in the dark wood, for one reason or another, be it lack of acumen, a certain willingness to accept alternative explanations simply because they go against the grain, or an opportunism and proclivity to capitalize on sensationalism. A case study, indeed perhaps the poster-child for the “if it is provocative it must be true” syndrome, is a professor of the philosophy of science with whom I once corresponded back in 2001. It is the story of how interest in the JFK assassination widened into an embrace of such bogus ideas as denial of the Holocaust, that Sandy Hook was a staged event, and that no planes hit the Twin Towers (see this essay). A cautionary tale about where this all can lead even someone with a mind honed on the whetstone of logic and a long academic career.

The homogenization of the conspiracy pudding is only one of the techniques used to convince people that such suspicions about how power operates are foolishly simpleminded. There exists a veritable toolkit of pop-psychological explanations ranging from collective infantilism to national neurosis (if not mass psychosis) that the media and authors defending the official stories habitually select from, including:

• People can’t believe that an insignificant assassin could fell a figure of world importance and stature;
• Only a highly trained mind can handle randomness; thus the idea that events, especially violent ones, are random is hard for most people to deal with (poor Albert Einstein!);
• People feel comforted by the knowledge that there exists a force beyond their control responsible for such horrible crimes (call that the “we are all Manichean dualists at heart” explanation);
• (in a similar vein) People are childlike in their need for fairy-tale melodrama.

Of course, anyone who has spent any time with the JFK evidence knows which side of the bread the fairy tale has been buttered on; as he quips to documentary filmmaker Randy Benson in The Searchers, Mark Lane kept his copy of the Warren Report on the same shelf as his copy of the brothers Grimm. And notwithstanding the paradoxes of quantum mechanics, if the highest form of thought were simply to dispense with causal explanation altogether, then modern science has wasted its time in a futile pursuit. But such are the attempts to frame any departure from the accepted narrative.

Now not every interrogation of conspiratorial thought-process is necessarily disingenuous. I once had a dialogue along these lines with a friend who is an intelligent and well-read fellow I admire and respect, and with whom I have had many an interesting conversation. But you can see much of the same psychologizing clockwork grinding its wheels in his musings:

The sincerity of my friend’s question apart, such rationalizations are predominantly specimens of hypocritical psycho-babble originating with the media and the authors it promotes. Instead of asking the hard questions about what could make the presumption of conspiracy credible, the latter indulge in these specious reflections, to which not only the television-pacified viewer falls victim: the same familiar tropes have also been earnestly absorbed and appropriated by academic and artistic cultural criticism. Several years ago, there was an exhibit in New York on conspiracy thinking. Here is an article about it from The Art Newspaper:

And here is an excerpt from an email I wrote about it (Monday, September 10, 2018):

Decades ago, Umberto Eco beat the organizers of the Met Breuer exhibit to the punch. His second novel, Il Pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum), which appeared in 1988, is an adroit and highly amusing, but also deadly serious, burlesque of “paranoid” hermeneutics and history, and (at least in my own reckoning) also probably furnished, along with their mutual source, that mother of masonic conspiratorial nonsense from 1982, the Lincoln-Baigent Holy Blood, Holy Grail, inspiration for Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. It is a propensity like Eco’s to put all such conspiracism under a satirical microscope (not inappropriately, I hasten to add, when it comes to such far-fetched inventions) that in my experience prevents most of the culture-critically attuned intelligentsia from giving any quarter to those who insist that the assassinations of the 60s should not be taken at face value. It is a real shame, too. I have been rather flummoxed by this resistance among my own colleagues, and have actually ruined a few friendships over it.

[April 9, 2022. A (partial) retraction.]

I never had the opportunity to visit the Met Breuer exhibit, which is unfortunate, as it has now come to my attention that my assessment of its nature and purpose was in all likelihood unduly hasty and unfair. In his recent book, Unanswered Questions: What the September Eleventh Families Asked and the 9/11 Commission Ignored, Ray McGinnis spends about a page and a half reviewing it. Here is some of what he reports:

It would therefore seem that my diatribe against the curators and artists of the exhibit was nearly entirely misdirected. What nevertheless continues to be symptomatic is that this false impression was engendered by the way the exhibit was framed in the Art Newspaper article I had read and on which I based my critique. My sense of what is going on there remains unaltered. And apparently, that article’s reservations were quite mild compared to the one in The Nation also discussed by McGinnis, who laments that the latter’s author “scolds the Art of Conspiracy curators for valuing the pursuit of ‘scavenging through the most contested chapters of American history to find plausible alternatives to today’s hard truths.’” He continues: “The article is a prime example of the phenomenon where a journalist presents their beliefs as ‘hard truths,’ while anything they distrust is characterized as ‘conspiracy theory.’” [292] The approach of the Art Newspaper is not as blatant or absolutist, but is perhaps all the more insidious for it.

If what I have just written comes across as philistinism, permit me to clarify that I hardly mean by it to dismiss as utterly worthless all efforts to bring present-day mentalities into focus through the lenses of semiotics or sociology. With respect to the latter, and looking at things from a particular angle, you do have to admit that, on the average, it seems as though in the U.S. the public is much more apt today to contemplate all manner of things implausible than in previous generations. What this might correlate with is a harder question to answer, though. Does it have something to do with the shifting fault lines in our social terrain? Can Durkheim’s anomie27 be adduced to account for it? Perhaps it is the long-term effect of a constant diet of junk-thought and entertainment as propagated by commercial television? And is conspiracy mongering peculiar to the U.S., or has it also made itself perceptible elsewhere in the post-millennial world? On the other hand, what could be in essence a persistent phenomenon may just have become more visible (and by extension, according to one line of reasoning, more contagious) thanks to the increased democratization of communication via internet and social media. I am also unsure if or how it tallies demographically.

What I find problematic are not these modes of analysis per se, but the promptness on the part of the media to pursue them to the exclusion of, or in order to obfuscate, other factors which should also come into play. As previously alluded to, it is not uncommon to read today how this attraction toward conspiracy-thinking is destroying the ability of our democracy to function (recalling Leo Strauss). Yet is it not realistic to expect, after decades of scandal followed by scandal, the eventual erosion of confidence in public institutions? Vietnam, Watergate, the revelations of the Church Committee, Iran-Contra, the stealing of two elections, phony WMDs, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the arrogation by the executive branch of the right to “assassinate” U.S. citizens, suspension of civil rights and persecution of whistleblowers, and so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam … under such circumstances, one does not need any special pleading to convince people not to trust the appearance of democratic process. But who is inevitably targeted with the brunt of the blame? Those, of course, who have offered up alternative explanations for major political events, most notably the JFK assassination. The blame is never laid at the door of the institutions which have done their utmost to prevent transparency or accountability. A further cause for consternation is the way this accusatory stance is always accompanied by an insistence that any doubts these critics could have are entirely groundless and preposterous. It is here that we are spoon-fed the compensatory socio-psychological pap pretending to provide some deeply insightful glimpse into our culture or mindset, where most of the time it is nothing but unconvincing and ultimately irrelevant hogwash. For a good example of what I mean, read this essay about a feature story that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly back in 2017 (and see now this follow-up). What demands to be counterposed to this drivel is the obverse side of the culture-critical coin: when the same newspapers or magazines also publish articles about corporate mythopoesis, about how the mass media constructs or props up the mythologies of capitalism and of the purity of our supposedly free institutions, then such excursions into the popular mind may be more readily accepted in the spirit of “balance.”

But the media is anything but balanced. When next you find yourself sniffing mainstream flatulence about current affairs, I would urge you to count the number of times a bloviating commentator or interlocutor prefaces his or her remarks with “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but ….” This has become practically de rigueur if you expect to be granted a hearing concerning any opinion which may lie somewhat outside the norm. “Conspiracy theory” has come to be used so loosely, has lost so much specific meaning, that, in one sense, to be called a conspiracy theorist ends up as nothing more than being called an outsider, being denied membership in the club. Or as Joseph Green has written, the expression often performs like an imprecation or magical oath, providing a way of closing off debate or discussion. “That’s just a conspiracy theory.”

How did this rather peculiar usage take hold? It is not difficult to imagine that once “conspiracy theory” entered the everyday koiné, the spontaneous processes of linguistic evolution went to work, wherein the affinity between “conspiracy” and “sinister intentions” was semantically close enough that substitution of the prosaic “So you think there is something nefarious behind this?” by the catchier or more hip “So you have a conspiracy theory about this?” felt quite natural. But one also cannot ignore the sardonic undertone with which that substitution is invested. And that is the point: We are not just dealing with simple denotative assimilation, because it is the rhetorical force of this displacement that is never lost and that is its very raison d’être. All the more so when this terminology gets transferred to any idea that may be considered the product of an overactive imagination or beyond the pale simply because it challenges approved or received wisdom. Whatever linguistic pressures might have contributed to it, that figurative slippage retains all the power of a studied poetic turn.

From the connotative and illocutionary contours this expression has acquired, one possible sociolinguistic deduction might therefore be that in point of fact it emblematizes, in counterpoint to any pretended surge in popularity, a widening attitude that this mode of conjecture (and anything likened to it) is by nature risible and unworthy of attention. But together with the increased frequency of occurrence, which already lends itself to being read as a barometer of sorts for our society’s fixations, the reality underlying the use of this idiom nevertheless calls for closer inspection. We are in fact left asking precisely how it came to haunt our political and cultural vocabulary in the first place. For language, like society itself, can at times be consciously, not just unconsciously, driven.

The statistical fact of the matter is that the English phrase “conspiracy theory” was rather unusual up until the late 60s. In the introduction to Conspiracy Theory in America, deHaven-Smith asks how the label came to be applied so ubiquitously:

What the author is referring to here is CIA Dispatch 1035-960 (transcription and original), dated January 4, 1967, which went out to “Chiefs, Certain Stations and Bases.” Some chronological context is in order. Journalists, lawyers and researchers like Joachim Joesten, Vincent Salandria, Mark Lane, Edward Epstein, Leo Sauvage, Harold Weisberg, Richard Popkin and Penn Jones had already published articles and books criticizing the Warren Report (the appendix to the dispatch enumerates some of them). Garrison had been investigating behind closed doors since the fall of 1966, but was being spied on and the story was about to break in the New Orleans States-Item (February 17, 1967). Before the year’s end, Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas and Sylvia Meagher’s Accessories After The Fact would both hit the presses. And critics were banging their fists, asking why the autopsy photos and X-rays had never been consulted by the Commission, compelling then Attorney General Ramsey Clark to convene a panel (known as the “Clark Panel”) to review them (behind closed doors, of course).28 At this juncture, the CIA had already penetrated the TV networks and newspapers (it was called “Operation Mockingbird”), and as Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame revealed in a 1977 article for Rolling Stone, according to findings of the Church Committee, the CIA had by the time of those hearings over 400 assets across the country in major media outlets.

As deHaven-Smith further demonstrates, occurrence of the term “conspiracy theory” in the New York Times and Time magazine then grew—nearly exponentially in the former—from that point onward, with a major jump in the aftermath of Oliver Stone’s JFK.29

The two words, “conspiracy” and “theory,” now seemed to form a stable lexemic compound, for which a great deal of energy would be required to break the bonds holding it together. Henceforward, there were to be no conspiracies that were not just theories—at least as far as mainstream commentary, especially in the mass media, was concerned.

Moreover, for us in the U.S. old enough today to have watched the television specials of the late 60s, the upshot of this propaganda program has over our lifetime actually been ambidirectional. No matter what its subsequent frame of reference, the phrase “conspiracy theory” always carries a residual trace of its point of origin. Whenever we hear it, we are tugged backwards, if only subconsciously, to the first link in its chain of allusion, the JFK assassination. It nearly works like a post-hypnotic suggestion, triggering via this recollection a sense that all such indictments of “idle speculation” are also an admonishment against overthinking that archetypal event upon which they have been made to rest.

It was undoubtedly easy for this CIA directive to fall upon receptive ears within the U.S. corporate media, where there appear to operate unwritten rules about the acceptability of opinion.30 In 1986, the professor of communications Daniel Hallin wrote a book, The Uncensored War, about the media coverage of the Vietnam war, in which he argued that the predominant source of information used by journalists (official U.S. government channels) tends to predetermine how any issue may be presented on the air or in print; he schematized this using concentric spheres:

It would be a truism to state that, when it comes to events like the assassinations of the 60s, conspiracy has never really fallen within the narrow sphere of “legitimate controversy,” but always has been pushed to its rim and beyond, into the sphere of deviance. In recent times, this has nearly calcified into a full prohibition. Where before the end of the 1990s, critics were sometimes represented on TV shows dedicated to the JFK assassination—though the amount of time allotted to them was always disproportionately small compared to the time spent trying to debunk them—the anti-conspiracist bent has finally won out, insofar as it is almost impossible these days to get any hearing at all.31

Of further note is that, more so than anywhere else, it is in the U.S. that the inadmissibility of such opinions has become nearly doctrinal with respect to the mainstream appreciation of the power structure. This has repeatedly been underscored by critics of the Warren Commission, and is well worth pondering. Concomitantly, and as others have also pointed out, the idea that conspiracies might occur elsewhere, in other countries, with other political systems, does not cause our media commentators to flinch in astonishment or guffaw with disbelief.32 The climactic sequence in JFK has Jim Garrison saying pretty much the same thing: if the assassination of a Soviet leader had been attributed by Pravda to a lone discontent, the West would have immediately suspected that a power shift had just taken place.

Nor does the press really have an objection to a conspiracy when it harmonizes with a U.S. perspective of the world. What were the events that transpired on September 11, 2001, according to the official story, except the result of a conspiracy of terrorists? What fuels the “War on Terror” but the fear of ongoing secret plans to bring harm to the U.S. by its presumptive enemies? Here the entire category of conspiracy is placed under erasure; the term is not even employed to characterize such activities. Granted, one of the axioms concerning the kind of conspiracy impugned by the media is the intention to keep it secret, so once a conspiracy is revealed (as they loudly proclaim all “real” conspiracies eventually are), it loses its conspiratorial aura. And with political terrorism—whether authentic or manufactured—the modus operandi is not to keep its origins or motivation hidden after the deed has been accomplished, but instead to declare them to the world. So it is to some degree excusable that the conspiratorial element would be glossed over in those instances. In others, however (like the unproven allegations of Russiagate), such considerations do not really hold. But remember: for the media gatekeepers, there are no conspiracies unless they are just theories (which always implies “suppositious” or “unfounded” if not downright “imaginary”). It takes some doing to escape the conclusion that what really is at stake is not at all an epistemology of history, or the application to human affairs of Occam’s razor (another misinterpreted and terribly abused concept often tossed around during discussions of conspiracy),33 but rather that the Rubicon is crossed whenever the integrity of U.S. institutions is questioned.

How the media shapes the national discourse34 goes well beyond the limitations implicitly imposed on its own discussants, because it also instills mimesis of the same practice in its audience. We unthinkingly replicate the same rhetorical gestures, parrying objectionable thought by using the same potent labels, and numbing ourselves to the possibility that some truth could reside in opinions which are not those bouncing continually off the walls of the corporate media echo chamber. At the same time, the counterintelligence program outlined in dispatch 1035-960 has been reborn in such latter-day infotech avatars as the Obama-era proposal by Cass Sunstein for “cognitive infiltration” of the internet in order to defeat 9/11 conspiracy theories. Sunstein also coauthored a book which rehashes the anti-conspiracy arguments I have laid out here. And the beat goes on with social media. Much as I find the more visible conspiracist figures to be extremely dubious, not to mention being revulsed by the right-wing ranting many of them engage in, what else do you call their being kicked off Facebook but an act of censorship?

In the end, though, the efforts exerted by the media and by officialdom to deflect interest in potential institutional-level conspiracies are entirely wasted on that segment of our society—and believe me, there are many in this category—that still puts its faith in U.S. Exceptionalism: to wit, that our leaders and institutions would be incapable of such heinous acts; that, in the words of Warren Commissioner John McCloy, “America is not a banana republic, where a government can be changed by conspiracy.”

Those authors with whom I share the certitude that the assassinations of the 60s entailed high-level planning often take comfort in the fact that the polls in the U.S. show the public on their side. Yet I can only wonder about what this really means to this ostensible majority of citizens, when this knowledge seems to have had little if no radicalizing effect on them. People have not, for instance, been led to demand either drastic reform or total elimination of the agencies the polls say most of them supposedly accept as having been complicit.† Perhaps my fellow nationals are stymied by a sense of resignation, by a sense that those events are no longer relevant, or by an inability or refusal to do the necessary arithmetic.

Or perhaps the pundits are right after all: conspiracy just makes for a good story.

†(As I review and edit this essay for posting, a bill has been introduced into the House, in response to nationwide protests calling for the defunding of the police, to cut discretionary military spending by $350 billion. While it is heartening to see that at least a small contingent of our representatives are willing to try to reverse this seventy-year budgetary hysteresis, this will indubitably end as just another quixotic joust.)

(And, predictably, here it is—July 22, 2020: House Bill to Reduce Military Discretionary Spending by 10% Voted Down 324 to 93.)

I resist the phrase “conspiracy theory.” As Joseph Green writes: There was a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy (and Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy), but I am not a conspiracy theorist. Or as Jim DiEugenio likes to assert: I don’t discuss conspiracy theories, I discuss conspiracy facts.

Not all conspiracies are created equal. The flimsy and at times loony conjectures that find their way into the public domain (there are myriad examples, but I suppose QAnon most immediately comes to mind these days) only complicate the issue, and give a bad name to serious investigations of high political crime.

But a knottier problem has to do with discriminating conspiracy from the broader sense of how power is constructed and plays itself out. To follow again C. Wright Mills: much of what takes place in terms of the political and economic elite need not imply a specific, premeditated decision to subvert the rule of law or to stack the deck in their favor. Most of the time, the policy decisions made by boards of directors or congressional committees are conditioned by a common habit of mind, and move naturally along the lines of least structural resistance, lines which in a capitalist system inherently favor the accumulation and concentration of wealth by a very small sector of society. When the World Bank forces its debtor nations into austerity measures, we cannot properly call that a conspiracy. Nor can we really call it conspiratorial when the FDA pushes through untested pharmaceuticals on behalf of the corporations that could be said to own such regulatory agencies. But here we begin to cross over into that grey area between the structural and the conspiratorial which practices like lobbying and backroom dealing introduce into the equation. It can perhaps be said that in such cases the conspiratorial has in fact become systemic. Returning to our reflections on the press may help shed further light on the liminal nature of the relationship between praxis and intention crucial to the distinction under discussion. There, a professional disinclination toward certain ideas (which is to some degree learned) tills the soil to receive corporate directives (on behalf of stockholders or sponsors) which in turn are on occasion seeded by counterintelligence programs (CIA memos).35 I would propose that it is only to this latter gambit that one may properly attach the notion of the conspiratorial. Thus if the term is to retain any real descriptive force within a critique of socioeconomic power, it needs to refer to something more precise than just the collusive potential built into the system as a whole. As the last example suggests, the most apposite model for understanding conspiracy in our contemporary world is none other than what in the jargon of intelligence is called a covert or “black” operation.

What dictates my approach to conspiracy is therefore something quite straightforward. Safeguarding democracy requires vigilance against alliances which can crystallize around powerful interests for the purpose of achieving ends that lie outside those strictly possible through legal or constitutional process. The existence of state organs which can facilitate and empower such concealed alliances spells nothing if not imminent disaster for the general polity. In this regard, what is often referred to as the invisible government,36 or the National Security State, is quite literally institutionalized conspiracy: it limits sensitive planning to a small number of individuals who need to know the details, and involves whoever else needs to be involved indirectly, often without revealing the true or full purpose of their participation to them, in order to maintain plausible deniability. The centrality of keeping secret in perpetuity both the sponsors of these plans and their intentions further undergirds the equivalence between covert operations and the type of conspiracy this essay has been treating. We sanction this clandestine (and mostly criminal) behavior at the heart of a government which ought to be entirely transparent, and as voters have no control over it. To paraphrase what one CIA officer said to an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 70s: presidents come and go, representatives come and go, but we remain. They are the corporate mafia, the organized crime syndicate37 that serves the plutocrats (as some have facetiously observed, CIA really stands for “Corporate Interests of America”), and which we continue to permit to rot the body politic, the worm of corruption that gnaws at the cadaver of the commonwealth which has long ago been laid to rest in the whited sepulcher of our nation’s public institutions. This is the core conspiracy we need to worry about, from which all the real conspiracies of our recent past have, like so many heads of the hydra, sprouted.

The difficulty then rests in developing, case by case, palpable proof for the illegal covert activities commonly dubbed conspiracies, and in bringing it into the light of general public awareness. While the first step is an arduous one, it is not impossible, as the many private citizens who have devoted their lives and livelihoods to that undertaking have made plain, and who for their undaunted perseverance are deserving of our fervid admiration and praise. But it is the second step which can pose a nearly insurmountable obstacle, for it involves scaling the wall guarded by the national media and the publishing houses with which they are conglomerated.

The fourth estate has by and large abdicated its duty to hold government accountable, especially this secret government, which is otherwise accountable to no-one. And so the beast has found a cavern dark enough to mask by day its monstrous visage, whilst it surreptitiously continues to extend its tentacles and consolidate its power unabated.

We should not be astounded by this acquiescence. As Upton Sinclair wrote, it is hard to make journalists understand something when their paycheck depends on their not understanding it. And in fact, the notion of the “liberal media” is a myth38 created by the Right to further keep any form of aberrant reportage at bay. There is no such thing and never has been. In the 20^th century and up to this day, the U.S. media has been in the hands of the ruling class. And that class is the same one for which the intelligence community works. Media and intelligence form a natural coupling. More so than in orchestrating regime change or planning assassinations, the CIA’s true forte lies in the control and shaping of information. If you can control the information flowing out of and around an event, you control the event. This is why something like an assassination does not have to be perfectly planned or executed. What is paramount is to ensure the information channels are secured to your purpose.39 The democratically elected Jacobo Árbenz government in Guatemala was overthrown in 1954 without a shot being fired, thanks to the control the CIA, under the direction of David Atlee Phillips and Howard Hunt, had of the radio waves. Some have called it the CIA’s greatest success story (it was prophetically codenamed PB/SUCCESS).

It goes without saying of course that curtailing the influence of the CIA and other like-minded agencies, and even eliminating them, should not be regarded as a sociopolitical panacea, for they are but the strong arm of, and do not themselves constitute, the system they serve to protect when licit means do not suffice. Yet a frontal attack on them would severely weaken the defenses of the status quo. To draw a comparison which I feel is quite apropos: At the time of this writing, the defunding of armed police forces and their replacement by other forms of protection is being suggested by many who would also be the first to speak of the vital need to address our society’s structural issues. I do not believe the proponents of this course of action would go so far as to claim that the police represent the root cause of systemic racism, but it is also not difficult to understand how such a program might advance us in important ways toward more fundamental kinds of change. If that reasoning is at all valid, then it should a fortiori apply to the intelligence apparatus at the very hub of our hegemonic policing of both home and abroad.

Unfortunately, most of the progressive and radical Left in the U.S. has also withdrawn from head-on confrontation with secret government and the menace it poses, preferring instead to engage in a broader style of opposition. As cogent and timely as some of their efforts may be, it is nonetheless deplorable that a tendentious revisionism has crept into what could be called the “standard model” for the events of the 1960s that adherents of these political positions have adopted, muddling and even occluding the role played by clandestine forces in determining the outcome of that decade. In my opinion, this is more than just scholarly indolence; it amounts to nothing less than a trahison des clercs.40

But when all is said and done, and as we have been at present painfully observing, facts—not theories—are what this must be all about. It is hard work being a “conspiracist.” And that is as it should be. For when you stop being honest about evidence, and cut corners, cherry-pick or stretch it to fit a preordained pattern, then you do history as much a disservice as do those who would try to hide the truth in the first place.

My attention was drawn today by an article which appeared on Consortium News to two brief papers from 2006 by Julian Assange entitled “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” and “Conspiracy as Governance” (both available here). Beyond the critical significance that the ultimate outcome of his persecution (I use the term with duly considered deliberateness) by the US government will have for freedom of information and the fundamental right to transparency which citizens of a democracy are supposed to enjoy, I believe Assange’s observations merit comment in that they speak to several of the central issues this essay has raised.

Assange sees secrecy as enough justification for classifying authoritarian regimes as conspiratorial:

The linking of elite conspiracy with authoritarian rule reminiscent of Beard, and the emphasis on the covert nature of its exercise, are not the only points of contact with my own presentation. In a striking statement which might appear tautological, but which actually drives home a point which is not immediately obvious, Assange underscores that “[i]n a conspiracy, individuals conspire, while when isolated they do not.” This realization not only suggests to him potential strategies for undermining the workings of conspiratorial elites; it also makes apparent the fact that individuals in a conspiracy function as part of a structure, and that their actions are not simply dictated by personal initiative. Hence the hackneyed opposition between human agency and abstract system is once more contested by a view of conspiracy itself as a system of relationships, relationships which work within and constitute institutional power.

Most notably, Assange defines conspiracy in computational terms, as a “cognitive device” which takes as input information and outputs a result, the conspiratorial action. Appealing to graph theory, Assange conceptualizes this device as a connected, weighted graph whose vertices represent the individuals and whose edges represent the information flowing between them, the weight of the latter determined by the importance of the information exchanged. Moreover, the size of the conspiracy (the number of vertices in the graph) is not its best measure; it is rather the sum of the weights of the edges that constitutes its “total conspiratorial power.” As a corollary, this model would also imply that some nodes are central, some fringe, and that not all points are aware of all the others; in graph-theoretical terms, this would be equivalent to claiming that knowledge inside the conspiracy is not a transitive relation, a feature which may serve as a (pseudo-)mathematical analogy for what has come to be referred to as “compartmentalization” in covert planning.

In Assange’s slyly AI-inspired algorithmization of conspiracy, everything then becomes a question of information flow. He in fact proposes that the strength of the invisible government has increased precisely thanks to modern advances in digital information technology. As he states: “Conspirators who have this technology are able to out-conspire conspirators without it. For the same costs they are able to achieve a higher total conspiratorial power. That is why they adopt it.” By the same token, strategies for defeating conspiracies entail either breaking the connectivity of or decreasing the weight of the important edges in the information-flow. Wikileaks thus emerges within this paradigm as a weapon of anti-conspiratorial guerrilla infowar. The efficacy of this insurgency in defeating the conspiracy of governance, however, remains to be seen, particularly in light of the recent intensification in state-sanctioned censorship originating from and wielded by the corporate power elite.