This is Part 2 of a two part series by Prof. Joshua Reno on conspiracies in the U.S. You can read Part 1 here.

In the August 2011 issue of American Ethnologist, I discuss how it is that evidence becomes inadmissible, stopping us from giving an argument due consideration. According to Marilyn Strathern, the use of evidence relies on the ability to create analogies between general claims and particular facts. In a criminal case, for example, establishing “guilt” requires making links between this account of events and information about the perpetrator, their intentions, the scene of the crime, the victim, their relationship, and so forth. But there are many ways of establishing such analogies. The rejection of certain claims as “inadmissible” can arise from a sense that they somehow violate the unspoken rules of establishing truth.

One thing that those labeled “-ers” (i.e. 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, bin Laden deathers) seem to have in common with each other is that they find an account more convincing the greater the stakes. Thus, if Obama’s entire presidency can be invalidated by his being foreign born, if Bush Jr.’s entire war on terror is premised on a danger posed to U.S. security, if Osama bin Laden’s death is meant to symbolize a historic victory in that same war, then the likelihood of a cover-up increases and a search for corroborating evidence begins. There is an analogy established, in other words, between the significance of the event, the political gain of the conspirator, and the appeal of conspiracy to explain it. It is suspicion aroused from a perceived motive.

What stops so many others from drawing this analogy? The answer certainly does not lie in their careful consideration of the facts. Professional conspiracy debunkers focus on the technicalities of evidential claims, rather than the assumptions underlying them. Like most people, I do not have in depth knowledge of the physics of demolition, of the bureaucracy of birth documents, or of covert military tactics, and yet I do not feel I need to see any of the mounting “proof” which conspiracists and debunkers regularly cite in order to settle on my opinions. Thus when someone emails me with “evidence” that Obama was not born in the United States I immediately deem it inadmissaible, not because I know for certain that it is wrong, but because I suspect the conditions under which it was derived. To be more specific, I assume that the “evidence” was artfully manipulated by some “-er” bent on feeding their obsession. Of course, this is merely reversing the “-er” logic described in the previous paragraph, assuming that the greater the desire the conspiracist has to prove their point, the less trustworthy their data. Once again, perceived motive overrules evidentiary claims. The question remains: what unspoken rules are “-ers” suspected of breaking, that makes their claims seem inadmissible from the start?

One possible reason for skepticism such as mine may lie in the appeal of conspiracy theories to people in the U.S. generally. Olmsted’s book would seem to suggest that an historic embrace of freedom and dislike of big government is responsible for the last century of developments in U.S. conspiracy culture. If this is true, then those same sentiments may prevent people from believing that conspiracy could be bureaucratically managed in a practical way. When I was young I was fond of a joke that went something like this: “how is the U.S. government supposed to manage covering up the Kennedy assassination when they can’t even deliver the mail properly?” To believe in the power of the state is to respect it, and people in the U.S. tend not to respect the government that much. This is why, at least since Reagan, Republicans can win elections by accusing their opponents of favoring “big government,” and why it is difficult to find any elected representatives who claims to be in favor of “big government” today. Would not the effective management of conspiracy on an everyday bureaucratic level, in office meetings, paperwork and communiqué, prove the ultimate triumph of big government: its capacity to manage truth itself?

Let me put this more clearly. The “-ers” I have met tend to accuse the uninitiated of being manipulated by the mainstream media to believe the “official” narratives that those in power demand. A complementary criticism is that those who do not believe would rather hide behind smug cynicism then challenge convention and seek out the truth at any cost. One possible reason people do not become “-ers” is not that they are media-manipulated dullards, or postmodern cynics, however, but that they optimistically believe the reverse of conspiracists: that a cover-up becomes implausible, regardless of the perceived reward to prominent political figures, when the risk of the whistleblower effect is so high. Whatever the advantages for the Bush administration of staging a terrorist attack, the planning and resources required to orchestrate such a massive event would seem to vastly increase the likelihood of something going wrong or of someone with knowledge of the cover up coming forward. John Dean testified against the president of the United States when the crime was only a simple burglary and conspiracy, a far cry from the mass murder of thousands of innocent U.S. civilians. The terrorist attacks on 9/11 might have taken only a few dozen Al Qaeda operatives to conduct, but it would have likely taken the complicity of thousands of government employees, most of them not well paid or rewarded for their efforts, to succeed in preventing any internal memo or illicit correspondence from coming to light.

Whether or not most people perform such a calculation, it seems as if “-ers” hold the opposite view: the bigger the scandal, somehow, the easier it is to believe. I would add another qualification to this, in light of the kind of “made up person” that “-ers” are supposed to be: the fewer people that believe you, the easier it is to believe. If this equation holds true, then one of the conditions that sustains “-ers,” for one reason or another, is the knowledge that their evidence is considered widely inadmissible, that their claims attract so much scorn and skepticism. It is easy to attribute the emergence of such a way of being to the isolated and anonymous experience that surfing the Internet can be, but that hardly explains Donald Trump. The core of narcissistic fantasy may be much simpler: an individualist enjoyment of being the heroic advocate for truth in the face of overwhelming opposition.

There are real conspiracies in the world, but I would argue that the biggest are rarely successful in accomplishing what conspiracists think they ought to first and foremost, which is to fool (almost) everyone. The Arab Spring is widely agreed to have begun in Tunisia, where people first rose in popular revolt. According to a recent dialogue between Zizek and the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, the Tunisians were inspired to overthrow their government, not because they were surprised to learn of political corruption within the ruling family (the so-called “Cable-gate” scandal attributed to Wikileaks), but because suddenly that vast public secret was out in the open. As described by Michael Taussig (1999), a public secret is something everyone knows yet no one is supposed to know. According to Zizek and Assange, the released Wikileaks cables made Tunisians suddenly aware that they were not alone and that no one, not even the U.S., could now deny what they knew to be true about their government.

It may be, in fact, that the greatest conspiracies are maintained by the complicity of people who know very well what is going on but do not or cannot act. This would be a conspiracy of knowing silence, rather than a conspiracy maintained, as many “-ers” assume, by ignorance. If information leaked tomorrow that Obama secretly received a promise of campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry in return for watering down his healthcare proposal, or from Wall Street executives for not seeking a tax on financial speculation, then there would be a new “-gate,” but no newly vindicated “-ers,” precisely because no one would be remotely surprised to learn that power and influence flows just as we all suspected. This is not conspiracy based on mystification. Maybe the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not convincing people he didn’t exist, as the old adage says, but convincing people that they were the only ones to believe in him. Perhaps what maintains the worst conspiracies is not that people are so easily corrupted or manipulated, but that they tend to think that other people are. In the case of “-ers,” this lack of faith in others may go a long way toward explaining the appeal of “being” one of them.

Joshua Reno is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in the Department of Anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008. He has articles on waste, techno-science, and environmental politics appearing in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist and Science, Technology and Human Values in 2011 and a book co-edited with Catherine Alexander on recycling economies expected in 2012.

It is both disturbing and fascinating to follow the role of conspiracy theories in U.S. politics over the last decade and their apparent relationship to the Internet. One could claim that nothing has really changed, that mysterious and powerful cabals have always played a significant part in the U.S. political imagination. Consider the Anti-Masonic Party (1828-1838), which was founded in Upstate New York by Federalists to challenge the perceived influence of secret societies on settler life, or the Midwestern Populists, at the end of that century, who alleged that an international Jewish conspiracy was responsible for lowering farm prices.

Conspiracy theories about treacherous minority groups, political factions and foreigners are not exclusive to the U.S., of course. In Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East, one of many anti-Zionist rumors holds that Pepsi actually stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel,” a belief that has helped encourage boycotts of foreign products. Throughout Latin America a legend of children being abducted for organ harvesting spread moral panic at the end of the twentieth century, which ultimately led to an attack on an innocent tourist in a Guatemalan town in 1994.

In her new book, Real Enemies (2009), historian Kathryn S. Olmsted claims that this widespread tendency to project treacherous plots onto various cultural “others” began to change direction in the U.S. after WWI, when the role of the federal government expanded considerably. While the moral panics of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings are well documented, for most of the twentieth century people in the U.S. have been equally if not more captivated by secret government plots—the hidden assassins that assisted Lee Harvey Oswald from the grassy knoll, the Roswell landing that did happen, the Moon landing that did not—and, by all accounts, they find these theories more convincing than ever. A similar number of Americans—around 80%—believe that Kennedy’s assassination and the existence of extraterrestrial life have been covered up. To take the first example, according to a recent Gallup poll 34% believe that the CIA was responsible for Kennedy’s death, and 18% blame Lyndon Johnson. At the time of the assassination, only half of Americans suspected a conspiracy, but the percentage grew after the release of findings from the House Sub-committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1976 and Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” in 1991.

If anything changed with the rise of post-modernism and the information society, it is the introduction of a suffix to brand conspiracies and related events. Since Nixon’s disgrace and resignation, it has become commonplace to label popular scandals and cover-ups with “-gate.” The addition of this signifier says nothing about the reality of an alleged crime, whether it actually took place, but only its reality as a particular kind of media event. True media events are, strictly speaking, “new news.” As Greg Urban argues in his book Metaculture (2001), news constitutes an important form of “culture about culture,” one which frames occurrences in a meaningful sequence as “stories.” Though media events are partly triggered by public interest, they are heavily shaped by how happenings around the world are presented as new and important within the non-stop telecommunication cycle. With the perpetual search for “new news” to sell, actual events quickly disappear into the background with each story that “breaks” and more and more attention goes to the process of metacultural production itself: the format of news presentation, the personalities of the pundits and anchors who present it, and the storylines that accompany competing brands of new news (e.g., “liberal vs. fair and balanced”). The “-gates” suffix indicates a particular way of presenting new news; such is the appeal of its narrative model. It is only appropriate that this is the lasting legacy of the Nixon administration’s very real cover up, which is linked in the public imagination with a growing paranoia about government power in general. Indeed, still today much is made of the missing 18 ½ minutes from the Watergate tapes, as if any of the actual revelations that became public are exceeded by the event’s symbolic import as the first “-gate.”

I would amend Olmsted’s claim only slightly and suggest that over the last decade the culture of political paranoia may have made another significant break with the past. As new “-gates” continue to develop and disappear in the twenty-four hour news cycle, those who believe in such cover-ups are now themselves suffixed into a type: 9-11 truth-ers, Obama birth-ers, Osama bin Laden death-ers, and so on. One could argue, though I know no one who has, that this may have originated from the use of the appellation “Holocaust deni-ers” (that ostracized and discredited group to whom other conspiracists are often compared, much to their chagrin). Regardless, this shift from marking events to marking persons is telling. For one thing, it reflects the relative ease with which like-minded people, of all political persuasions, can not only find and amass information and opinion, but also share it through a wide variety of media channels.
 

Any time a new type of subjectivity arises a new form of “making up people” is involved, as philosopher Ian Hacking puts it. Being an “-er” is distinctive, as a new way of being a person, because it involves sharing one, and only one, belief. Even anti-masons, populists and anti-communists had other agendas, but an “-er” need only possess a single conviction, one which spirals out into a predictable set of propositions: that there is some cover up of significant proportions and that government officials, experts and members of the media are complicit in spreading a lie. As Hacking argues, there tends to be a “looping effect” when new human kinds are introduced. Pundits may think they are dismissing conspiracy theorists when they give them a suffix, but they are also giving them a rallying cry (“no one believes us, look how we’ve been unfairly excluded…”) and, before long, a Wikipedia entry.

As is common with new human kinds, much is made of what makes them the “type of person” who could “believe something like that.” Less discussed is why many of us are not that “type of person.” After all, conspiracies do happen. Government officials do lie and conceal facts from the public on a regular basis, even if only about infidelities, campaign contributions, and relationships with special interest groups. They might not possess secrets about aliens and assassinations, but they must surely collude in various ways to misrepresent their actions to the public. Similarly, members of the media can and do selectively misrepresent events to suit the interests of corporate sponsors and their own ideological commitments. It is hardly surprising that Fox News Channel and its affiliates have reported very little on the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed its parent company, News Corp, this summer. Many are aware, similarly, that the “Clean Coal” lobby sponsored the presidential election debates on CNN in 2008, during which “clean coal” received a strong endorsement from all of the candidates. Finally, expert accounts may indeed be riddled with errors of judgment, shaped by personal and political ambitions, and so on. Scientists from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, for example, may have actively sought to have the International Panel on Climate Change exclude views they disagreed with and include their own instead, and this may seem like a good conspiracy tale—it was certainly enough to give the episode a “gate” suffix during the extensive media coverage—but it is also something which can happen during normal academic peer review processes.

And yet, the reality of collusion in the corridors of power does not prove conspiracists correct or make them seem any more believable to the majority of us (at least for now). To paraphrase philosopher Slavoj Zizek (1999), even someone whose paranoid suspicion about their partner’s infidelities is proven correct is still pathologically jealous, because their beliefs are ultimately rooted in fantasy, not fact.

Why are many of us not conspiracist believers? Check back on Wed, August 17th for Prof. Joshua Reno's answer in Part 2 of this two part essay!

Joshua Reno is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in the Department of Anthropology. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 2008. He has articles on waste, techno-science, and environmental politics appearing in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist and Science, Technology and Human Values in 2011 and a book co-edited with Catherine Alexander on recycling economies expected in 2012.