The Origins Of Conspiracy Theories

A small group of international elites (known as the Ashmedai’s 2069,  1001 Club,  Bilderberg Group, Bohemian Grove, Committee of 300, Council on Foreign Relations, Freemasonry, The Illuminati, Le Cercle, Majestic 12, Men In Black, Nine Unknown Men, Pilgrims Society, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Skull & Bones, Trilateral Commission, or more broadly as the New World Order) controls and manipulates governments, industry, and media organizations worldwide.

Various parties high in the U.S. and British governments knew of the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and may even have let it happen or encouraged it in order to force America into war via the “back door.”

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was orchestrated by the FBI.

Individuals in the United States government knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand and purposefully allowed them to occur, or orchestrated the attacks themselves, as a pretext for the “War on Terror”.

A second gunman on the grassy knoll killed JFK and framed Oswald.

Bill Clinton, while he was president and before, was quietly assassinating his associates (ostensibly anyone who got in the way of his career, such as Vince Foster).

A U.S. Navy warship was turned invisible and caused severe harm to on-board crew members.

Clouds behind aircraft, having the general appearance of contrails, but are chemical spraying performed for some secretive purpose.

AIDS is a man-made disease, created by a conspiratorial group or by a secretive agency such as the CIA, created as a tool of genocide and/or population control.
Or the virus was created as an experiment in biological and/or psychological warfare, and then escaped into the population at large by accident. Some who believe that HIV was a government creation see a precedent for it in the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which government-funded researchers deceptively denied treatment to black patients infected with a sexually transmitted disease.
Or the CIA deliberately administered HIV to African Americans and homosexuals in the 1970s, via tainted hepatitis vaccinations as part of a plan to destroy the black race and was administered in Africa as a way of crippling the development of the continent.
Or either the HIV virus or a sterilizing agent has been added to polio vaccines being distributed by the World Health Organization in Nigeria.

Fluoridation is part of a Communist or New world order or Illuminati plot to take over the world.
Or it was designed by the military-industrial complex to protect the U.S. atomic weapons program from litigation.
Or it was pioneered by a German chemical company to make people submissive to those in power.
Or it was used in Russian prison camps and produces schizophrenia.
Or it is backed by the aluminum or phosphate industries as a means of disposing of some of their industrial waste.
Or it is a smokescreen to cover failure to provide dental care to the poor.

The “Peak Oil” concept is a fraud concocted by the oil industries to increase prices amid concerns about future supplies. The oil industry is aware of vast reserves of untapped oil, according to these theories, but it deliberately refuses to utilize them in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity.

Humanity is actually under the control of shape-shifting alien reptiles, who require periodic ingestion of human blood to maintain their human appearance.

And countless others…

Can I conceive of a way the conspiracy would be plausible?
What would it mean if it were true?
How many people would have to “be in on it” for it to work?
If the conspirators are so adept at whatever they are up to, how did they let the truth slip out?
And on, and on, and on…

Conspiracy theories always seem to create more questions in my mind then they answer. But today’s post is not about any specific conspiracy theory, but their origins.

But first, maybe I should define what is a conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy Theory
Conspiracy theory is a pejorative term used almost exclusively to refer to any fringe theory which explains an historical or current event as the result of a secret plot by conspirators of almost superhuman power and cunning. Conspiracy theories are viewed with skepticism by scholars because they are rarely supported by any conclusive evidence and contrast with institutional analysis, which focuses on people’s collective behavior in publicly known institutions, as recorded in scholarly material and mainstream media reports, to explain historical or current events, rather than speculate on the motives and actions of secretive coalitions of individuals.

According to political scientist Michael Barkun, conspiracy theories once limited to fringe audiences have become commonplace in mass media. He argues that this has contributed to conspiracism emerging as a cultural phenomenon, and the possible replacement of democracy by conspiracy as the dominant paradigm of political action in the public mind. According to anthropologists Todd Sanders and Harry G. West, “evidence suggests that a broad cross section of Americans today…gives credence to at least some conspiracy theories.” Belief in conspiracy theories has therefore become a topic of interest for sociologists, psychologists and experts in folklore.

With that in mind, I’d like to take a look at the origins of a conspiracy theory. It seems as if there are a few primary aspects to the creation of any conspiracy theory: questioning, seeing patterns where none exist, anomaly hunting, distrust of some group, fear of powerlessness, making shit up, and stopping questioning.

Questioning
Many, if not most, conspiracy theories seem to come from an attempt to answer a question that at least the one questioning believes is legitimate. Many people questioned whether or not NASA really had the technology to make it to the moon in 1969 and had valid reasons to inquire into the details.

While questioning is a good and important aspect of critical thinking there are times when it can be taken to such an extreme that it goes beyond healthy skepticism and leads to denial. For instance if I tell somebody that I write a blog, they might ask for the URL to check it out. If they check the URL and see the author’s name is not my name, they should clearly question further. However if they look and find that the author has the same name as me, and it is next to a picture that looks like me, it’s safe to assume that the blog is mine. If upon further research this author has written a biography of them self that matches my own biography it would seem as if there would be nothing left to question.

Seeing Patterns Where None Exist
The human brain is designed extraordinarily well to see patterns. We tend to recognize things like shapes and sounds when we have previous experience from similar shapes and sounds. At a glance we are able to discern a face from even with the slightest information available to our eyes, even if no face exists.

Pareidolia is, basically, the phenomenon which happens when we perceive recognizable patterns in randomness, even though the patterns really aren’t there. For example, random blotches of paint might look like a face, or random noise might sound like a spoken word (or even a full sentence). Conspiracy theorists often abuse pareidolia. They will make people see patterns where there are none, and people will be fooled into believing that the patterns really are there, and thus are proof of something.

An example of this would be those who claim to have seen a pattern in the actions many unrelated actions, which have lead them to believe that some shadowy organization (New World Order, Illuminati, Freemasons, Bilderbergers, etc) are engaged in some vast conspiracy.

Anomaly Hunting
One of the most common and insidious bits of cognitive self-deception is the process of anomaly hunting. A true anomaly is something that cannot be explained by our current models – it doesn’t fit into existing theories. Anomalies are therefore very useful to scientific inquiry because they point to new knowledge, the potential to deepen or extend existing theories.

Conspiracy theorists use anomalies in a different way. They often engage it what we call anomaly hunting – looking for apparent anomalies. They are not, however, looking for clues to a deeper understanding of an issue. They are often hunting for anomalies in service to the overarching pseudoscientific process of reverse engineering scientific conclusions.

What this means is that they almost always works backwards – that is its primary malfunction, starting with a desired conclusion and then looking for evidence and twisting logic to support that conclusion.

Again using the example of me telling somebody that I write a blog. In that example they have checked the blog and found my name, a picture that looks like me, and a biography that matches my own. So they use the internet archive and notice that in some past incarnation of the site there were no pictures on the About page, and the biography was less specific. They then latch on to this as “evidence” that this blog is not in fact mine, but that I am engaged in some type of subterfuge.

Distrust of Some Group
- The Liberals are coming. The Liberals are coming!
- A Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.
- Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution, and it was designed to eat the Constitution, to progress past the Constitution.

Distrust is a simple concept, one really not needing any explanation. Where it can get out of hand and lead to a conspiracy theory is when this distrust is coupled with the other factors I am discussing here. I distrust used car salesmen, but I don’t believe they are part of some global conspiracy to take over the world. Now perhaps some used car salesmen are honest people and try to give their customers the best possible deal. In this case my distrust might lead me to not take a deal with them for a bad reason, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not really all that harmful. The harm comes when this distrust is blown out of proportion and negative actions are taken as a result of this distrust. People buying up weapons because they believe the government is going to declare martial law. People not vaccinating their children because they believe “Big Pharma” is out to make them sick.

Some groups which are distrusted become the conspiracy (Bildergurg Group), some groups don’t even exist (New World Order), and others are given far more credit than they deserve (Freemasons), but the common thread is distrust of some group, real or imagined.

Fear of Powerlessness
Everybody feels a sense of powerlessness at times in their life. You get dumped by somebody you care about. Your car breaks down on the side of the highway in an unfamiliar area. You fought the law, and the law won. We’ve all had these experiences.

It’s a natural, but very uncomfortable, part of life, and it’s something nobody likes to feel. For many people their first instinct when they feel this sense of powerlessness is to fight back against it. But what if you’re up against something “too big” to fight against or if there is no “thing” to fight against, but just some of the random shit that happens in a person’s life at times? Well for conspiracy theorists, one common thread seems to combine this sense of powerlessness with their distrust of some group, and blame that group. I didn’t just happen to run out of gas, some shadowy organization siphoned my gas out of my car so that I would not be able to make it where I was headed. That person wasn’t more qualified than me for this job, it’s part of some zionist plot.

Making Shit Up
In many conspiracy theories the claims become so outrageous, so out of touch with reality that is becomes clear that no misunderstanding could have taken place which accounts for it, no alternate interpretation can explain the outright falsehoods being put forth. It becomes clear that somebody just made shit up.

In some cases it can be understood as not being intentional, such as when recently an old video from The Onion (a satirical website) revealing a hyperbolic martial law bill was recently rediscovered by conservatives, and began to pop up on right-wing Facebook walls as being true. Clearly those who accepted this as true did not use critical thinking skills and failed to do any checking into the background of the story.

But in other cases people just make shit up to push forward some idea to bolster some theory they already have.

Stopping Questioning
The final aspect to the creation of a Conspiracy Theory is that once a theory has been defined to encompass the conspiracy, that the true believers cut off all questioning of their theory and dismiss any contradictory evidence as being part of the conspiracy. What began with legitimate questioning now completes by closing off all questioning.

When broken down in such a way, it seems understandable how one can fall victim to believe these ideas. Each step along the way is a small one, and one that any person might make. It’s only the combination of so many that lead to the results discussed here.