 With
the anniversary of 9/11 looming, there has been a recent resurgence of
attention given to so-called 'conspiracy theories' -- e.g. that 9/11
was a neocon plot, that the recent 'terrorist busts' in the UK, US and
Canada were scripted and hyped by Homeland Security to make the
authorities look less incompetent, that the Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004
presidential votes (and hence the election results) were rigged, that
Paul Wellstone's plane crash was an assassination, that the government
is using chemtrails to try to mitigate global warming, that the most
recent oil crisis was deliberately precipitated to reduce public
resistance to environmentally disastrous domestic drilling activity,
and so on.
Conspiracies, and conspiracy theories, can only thrive in complex
situations -- where all of the relevant information is not only
undisclosed but unknowable (there is just too much of it to capture),
and where analysis and causality and predictability break down because
there are just too many variables to consider, and the relationships
between them too complex and multivariate to completely fathom. When
your phone breaks down, there are a finite number of possible causes,
and you can 'systematically' go through them, find the cause(s) and
rectify the problem. The mystery is solved. But when ecological or
social systems break down, or function in mysterious ways, we often never
understand why, or what to do to 'solve' the problem. In fact, a
'solution' may be impossible -- we may have to settle for ways to cope
with the problem's consequences.
Reader Holly Hartman
suggested to me that this 'unanalyzable, unsolvable' feature of complex
system 'failures' might actually encourage exploitation by opportunists for personal advantage, that one possible 'emergent behaviour' in complex adaptive systems is conspiracy,
because the conspiracy is impossible to prove with any degree of
certainty. If we appreciate that, in today's world, no one is really
in control, then if someone can conspire effectively to do something
really diabolical, there will be a natural inclination among the public
to believe they didn't do it, that they couldn't
have done it, that 'no one could have pulled that off' -- because it's
just too complex. Could Bush really have conspired with Bin Laden
without anyone blowing the
whistle? Could two US elections be stolen without anyone behind the
scenes, and without anyone in the media, coming up with and revealing
the smoking gun evidence of the conspiracy? Our skepticism causes us to
believe the answer is no. But this
very human reluctance to believe that such monumental conspiracies are
possible paradoxically increases both the likelihood of them
succeeding, and the likelihood that extremists will try to orchestrate
them.
Holly also suggested that really dysfunctional
behaviours like our North American propensity to work longer and harder
every year (happy Labour Day, everyone!) could also be an emergent quality
of modern complex political and economic systems, a 'conspiracy' to
keep us so busy and distracted we don't have time to realize what is
really happening in this world, how we're being exploited, and what to
do about it. In a sense, our co-dependency with our exploiters, and
specifically our addiction to consumption and debt brought about by the
existing systems serve the rich power elite very well, and could be
said, in Darwinian terms, to be selected for, and self-perpetuate. As
Holly puts it:
The abusive
overwork standards of today's American free enterprise system keep our
vitality so low that it reduces the likelihood of an uprising...I
believe we collectively are the victims of grand sweeps of
socioeconomic forces which are not appreciably
alterable by grass roots efforts...The more I see why the world really
works the way it does, the less empowered I feel to do anything about
it.
That's not to say the rich and powerful are deliberately, consciously conspiring
to keep us off balance, exhausted, distracted and addicted. But because
that situation serves to reinforce the status quo and is not discouraged, it has emerged as a self-reinforcing quality of our modern wage-slave economic system.
So
not only is conspiracy encouraged and more likely to succeed because of
our instinctive skepticism of its possibility, but complex system
inertia and learned helplessness come into play reducing both our awareness of situations that conspire (often circumstantially, not deliberately) against our collective interest, and our time and energy to try to change those situations.
Like the two-income trap,
the consequence is a vicious cycle in which exploiters and exploited
dance together complicitly and co-dependently. The exploiters are
encouraged and emboldened to conspire against us for their personal
advantage, and the exploited believe, and want to believe,
that there is no conspiracy, that everything is OK, that things are the
only way they can be, and that there is nothing they can do to change
it anyway.
The front line of those seeking self-liberation from
this vicious cycle are the so-called Truth Movements, exemplified by
the well-established, feisty, diverse and activist 9/11 Truth Movement.
This movement has three main factions: (a) believers that the Bush
Administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, (b) believers that the
Bush Administration had foreknowledge of and deliberately allowed the
9/11 attacks to occur, and (c) believers that the Bush Administration
was guilty of staggering and catastrophic negligence in failing to act
to prevent the 9/11 attacks, and has since frantically tried to cover
up evidence of that negligence (out of fear that public fury if the
truth were discovered could actually bring down the government, perhaps
in a revolution rather than 'democratically').
These three
factions allege three different 'flavours' of conspiracy: (a) active
conspiracy, (b) complicit conspiracy, and (c) cover-up conspiracy.
What's interesting to me is that, while I'm more inclined to believe
(b) than (a), and (c) than (b), several writers,
especially among conservative bloggers, seem to find (c) even more
"outrageous" than (a) or (b)? What are we to make of this? Is this a
knee-jerk reaction of adherents to the strict-father morality frame
that being weak is worse than being wrong?
My take-aways, and messages to think about as yet another anniversary of 9/11 nears:
- We
need to be alert to the possibility that our skepticism about
conspiracies actually plays right into the hands of conspirators
(remember Watergate?), and maybe we need to become a bit skeptical
about our own skepticism; and
- We need to support Truth
Movements, even though they include some wacky elements -- as a result
of the near-complete absence of investigative reporting among the
mainstream media, it is only these movements, and the die-hards in the
indymedia, that discourage the exploiters from exploiting us even more
abusively, and work relentlessly to bring true conspiracies to light
and their perpetrators to justice.
- Corporatist oligopolies,
which are nothing less than global conspiracies to control and distort
markets in the interest of power elites and against the interest of
everyone else, are overt, endemic and in today's corrupt and
'deregulated' political environment almost unchallenged -- their
success emboldens and even legitimizes other, more dangerous and
diabolical conspiracies, and we must take action to end them.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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