The Truth Is Out There?
I have written pretty often over the years about conspiracies and conspiracy theorists and all that comes with them. (I know, bad form to not have hyperlinks, but as I write this I’m curating and don’t have anything at hand; I’m sure I’ll end up republishing something as I come across it going through my archives.)
There are some problems that I haven’t really talked about much, though, and that we don’t really talk about much, related to conspiracies and reality and abuses of power. On social media, a friend wrote:
“At what point will society treat conspiracy theorists for the mental illnesses they clearly have??”
This provoked a lot of thought, from multiple directions…and as usual, the direction my thoughts came from are a little different from any of the mainstream pro or con, and I thought it was worth discussing at length.
The first direction of my thought is that there are some issues with conspiracy theory that we don’t talk about enough. The biggest is that some events originally written off as conspiracy theory have proven true over the years: government mind-control programs; cover-ups of UFO encounters; poor black men given deadly diseases and left untreated for observation by the government without their knowledge or consent; the trading of arms to designated terrorist nations in exchange for hostages through a group of middlemen who were also in the middle of an ongoing coup attempt in central America…just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, right?
If we’re going to look down our nose and pooh-pooh conspiracy theorists – and quite often that’s the only reasonable response – we have to take a hard look at that reality. Otherwise, to whatever extent any of us knee-jerk a dismissive response to a conspiracy theory simply because it sounds implausible or violates our biases, we are vulnerable to manipulation, disinformation, and deceit – if in no other way than by omission.
So before we talk about how to apply our critical thinking skills to trying to get a handle on when something over the top might not be as far over as you think, let’s take a quick look at a few “wild conspiracy theories” that turned out to be anything but.
The Bad News
We all love to either laugh off a “crazy conspiracy theory” or dive right into it just to see how crazy it is, but sometimes it turns out things aren’t so crazy as they seemed on the surface. Here are a few prominent examples; I’ve included the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, and links, for each. All of the links should be live as well; as is the case with all wiki footnotes, they’ll link to a reference at the bottom of the main page, and you can go check it out yourself.
COINTELPRO – “COINTELPRO (syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) (1956–1971) was a series of covert and illegal[1][2] projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations.[3][4] FBI records show COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals the FBI deemed subversive,[5] including feminist organizations,[6] the Communist Party USA,[7] anti–Vietnam War organizers, activists of the civil rights movement or Black Power movement (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr., the Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party), environmentalist and animal rights organizations, the American Indian Movement (AIM), independence movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left, and unrelated groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.[8]” It should be more than mildly startling and a little terrifying that, as the article notes with appropriate references, the techniques deployed during the official COINTELPRO period which ended in 1971 are still in use, even though they were largely deemed illegal as hell.
Project MKUltra – CIA doses people with LSD without their knowledge, and more fun. “Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) is the code name given to a program of experiments on human subjects that were designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of which were illegal.[1][2][3] Experiments on humans were intended to develop procedures and identify drugs such as LSD to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. The project was organized through the Office of Scientific Intelligence of the CIA and coordinated with the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories.[4] Other code names for drug-related experiments were Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke.[5][6]” (I’ve long had a low-key suspicion my dad was involved in this as a subject while a young Marine in the early 60’s, but he wouldn’t have said either way, if a) he was and b) he knew about it. He took his oaths pretty seriously.)
Then there’s the Tuskegee Experiment: “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male[1][2][3] (informally referred to as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment,” the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American Male,” the “U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee,” or the “Tuskegee Experiment”) was an ethically abusive study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).[4][5] The purpose of this study was to observe the natural history of untreated syphilis. Although the African-American men who participated in the study were told that they were receiving free health care from the federal government of the United States, they were not.[6]” In short, they gave a bunch of black guys syphilis and let ’em run around with it for four decades, living their lives, and told them only that they were getting free government health care. Not only are the obvious problem obvious, but y’all wonder why poor black people don’t trust the government and medicaid. Literally sold these guys a story they were getting free health care from Uncle Sam, and not only used them as lab rats but sent them out into the world to infect others, all without knowing it. Our government did that.
These are all real things that really happened, and every one of them was dismissed for years as a wild-eyed conspiracy theory, something that simply could not be happening and no reasonable person would believe.
And yet…
But Wait, There’s More!
It goes on and on, right? You’ve got the Edith Wilson presidency, in which the wife of the President – who married him after he was elected as a widower, mind you – assumed the duties of his office without the slightest hint of or attempt at public consent or approval, after president Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke in October of 1919. Between then and January 1921, his wife – unelected, unannounced, unacknowledged, and with all the bravery and spirit and not a jot or tittle of legal or moral authority – assumed the duties of the presidency.
Then there’s the cancer-causing properties of cigarettes. Most folks know that in the mid-20th century before official science linking lung cancer and tobacco use was established the tobacco industry did such insane things as hiring doctors to sell cigarettes. What many don’t know is that even into the late 1970’s – over a decade after the US Surgeon General had established the requirement of a health warning on all cigarette and cigar packaging – international tobacco companies conspired at the highest levels to minimize, hide, and obfuscate the health risks of smoking from the general public for the sake of maintaining their lucrative and addicted market share. I want to note here that I have distinct and reliable memories of some pretty questionable metrics around the “truth.org” anti-smoking ads that the tobacco companies were forced to create after the big class action settlement back in the ’90s. I’m having difficulty finding that information now, and it may be apocryphal, or the problem wasn’t as big as I remembered, or it was one of those jokes that got out of hand. (“Say, these anti-smoking commercials make me want a cig! Hahahah!” “Yeah hahahaha hey wait…”)
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident that started the Vietnam War is particularly interesting because of the way they used a legitimate incident to fabricate a second, more serious one that was then used as a premise to pursue military escalation, eventually leading to lots of dead kids, lots of rich military contractors, and lots of deformed Vietnamese babies (do not google “agent orange birth defects” if you’re not prepared to have nightmares. I’m not linking any relevant content; the hint is enough).
Then there’s the abandoned – thank $DEITY – Operation Northwoods, in which the US government proposed launching “terrorist” attacks against itself and blaming Cuba as a precept for war against that country. Of course the one most of us are most familiar with, the Iran-Contra affair in which the United States Government sold military equipment to sanctioned and open US opponent/critic Iran to fund the radical right-ring insurgent Contras in Nicaragua. Some of that entanglement also provided the pathway for the CIA to fund – whether intentionally or not remains an open question – a significant portion of the incoming crack cocaine in the 1980s, the devastating effects of which are still being felt. Nearly every word of those two sentences is a federal crime. The most instrumental person in those crimes, Oliver North, is now a well-known TV talking head who often tells us what we should think about the military, government, and ethics.
Many poor black people had claimed for years the feds were in on the crack situation and were blown off as…well, crackpots. Turned out they were right. As were the hippies and black radicals of the sixties who were accused of paranoia and fantasy when they told people they were being infiltrated and even directed by outside elements, probably the government.
And that’s not even the biggest fish in the barrel…
The Mother Of All Bullshit
Then we come to what I think of as the Big Daddy of them all, probably because it’s significant in my lifetime: the whole process by which we first sold biological and chemical weapons, fabrication equipment (and I mean entire factories), and even satellite intelligence which they then used to bomb the Kurds…and we then spent two decades destabilizing the region and (again!) inflating the bank accounts of military contractors at the unnecessary cost of hundreds of thousands of lives innocent or otherwise.
This one really fascinates me because we literally had public congressional hearings about it in which we seriously dragged out the receipts for things we sold to Iraq like botulism, anthrax, and a host of other nasties. You have Donald Rumsfeld, who would later become Secretary of Defense, unilaterally lobbying to have Iraq removed from the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring nations in the early 1980’s as a specical envoy on behalf of the Reagan Administration. This allowed MIC profiteers – who in what I’m sure is just a giant coincidence also happened to be among the largest contributors to the political campaigns of Reagan and his allies – to sell various fun bits of weaponry to Iraq under the ruse of being “dual-use,” for instance how you can use Anthrax bacteria for agricultural research. The missile fabrication and guidance systems as well as the military intelligence they used to deliver their research projects to the Kurds also had, I imagine, some just barely plausible “other” application.
Now keep in mind this is all happening while we’re also equipping the Iranians, who are at war with the Iraqis and between whom the Kurds are largely stuck, with the equipment to prosecute their war against Iraq. We literally sold the weapons to both sides bumping up against the Iran-Contra scandal mentioned earlier. And that’s not even where it gets craziest.
During the first Gulf War, there was a problem with veterans exhibiting various sorts of symptoms consistent with exposure to biological or chemical agents. There were big ol’ congressional hearings about it, which included a stunning parade of the receipts from our deals with Iraq, some of which continued even after the end of the first Gulf War.
This, we discovered in 1993 during the congressional investigation into what was called “Gulf War Syndrome.” Included in the final report (colloquially called “The Riegle Report” after US Sen. Donald T. Riegle, who chaired the investigation) was a list of nasty little bits of stuff that will curdle your blood if you read it – the very same stuff that we first “suspected” had been “discharged” during Gulf War I, and then we “just knew” that Iraq had, and had used to “gas their own people,” as the precept to the second.
How did we know? It’s like Bill Hicks said, and exactly like that: We looked at the receipts. We sold that stuff to him. That’s how we knew so bad that he had it. We sold it to him, taught him how to use it, taught him how to make more, handed him a big stack of information screaming “THERE’S THE KURDS RIGHT THERE DON’T GO DOING ANYTHING TO THOSE PEOPLE YOU HATE WITH THOSE DEADLY FARM RESEARCH PROJECTS WE GAVE YOU” and then he did and we said “how dare you gas your own people you bastard” and killed him.
Not the story you were probably taught in school, if you’re young enough for this to have been history for you and not ongoing reality.
So one of the genuine problems with conspiracy theories is sometimes they turn out to be legit, and this just feeds the crazier stuff, and you never get to the juicy center of anything until it’s too late.
Maybe…that’s not an accident?
Meta-Conspiracy
I want to be clear at the outset that I’m not asserting anything here, just making some observations. Let I have to deal with the comment section going “hur hur you think there’s a conspirserary.”
But, consider.
The Bigfoots and Loch Ness Monsters, the alien abductions and crop circles, the shadowy men on a shadowy planet lurking in the shadows doing shadowy things and who knows what shadowy evil lurks in their shadowy hearts why The Shadow knows…do you ever wonder how that stuff helps invalidate and discredit legitimate information, like some of the things we talked about earlier?
Because when you lump “giving black people free syphilis” and “literally selling weapons to both sides of a war and illegally in both cases at that” in with the chupacabra and the Jersey Devil, it becomes pretty easy to dismiss that stuff, doesn’t it? People right now think the coronavirus is a conspiracy. Most people – especially most white people – don’t realize that whole “CIA created the crack epidemic” thing is legit and proven, and at least one journalist was probably murdered for proving it.
Is it reasonable to assert that there are people out there deliberately keeping us distracted with nonsense and goofiness to both discredit genuine and well-founded concerns about abuses of power and to occupy our minds and keep us distracted from the “real enemy?” Probably not; there’s no evidence of it except the results. And, as one of my heroes George Carlin pointed out, it doesn’t require a formal, organized, overt conspiracy for people of like interests, like backgrounds, like social connections, and so forth to come to similar conclusions about the best way to protect those interests at the expense of others.
But isn’t it kind of funny we still think of the FBI infiltrating student groups, alien butt probes, the burning of the Koresh compound, Bigfoot, the MOVE bombing, Batboy, and the murder of Fred Hampton all in the same kind of general basket?
More to the point, isn’t it kind of funny that we don’t notice this more, talk about it more? And that’s what brings us to the last part of this conversation
How Can You Know?
We’re left then with one fundamental and disturbing question: for any given bit of information, how can we know what the truth really is?
Fortunately, although education has suffered greatly in the US over the last forty years (and maybe that’s a conspiracy too!), we still have the tools at hand to somewhat reliably weed our way through some of this stuff. Here are a few points for you to consider when weighing the evidence on any given questionable proposition:
- Is there objectively verifiable proof? – one way or the other, what are the facts as best as you can determine them?
- Have you checked your biases? – the number one place you can stop a bad or baseless theory in its tracks is with you not repeating it. Ask yourself why you want to support or oppose a given proposition. That’s not to say having a bias is bad; everyone does, whether they’re aware of it and honest about it or not. The point isn’t to “make sure you don’t have a bias.” The point is to make sure you’re identifying your biases and factoring them honestly in your critical thinking processes, and that very much includes making sure you apply the same degree of skepticism and analysis to things you like hearing as you do to things you don’t.
- “Follow the money.” – don’t necessarily take this literally, or even as just a basic metaphor. Consider who benefits and who gets hurt if you do or don’t believe something. Consider whether anyone – a group, individual, vested interest – is pressuring you to feel one way or the other about it. Understand what people’s interests are, and what your own are, so you can understand the potential motivations for disinformation
- Don’t get distracted. – consider that in any given situation, what you’re seeing as the dominant narrative or focus may be taking attention away from something that actually deserves that level of attention and isn’t getting it.
- Common sense – the aphorisms all apply: if it sounds too good to be true it probably is, be wary of appeals to irrelevant biases like sex appeal or national pride or identity in an ethic, sexual, gender, religious, age, or other demographic
- Get the tools! – Especially if you’re under 40 or so in the US, you probably didn’t get all the tools you need for good, clear evaluation of information sources in high school, and maybe even in college if you didn’t take a lot of communication-related courses.
One of the very best contemporary tools I can recommend is Robert Cialdini’s “Influence.” You should see an affiliate link (meaning I get a little bit if you order through that link) near this paragraph to the 6th edition on Amazon; at the time of this writing that edition is planned for release in a few weeks – the first substantial update since 5e in 2008 – but it’s not yet on the market. The previous edition was an excellent book used as a text for a class I took on social persuasion and influence in 2012, and it’s really fascinating – and more than a little scary sometimes – not only how susceptible we can be to compliance-gaining tactics, but how that remains true even when we know better. Again, you end up at that mirror. Cialdini’s “Influence” is a widely known and applied set of tools in the world of advertisers, marketers, MBAs, behavioral psychologists, sociologists, and more, and when you understand those tools and how they’re applied, you can see them everywhere. Many of us don’t even know we’re doing it when we are.
There are many resources to help develop your critical thinking and analytical skills out there, but for a single-book, reasonably easy to read and understand, that will rattle your preconceptions and get you thinking hard about what you’re doing, I can’t recommend anything more highly.
Conclusion
In the end there can be no question that media and information literacy, including the ability to parse through multiple meta-layers of disinformation and misinformation, will be critical life skills. Not all “propaganda” has a malicious motive; not all causes relying on noble motivations have noble motives.
That last part starts getting, again, into the question of the ongoing real-time, high-speed, self-aware evolution of the species to which I frequently refer in my writing and shows. For most of our history we’ve habitually reduced key questions to binary propositions – yes or no, black or white, up or down.
For the last few hundred years we’ve set the stage through philosophy and other endeavors for the elevation, wholesale, of the nature of our thinking to encompass a more spectral, multi-dimensional approach that is more in tune with the way the universe really functions, including understanding ideas like “place” and “purpose” in more effective and meaningful ways. I believe the near future of the species includes coming to real terms with concepts like compromise – what sort of behavior outside the norm are we willing to tolerate from our heroes, for example? Compare and contrast the cases of Gary Glitter and Jimmy Page and ask why one man has a career, and the other doesn’t, and whether that’s ethically legitimate. Don’t forget to get Lori’s perspective on the question.
Difficult and thorny questions that have a chance of not really leaving us feeling great no matter which way we go. But that’s what we’ve been equipping ourselves to handle for the last umpteen decades with literature and art and poetry and philosophy and the considerations of the Questions of the Ages.
Now we go from studying all this philosophy to truly applying it, so hitch up your getalong and dig in, kids, because it’s going to be a bumpy, confusing, and sometimes scary ride, but when it’s over you’ll be coming out into a much brighter world.