Inquiry Without Atrocity

This is the second part of a two-part piece. Readers can access Part 1 here.

My JFK assassination example in Part 1 might have misled readers into thinking that I am particularly interested in revisiting the evidence on this assassination. In fact, until the relevant government files have all been declassified, I am not. Nevertheless, the past can offer a helpful perspective from which to evaluate the taboos of the present.

In late 1969, for instance, it would have been accurate to describe as a “conspiracy theory” the claim that the FBI and Chicago police conspired to assassinate Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton. This claim neatly fits Douglas and colleagues’ (2017) characterization of conspiracy theories as “explain[ing] important events as secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups.” This claim is particularly conspiratorial since it implies that two powerful US institutions of law enforcement conspired to murder in cold blood a US citizen on US soil without having charged, tried, or convicted him of any crime. This particular conspiracy hypothesis is no longer controversial, however, and is recorded as factual in US government archives.

Incidentally, since I am writing these two “conspiracy theory” pieces shortly before what would have been the 91st birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it is important to note another conspiracy hypothesis that is widely acknowledged as factual. This hypothesis claims that certain enemies of Dr. King surveilled and harassed him, even to the point of trying to blackmail him into committing suicide. Notably, the hypothesis identifies the people responsible for this specific anti-MLK behavior not as "racist Southern yokel illiterates" but rather as (presumably more sophisticated and erudite) agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Again, though, in spite of positing a “secret plot by a powerful and malevolent group,” this conspiracy hypothesis is accurate.

Importantly, the claims about FBI actions against Hampton and King are accurate in a way that calls for attention, reflection, and a push for social change. Having discerned their accuracy, it is socially irresponsible to retreat into unreality by pretending that these claims are silly fantasies by “conspiracy theorists." In other words, refusing to talk or think about these historical facts because of the “conspiracy theory” stigma hanging over them is counterproductive to collective moral progress.

I do not think, incidentally, that the FBI—though quite consistently powerful over the years—is inevitably a malevolent organization filled with nothing but malevolent people. Nor is it necessary to think this in order to believe the evidence that the 1960s FBI helped murder Fred Hampton and harass Martin Luther King. I fully acknowledge that, after 9/11, the FBI—while not without some serious issues—has done a good job of looking less awful than some comparable forces of surveillance and violence funded by US taxpayers. For instance, the FBI was relatively disinclined to support the use of Survive Evade Resist Escape (SERE) school torture to make detainees give false intel reports that bolstered the case for the desired war with Iraq—though they did send FBI agents to participate in the CIA's (torturous) black site program. The taint of FBI participation in the program notwithstanding, those in control of the CIA and the Department of Defense at the time were considerably more enthusiastic about such torture. Relative malevolence fluctuates with time and context.

I also do not think that that the taboo against conspiracy theories is itself a result of a conspiracy. Such a taboo, on the contrary, can be very well-motivated. Consider the infamous QAnon theory, for instance, which has gained disturbing political prestige among Republicans recently. QAnon theory has a very funny yet still quite sinister alien-focused variant that might be called “Alien QAnon.” The irony-free “documentary” Above Majestic is one widely-distributed source for Alien QAnon claims.

Above Majestic asserts, with highly unorthodox standards of deductive and inferential logic, that space aliens have been interacting with human civilizations for millennia, that the reptilian breed of space aliens run most of the governments of the planet, that the vast majority of books and other records in all the planet’s libraries and bookstores are deliberate disinformation, that the reptilian rulers use pedophile rings to sexually molest, terrorize, and murder children in order to draw psychic energy from their agony and blackmail government officials; that they kidnap and abuse people and then age regress them so it seems like no time has passed; that the US government knows about all of this and has been covering it up since aliens first responded to the atomic bomb blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and that President Trump and major sectors of the military and intelligence apparatus are part of an “alliance” valiantly resisting these child-raping reptilians from outer space—with the help of initiatives like Trump’s “space force.” Alien QAnon theory illustrates clearly why conspiracy theories are intellectually and morally taboo and likely to become the brunt of late-night comedy routines and pathologizing psychological investigations.

And yet, in the case of Alien QAnon theory at least, there are a couple of problems with using the term “conspiracy theory” to condemn it. Technically, Alien QAnon theory is a textbook example of positing “secret plots by powerful and malevolent groups.” And yet the term “conspiracy theory”—especially as defined by Douglas and colleagues (2017)—is far too broad in its scope to be sufficiently condemnatory of a theory that is not only conspiratorial but also utterly nonsensical, in violation of the laws of physics, grounded in bizarre and grand-leap-of-logic standards of inference, and, in many particulars, effectively unfalsifiable. I mean, how can you investigate the claim that all the world’s books are deliberate disinformation? It would take months if not years to gather sufficient evidence to corroborate that claim for even one book. Alien QAnon is thus not in the same class as theories like “Oswald didn’t act alone.” It’s not even on the same planet.

Also, Alien QAnon is arguably as much of an “official story theory” as it is a “conspiracy theory” because it encourages its adherents to trust the most powerful elected representative of the world’s most powerful country (i.e. US President Trump and at least two other branches of the US government on his side) as well as large sectors of that country’s military and intelligence community. Generally, claims that bolster the credibility of those so clearly at the pinnacle of power can be classified as official story claims in spirit.

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It would appear, then, that applauding one set of powerful and secretive actors can coexist with casting suspicious aspersions on another set. This should hardly be surprising, as powerful actors and institutions frequently clash with each other both intranationally and internationally. It is unclear why something as natural as suspecting your perceived power rivals of doing bad things should be considered intellectually and morally beyond the pale—unless you imagine your rivals being controlled by time-regressing child-raping reptilian space aliens.

Let’s grant that perhaps there is some utility in considering conspiracy theories taboo on the basis of what so many of them tend to be like, and thus Alien QAnon should be considered prototypical of the “conspiracy theory” genre for the sake of having a pejorative broad brush. To make that taboo more reasonable, though, the criteria-implying definition of “conspiracy theory” should change to incorporate more of the objectionable features of that and similar theories. Definitional criteria should focus specifically on the shabby processes of inquiry, gross illogic, and physical impossibility associated with the dumbest conspiracy theories like Alien QAnon, rather than simply the fantastical or politically ill-motivated content of the theories themselves. Every once in a while—albeit rarely—fantastical and politically ill-motivated claims can be bolstered by sound evidence and argument.

Revising the definition of “conspiracy theory” would mean no longer extending its implied taboo against more reasonable-but-probably-wrong conspiracy hypotheses (like Oswald didn’t act alone) and certainly not reasonable-and-right ones (like that FBI/Chicago police assassinated Fred Hampton, the FBI surveilled and harassed MLK, MKULTRA happened, Watergate and Abu Ghraib went right to the top, etc). Alternatively, we can leave the definition of conspiracy theory in the ballpark of Douglas and colleagues’ broad and content-based definition but eschew the implied pejorative tone.

In other words, I’m saying there’s a choice between (A) defining “conspiracy theory” broadly and on the basis of content (as per Douglas and colleagues) and thus letting it be valence-neutral (not pejorative), or (B) defining it more narrowly and with attention to inquiry process so as to better justify using it pejoratively. What doesn’t make sense—and arguably harms norms of public discourse and inquiry—is to simultaneously define it broadly and on the basis of content, and also make it pejorative.

Admittedly, taking my advice might open up the so-called “Overton window” and allow a lot more claims to be considered tentatively taboo-free pending reasonable processes of evidence-gathering and inferential and deductive logic in defense of them. I have a hard time seeing why this would be a bad thing, though. Some of the claims newly unencumbered by taboos might be catastrophically inflammatory or horrifically prejudiced or both, but such claims are very unlikely to gather sound evidence for them. I imagine a process taboo (stigmatizing bad arguments and lousy inferences from available evidence) would be considerably more effective than a content taboo for preventing these claims from gaining mainstream traction.

Content taboos, to the extent they’re respected, narrow mainstream discourse down conventional channels acceptable to power, and this is bad enough. Such taboos are also more likely to arouse resistance by activating suspicions (“why can’t we just review all the evidence together, hmm?”) and thus invite those with the most dubious beliefs to feel morally heroic about persisting in them against the will of “the reptilian liberal media overlords,” etc.

This encourages the creation of whole subcultures of nonsense that become very difficult to be re-engaged by the reality-based community. A process taboo, in contrast, could guide discourse down better paths with considerably less cost to the free-flowing ecological diversity of ideas and dialogue-across-viewpoints that are essential both for healthy processes of truth-discernment and for effectively holding power accountable to that truth.