Why "conspiracy theory" rhetoric is unproductive
I've found Charlie Skelton's Bilderberg coverage a bit overloaded with cutesy anecdotes, but this is a really good point:
In 2008, when George Osborne, as a private individual, hangs out in Corfu with a Russian oligarch (Oleg Deripaska), Nat Rothschild and Peter Mandelson, the British press has a field day with the gossip – Mandelson "dripping poison" about Osborne, and allegations that Osborne was grubbing around for party funds.
But in 2011, when Osborne spends four days, in his official role as chancellor of the exchequer, cooped up with Lord Mandelson, a Russian oligarch (Alexei Mordashov), and the former vice-chairman of Rothschild Europe (Franco Bernabè) – along with the president of the World Bank, the president of the European Central Bank, the Greek minister of finance, the queen of Spain, the chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, the governor of the Belgium National Bank, the chairman of Goldman Sachs International, and the chief executive of Marks and Spencer …
This isn't news.
Exactly. The reason that it does actually make sense to pay attention to these things is that the individuals who attend them are the sort of people who you would be interested in if they were just meeting up to play badminton together. The category error made by both the people who do the larf-o-larf thing about "maybe the Bilderberg group rules the world LOL!" and the people who fixate on it[1] is to think about the group itself, rather than the underlying structure of relationships and institutional power. "The Bilderberg Group" is just an administrative convenience.
[1] Although frankly there is an asymmetry here - I have never actually met or heard of anyone who holds the naive "Bilderberg is the secret world government" view (maybe Alex Jones), while people who use it as a straw man while holding an opposite view just as ridiculous are all over the place. When you think about it, the word "just" in "it's just a dinner club for rich and powerful people" is having to do a hell of a lot of work.
Or even shorter: If it's not important, why do they do it?
ReplyDeleteThese are busy people, you know.
Isn't the issue here that The Man In The Street assumes that everyone of any importance is *already* mates with everyone else of any importance? Which, although obviously false, is also obviously comprehensible if you live in a sphere where Jordan, David Cameron and Andrew Marr are all just 'people from the telly you've no chance of meeting in real life'.
ReplyDeleteTBH, although Oxbridge obviously helped, the only thing which completely cured me of this delusion was watching people who I thought were quite important fawning like gothy fanbois whenever someone *they* thought was important RT'd them on Twitter (blogged about them, etc).
Did you go to Cambridge as well as Oxford?
ReplyDeleteMaybe he's a Boniface man, or maybe Fernham College now accept women.
ReplyDeleteHold on, hold on: Jordan and Cameron and Marr hang out together? Do the Bilderbergers know about this!?
ReplyDeleteIn political science the difference between the politics of governance and the politics of consent is a given, and in practice two different groups of people do these things, with only a few people doing both things. And it's assumed that some of the things done to gain consent will never be realized in governance.
ReplyDeleteAnd you also have a very large number of liberal heavies (and also conservatives) arguing that direct democracy is a very bad thing and that public opinion should have essentially no influence on actual policy, but should just select elite rulers. Lippman, Popper, Hayek and the neoliberals (per Mirowski), Strauss and the neocons, Daniel Bell and Edward Shils and the technocrats, and who did I forget? It's liberal dogma. The whole argument for the Federal Reserve System is to protect financial policy from democratic politics.
Thus, being a political insider always involves knowing that "What he said was X, but what he meant was Y".
But most people are outsiders, and every once in awhile they find out that they're lives have been ruined because everyone's been lying to them for ten years. And they're not good sports about it.
So anyway, the exotic conspiracy theories are usually crap, but in a democratic society, anyone who takes what anyone says at face value is a chump and a likely victim. And everyone in the biz knows this. Especially (above all, more than anyone else) the people who ridicule conspiracy theorists, who are normally insiders who have their stake in the insider games.
A lot of the anti-conspiracy theory message is "Sit down and shut up. You don't understand, you'll never understand, trust us!"
I'm an admirer of the original conspiratists, American Populists. As far as I can tell they were mostly right. There was a deliberately deflationary policy which hurt them, the tariffs were rigged against them, the rail monopolies were milking them, the milling monopolies were milking them, and the federal and state governments were mostly collaborating.
One point that comes up, though, is that maybe this was a good thing. By squeezing as much capital as possible out of agriculture (a major source of foreign exchange) the US was able to industrialize without becoming an agricultural colony of Britain.
But this isn't a refutation of the conspiracy theory, it's a justification of the conspiracy. Sometimes denying that something is happening amounts to supporting it.
And everyone in the biz knows this. Especially (above all, more than anyone else) the people who ridicule conspiracy theorists, who are normally insiders who have their stake in the insider games.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that a fair few journalists are the exception to this. And possibly quite a few academics.
Maybe some academics. But here in the US, most journalists are committed to the insider game. It's often sort of a stupid insider game, closer to Hollywood and People Magazine than to the Council on Foreign Relations, but insiderism is pretty dominant.
ReplyDeleteA slightly more developed argument: http://trollblog.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/if-youre-not-a-conspiracy-theorist-some-of-the-time-youre-a-sucker/
ReplyDeleteI'd agree that most journalists want to be insiders, and often like to pretend that they are. I'm not convinced that's the same thing, though.
ReplyDeleteActually, one of the infinite number of problems the Democratic Party has is a large population of pseudo-insiders, the insider or wonk demographic. They identify with the real insiders and wonks against the ignorant party base, and for that reason can be suckered into accepting anything the real insiders want to do.
ReplyDeleteParty members have to contend with the party apparatus at the same time that the party apparatus contends with the other party, but party members who personally identify with the party apparatus are putty in the party's hands and always lose these contentions. The squeaky wheel etc. So the most sophisticated Democrats, the wannabe pros, are the biggest suckers.
Yeah I'd agree with that, but I'd also extend it to say the journalists who write about politics in Washington. Or somebody like Alex Bloomberg from Planet Money (NPR thing).
ReplyDeletePerhaps this interview with Chip Berlet would be helpful?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S_rtdtQvu0
That politicians lie to the public is not quite a conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I can tell, the architects of the Iraq war did not secretly discuss which statements were for public consumption and what their actual beliefs and plans were.
The architects who planned the Iraq War knew well in advance of the fact that they were going to invade Iraq, probably before 9/11 and before Bush was even elected. People like PNAC were openly proposing this, but no candidate or public official associated himself with PNAC's plan. Instead they made a large number of statements about the decision-making process which were inconsistent with the fact that the decision had already been made.
ReplyDeleteIf that isn't a conspiracy, what is? Sure, "as far as you can tell" they didn't engage in and secret discussions. That's what "secret discussions" means.
The words "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory" have been so misused as pejoratives ha ha ha that people can't recognize a conspiracy when it bites them in the ass.
CONSPIRACIES ARE VERY COMMON IN HISTORY AND ARE A NORMAL PART OF POLITICAL LIFE. Sort of like wars, and graft, and slander, and lies. None of these are intrinsically thing, but none of them are in any sense strange or improbable, and suggesting that they've happened is not a wild and crazy thing to do.
"intrinsically good things"
ReplyDeleteI mean quite late in the process, say, 3/2003, there were statements about how the Iraqis would greet the liberators with open arms and magically form a peaceful democracy. As far as I can tell, Wolfowitz believed stuff like this, while others thought this was so obviously lies for public consumption, they didn't bother to tell him. On the opposite extreme, it looks to me like Rumsfeld did not know that there was going to be a long-term presence, either occupation or nation-building. He would have been happy to break the government and walk away from chaos, but was unaware that others weren't planning on this.
ReplyDeleteSo your argument is that it couldn't have been a conspiracy because:
ReplyDelete1) it didn't go according to plan?
2) They may have believed some of the stuff that they peddled to the public?
I think that there were probably hierarchies in terms of who knew what, who was really making the decisions, and who believed what at what time, so that some people were really in on the conspiracy and who weren't.
ReplyDeleteI cannot believe that anyone seriously believed the WMD / al Qaeda story. I think that the key argument and only necessary in the decision was "We already knew in 2000 that we were going to have to take Saddam down, and now is the time to do it." ("Have to" is just they way they packaged it, of course.)
Alterman has written about Presidential lying, and basically says that it's unavoidable. Sissela Bok says something like that. The US may have gone into WWII too late rather than too early, but even so, Roosevelt's path to war was a bit devious. You can say that and still admire Roosevelt enormously.
One of the problems is that it isn't really a conspiracy unless it's wrong, wrong, wrong! Secrecy and collusion are necessary, and probably deception, but they aren't really sufficient without serious wrongness.
At worst we end up with a steep double standards, where whatever the authorities does is OK because it's necessary, and any suggestion that conspiracy was involved is ridiculous and insane, not because the elements of conspiracy weren't there, but because either a.) the thing done was right or b.) the people making the charge do not deserve a hearing and should just shut up.
All this is expressed in terms of skepticism and the rules of evidence and nitpicking about detail and moral preaching about discursive charity and psychiatric speculation about insanity, but the real deciders are "You have to give the authorities the benefit of the doubt" and "People like that don't deserve a hearing".
To go on, not that anyone cares, talking about conspiracy theories is like breaking Congressional courtesy. What you say is "the honorable Senator from the great state of Mississippi". You don't say "the murderous reptile from that third world shithole down there".
ReplyDeleteIn the same way, knowing full well that everyone lies a little and some people lie all the time, you let people know that you know that, but you don't start screaming about the lies. It makes doing business impossible. If you're allowed to bring the 500 lb conspiracy gorilla into the room, everything changes and the gloves are off. It amounts to saying "This isn't a normal everyday conspiracy. It's too big and evil to ignore". And this is why that gorilla is never seen in polite company.
To go further, not that anyone cares, talking about conspiracies is a sort of liberal-pluralist-secular version of lese majesty.
In a monarchy you cannot insult the monarch, who is the fiction holding everything together. In a secular liberal pluralist processual democracy, the fiction is that all players re playing in good faith. You don't insult the king, and you don't insult the process.
Two thoughts.
ReplyDelete1. The Corfu meeting looked like more of a good time leisure activity. Bilderberg on the other hand looks like a business meeting or conference, not too different from events that lots of plebes have attended, albeit with posher facilities and food.
2. The Corfu thing was a tiny gathering, arguably far more exclusive than Bilderberg-type events. I think that inclines people to think it's a venue for making a particular shady deal involving the attendees.
Events like Bilderberg are so big, and attendees represent such a range of interests, that it seems less likely that the meeting will be focused in the same way. It's probably assumed that attendees might be cutting side deals and making connections, but in much the same way that might happen at a trade show or society do.
As a practical matter, Bilderberg doesn't seem much different than, say, Davos. Just with more privacy (or secrecy, if you prefer). But even with Davos' media coverage, VIPs could still gather in private there and "scheme". Yet Davos doesn't seem to feature to the same degree in conspiracy theories.