A Reflection on Humans, Conspiracy, and Conspiracy Theories:

A few obvious truths about humans

• Human beings¹ are (undeniably, even notoriously) capable of conspiring.
• Human beings are not reluctant to put that capacity to use when something significant is at stake—and any rise in significance will bring about a directly proportionate reduction in their reluctance.
• The most significant somethings (and therefore by definition those most worth conspiring over) are generally reducible to Power and Money.

Trusting People (in both senses)

I am not an unusually mistrustful person. Just your average, garden variety, tendentially mistrustful person. Just someone who’s been alive for a long time and has been paying occasional attention to what passes for normal human behavior under a variety of conditions. 

But enough about me … here’s a little quiz to determine something about how trusting (or mistrustful) you are – and possibly help establish a rough baseline for the measurement and interpretation of the phenomenon of Trust among Humans. On the basis of your responses to the following set of questions, you will be assigned a score on the TMS, or “Trusting–Mistrusting Scale” (the two extremes of which are represented by the profile types: Gullible Imbecile and Cringing Paranoic): 

1. Imagine a random anonymous person… 

…well, ok, not truly random – let’s exclude potential saints, demonstrably unredeemable villains and textbook psychopaths … 

So (given that exclusion), imagine a random, anonymous, average person who  finds themself in a situation where by lying … and with a near zero chance of being found out, they stand to gain, say, $3,000. To what degree would you trust this person not to lie? What probability (in percentage points) would you assign to the likelihood that they will lie and take the money?”

2. What if the amount in question were $1 million? Again, this person – “Our Subject” – can be reasonably sure they’re not going to be discovered or punished – they just have to lie – to make up or misrepresent certain information. Again, please quantify (in percentage points) your estimation of the probability that they would lie.

3. What if Our Subject were not an average anonymous individual, but rather a large anonymous corporation², faced with an analogous opportunity, but this time standing to make, not a million, not hundreds of millions, not even billions, but hundreds of billions of dollars – and with it, the worldly power that ALL THAT MONEY would command. Again, just by lying. And with:

• Again, little chance of being caught.
• Power and influence – or connections to power and  influence – sufficient to effectively control, manipulate or at least ‘guide’ government regulations, media coverage and, hence, public opinion.
• The legal guarantee (historically – and repeatedly – demonstrated) that even in the case they were investigated and found in court to have lied, and broken laws, any fine they could be forced to pay would simply be written off as the cost of doing business. The vast majority of their (vast) profits would be retained. And their business continued, as usual. Forever. Ok, same question: how far would you trust them? I.e. what degree of probability (in percentage points) would you assign to their potential malfeasance?

4. Review your answers to be sure they accurately reflect your views on human nature. Now, in a simple, succinct sentence make an honest judgment regarding what an intelligent objective outside (i.e. alien) observer would infer about Trust Among Humans.

Reflection on the “Lunatic Fringe”:

Many , probably most, groups – when they reach a certain size (whether mainstream or radical, traditional or alternative, conservative or progressive), and certainly Society as a Whole, comprise various subgroups, one of which will, inevitably, be a quite specific and peculiar set of outliers: people who will believe anything. And because they will believe anything, these people (for convenience let’s call them lunatics, and assign to their subgroup the colorful moniker: “thelunatic fringe”) inevitably end up believing a lot of nonsense and falsehoods. And they will also end up, equally unavoidably, believing a great deal other information – dull, true and perfectly valid though it may be.

Conclusion: it is (clearly) a fallacy to conclude that, because a given lunatic believes a lot of nonsense or falsehoods, everything this lunatic believes can ipso facto be categorized as nonsense or falsehood.

Now: it is  (famously and undeniably) true that there exists a lunatic fringe in contemporary American society that:

a. will believe anything, and 

b. is especially attracted to and easily persuaded by controversial, inflammatory and highly implausible accounts of … anything and everything.

But: as it has been unequivocally established (see above) that Human Beings do at times Conspire, and that Conspiracies are, therefore, occasionally Afoot – it is also equally – even symmetrically – fallacious and unjustified to categorize, by default, everyone who perceives, believes and reports that a particular conspiracy is currently afoot as a member of the lunatic fringe.

Furthermore … as Woody Allen observed, being a paranoid lunatic (pathologically unrealistic though that state may be) does not suffice to guarantee that you are not being followed (or, for that matter, persecuted, talked about behind your back, or possibly even CONSPIRED AGAINST).

Notes:

1. Octopuses and some primates are also apparently capable of deceptive behavior and as such should probably be acknowledged, duly condemned and forever mistrusted as potential conspirators. But – to the best of my knowledge – they haven’t, as yet, presented any significant problems for human society, so for the moment I’ll exclude them from my current analysis (and any subsequent theorizing). ↩︎
2. In all fairness, we should probably reconsider our above-stipulated “psychopath exclusion”; In any case you should bear in mind the following caveat: according to renowned forensic psychiatrist Robert Hare– if the typical behaviors of most corporations were analyzed – and subsequently assigned a ‘personality type’ according to the traditional diagnostic criteria in psychiatry – they would be classified as psychopaths. Corporations have an absolute responsibility to (and only to) its shareholders … to make a profit. They bear absolutely no responsibility to the public. I.e. to protect them, to deal fairly or to be honest with them. ↩︎

An old Gary Larson cartoon: