Documented conspiracies
The ones known from courts, documents and confessions.
Which conspiracies are documented by courts and records, and how were they proven, unlike a conspiracy theory?
Hidden history
Conspiracies, examined
Conspiracy theories, examined rather than preached or sneered at: who first claimed it, what is documented, and where the claim outruns the evidence. Real conspiracies exist and are known from documents and courts.
What is documented, and what is not
Ask the OracleHow do I tell a documented conspiracy from a conspiracy theory?
The art, in brief
Real conspiracies exist. Officials, agencies and companies have agreed in secret to break the law or deceive the public, and they are known because someone talked, a file was released or a court heard the evidence. A conspiracy theory is something else: a claim of a hidden plot that lacks that kind of proof, and often one framed so that no finding could ever count against it. The work of this art is telling the two apart, one claim at a time.
The house examines a theory and does not preach it or mock it. It asks who first made the claim and when, what the records show, and where the claim goes past them. It also looks for the true thing that often lies beneath: a real wrong, a broken trust, a wish for a painful event to make sense. It presents no claim against a people, a faith or a family as true, and nothing on this shelf is a reason to refuse medical care.
The teaching
As the craft of weighing a claim against the record teaches it.
The conspiracy theory of society
Karl Popper, who gave the phrase conspiracy theory its critical sense, uses it for a whole way of seeing the world. It is the view that whatever happens in a society, above all the things people dislike, war, poverty, unemployment and shortage, happens because some powerful person or group designed it so, and that to explain an event is to find out who wanted it and who planned it. For Popper it is an old belief in new clothes. Homer's listeners pictured the gods plotting on Olympus while the war ran its course on the plain below Troy; when the gods were set aside, powerful men and hidden groups were put in their place.
Popper does not deny that conspiracies happen. He holds that they are common, and that few of them succeed as their makers intended, because every act in a society meets the acts of many others. His homely example is a buyer who badly wants a house in a certain district: simply by coming to the market as a buyer, he raises the price of houses there, which is the last thing he wants. Much of what happens in a society is of this kind, the unintended sum of many people's intended acts, and tracing such sums is, for Popper, the main work of the study of society.
Three kinds of explanation
On Popper's ground the art builds its first tool. For any event that seems to cry out for a plot, three kinds of explanation are weighed side by side. There is accident: chance, error, muddle, the failure of a part or of a person. There is the unplanned sum: many people each pursuing their own ends, out of habit, interest or fear, until a result appears that none of them chose, as a crowd crushes at a gate or a market falls. And there is the plan: a few people agreeing in secret to bring a thing about.
All three are real, and the third is not ruled out because the other two are commoner. The art asks only that a plan be shown as the others are, by the record, and not assumed because it makes the better story. A great loss pulls the mind toward the plan, since a plain cause feels too small for it; that pull, taught on Why theories take hold, is a reason to weigh the three with special care while grief is fresh.
The shape of a real plot
Real conspiracies have a recognisable shape, and it is the shape of human beings working together under strain. They are kept by small circles, for a definite aim, over a limited time. They leave paper, because no organisation can spend money, give orders or keep people quiet without records. They make mistakes. And they come apart, through a conscience, a quarrel, a lost file, a lawsuit or a reporter, which is how they come to be known at all.
The plot of a conspiracy theory has the opposite shape. It is vast, taking in governments, sciences and professions across rival countries; it runs for generations; it leaves no trace that can be found; and it never fails, while its clues are visible only to those who already believe. The difference in shape is itself a piece of evidence. Cases that show the first shape on paper, from the Tuskegee study to the tobacco companies' files, are taught on Documented conspiracies.
The paranoid style
Richard Hofstadter drew the art's portrait of a way of seeing, which he called the paranoid style, using the word for a manner of mind and not for an illness. What marks it is not that it sees plots here and there, since there are plots, but that it takes one vast plot to be the force that moves history. Its enemy is a perfect model of malice, cunning, rich and tireless, steering the press and the public mind. Its stakes are always final: a whole way of life stands at its last defence, and what is called for is a fight to the finish, never a compromise.
Two further marks are worth learning by heart. The style is more coherent than the world: it leaves no room for mistakes, failures or ambiguity, so everything fits, and the fit is taken as proof. And it is careful, even pedantic, with evidence, piling up facts, notes and quotations, until at some point the chain makes a leap that the facts do not support, from what is known to what is imagined. Much of the student's work is finding that point.
Kinds of evidence and their weight
The art weighs evidence as a court and an archive do. A primary source is a record made at the time by those involved: a memo, a ledger, a letter, a recording, a statement given on oath and tested by questions. A secondary source is an account built from primary ones, and is only as good as what it rests on and how faithfully it uses it. Testimony at second or third hand, what someone heard that someone else said, counts for little, and a document that cannot be found counts for nothing until it is found.
Some things that feel like evidence are not. That a person or group gained from an event is a reason to look, not a finding; so are a coincidence of dates, a question no one has answered and a claim repeated by many voices. The burden of proof lies with whoever says a plot exists, and others are not bound to disprove it first.
Courts set the bar by what is at stake. To convict a person of a crime they must be sure of it beyond reasonable doubt; to settle a civil claim, the evidence need only make it more likely than not. A claim that would brand a whole institution, a profession or a people as criminal asks for at least the first standard, and is usually offered on far less. Between shown and shown false there is an honest place to wait, unproven, and a careful student keeps many claims there.
Each claim on its own record
A wrong that has been shown is evidence about the case it shows. The Tuskegee study shows that a public health service deceived and harmed the men in its care for forty years, and the distrust it left behind was earned. It does not show that any other claim about medicine is true. Each claim is examined on its own documents, as Tuskegee was on its own, and the art holds both things at once: a real wrong is never denied, and it is never taken as proof of every other charge.
The rule cuts the other way too. A claim shown false does not make every claim of its kind false: officials have proposed staging attacks to justify a war, and the memorandum survives, though the government of the day refused it. The question is always what this record shows about this case.
When a theory names a people
One kind of theory the art meets with a settled answer. When a claim moves from what named persons did to what a whole people, a faith or a family supposedly is and secretly plans, it has left the record behind, for a people does not act as one person, keep minutes or sign memos. Two of the oldest such claims, that Jews poison wells and that they rule the world in secret, are false in every form, and both have been used again and again to justify massacre. When Jews were accused of poisoning the wells in the Black Death, the pope of the day answered that they were dying of the plague like everyone else, and that it raged where no Jews lived.
The text most used to spread the claim of a hidden Jewish government, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a forgery, copied in large part from a French satire aimed at the emperor Napoleon III that has nothing to do with Jews, as The Times of London showed by printing the passages side by side. A student who meets such a claim names it for what it is, and asks of any theory whether it is drifting toward a people; the drift is the warning.
How a student begins
A student begins by learning what proof looks like. They choose one documented case and read a few pages of its primary record: a section of the Church Committee's reports, a transcript of the Watergate tapes, a page of the tobacco companies' own papers, all of them public. Names, dates, sums and signatures are what a real plot leaves behind, and those pages set a standard that every other claim can be held to.
Then they take one claim they have met and are unsure of, and trace it: its first telling, the source it rests on, read whole, the finding that would prove it wrong, and the number of people who would have to keep the secret. They write the claim in a notebook with its standing, shown, unproven or shown false, and the record beside it, and return to it when new evidence comes.
Two things are watched throughout. One is the student's own feeling: the pull of a story that explains everything, the pleasure of seeing what others miss, anger at a real wrong. These are human, and they are the moments to slow down. The other is the line that holds on every page of this art: nothing here is a reason to refuse a doctor's care or a child's schooling, and no claim against a people, a faith or a family is presented as true.
How the branches stand
Documented conspiracies comes first, because it shows the real shape on paper, case by case. Testing a claim gives the tools a student carries to any claim, from the first telling to the count of those who would keep the secret, with one claim tested whole. Why theories take hold turns to the mind and its needs, so that a student can understand the pull of a theory in others and in themselves, without contempt.
Two pages then work through one field each with those tools. Science and faith examines the claim that science was faked to drive out God; Medicine and schools examines the claim built on the Flexner Report and the Rockefeller boards. Each separates what the record shows from what has been built on it, and each is a model for examining any theory a student meets.
Before you practise
The Oracle examines a conspiracy theory: who first claimed it, what is documented, and where the claim outruns the evidence. Distrust often has real roots, but a theory is not a proof. It will not present a claim against a people, a faith or a family as true, and nothing here is a reason to refuse medical care.
Its branches
Each one is a question you can ask.
Why theories take hold
A real wrong, a real distrust, a wish for the world to make sense.
Why do conspiracy theories take hold of people?
Testing a claim
Who said it first, what would disprove it, who checked.
How do I test a conspiracy theory I have heard?
Science and faith
The claim that science was faked to disprove God, examined.
Is modern science a conspiracy against God? What is claimed, and what is documented?
Medicine and schools
The Flexner Report and the Rockefeller boards: what the record shows.
What is documented about Rockefeller, the Flexner Report and modern medicine, and where do the conspiracy theories go beyond it?
Its words
Each opens its page in the dictionary.
- Conspiracy Theory
- An explanation of an event by the secret plan of a powerful group, held without the records or testimony that would establish such a plan in a court or an archive.
Confirmation Bias- The habit of noticing and remembering what fits a belief already held, and passing over what does not.
- Proportionality Bias
- The feeling that a great event must have a great cause, which makes an accident or a lone actor hard to accept after a great loss.
- Cognitive Dissonance
- The discomfort of holding two things that do not fit, such as a firm belief and a fact against it, and the urge to explain one of them away.
- Falsifiability
- Karl Popper's test: a claim says something about the world only if some possible finding could show it to be wrong.
- Burden of Proof
- The rule that whoever makes a claim must support it. Others are not obliged to disprove it first.
- Occam's Razor
- The rule of thumb that, of two explanations that fit the facts equally well, the one needing fewer assumptions is to be preferred.
- Primary Source
- A record made at the time by those involved: a court transcript, a memo, a letter, a recording. It is the evidence other accounts are built on.
More of its words 10
- MKUltra
- A CIA research programme into drugs and the control of behaviour, approved in 1953 and known from Senate hearings and the financial papers that outlived the destruction of its files.
- COINTELPRO
- The FBI's covert operations of 1956 to 1971 to disrupt political groups inside the United States, exposed by stolen files and then set out by a Senate committee.
- Operation Northwoods
- A memorandum of 1962 in which the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed staging incidents to blame on Cuba. It was turned down, nothing in it was done, and it was released in 1997.
- Gulf of Tonkin Incident
- Two reported clashes at sea off North Vietnam in August 1964. The first was real and the second was a mistaken report, on which Congress passed a war resolution.
- Tuskegee Syphilis Study
- A forty-year study in Alabama, ended in 1972, in which US health officials watched syphilis run its course in Black men who were neither told nor treated.
- Watergate Scandal
- The burglary of a party's offices in Washington in 1972 and the cover-up run from the White House, proved by hearings, courts and the president's own tapes.
- Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- An antisemitic forgery printed in Russia from 1903, posing as the minutes of a Jewish plot. It was copied from a French satire and has been used to stir hatred of Jews.
- Gunpowder Plot
- The plan of a small band of English Catholics to blow up King James I and his Parliament in November 1605, found out before the powder was lit.
- False Flag
- A real act whose author is disguised so that the blame falls on someone else, usually to excuse a response already planned. Few cases are confirmed.
- Paranoid Style
- Richard Hofstadter's name, given in 1964, for a manner of political argument in which one vast hidden plot is made to explain all of history.
Its history, in dates
- Augustin Barruel and John Robison each publish a book wrongly blaming the French Revolution on Freemasons and Illuminati, the pattern for later theories of a hidden hand.
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an antisemitic forgery, is printed in Russia. In 1921 The Times shows it to be a forgery copied from a French satire of 1864.
- The Carnegie Foundation publishes the Flexner Report, and within a generation more than half of American medical schools have closed.
- Karl Popper publishes The Open Society and Its Enemies. In a lecture of 1948 and in the book as later revised he criticises what he calls the conspiracy theory of society.
- Richard Hofstadter's essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics describes history imagined as one vast plot.
- A press report ends the Tuskegee syphilis study after forty years. The Watergate break-in takes place the same summer.
- The Church Committee of the US Senate documents the FBI's COINTELPRO and the CIA's MK-Ultra from the agencies' own files.
- A US federal court finds that the large tobacco companies deceived the public for decades about the harm of smoking.
Books to read
- The Open Society and Its EnemiesKarl Popper, 1945The book that carries the phrase in its critical sense, with the argument that large plans rarely go as their makers intend.
- The Paranoid Style in American PoliticsRichard Hofstadter, 1964The classic essay on a recurring way of seeing politics: a hidden enemy, a total plot, and a last stand against it.
- Warrant for GenocideNorman Cohn, 1967The history of the Protocols forgery: who made it, how it spread, and what was done in its name.
- Real EnemiesKathryn S. Olmsted, 2009A historian on how proven government secrets, from the First World War on, fed the theories that followed.
- Merchants of DoubtNaomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2010A documented account of how the tobacco industry manufactured doubt about science, drawn from its own papers.
- Suspicious MindsRob Brotherton, 2015A psychologist on why ordinary minds are drawn to such theories, written without contempt for those who hold them.
Its roots: the lives to read with it
- Albert Pike1809 to 1891
American lawyer, writer and Confederate brigadier general. From 1859 until his death he led the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry’s Southern Jurisdiction, whose degrees he rewrote. His Morals and Dogma (1871) is a long commentary on those degrees, much of it taken from the French occultist Éliphas Lévi.
- Nikola Tesla1856 to 1943
Serbian-American inventor and engineer. His induction motor and polyphase system (patents of 1888) made alternating current the way the world moves power; the Tesla coil (1891) and work on wireless signalling and remote control followed. His tower at Wardenclyffe, meant to send power without wires, was never put to work. He died alone in a New York hotel in 1943. Biographers record his compulsions with the number three: he walked round a block three times before entering a building, and wanted rooms whose numbers divided by three.
- Adolf Hitler1889 to 1945
- Santos Bonacciliving; lecturing since about 2011
Shares roots with
Physics and the mysticsThe sky in the scripturesOrders and mystery schoolsSymbols
