Edward Snowdon - Conspiracy Theories Are How We Conceal Conspiracies.

 


Edward Snowden writes that conspiracy theories are so widespread because sometimes the truth is just too much to bear. He says that conspiracy theories often mask conspiracy practices that are underway right out in the open. False conspiracy theories are the engine by which followers embrace tribalism.

...conspiracy practices – the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized – are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.

...In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a top secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing – and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press – I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse – Facebook.

As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of Internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background, and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”

...In democracies today, what is important to an increasing many is not what rights and freedoms are recognized, but what beliefs are respected: what history, or story, undergirds their identities as citizens, and as members of religious, racial, and ethnic communities. It’s this replacement-function of false conspiracies — the way they replace unified or majoritarian histories with parochial and partisan stories — that prepares the stage for political upheaval.

Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn’t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.

...Most of the taxonomies of conspiracy-thinking are based on the logic that most intelligence agencies use when they spread disinformation, treating falsity and fiction as levers of influence and confusion that can plunge a populace into powerlessness, making them vulnerable to new beliefs – and even new governments.

But this top-down approach fails to take into account that the predominant conspiracy theories in America today are developed from the bottom-up, plots concocted not behind the closed doors of intelligence agencies but on the open internet by private citizens, by people.​​​​​​​

In sum, conspiracy theories do not inculcate powerlessness, so much as they are the signs and symptoms of powerlessness itself.

...From Outside, from Within, from Above, from Below, from Beyond … events, systems, superconspiracies … shallow and deep heuristics … these are all attempts to chart a new type of politics that is also a new type of identity, a confluence of politics and identity that imbues all aspects of contemporary life. Ultimately, the only truly honest taxonomical approach to conspiracy-thinking that I can come up with is something of an inversion: the idea that conspiracies themselves are a taxonomy, a method by which democracies especially sort themselves into parties and tribes, a typology through which people who lack definite or satisfactory narratives as citizens explain to themselves their immiseration, their disenfranchisement, their lack of power, and even their lack of will.

As we degenerate from democracy to tribal societies what matters is the narrative, not the truth of that narrative. This is real Lord of the Flies stuff. If we don't find a way to reverse this we will regret it.

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