In one of the modern Columbo movies (the best television detective drama ever, by the way) the aging Peter Falk bums around a magnate who has killed his wife, slowly and meticulously building a circumstantial case. As Columbo gets closer and the perpetrator gets more annoyed, suddenly an alibi turns up: a photo ticket showing him running a red light far across town at the time of the murder. Looks like it's all over for the droopy detective until the denouement, when Columbo shows how the photo was faked by the secretary who was secretly having an affair with the killer. The faked photo is finally hard evidence which cannot be refuted, and the wrongdoer goes off to jail.
After the alibi photo turns up, but before the j'accuse moment, there was an interval during which Columbo had a theory that the man and his secretary had conspired together to commit murder. This was a theory about a conspiracy which turned out to be true, albeit in a fictional world. But there are plenty of real examples of people who have conspired in illegal activities. We know that these happened because they have been revealed by history as true conspiracies, and no doubt there are countless others that we do not know about, not yet and perhaps not ever. But if we speculate about these, are we engaging in Conspiracy Theories?
Calling something a conspiracy theory is a form of ridicule intended to end discussion. Conspiracy theories are the paranoid delusions from the overactive imaginations of what are called the "tinfoil hat" culture, and not to be taken seriously. This is true for some theories, especially regarding the Illuminati or space aliens. But damning all theories about conspiracies as (paranoid) conspiracy theories is a fallacy of equivocation: we are really talking about two different things.
Although there is no hard line between a plausible conspiracy theory and a paranoid conspiracy theory, some rules of thumb can help us tell them apart.
1) A conspiracy is less plausible the larger the number of people who would need to be involved. Keeping secrets can be difficult, so the more people know the secret the more likely it is that it will become public knowledge. In the case of X-Files scale conspiracies, where virtually everyone in the entire government, military and industry are keeping a huge secret, it could be argued that it already is public knowledge since so many people know.
2) Conspiracy is only plausible if everyone involved has a good incentive to keep the secret. If the secret is about a known crime or something of great public interest, there will be a lot of pressure to reveal it. As long as everyone involved has benefited from the conspiracy and are equally culpable, they will be able to keep quiet. If the theory involves people who would have to keep quiet because of threats, it becomes less plausible. This is also related to the size of the conspiracy, since a larger group will have more peripheral members with lesser incentives.
3) Plausible conspiracies have fewer failure points. If the actions of the conspirators can be thwarted or revealed in too many different ways, then it's implausible that everything would go off successfully. This is just good planning. A plot with a lot of ways to go wrong is simply more likely to fail. If it has nothing that can fail, or it requires only a little good luck, then it's easier to suspect that it's possible.
4) Finally, plausible conspiracy theories can be refuted by evidence. If the theory suggests that some evidence should be found in a specific place, and that evience is missing, then the theory is wrong. If the supporters of a theory take the absense of evidence and use it as evidence of how powerful the conspiracy is, you know you are dealing with a paranoid conspiracy theory.
Most of these really have to do with the scale of the proposed conspiracy. Lots of diverse people doing lots of tricky, interlocking things for many different reasons is simply unlikely. A few, well-motivated people doing relatively straightforward things is plausible. Note that this does not refer to the scale of the actual crime committed. Certainly the terrorist attack of 9/11 was one of the biggest crimes ever, but it's no theory that it was a conspiracy. They were a small group of people, with strong motives to keep their actions secret, and with a plan that didn't involve anything very complex or improbable.
On a related note, here's a good summary of the evidence of voting anomalies so far. Judging whether any allegations of foul play are plausible will depend on the means proposed and the actors involved. So far nothing proposed has sounded very plausible, but this is not a reason to reject any suggestion of tampering as an a priori Conspiracy Theory.
- jack*
The best conspiracies are conspiracies not to act. One of the clear problems with the voting system, is that it places hurdles in front of voting, and these hurdles benefit people who have lived in one place, and have more money. It is when the sum and total of these small barriers, inefficiencies and injustices add up, that there becomes a pervasive bias. One that can be manipulated.
Posted by: Stirling Newberry | November 19, 2004 at 07:33 PM