By Edward Snowden
The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious
— not theories, but practices expressed through law
and policy, technology, and finance.
Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more
often than not announced in public and with a
modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our
newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our
magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled
across our screens — all with such regularity as to
render us unable to relate the banality of their
methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.
The party in power wants to redraw district
lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free
service has been created to host our personal files.
These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives;
and yet they can’t compete for attention with
digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the
basement of a DC pizzeria.
This, in sum, is our problem: the truest
conspiracies meet with the least opposition.
Or to put it another way, 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 life, I’ve had enough of both the practice
and the theory. 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?”
It took years — eight years and counting in exile
— for me to realize that I was missing the point: we
talk about conspiracy theories in order to
avoid talking about conspiracy practices,
which are often too daunting, too threatening, too
total.
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It's my hope in this post and in posts to come to
engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by
examining the relationship between true and false
conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions
about the relationships between truth and falsehood
in our public and private lives.
I'll begin by offering a fundamental proposition:
namely, that to believe in any conspiracy, whether
true or false, is to believe in a system or
sector run not by popular consent but by an elite,
acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the
Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or
Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major
banking institutions and the Federal Reserve — the
point is, a conspiracy is an inherently
anti-democratic force.
The recognition of a conspiracy — again, whether
true or false — entails accepting that not only are
things other than what they seem, but they are
systematized, regulated, intentional, and even
logical. It’s only by treating conspiracies not as
“plans” or “schemes” but as mechanisms for ordering
the disordered that we can hope to understand how
they have so radically displaced the concepts of
“rights” and “freedoms” as the fundamental
signifiers of democratic citizenship.
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.
The concept of the enemy is fundamental to
conspiracy thinking — and to the various taxonomies
of conspiracy itself.
Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason and
author of The United States of Paranoia: A
Conspiracy Theory (2013), offers the following
categories of enemy-based conspiracy thinking:
- “Enemy Outside,” which pertains to
conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on
actors scheming against a given
identity-community from outside of it
- “Enemy Within,” which pertains to conspiracy
theories perpetrated by or based on actors
scheming against a given identity-community
from inside of it
- “Enemy Above,” which pertains to conspiracy
theories perpetrated by or based on actors
manipulating events from within the circles of
power (government, military, the intelligence
community, etc.)
- "Enemy Below," which pertains to conspiracy
theories perpetrated by or based on actors from
historically disenfranchised communities seeking
to overturn the social order
- “Benevolent Conspiracies,” which pertains to
extra-terrestrial, supernatural, or
religious forces dedicated to controlling the
world for humanity's benefit (similar forces
from Beyond who work to the detriment of
humanity Walker might categorize under “Enemy
Above”)
Other forms of conspiracy-taxonomy are just a
Wikipedia link away:
Michael Barkun's trinary categorization of Event
conspiracies (e.g. false-flags), Systemic
conspiracies (e.g. Freemasons), and Superconspiracy
theories (e.g. New World Order), as well as his
distinction between the secret acts of secret groups
and the secret acts of known groups; or Murray
Rothbard's
binary of
“shallow” and “deep” conspiracies (“shallow”
conspiracies begin by identifying evidence of
wrongdoing and end by blaming the party that
benefits; “deep” conspiracies begin by suspecting a
party of wrongdoing and continue by seeking out
documentary proof — or at least “documentary
proof”).
I find things to admire in all of these
taxonomies, but it strikes me as notable that none
makes provision for truth-value. Further, I'm not
sure that these or any mode of classification can
adequately address the often-alternating, dependent
nature of conspiracies, whereby a true conspiracy
(e.g. the 9/11 hijackers) triggers a false
conspiracy (e.g. 9/11 was an inside job), and a
false conspiracy (e.g. Iraq has weapons of mass
destruction) triggers a true conspiracy (e.g. the
invasion of Iraq).
Another critique I would offer of the extant
taxonomies involves a reassessment of causality,
which is more properly the province of psychology
and philosophy. 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.
This leads us to those other taxonomies, which
classify conspiracies not by their content, or
intent, but by the desires that cause one to
subscribe to them.
Note, in particular, the
epistemic/existential/social triad of
system-justification: Belief in a conspiracy is
considered “epistemic” if the desire underlying the
belief is to get at “the truth,” for its own sake;
belief in a conspiracy is considered “existential”
if the desire underlying the belief is to feel safe
and secure, under another's control; while belief in
a conspiracy is considered “social” if the desire
underlying the belief is to develop a positive
self-image, or a sense of belonging to a community.
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.
Edward Joseph Snowden is a former computer
intelligence consultant who leaked highly classified
information from the National Security Agency in
2013 when he was an employee and subcontractor for
the Central Intelligence Agency.
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1
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