Blayne Sucks

There’s a new article up on New Scientist (subscription required) about how conspiracy theories work. I found this from Bruce Schneier’s blog and he had a link to a non-subscription version here.

Now, there are several reasons why I’m interested in this. One is that I am a JFK assassination hobbyist, which is probably one of the most famous conspiracy theory generating events in world history. Probably the most important reason is that I think current government policies, like RealID and NSA warrantless surveillance, are being born based on a similar rationale.

There’s this instinct to try and balance the scales when a major unexpected event happens like the JFK Assassination or the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks. In the case of the JFK Assassination, people couldn’t balance a crazy lone gunman with a rifle against the charismatic, popular President of the United States. Thus, millions of conspiracy theories were born. Unfortunately the government’s response to 9/11 has been similarly reasoned. Government officials are unable to balance that a relatively small group of people was able to pull off the biggest terrorist attack on the US. In an attempt to balance the scales these officials and politicians have blown the problems caused by terrorism way out of proportion. Sadly, this response has brought about some changes in government that are wide-ranging and equally ill advised.

Sometimes horrible things happen for simple, unfortunate reasons. JFK was killed by one guy with a rifle. 9/11 was pulled off by a small group of extreme extremists. These things don’t mesh with our desire to balance them. We want to say that JFK was killed by the maffia or Cuba or some US government faction. We want to say that 9/11 happened because of a terror network so massive that we need to let the NSA have unprecedented ability to use surveillance on Americans without a warrant simply to ferret out some of this network.

If you look at the world through the glasses of a conspiracy theory, everything suddenly becomes suspect. The reality is that the traditional methods of investigation almost caught the 9/11 terrorists. Somehow even this fact is perverted into support for the changes that have been proposed. (e.g. “We had all the information we needed right under our noses and we still failed to get them! Let’s change everything!”) While ‘almost’ doesn’t help anyone killed or bring back the billions of dollars lost in the attacks, it should at least have provided proof that many of the massive changes which have taken place aren’t necessary and may actually hurt.

Some things are tragic simply because there is no way to balance them sensibly. Life doesn’t have a law of reciprocation. Sometimes there is no “equal an opposite” cause for a tragic effect. If anything, that is the point of the word tragedy. The government’s continued futile attempts to rationalize tragedies in this fashion only prolongs the grieving process and prevents us from moving on.