Politics, Conflict and Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theorist said:

I think the movement needs to modernise and move on. We have important work that needs to be done, we have an important message that needs to be delivered and if we cock up our country could be destroyed right under our noses.

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What drives this? Is it a product of modern politics failing to provide forms of political identification & interaction which can motivate people and leave them feeling involved? There’s a massive sense of identification and personal involvement with a uniquely important cause. Is this sublimation of a desire for political participation? If we had some sort of genuinely participatory democracy, or even simply reverted to a situation of genuinely adversarial politics, would the conspiracy theorists stop being drawn into this?

I’d argue that liberalism’s rationalism and individualism leaves it unable to theorise the psychological level of political participation. A writer I like claims that: “in order to act politically people need to be able to identify with a collective identity which provides an idea of themselves they can valorise”. Liberalism is destructive of collective identities because of its commitment to reducing all explanations to the level of the individual. Likewise its rationalism engender a focus on consensus when, in many areas of political life, no such thing is possible. Conflict will always occur. Denying this theoretically doesn’t negate it but when lots of people in power share this view, a system of politics will start to develop that undermines the emotional basis of collective identities (collective participation in a common project) as well as trying to move beyond adversarial left/right politics. This doesn’t remove the conflictual element intrinsic to political life but rather sublimates it. People still want to identify with something beyond themselves. People still want to be involved in fighting important battles. If politics doesn’t provide outlets for these drives it doesn’t mean they go away. Rather, instead of taking forms within the political process – where conflict takes place between actors who see each other as legitimate adversaries – it takes place outside politics where there’s no reciprocal sense of the opponent’s legitimacy.

People who would otherwise find political forms of identification latch onto particularistic ethnic, religious and nationalist identities in the hope of finding some sense of participation and involvement. However because these forms of identification arose outside politics – the sphere where ideas and identities are contested – they’re likely to come hand-in-hand with an intransigence about values and an unwillingness to co-operate. The opponent is not an adversary but an enemy. The possibility of rational debate breaks down as people so identified aim to participate within society (indeed they have political aims) but are not open to society. From their perspective: you’re either with them or you’re against them.

Any thoughts?

as a spill over from the other thread, i was thinking 'what is the nature of the bond between conspiracy theoriests?' - social, ideological, circumstantial - a kind of lowest common denominator internet thing. Something different from a social relationship? Postmodernism come true? Distant people with unconnected minds seeking to reinforce a feeling that they are not alone?

If its any of that,its not new but its somehow more immediate in an electronic age. In the past, these things would have circulated slowly in pamphlet form - nowadays its in real time

4thwrite said:

as a spill over from the other thread, i was thinking 'what is the nature of the bond between conspiracy theoriests?' - social, ideological, circumstantial - a kind of lowest common denominator internet thing. Something different from a social relationship? Postmodernism come true? Distant people with unconnected minds seeking to reinforce a feeling that they are not alone?

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Solidarity? (seriously)

If its any of that,its not new but its somehow more immediate in an electronic age. In the past, these things would have circulated slowly in pamphlet form - nowadays its in real time

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The internet overcomes geography to bring minority groups together in a way that wasn't previously possible. Once together group polarization kicks in and a movement is born in a way that simply can't arise out of a heterogeneous group.

nosos said:

Solidarity? (seriously)
The internet overcomes geography to bring minority groups together in a way that wasn't previously possible. Once together group polarization kicks in and a movement is born in a way that simply can't arise out of a heterogeneous group.

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Yes, solidarity - which means something other than it used to do in an pre-internet age. But its the kind of solidarity you see around closing time - somebody starts ranting about the state and cctv - whilst the next pisspot pipes up: 'yeah, they've stopped me seeing my kids for two years. MY FUCKIN KIDS!' - and the two loons go off together arm in arm, each reinforcing the other

Here are some thoughts of mine.

What I find interesting is that the conspiracy theories concerning 9/11 aren't just the usual counter-narratives that start forming after rare and dramatic events, but they're extraordinary counter-narratives, really fantastical stuff with nothing but wild conjecture to back it up with. I think this is because of not only the huge scale of the event but the way it was immediately politicized by the Bush administration. They didn't miss a beat in selling us the narrative that it was Osama Bin Ladan's terror network, protected by Afghanistan who in turn all have close connections with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. It was instantaneous. It was the global war against terrorism...and well, we now know the rest. The speed of how this package was sold to us got a lot of people suspicious, and the ideologically narrow US media and political system offered very little room for any worthwhile debate. So people just start making this wild shit up about remote control planes and whatever.

We also have to remember that CT, obviously, are given very little serious coverage in traditional media. Therefore the internet is the perfect place for their ideas and influence to spread. Whereas the JFK assassination was quite slow burning in terms of possible counter-narratives, the 9/11 conspiracy elves have been pumping out infinite threads since 9/12. This new technology disseminates and amplifies CT at very high levels, and therefore they are able to reach far more people who are susceptible to them. Because of their wide reach and prevalence it is becoming more acceptable for people to hold these views.

“in order to act politically people need to be able to identify with a collective identity which provides an idea of themselves they can valorise”.

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necessarily? why?

There are a couple of paragraphs from Ben Goldacre's recent column in the Guardian where he talks about something similar. The article is about (a few of) the evils of the pharmaceutical industry, and he does a decent job providing a little summary, but changes tack at the end:

But what really interests me is what we do with our feelings about this evil, market-driven venality, which can be found in every market sector. But we find it uniquely distressing when we are sick and needing healthcare.

This moral discomfort and resentment leaks out in delusional anti-MMR beliefs, or bizarre acts of faith in the vitamin pill industry, as acts of misguided and wasteful political rebellion. Why? Because everybody is a socialist when it comes to healthcare, but nobody knows what to do with those feelings any more.

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(emphasis mine) And this clearly has resonance outside of the vaccines-don't-work lot; it covers a lot of other ground. The response that you get criticising conspiracy theories is overwhelmingly "oh, so you believe what Bush and Blair say, then?" It's a blind oppositional movement, a reaction to the (accurate) perception that we are being lied to to our faces, but one that has basically given up on any practical recourse.

It's a dead end; there isn't going to be some magical global consciousness awakening because people are exposed to easily-countered bollocks. But you can taste the frustration - "we are being lied to, and obvious lies are shown to us as truth, what the hell do we do about it?" You can't do anything within the existing political process because the system which results from that prohibits anything potentially challenging from entering. The "approved" modes of action, protests, marches, are easily counteracted by propaganda and media acceptance, and if it looks like they might work they are shut down, by law or simply by force. There's nothing to attach oneself to that looks like it might work.

In the face of that, is it bad that people act within identity groups?

nosos said:

What drives this?

....

Any thoughts?

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Too much time on their hands.

People are blind to the real conspiracy. Consumer capitalism.

fudgefactorfive said:

necessarily? why?

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That’s an overstatement that’s perhaps down to poor translation. Put it this way: the affective dimension of political activity demands a collective identity that people can identify with which provides an idea of themselves they can valorise. What moves people towards political participation – as opposed to what they may decide to act after a process of rational reflection – is the urge to participate in something worthwhile beyond themselves and through that participation they too become worthwhile.

FridgeMagnet said:

You can't do anything within the existing political process because the system which results from that prohibits anything potentially challenging from entering.

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I think there’s also a fixation of macro-political issues in mainstream culture which is in itself intrinsically disempowering. The general categories of mainstream political thought resolve around big issues: those phenomena which are, by their nature, beyond the capacity to be influenced by any individual as an individual. So people see what’s wrong in these terms but the terms themselves preclude any sort of readily apparent perception of how to start to make things right: forms of activity that will be necessarily be micro-political (organising around the arenas in which we live and work in response to lived issues rather then abstract & reflective concerns).

The "approved" modes of action, protests, marches, are easily counteracted by propaganda and media acceptance, and if it looks like they might work they are shut down, by law or simply by force. There's nothing to attach oneself to that looks like it might work.

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I partly agree but again I think there’s the issue of scale. If say, at the time of the Iraq war, there was a genuine adversarialism at the macro-political level – rather than Liberal dissent which accepted the terms in which Labour posed the war & once the war started delegitimised dissent so as to “support the troops” – as well as genuine movement which people could participate in beyond the passivity fostered by the STWC then I don’t think the anti-war movement would have fizzles out in the way that it did. Passive identification with macro-political actors would be insufficient but it’s a necessary condition for overcoming the gap between micro and macro politics. If there’s something in the mainstream political consciousness which individual groups operating locally can attach themselves to then it would have allowed the anti-war movement could take on a life of its own as a self-sustaining identity rather than something hat fizzles out once the momentum of the local groups stops.

Grego Morales said:

Because of their wide reach and prevalence it is becoming more acceptable for people to hold these views.

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Which is exactly why I think we should point & laugh rather than engage.

nosos said:

That’s an overstatement that’s perhaps down to poor translation. Put it this way: the affective dimension of political activity demands a collective identity that people can identify with which provides an idea of themselves they can valorise. What moves people towards political participation – as opposed to what they may decide to act after a process of rational reflection – is the urge to participate in something worthwhile beyond themselves and through that participation they too become worthwhile.

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hmmm

maybe

but my heart's not in it

i think this requires a population who have actually run out of "worthwhile" things to do

put it this way, political action within a community does not need and does not have to generate a "common identity" - whatever that means in the first place - as long as the stakes are high enough, eg. avoiding total annihilation, watching your children starve etc.

it's only in a market-driven society utterly stripped of satisfying real world truth that any of this crops up in the first place. why would isolated communities need a "group identity" when the "group" is so clearly defined by say, actual real world geography?

it's only because the currency of the word "community" is in free fall that we talk about "identity" at all. that, and corporations battening onto identities like fucking psychic leeches.

from that perspective conspiracy theorists are remarkably similar to nearly everyone else. ie. who's not valorising these days. it's bloody valorise this, valorise that, all over the shop. enough with the valorising already.

To a certain extent I agree with what you're saying but it only applies to local life. As you say - political action within a community does not need and does not have to generate a "common identity" - as it's a response to lived circumstances whereas macro-politics (or we could just say the desire to collectively influence stuff far beyond your individual capacities) has a intrinsically symbolic element to it whereby participation in that shared space of meaning (public political life, or the national conciousness) necessarily entails some form of identification. I think conspiracy theories grow because there's nothing productive that's big to latch onto and this feeds into a lack of percieved small options. The percieved pointlessness of macro politics feeds into an atomised and powerless understanding of the capacities we have on an individual level.

fudgefactorfive said:

it's only in a market-driven society utterly stripped of satisfying real world truth that any of this crops up in the first place.

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But the reality of the world in which we live entails that we're forced out of the local lived arena where real world truth occurs. Every time we watch the news, every time we talk about a political issue and everytime we wander beyond the scope of our immediate lived experience, we enter a space of meaning constructed by the imperatives of the political and economic system within which we live.

(or at least more constructed by them)

it's only in a market-driven society utterly stripped of satisfying real world truth that any of this crops up in the first place

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What, as opposed to an agrarian, feudal theocracy? Conspiracy theories are as old as civilisation, and I'm surpirsed no one's looked at the individual psychological reasons Cters believe what they do.

First off, the tendency to create a meta-narrative to explain complex, on the face of it inexplicable events. X could not have happned without Y and Z,plus A, B, C and D, and it had to happen IN THAT ORDER because accepting coincidence in events raises too many variables about existance generally - it's like Einstein rejecting QM because it was too random, a CTer rejects anything that can't be used to create a conventional, linear narrative to explain an event

Second, the human mind's ability to analyse patterns, one of it's primary analytic strengths, can go seriously awry. I can't remember the name of the condition, but it happens often, where people construct patterns that don't exist.

Conspiracies exist because actually constructing a worldview that's as close to reality as one can subjectively get is astonishingly complex, and since such a thing revolves around ascribing thoughts, motivations and actions to other humans, something that you can never actually know, truly understanding Reality is ultimately a non-stop succession of questions. CTs act in the same way as religion, in that they take complex, non-linear things like societies or environmental events and construct a linear, E-ZEE Reader story around them.

Where the meta-power structure comes into play is in seeding CTs as memes - be it Jewish, Catholic or Islamic conspiracy, when used in the context of religious management they're a conflict meme used to generate fear, but historically haven't served to alienate those preaching them (indeed, they often become religious orthodoxy). In a secular conspiracy, they serve to both alienate and unsettle - CTers are alienated (and thus become more militant in their belief), and in the wider population they serve to unsettle in the 'Well, yes 99% of me says that the planes on 9/11 were real, and were piloted by NLCs, but 1% of me wouldn't put it past Cheney to have been involved'...not to mention the hordes of Express and Mail readers who believe fervently that Diana died because of her relationship with Dodi, because the simple mundane truth is that she died because she wasn't wearing a seatbelt, paying the price of the hubris of all those insulated by wealth and power that car accidents happen to 'other people'

kyser_soze said:

What, as opposed to an agrarian, feudal theocracy?

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no

I think I'm mostly with Kyser on this one.

It's worth considering that generally it's a rather small percentage of the population that tends to swing with the 9/11 or Princess Di conspiracies. As such it's worth asking why everybody else isn't feeling the same kind of alienation.

inflatable jesus said:

I think I'm mostly with Kyser on this one.

It's worth considering that generally it's a rather small percentage of the population that tends to swing with the 9/11 or Princess Di conspiracies. As such it's worth asking why everybody else isn't feeling the same kind of alienation.

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I blame the Internet. Before these people would just shout at you at bus stops or down the boozer. Now they can get together and reinforce each other online. Care in the cyber world I call it.