Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bacasper]

[Gopher]

ROFL. Now there are three fantastic only-on-Dave's claims that I have seen articulated or implied: there are no "leftists," only the so-called left; antiAmericanism does not exist either; and now there are no conspiracy theorists.

There are only brainwashed right-wingers and ultrapatriots.

[bacasper]

All these labels you are throwing around are not helping the discussion, especially when you refuse to define them.

If all you can do is label and opine, we won't have much to talk about.

[Gopher]

You are right in that we have little to discuss. Carry on. You were saying that conspiracy theorists do not exist...

[Ya-ta Boy]

Michael Barkun uses the following in his book 'A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America':

(p 3-4)

The essence of conspiracy belief lies in attempts to delineate and explain evil. At their broadest, conspiracy theories 'view history as controlled by massive, demonic forces.' The locus of this evil lies outside the true community, in some 'Other, defined as foreign or barbarian, though often...disguised as innocent and upright.' The result is a worldview characterized by a sharp division between the realms of good and evil.

For our purposes, a conspiracy belief is the belief that an organization made up of individuals or groups was or is acting covertly to achieve some malevolent end...

A conspiracist worldview implies a universe governed by design rather than by randomness. The emphasis on design manifests itself in three principles found in virtually every conspiracy theory:

--Nothing happens by accident. Conspriacy implies a world based on intentionality, from which accident and coincidence have been removed. Anything that happens occurs because it has been willed. At its most extreme, the result is a 'fantasy [world]...far more coherent than the real world.'

--Nothing is as it seems. Appearances are deceptive, because conspirators wish to deceive in order to disguise their identities or their activities. Thus the appearance of innocence is deemed to be no guarantee that an individual or group is benign.

--Everything is connected. Because the conspiracists' world has no room for accident, pattern is believed to be everywhere, albeit hidden from plain view. Hence the conspiracy theorist must engage in a constant process of linkage and correlation in order to map the hidden connections.

In an odd way, the conspiracy theorist's view is both frightening and reassuring. It is frightening because it magnifies the power of evil, leading in some cases to an outright dualism in which light and darkness struggle for cosmic supremacy. At the same time, however, it is reassuring, for it promises a world that is meaningful rather than arbitrary. Not only are events nonrandom, but the clear identification of evil gives the conspiracist a definable enemy against which to struggle, endowing life with purpose.

***
There. It may not be pithy, but it should serve the purpose.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Do you see the difference?

Take 'Fargo' for example. William Macy decides to have his wife kidnapped so he can get ransom money from his father-in-law to pay off debts. He conspires with the Steve Buscemi and the other guy...

There is no attempt to explain the world in terms of good and evil; accidents happen that are not under the control of malevolent forces; there is no need to connect the wife's disappearance to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa or Judge Crater or the princes in the tower; there is no need to bring in space lizards or the Knights Templar to explain it all.

[Gopher]

[Kuros]

Who is a conspiracy theorist?

He is one whom shackles himself in chains of his own theories of powerlessness, resentment, and estrangement. He is one for whom intellectual investigations of why things have come to be are interrupted by the intercession of the ever tyrannical (and fictional) 'the man.' He is an obsessive, not a little bit narcissistic, and happens to be a stain on internet forums besides.

But far worse than anything else, a conspiracy theorist is a bore.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Gopher]

Yes, Joo, the conspiracy-theory crowd certainly represents a ready-made and heavily-exploited marketing sector. But I still think most of it derives from a paranoid and twisted anticapitalist worldview.

I personally know someone who watched the X-Files religiously and then persuaded him or herself that he or she "knew too much" and that the govt was following him or her. I kid you not.

Besides the personality traits already identified, above, from whence does this come? Again, start with Marx. Move on to Lenin. Then check out contemporary writers like Kees Van der Peel.

[moosehead]

[wannago]

[Gopher]

[Ya-ta Boy]

I think some of the following will shed some light on conspiracy theorists. From the same book as above, p 23-29:

(p23-29)
The term cultic milieu was introduced in the early 1970s by British sociologist [Colin] Campbell�Campbell argued that cults emerge out of a supportive social and ideological environment, which he called the cultic milieu�The cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities, and because no single institution within the milieu has the authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds in it �unifying tendencies.� One such tendency is it opposition to �dominant cultural orthodoxies��t is also a major characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. The very oppositional situation of the cultic milieu makes it wary of all claims to authoritative judgment. Its suspiciousness makes it intrinsically receptive to all forms of revisionism, whether in history, religion, science, or politics.[W]e need to extend the cultic milieu to encompass a broader range of phenomena. This can be done through the concept I call stigmatized knowledge claims.

By stigmatized knowledge I mean claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error�universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like�The domain of stigmatized knowledge claims may be divided into five varieties:

[i]Forgotten knowledge: knowledge once allegedly known but lost through faulty memory, cataclysm, or some other interrupting factor (e.g., beliefs about ancient wisdom once possessed by inhabitants of Atlantis).

Superseded knowledge: claims that once were authoritatively recognized as knowledge but lost that status because they came to be regarded as false or less valid than other claims (e.g., astrology and alchemy).

Ignored knowledge: knowledge claims that persist in low-prestige social groups but are not taken seriously by others (e.g., folk medicine).

Rejected knowledge: knowledge claims that are explicitly rejected as false from the outset (e.g., UFO abductions).

Suppressed knowledge: claims that are allegedly known to be valid by authoritative institutions but are suppressed because the institutions fear the consequences of public knowledge or have some evil or selfish motive for hiding the truth (e.g., the alien origins of UFOs and suppressed cancer cures).

Two characteristics of the stigmatized knowledge domain require particular attention: the special place accorded to suppressed knowledge and the empirical nature of the claims. The suppressed knowledge category tends to absorb the others, because believers assume that when their own ideas about knowledge conflict with some orthodoxy, the forces of orthodoxy will necessarily try to perpetuate error out of self-interest or some other evil motive. The consequence is to attribute all forms of knowledge stigmatization to the machinations of conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories therefore function both as a part of suppressed knowledge and as a basis for stigmatization. At one level, conspiracy theories are an example of suppressed knowledge, because those who believe in conspiracy theories are convinced only they know the true manner in which power is held and decisions made. The conspiracy is believed to have used its power to keep the rest of the populace in ignorance. At another level, conspiracy theories explain why all forms of stigmatized knowledge claims have been marginalized�allegedly the conspiracy has utilized its power to keep the truth from being known. So the distinction between hidden knowledge on the one hand, which is �true� and orthodoxy on the other, which is �false�, acts to push believers in stigmatized knowledge claims toward beliefs about plots to suppress the truth, and hence in the direction of conspiracism.

Stigmatized knowledge appears compelling to believers not only because it possesses the cachet of the suppressed and forbidden, but because of its allegedly empirical basis�[S]tigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth�for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth?...[A]t the same time�the literature of stigmatized knowledge enthusiastically mimics mainstream scholarship. It does so by appropriating the apparatus of scholarship in the form of elaborate citations and bibliographies. The most common manifestation of pedantry is a fondness for reciprocal citation, in which authors obligingly cite one another. The result is that the same sources are repeated over and over, which produces a kind of pseudoconfirmation. If a source is cited many times, it must be true. Because the claims made by conspiracy theorists are usually nonfalsifiable, the multiplication of sources may leave the impression of validation without actually putting any propositions to the test of evidence.

[moosehead]