{"id":30029,"date":"2016-06-30T01:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30029"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:17:27","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:17:27","slug":"qotd-the-essential-weakness-of-any-conspiracy-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/06\/30\/qotd-the-essential-weakness-of-any-conspiracy-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The essential weakness of any conspiracy theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good propaganda and excellent satire (vide <em>Illuminatus!<\/em> or any of half a dozen other examples). As guides to action, however, they are generally dangerously misleading.<\/p>\n<p>Misleading, because they assume more capacity for large groups to keep secrets and maintain absolutely unitary conscious policies than human beings in groups actually seem to possess. The history of documented \u201cconspiracies\u201d and failed attempts at same is very revealing in this regard \u2014 above a certain fairly small size, somebody always blows the gaff. This is why successful terrorist organizations are invariably quite small.<\/p>\n<p><em>Dangerously<\/em> misleading because conspiracy theories, offering the easy drama of a small group of conscious villains, distract our attention from a subtler but much more pervasive phenomenon \u2014 one I shall label the \u201cprospiracy\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don\u2019t necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy\u2019s goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.<\/p>\n<p>What makes a prospiracy like a conspiracy and distinguishes it from a mere subcultural group? The presence of a \u201csecret doctrine\u201d or shared goals which its core members admit among themselves but not to perceived outsiders; commonly, a goal which is stronger than the publicly declared purpose of the group, or irrelevant to that declared purpose but associated with it in some contingent (usually historical) way.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, a prospiracy is <em>unlike<\/em> a conspiracy in that it lacks well-defined lines of authority. Its leaders wield influence over the other members, but seldom actual power. It also lacks a clear-cut distinction between \u201cins\u201d and \u201couts\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=67\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Conspiracy and prospiracy&#8221;, <em>Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2002-11-14.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good propaganda and excellent satire (vide Illuminatus! or any of half a dozen other examples). As guides to action, however, they are generally dangerously misleading. Misleading, because they assume more capacity for large groups to keep secrets and maintain absolutely unitary conscious policies than human beings in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,41],"tags":[127,1235,388,257],"class_list":["post-30029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-esr","tag-secrecy","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Ol","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30030,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30029\/revisions\/30030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}