God, how many journalist flunked out of psychology courses? Here’s one, Jonathan Kay, holding forth in the National Post…
When the phrase “conspiracy theorist” is used, most people imagine an anti-social, mentally unstable nut, along the lines of Mel Gibson’s taxi-driving paranoiac in the 1997 movie Conspiracy Theory.
From what I remember of Conspiracy Theory Gibson was only an “anti-social…paranoiac” as he’d been an MK-ULTRA test case, pumped full of hallucinogens. Seems that Kay is so disdainful of “conspiracy theories” he can’t even quite believe that they exist in movies.
…by far the biggest category of conspiracy theorist is what I call the “failed historian.” He is someone who views human history through a rigid and all-encompassing ideological template. Some are Marxists. Others are Islamists, or Chomskyites, or radical Tea Party conservatives, or white supremacists. Whatever the details of their belief system, they all have a shared need to reconcile everything they know about the world with their totalizing world view.
No, they don’t. Really. Promise! Hell, at one time or another two-thirds of the U.S. public thought that JFK fell victim to some kind of machination. Were they “all” expressing this “shared need“? No, I think that Kay’s just trying to reconcile everything he knows about conspiracies with his banal, selective and moderate world view. For the rest of us, however, it should be quite obvious that conspiracies can exist, have existed and, it’s near certain, will continue to arise.
September 25, 2010 at 9:07 am
a. Yes, but as I often tire of saying, it depends on what level you want to pitch these conspiracies: what level of organisation, what level of achievement, what level of secrecy. Of course people conspire: two kids may conspire to rob the street tray by one distracting the shopkeeper while the other runs off with the Smarties. But if we’re talking about high-level political conspiracies, it’s useful to be pretty realistic and reasonable about what we’re prepared to claim, and perhaps also to make some distinction between cover-up and conspiracy.
b. I’m not happy about “flunk out”. I can locate plenty of references to it, it’s not of your devise, but how has the phrasal verb developed? There was an already-existing transitive verb “to flunk” the meaning of which was precisely the same.
September 25, 2010 at 10:15 am
1) Well, I’m “prepared to claim” anything the evidence leads me to believe! That’s not desperately helpful, though…I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of governments endangering/abusing their own people (Gladio, Iraq, the Tuskegee syphilis study), palling up to forces they’ve pretended to oppose (CIA drug running, Operation Midnight Climax) and keeping large-scale plots under wraps for a fair time (Gladio, the Gulf of Tonkin).
2) I rather suspect that I’m careless and you’re right! To put it very crudely and why-didn’t-I-take-English-language-y “to flunk” suggests failure and “to flunk out”, I think, connotes both failure and departure. One could flunk out of a course after flunking several modules…Apologies if that’s a load of, er – flunking nonsense.
January 26, 2011 at 7:28 pm
[...] sceptics know that they’re just paranoid cranks trying to impose order upon the universe; reconcile events with their worldview; prove their own superiority to more benighted folk and, [...]