Why I love conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theorist and conspiracy theory have today become synonyms for nutcase and lies. To call someone a conspiracy theorist is to denigrate them; it’s why terms like Truther or Climate Skeptic have appeared. The reason that people who believe conspiracy theories prefer these terms is that it gives them a sense of legitimacy. I spent a previous blog post expounding the virtues of being a skeptic and now I’m disparaging them, the difference here is that (In the majority of cases) the skepticism is unfounded. This isn’t to say that real conspiracies don’t exist but proven, well founded and generally agreed upon conspiracies don’t interest me in the same way that the contentious ones do. I’m fascinated that otherwise intelligent and rational people will so easily believe what seems like nonsense to me.

As a pre warning, if you believe in any of the following conspiracies related to these topics:

• The Moon Landing
• The 9/11 Attacks
• Climate Change
• Genetically Modified Food
• AIDS Denial
• The flat Earth

Then prepare to disagree wholeheartedly with everything I’m about to say. I don’t care how passionately you believe it; I’m so interested in these topics that I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of my time reading about them. I’d be very surprised to be presented with any information I haven’t encountered before. With all that said a true skeptic always has an open mind but I won’t keep my mind so open that my brain falls out!

So before I talk about why I don’t believe certain conspiracy theories, let’s talk about how real conspiracies happen. I’ll use two examples, Watergate and The Manhattan Project. Watergate is perhaps the most well known conspiracy but one of the hardest to explain simply. The whole Watergate story stretches back all the way to Nixon’s unsuccessful presidential campaign against Kennedy in 1960 and lasts until long after his voluntary resignation (read: impeachment) in 1974. To grossly oversimplify, Nixon had a secret organisation called CREEP – yeah, I’m not making that up – Which stands for “Committee to Re-elect the President”. One of the many illegal activities that CREEP was involved with was breaking into headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex. A security guard found a tape that was left behind and 5 Plumbers (As they were listed on Republican party’s Payroll) were arrested. Following this, two journalists from the Washington Post launched a campaign to expose the president’s link to the break-in. After 2 years (during which time Nixon was re-elected) the investigative work by the journalists led to a court case during which time it was reveled that Nixon was indeed tied to CREEP and discussed the break-in 35 times. After the case, (which implicated the US Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA and the White House) 69 government officials were charged and 48 were found guilty including some of Nixon’s most senior aides[1].

Alright, that was as simple as I could explain Watergate and remain true to the events but simpler still it’s just an example of how people in the highest positions of power lied to the public and used their power to cover it up. Pretty much everyone who was arrested had a good idea of what they were doing and nearly all were involved in the cover up. It’s an example of what I’ll call a “Top down” conspiracy, it’s organised by a hierarchy of power and the ability to expose the conspiracy lies with almost everyone involved. In the Watergate case it was the infamous “Deep Throat” who was later revealed to be the FBI’s number two, Mark Felt.

The Manhattan Project wasn’t the same sort of conspiracy. It was a Top Secret Military effort that led to creation of the Atomic Bomb. For all its deadly power, the Atomic Bomb is actually a marvel of engineering and something that a lot of very talented engineers spent the best part of their lives devoted to. The ingenious part of the atomic bomb was not the bomb itself but the method by which the bomb was created. The theory of the Atomic Bomb was well understood it was just incredibly difficult to imagine how to create one. You would require large amounts of the Uranium-235 isotope, which only makes up 0.7% of natural Uranium, the other 99.3% being Uranium-238. Uranium-235 and Uranium-238 are chemically identical so cannot be separated by any chemical means. In fact the only way to tell the two apart is by their atomic weights. Scientists at Oak Ridge, Tennessee developed a technique of gaseous diffusion where by the heavier atomic weight of Uranium-238 means that it would travel (as a gas) more slowly than Uranium-235 so with a little bit of pipe it would be possible to separate the two isotopes and obtain large amount of Uranium-235. Well…I’m sort of underselling by saying a little bit of pipe; in reality it was 2,760,000 m3. In fact so massive was the job of building and running the gaseous diffusion plant that over 25,000 workers were employed to run the facility[2]. The truly amazing thing about this is that although everyone there knew they were doing “something” related to the war effort, no one person contained all the information necessary to piece together that they were building the atomic bomb. This is what I’ll call this a “Bottom Up” conspiracy where no one person could expose it and only a selected few elites have a good overview of the plan.

Ok, that took quite a while, but hopefully it gives you a good background to what sort of conspiracies could exist and how I’m not flippantly disregarding the existence of conspiracies as a concept. So with that out the way, I’m now going to show you an interesting observation, that the tendency to believe certain conspiracies has little to do with education and a lot to do with political leaning. You might be thinking that people who believe (or don’t believe) certain facts have not spent enough time researching a topic or that their research has been in the wrong area and that you could sway their opinion with enough data. This would be great. Depressingly though, this might not be true. A 2012 study: “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks” by Donald Braman et al.[3] shows a link between climate change skepticism and right wing political leaning and climate change belief and a left wing political leaning. This is not surprising. What was surprising was that if you were right wing and educated about the subject you were MORE likely to be skeptical of than if you were right wing and knew little of the topic. This idea is that world view is more important than facts, even when presented with all the data, people with certain biases will latch on to certain otherwise irrational beliefs (discussed in my last blog post).

Right now you might be a little confused as to why I would actually enjoy contentious conspiracy theories. So far I’ve described them as the irrational beliefs of bias people, so why would I give them the time of day? Well, I consider myself a skeptic so I feel a responsibility to investigate that which I am unsure of. If you spent any time reading about any conspiracy I bullet pointed at the top of this post then you’re bound to find yourself up against some piece of “evidence” that proves the “official story” is false. In order to properly refute these claims it’s necessary to gain a little bit of understanding about an incredibly varied and interesting amount of topics. Topics, I would not have found out about by myself. I liken it to the Radio, although I enjoy listening to my own music collection, I know what’s coming next, and I can’t be surprised or have my mind broadened. Every now and again I like to listen to the radio (especially radio 2 after 7pm) so I can experience a wider array of entertainment than I would have by myself.

I’ve gone on a bit this week and to keep the length of this blog post down I’ll discuss the theories I’m skeptical of the in next week’s post but for now I’ll share just one thing I learnt about that that I really don’t think I would have researched if it wasn’t for conspiracy theories. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon it might have been just a small step but it actually left quite a big, well defined footprint. This isn’t that interesting until you understand that in order to create a footprint in sand on Earth you require some moisture. If it’s too dry then all the small particles of sand roll past each other and no footprint is left. So how could the astronauts on the Moon (which doesn’t have any water) leave footprints? Well the answer is that lunar dust is different to sand. Sand is made of mostly smooth particles because of erosion (sand is just rocks plus weather plus time). On the moon, any small particles exist because of impacts with other rocks therefore the lunar soil is jagged and when a foot pushes the particles together they can’t roll like smooth sand can and become stuck next to each other[4]. Facts like this are exactly the sort of trivia I thrive off so it’s completely unsurprising that I love conspiracy theories really.

[1] http://www.thejournal.ie/what-was-watergate-14-facts-richard-nixon-494970-Jun2012/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25

[3] http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1298&context=faculty_publications

[4] https://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/the-apollo-moon-hoax-footprints-need-water-to-form-right-and-how-hoaxers-argue/