Conspiracy theory

Official characterisation of defining events, for example, wars, terrorist attacks, extrajudicial killings, extraterrestrials and space missions, economic and political crises et cetera are often viewed as ill-motivated and met with severe scepticism by many across the world. Counter configuration of such events that attempt to prove falsehood of the official story and articulate the "real" story is generally known as Conspiracy Theory (CT).

The Making of CT

CT often emerges when (a) the official storyline appears incongruent, (b) critical information released does not sound credible, (c) the office is not believed to be truthful, (d) released information is far from adequate or transparent, (e) the event/phenomenon is quite complex for most commoners to see holes in the official story line, (f) there exists a scope to blame other individuals or entities and thus create the pretext for a future action, and (g) security and confidentiality argument can be invoked to prevent a fuller disclosure.

Arguably the most popular CT of all time concerns the 9/11 "Terrorist" attacks in the USA that claimed the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. The dominant CT theme here is the engineering incongruence, namely how the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York could not possibly have imploded the way it did from the heat of the burning jet fuel. The CT counter-explanation relies on controlled detonation of explosives placed tactically in the Tower ahead of time.

Officially released information lacks credibility as it implied an incredibly wide and persistent array of intelligence and security failures. This credibility problem is preceded by the notion that the US Government has historically promoted and protected the commercial welfare of big businesses, most notably energy and weapons.

Till date there is a remarkable paucity of official information about such a complex operation, allegedly hatched and executed by Al-Qaeda under Bin Laden, once a favourite jihadist of the USA in Afghanistan. The CT proponents argue that the neoconservatives in the US Government might have used the deadliest terrorist attack in the USA as a national security pretext for initiating a series of armed conflicts requiring extensive US military presence in the Middle-East and Asia, with the ulterior motive of controlling Middle-East geopolitics and oil resources and boosting warfare commerce.

Prospect and Popularity of CT

CT is a legitimate way of expressing dissention with and disapproval of the official account of grave events with enormous local, and often global, consequences. CT is also often advocated in a way that appears more credible and connected to other events and developments, and usually adds aspects of evidence and angles to the analysis and understanding of events. For the vast majority of events, CT is no less of an explanation and holds similar, if not more, prospect of capturing the truth as the official account.

To the geopolitical connoisseurs and game theorists, CT is of course absolutely delightful and stimulating. But CT also can and usually does hold popular appeal due to psychological reasons and the way the human brain works.

Psychological/behavioral research suggests that people tend to be suspicious of powerful individuals and organizations perceived to be adversarial. Further, CTs often emerge following events that generate uncertainty and fear and make people feel powerless over their life and surroundings. Under such circumstances, people feel comforted if they can make sense of the dreadful event by connecting dots that are not necessarily connected and filling holes that may be imaginary. This is of course what the CTs offer.

Further scientific research suggests that the human brain functions in an associative manner and is better at retaining information that appears associated or connected, although the association may be totally coincidental. In the context of CT, this means that a CT, by connecting widely known dots (names of organizations/states, figures, phenomena and events) can create a scheme of events that will appear familiar, and hence offer a sense of comfort with the scheme, whether true or not.

Government CT

While CT in popular parlance refers to the Government as the conspirators, there are perhaps more instances where the Government leaders and officials propagate and promote CT of their own to vilify opposing forces and justify government policies that are generally suppressive in nature. A well-known case in question is the WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) intelligence story used by the US and UK to attack Iraq in 2003. No WMD was ever found in Iraq and recently former UK PM Tony Blair has apologized for the mistakes of the time.

Academics on CT

Attempts to debunk CT, government sponsored or not, are spun by the opposite camp as sneaky endeavours to undermine the alleged conspiracy and hence get folded into CT. This means that a CT is a dead end, unlikely to be resolved by one camp producing sufficient evidence for the other camp to withdraw from their position. This is especially so when the government is the alleged conspirator, since there is little evidence of governments worldwide disclosing more pertinent information in response to privately sponsored CT.

A CT is more easily accepted if and when the belief system of an individual or a social/ethnic group is biased against the alleged conspirators. This is consistent with the US Government's Al-Qaeda terror explanation of the 9/11 attack being generally accepted in the West, while the CTs alleging US Government involvement being overwhelmingly popular in the Middle-East and elsewhere. In other words, CTs tend to strengthen rather than dissipate prejudices.

In general, CTs tend to polarise people into "camps of extreme agreement and disagreement based upon identity rather than rational discourse." As such, it is clearly detrimental for consensus building on vital national issues when competing political camps, as a tactic, regularly blame each other for conspiring against national interest, rarely if ever producing sufficient and verifiable evidence.

In the end, except cases like Watergate and WMD, very few CTs are ever validated or invalidated. Invoking national security, governments rarely divulge tangible evidence. Barring such privileged information or the leak thereof (e.g. WikiLeaks), privately proposed CTs have very little chance of being proven. This fundamental issue of lack of transparency and disclosure meantime can have the unintended consequences of stronger antagonism, bias and dubiety, within a nation or globally. While some CTs may indeed be true, their practical benefit seems limited to the psychological sphere of offering comfort to people in a situation of pervasive fear and grief.