People who think the U.S.

government was complicit in 9/11 or in the JFK assassination sometimes

complain that those who dismiss them as conspiracy theorists are guilty of inconsistency. For dont
the defenders of the official story behind 9/11 themselves believe in a conspiracy, namely one
masterminded by Osama bin Laden? Dont they acknowledge the existence of conspiracies like
Watergate, as well as everyday garden variety criminal conspiracies?

The objection is superficial. Critics of the best known conspiracy theories dont deny the possibility
of conspiracies per se. Rather they deny the possibility, or at least the plausibility, of conspiracies of
the scale of those posited by 9/11 and JFK assassination skeptics. One reason for this has to do with
considerations about the nature of modern bureaucracies, especially governmental ones. They are
notoriously sclerotic and risk-averse, structurally incapable of implementing any decision without
reams of paperwork and committee oversight, and dominated by ass-covering careerists concerned
above all with job security. The personnel who comprise them largely preexist and outlast the
particular administrations that are voted in and out every few years, and have interests and attitudes
that often conflict with those of the politicians they temporarily serve. Like the rest of society, they
are staffed by individuals with wildly divergent worldviews that are difficult to harmonize. The lack of
market incentives and the power of public employee unions make them extremely inefficient. And so
forth. All of this makes the chances of organizing diverse reaches of the bureaucracy (just the right
set of people spread across the Army, the Air Force, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, etc. not to mention
within private firms having their own bureaucracies and diversity of corporate and individual
interests) in a short period of time (e.g. the months between Bushs inauguration and 9/11) to carry
out a plot and cover-up of such staggering complexity, close to nil.

Another reason has to do with the nature of liberal democratic societies, and the way in which they
differ from totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, whose leaders did conspire to
do great evil. The point is not that the leaders of liberal democratic societies are not capable of great
evil. Of course they are. But they do not, and cannot, commit evils in the same way that totalitarian
leaders do. There are both structural and sociological reasons for this. The structural reasons have to
do with the adversarial, checks-and-balances nature of liberal democratic polities, which make it
extremely difficult for any faction or interest to impose its agenda by force on the others. In the
American context, the courts, the legislature, and the executive branch are all jealous of their power,
even when controlled by the same party. The Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, CIA, FBI, etc. are all
also notoriously often at odds with one another, as are the various departments within the executive
branch. The same is true of private interests the press, corporations, universities, and the like. All
must work through public legal channels, and when they try to do otherwise they risk exposure from
competing interests. Unlike traditional societies, in which the various elements of society agree (if
only because theyve never known any alternative) to subordinate their interests to a common end
(e.g. a religious end), and totalitarian societies, which openly and brutally force every element to
subordinate their interests to a common end (e.g. a utopian or dystopian political end), liberal
democratic societies eschew any common end in the interests of allowing each individual and faction
to pursue their own often conflicting ends as far as possible.

Now I do not claim that liberal democratic societies in fact perfectly realize this ideal of eschewing
any common end. Far from it. The liberal democratic ethos inevitably becomes an end in itself, and
all factions that refuse to incorporate it are ultimately pushed to the margins or even persecuted.
(John Rawlss so-called political liberalism is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to
rationalize this soft totalitarianism.) But that does not affect my point. The imposition of the liberal
ethos may involve an occasional bold power grab on the part of one faction (as Roe v. Wade did in
the case of the Supreme Court). It may involve attempts culturally to marginalize the opposition (as
in the universities and entertainment industry). But the other factions know about these efforts
they are hardly carried out unobserved in smoke-filled rooms and never roll over and play dead, as
they would in a totalitarian society. Liberal ideologues must work through the very adversarial
institutions that their ideology calls for, which is why these alleged arch-democrats are constantly
complaining about the choices their fellow citizens democratically make (electing Bush, voting for
Prop 8, opposing gun control, supporting capital punishment, etc.). For them to impose their
egalitarian ethos on everyone else through force of law takes generations, and a series of public
battles, before the other side is gradually ground down. The evil that results is typically the result of a
slowly and gradually evolving public consensus to do, or at least to give in to, evil not a sudden and
secret conspiratorial act.

So, structurally, there is just no plausible way for an inside job conspiracy of the JFK assassination
or 9/11 type to work. There is simply not enough harmony between the different institutions that
would have to be involved, either of a natural sort or the type imposed by force. And this brings me
to the sociological point that the liberal ethos itself, precisely because it tends so deeply to permeate
the thinking even of the professedly conservative elements of liberal democratic societies, makes a
conspiracy of the sort in question impossible to carry out. Freedom, tolerance, democracy,
majority rule, and the like are as much the watchwords of contemporary American conservatives
as they are of American liberals. Indeed, contemporary conservatives tend to defend their own
positions precisely in these terms, and are uncomfortable with any suggestion that there might be
something in conservatism inconsistent with them. The good side of this is that contemporary
American conservatives will have absolutely no truck with the likes of Tim McVeigh, and will
condemn right-wing political violence as loudly as any liberal would. The bad side is that some of
them also seem willing to tolerate almost any evil as long as there is a consensus in favor of it and it
is done legally. (Same-sex marriage? Well, the courts imposed it without voter approval. But what if
the voters do someday approve it? Will conservatives then decide that its OK after all? Some of
them already have.)

The point, in any event, is that just as the structure of a liberal democratic society differs from that of
totalitarian states, so too does the ethos of its leaders. They generally like to do their evil in legal and
political ways, through demagoguery, getting evil laws passed, destroying reputations, and other
generally bloodless means. Occasionally theyll resort also to ballot-box stuffing, and maybe the odd
piece of union thuggery or police brutality. But outright murder is extremely rare, and usually folded
into some legitimate context so as to make it seem justifiable (e.g. My Lai or the firebombing of
Dresden, atrocities committed in the course of otherwise just wars). Do ideologically motivated
sociopaths like General Jack D. Ripper of Dr. Strangelove fame sometimes exist even in liberal
democratic societies? Sure. But hundreds or even just dozens of Jack D. Rippers, occupying just the
right positions at just the right times in the executive branch, the FBI, the FAA, the NYPD, the FDNY,
the Air Force, American Airlines, United Airlines, Larry Silversteins office, CNN, NBC, Fox News, The
New York Times, etc. etc., never accidentally tipping off hostile co-workers or fatally screwing up in
other ways? All happily risking their careers and reputations, indeed maybe even their lives, in the
interests of the Zionist cause, or Big Oil, or whatever? Not a chance. Indeed, the very idea is
ludicrous.

Of course, some conspiracy theorists will insist that the adversarial, checks-and-balances nature of
liberal democracies and their tolerant ethos are themselves just part of the illusion created by the
conspirators. Somehow, even the fact that conspiracy theorists are perfectly free to publish their
books, organize rallies, etc. in a way they would not for a moment be able to do in Nazi Germany or
Soviet Russia is nevertheless just part of a more subtle and diabolical form of police state.

Here weve gone through the looking glass indeed, and come to a third and more philosophically
interesting problem with conspiracy theories, one that can be understood on the basis of an analogy
with philosophical skepticism and its differences from ordinary skepticism. Doubting whether you
really saw your cousin walking across the bridge, or just a lookalike, can be perfectly reasonable.
Doubting whether cousins or bridges really exist in the first place maybe youre only dreaming they
exist, or maybe theres a Cartesian demon deceiving you, or maybe youre trapped in The Matrix is
not reasonable. It only seems reasonable when one is beholden to a misguided theory of knowledge,
a theory that effectively undermines the possibility of any knowledge whatsoever. The difference
here is sometimes described as a difference between "local" doubt and "global" doubt. Local doubts
arise on the basis of other beliefs taken to be secure. You know that you are nearsighted or that your
glasses are dirty, so you doubt whether you really saw your cousin. Global doubts have a tendency to
undermine all beliefs, or at least all beliefs within a certain domain. You know that your senses have
sometimes deceived you about some things, and being a philosopher you start to wonder whether
they are always deceiving you about everything.

Notice that unlike local doubt, global doubt tends to undermine even the evidence that led to the
doubt in the first place. Doubting that you really saw your cousin doesnt lead you to think that your
belief that you are nearsighted or that your glasses are dirty might also be false. But suppose your
belief that you sometimes have been fooled by visual illusions leads you to doubt your senses in
general. You came to believe that your perceptual experience of a bent stick in the water was illusory
because you also believed that your experience of seeing the stick as straight when removed from
the water was not illusory. But you end up with the view that maybe that experience, and all
experience, is illusory after all. You came to believe that you might be dreaming right now because in
the past youve had vivid dreams from which you woke up. You end up with the view that maybe
even the experience of waking up was itself a dream, so that youve never really been awake at all.
Again, the doubt tends to swallow up even the evidence that led to the doubt. (Philosophers like J. L.
Austin have suggested that this shows that philosophical skepticism is not even conceptually
coherent, but we neednt commit ourselves to that claim to make the point that it does at least tend
to undermine the very evidence that leads to it.)

I suggest that the distinction between ordinary, everyday conspiracies (among mobsters, or
Watergate conspirators, or whatever) and vast conspiracies of the sort alleged by 9/11 and JFK
assassination skeptics, parallels the scenarios described by commonsense or local forms of doubt
and philosophical or global forms of doubt, respectively. We know that the former sorts of
conspiracies occur because we trust the sources that tell us about them news accounts, history
books, reports issued by government commissions, eyewitnesses, and so forth. And there is nothing
in the nature of those conspiracies that would lead us to doubt these sources. But conspiracies of the
latter sort, if they were real, would undermine all such sources. And yet it is only through such
sources that conspiracy theorists defend their theories in the first place. They point to isolated
statements from this or that history book or government document (the Warren Report, say), to this
or that allegedly anomalous claim made in a newspaper story or by an eyewitness, and build their
case on a collection of such sources. But the conspiracy they posit is one so vast that they end up
claiming that all such sources are suspect wherever they conflict with the conspiracy theory. Indeed,
even some sources apparently supportive of the conspiracy theory are sometimes suspected of being
plants subtly insinuated by the conspirators themselves, so that they might later be discredited,
thereby discrediting conspiracy theorists generally. Overall, the history books, news sources,
government commissions, and eyewitnesses are all taken to be in some way subject to the power of
the conspirators (out of sympathy, or because of threats, or because the sources are themselves
being lied to). Nothing is certain. But in that case the grounds for believing in the conspiracy in the
first place are themselves uncertain. At the very least, the decision to accept some source claims and
not others inevitably becomes arbitrary and question-begging, driven by belief in the conspiracy
rather than providing independent support for believing in it.

Now, while global forms of skepticism might be fun to think about and pose interesting
philosophical puzzles, it would hardly be rational to think for a moment that they might be true.
Seriously to wonder whether one is a brain in a vat, or trapped in The Matrix, or always asleep and
dreaming not as a fantasy, not in the course of a late-night dorm room bull session, but as a live
option would be lunacy. Certainly it would make almost any further rational thought nearly
impossible, because it would strip almost any inference of any rational foundation. But something
similar seems to be true of conspiracy theories of the sort in question. The reason their adherents
often seem to others to be paranoid and delusional is because they are committed to an
epistemological position which inherently tends toward paranoia and delusion, just as a serious
belief in Cartesian demons or omnipotent matrix-building mad scientists or supercomputers would.
Their skepticism about the social order is so radical that it precludes the possibility of coming to any
stable or justified beliefs about the social order.

Am I saying that news organizations, government commissions, and the like never lie? Of course not.
I am saying that it is at the very least improbable in the extreme that they do lie or even could lie on
the vast scale and in the manner in which conspiracy theorists say they do, and that it is hard to see
how the belief that they do so could ever be rationally justified. But what about government
agencies and news sources in totalitarian countries? Doesnt the fact of their existence refute this
claim of mine? Not at all. For citizens in totalitarian countries generally do not trust these sources in
the first place. Indeed, they often treat them as something of a joke, and though they might believe
some of what they are told by these sources, they are also constantly seeking out more reliable
alternative sources from outside. Moreover, these citizens already know full well that their
governments are doing horrible things, and many of these things are done openly anyway. Hence, we
dont have in this case anything close to a parallel to what conspiracy theorists claim happens in
liberal democracies: evil things done by governments on a massive scale, of which the general
population has no inkling because they generally trust the news sources and government agencies
from which they get their information, and where these sources and agencies purport to be, and are
generally perceived to be, independent.
On such general epistemological and social-scientific grounds, then, I maintain that conspiracy
theories of the sort in question are so a priori improbable that they are not worth taking seriously.
That does not mean that the specific empirical claims made by conspiracy theorists are never
significant. In my college days I read a great deal about the JFK assassination case, and was even
convinced for a time that there was a conspiracy involving the government. While I no longer believe
that I believe that Oswald killed Kennedy, and acted alone I concede that there are certain pieces
of evidence (e.g. the backward movement of Kennedys head, Rubys assassination of Oswald) that
might lead a reasonable person who hasnt investigated the case very deeply to doubt the official
story. (Ive also examined a fair amount of the 9/11 conspiracy theory material, though I must say
that in this case this has only made the whole idea seem to me even more preposterous than it did
initially, if that is possible. They dont make conspiracy theorists like they used to.) But in my
judgment, in the vast majority of cases the alleged evidence of falsehood in the official story is
nothing of the kind, and where it is it can easily and most plausibly be accounted for in terms of the
sort of bureaucratic ass-covering, incompetence, or just honest error that is common to
investigations in general (whether by police, insurance companies, or whatever).

If one is going to claim more than this, then just as in these other sorts of investigations, one needs
to provide some plausible alternative explanation. The Im just raising questions shtick is not
intellectually or morally serious, certainly not when youre accusing people of mass murder. And
given the considerations raised above, it is hard to see how conspiracy theories of the sort in
question could ever be plausible alternatives.

Why, then, do people fall for these theories? Largely out of simple intellectual error. But what makes
someone susceptible of this particular kind of error? That is a question I have addressed before, in a
TCS Daily article which suggested that the answer has something to do with the (false) post-
Enlightenment notion that science and critical thinking are of their nature in the business of
unmasking received ideas, popular opinion, and common sense in general. Some readers of that
article asked a good question: How does this suggestion account for the existence of conspiracy
theories on the Right, which generally sees itself as upholding received ideas and common sense?

I would make two points in response. First, consider some standard examples of such right-wing
conspiracy theories, such as those involving Freemasons or Communists. These can be understood in
two ways. On one interpretation, the idea would be that Freemasons, Communists, or whomever,
given their ideological commitments, have actively sought to get themselves and their sympathizers
into positions of power and influence so as to promote and implement their ideas, and that they
have done so subtly and by using duplicity. But there is nothing in this idea that conflicts with
anything Ive been saying. In particular, there is nothing in it that entails that any single massively
complex event was engineered in detail by a small elite manipulating, with precision, dozens or
hundreds of actors across a bewildering variety of conflicting institutions and agencies in the context
of a society that is to all appearances reasonably open, all the while skillfully covering their tracks to
hide their actions to all but the most devoted conspiracy theory adepts. Rather, it just involves like-
minded people working systematically and deviously to further their common interests in a general
way over the course of a long period of time a phenomenon that is well-known from everyday life,
and does not require belief in any radical gap between appearance and reality in the social and
political worlds. In short, it does not involve belief in any conspiracy theory of the specific sort Ive
been criticizing.

The alternative interpretation would be that Freemasons, Communists, and the like have done more
than this, that they have indeed conspired to produce individual events of the sort in question, in just
the manner in question that they conspired across national boundaries and bureaucracies to
engineer World War I, say, or various stock market crashes, or whatever. Here the right-wing sort of
conspiracy theory does indeed run into the problems I have been identifying, and is as a
consequence just as irrational as its left-wing counterparts. And this brings me to my second point.
As I said earlier, given the hegemony of liberal, post-Enlightenment ideas in modern Western society,
even many conservatives can find themselves taking some of them for granted. Ironically, this
sometimes includes even those conservatives most self-consciously hostile to liberal and
Enlightenment ideas, namely paleoconservatives (the sort, not coincidentally, who are most likely to
be drawn to conspiracy theories). And it does so, even more ironically, precisely because of their
awareness of this hegemony. Because they quite understandably feel besieged on all sides by
modernity, and utterly shut out of its ruling institutions, they are tempted by at least one modern,
post-Enlightenment, left-wing illusion, and the most beguiling one at that: that all authority is a
manifestation of a smothering, omnipotent malevolence. Like the Marxist or anarchist, they find
themselves shaking their fist at the entire social order as nothing more than a mask for hidden forces
of evil, and even the most absurd conspiracy theories come to seem to them to be a priori plausible.

The overall result is something eerily like the old Gnostic heresy, on which the apparently benign
world of our experience is really the creation of an evil demiurge, and where this dark and hidden
truth is known only to those few insiders acquainted with a special gnosis. (Into the bargain, the
demiurge was often identified by the Gnostics with the God of the Jews.) For world read modern
Western society, for demiurge read Freemasons, Communists, or Zionists, and for gnosis read
the vast labyrinth of conspiracy theory literature. Alternatively, it is like the Cartesian fantasy of a
malin genie who deceives us with a world of appearances that masks a hidden reality. Certainly these
similarities should give any traditionalist pause; and the conspiracy theory mindset is in any event a
very odd thing to try to combine with the traditional Christian anti-Gnostic emphasis on the public
and open nature of truth, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic rejection of any radical Cartesian
appearance/reality distinction in favor of moderation and common sense.

Anyway, if the question is how, given that (as I argue in the TCS Daily article) conspiracy theories are
essentially an artifact of certain key modern, post-Enlightenment attitudes and assumptions, right-
wingers could ever accept them, the answer is that here, as elsewhere, conservatives and
traditionalists are too often not conservative and traditional enough.