At forty-six minutes past eight on the morning of the eleventh of September, 2001, an American Airlines passenger jet bound for Los Angeles slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, a second jet, this one a United Airlines flight, struck the South Tower. The two skyscrapers eventually came crashing down, one after the other, as the fires fed by the jet fuel softened and buckled the steel that held them up.
Together with the American Airlines jet that hit the Pentagon and the United Airlines flight that went down, and the collapse of the Twin Towers, what has been called the bloodiest terrorist attack in modern American history claimed nearly three thousand lives, left some six thousand injured, and left more than a thousand people unaccounted for or impossible to identify from their remains (Plummer, 2019).
The economic losses were beyond reckoning, and the attack went on to trigger the war in Afghanistan, which has now run for nineteen years. For many Americans, 9/11 was without question a tragedy that played out amid utter chaos, and one whose impact is hard to fathom. Perhaps it is for this very reason that some people believe the cause of the event was not so simple. Conspiracy theories duly sprang up among the public, the best known of which holds that 9/11 was orchestrated single-handedly by the US government — that it launched a war in the name of the nation's wounded and of counter-terrorism, while pursuing a plan for hegemony.
Types of Conspiracy Theory
Michael Barkun (2003), a professor at Syracuse University, argues that conspiracy theories can be sorted into three broad categories according to the scope of what they claim to cover.
The first category is the event conspiracy theory, which is tied directly to a particular incident. The theories surrounding 9/11, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the death of former South African president Nelson Mandela in prison are all examples of this kind.
The second category is the systemic conspiracy theory, which refers to a body intent on dominating the entire world by driving social, economic and political events. Conspiracy theories of this kind include those about the Illuminati and the Freemasonry.
The third is the superconspiracy theory, a single overarching set of ideas formed by linking together multiple systemic conspiracy theories; it can also be understood as a complete worldview.
Trait One: Oversimplified Reasoning
Looking across the many widely known conspiracy theories in history, three traits stand out especially clearly. The first is that the reasoning used to prop up a conspiracy theory is, more often than not, oversimplified. Take, for instance, the evidence for a flat Earth put forward by the Flat Earth Society: they note that surveyors and architects never take the curvature of the Earth into account when designing railways and bridges, and treat this as proof that the Earth must, after all, be flat — otherwise these structures could never have been built.
Plainly, this reasoning is riddled with errors. The Earth's curvature has little effect on relatively small structures, but the truth is that engineers do indeed take it into account when designing large ones. For example, on the 1,300-metre-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the two towers are 41.28 millimetres farther apart at their tops than at their bases. The difference looks tiny, but those extra few centimetres provide the structural stability the bridge requires (Owen, n.d.).
Trait Two: A Closed Belief System
That said, even when a given account looks neatly reasoned, we should be on our guard. Conspiracy theories generally involve an unfalsifiable, closed belief system — and this is the second trait. A closed belief system, like an ordinary belief system, is made up of individual beliefs combined into a theory for making sense of the world.
But it is "closed" in that it is meticulously designed to be self-justifying — which is to say that a closed belief system contains certain individual beliefs that immunise it against contrary evidence, so that any criticism or challenge is simply waved away. This stands in contrast to an open belief system, which can be tested by experiment and refuted.
An example of a closed belief system might be this: a self-styled seasoned exorcist tells you there is a ghost in your house. Would you believe him? You could choose to press him for proof: Is it male or female? What does it look like? Can I communicate with it? The exorcist gives a little laugh, and then says to you: "This ghost is fearsome — it has no shape, no sound, no colour and no smell. I'm afraid even I can't make contact with it!"
This claim that "there is a ghost in the house" can always justify itself, no matter what, because the exorcist has offered no workable method for testing whether the ghost exists at all. "Closed" means that this closed belief and our experienced world (the Empirical World) are wholly disconnected: these claims merely form a self-contained, self-justifying enclosure, with no point of intersection with our lived reality.
From a scientific standpoint, the exorcist's remarks lack falsifiability. The falsificationism advocated by the British philosopher Karl Popper holds that all scientific hypotheses must be falsifiable — that is, the hypothesis must logically allow for the existence of a counterexample (1959). This philosophy of science encourages scientists to use experiments to seek counterexamples to a given hypothesis, giving scientific theory room to advance and steadily refining our knowledge of the world. The exorcist's hypothesis, however, does exactly the opposite: it violates this requirement of falsifiability. You have no way of testing whether what the exorcist says is true or false; the ghost's defining quality of being unobservable means it could exist under any circumstances — including even after the exorcist has finished the ritual. In the same way, conspiracy theories generally lack falsifiability. It is as if any contrary evidence can be unquestioningly rebutted by the conspiracy theory, and can even become evidence in its support.
The conspiracy theory around the children's book series "the Berenstain Bears" is one such example. Even though the series has used the spelling Berenst-A-in ever since it was launched in 1962, plenty of people still insist that the correct spelling of the Berenstain Bears is Berenst-E-in.
What is interesting is that psychologists and conspiracy theorists approach this phenomenon from very different angles: the former explain it as a collective false memory, while the latter explain it as a crossing-over of parallel timelines. But just try to imagine it: proving that your own past did not involve a crossing of timelines is in fact extremely difficult. All the evidence you cite, including the relevant memories and objects, can equally be explained by conspiracy theorists as products of a timeline crossover. In that case, a conspiracy theory of this sort is unfalsifiable, and fails to meet the threshold Karl Popper set for a scientific theory to be falsifiable.
Trait Three: A Vast Hidden Hand Behind the Scenes
Another belief commonly underpinning conspiracy theories is the conviction that an untouchable and immensely powerful hidden hand is manipulating the course of the world; that this conspirator has already infiltrated every walk of life, pulling the strings of everyone from prominent figures and politicians at the top down to the grassroots — and this is the third trait. This belief serves the same function as the second trait, namely to lend the theory completeness. Where it differs, however, is in the sense of powerlessness that comes with it.
Because the body involved wields such enormous social, political and economic influence, conspiracy theorists are portrayed as a group of passive, exploited people for whom any struggle is futile. There is, for instance, a conspiracy theory claiming that the Rothschild Family used a space-based laser cannon to set off the 2020 California wildfires in order to clear land for an infrastructure project — a far cry from the version in news reports that traced the fire to a Gender Reveal Party[1]. According to this account, the Rothschild Family worked their mischief through the press outlets and politicians they controlled, pulling the wool over the eyes of the ordinary public. Even if you discovered the truth, the family would have ways to silence you.
[1] A party at which new parents announce their baby's sex to friends
This article is excerpted from Fear and Hope: A Psychology for Troubled Times — available at major bookshops across Hong Kong
| Author | TreeholeHK | |
| Publisher | Brightlight Culture Limited |
Through words, we walk alongside the people of Hong Kong — thinking together and, together, searching for our bearings in troubled times
In the twenty-first century, the great wheel of the age is turning at speed; the vastness of the world, and the pace of its change, are beyond anything we could foresee.
To be born human is, more or less, to live through moments of despair — whether as individuals, as a society or as a world. Some have lived through a sorrowful childhood, only to find, on growing up, that they still cannot escape the family's grip; faced with the complexity of social problems, they sense too that no one person's efforts could ever turn things around. Finding our bearings in troubled times is not easy; and in today's glittering, materialistic modern society, knowing ourselves is harder still.
Psychology is the science that studies human thought, behaviour and emotion, and many phenomena in society — including powerlessness, avoidance, discrimination, religion, identity and the fear of death — are inseparable from concepts in psychology; so learning psychology can be of real help in making sense of these strange and disorienting features of modern life.
These past few years, what was once familiar is familiar no longer. Perhaps you feel lost and at a loss for what to do, but seen from another angle, this may also be a pivotal era in history — as Dickens put it: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
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