The denial of contingency, and the search for necessity, is evident in all domains. Theological and philosophical explanations. For example Plato' s notion of a great chain of being from the angels down to the lowest animals - is an attempt to establish that the existence of the world follows necessarily from God's agape. And even the atheistic Nietzsche discovered something akin to a providence, which entered into his philosophy as "amor fati." But the wish to deny the contingent dimension of spatiotemporal existence, and the insistence that events happen out of necessity, also at times leads science to posit causal explanations.
Conspiracy theories are, therefore, not unique in that regard, for they, too, seek to demonstrate that behind the appearance of contingency, acddent, chance, and indeterminacy, lies necessity. They claim that none of the significant events of the sodal and politieal realm are free, unplanned, or accidental. On the contrary, these events are due to a nefarious cabal of conspirators operating clandestinely. If one thinks otherwise, then one has been deluded by appearances, and fooled into complacency by the conspirators. The notion that "nothing happens by chance" has reached absurd proportions in the Middle East, predicated on the notion that the Jews - and sometimes the Americans or the British - are behind just about everything bad that happens, including natural disasters like earthquakes and droughts as we will see next.
On the other hand that the loss of Great Britain' s colonies in the twentieth century was not something that happened for merely contingent reasons - for example, the fact that Mahatma Gandhi appeared on the scene - but was due to long-term economic and geopolitical trends- differs from a conspiracy theory in that the identity factors that they posit. A long term sodal trend (such as the aging of the population of a country), an economic law (such as the Pareto Principle), a geopolitical and social reality (such as the closing of the American frontier), or a cultural change (such as the rise of feminism) - are abstract and impersonal.
The social and political theories, the identity factors posited by conspiracy theories - the secret and nefarious designs of a certain group of people – are particular and personal. That is the strange twist in conspiracy theories, their oddity as a mode of explanation, for instead of truly ascending to the abstract and universal, they conflate the particular and the universal. That is, after all, what is implied in suggesting that a particular group of people is the universal cause of al1 that is wrong with the world.
Ofcourse one could also argue that the essenee of conspiracy beliefs lies in attempts to delineate and explain evil, even if it is only the vehicle of explanation, i.e. the identity factor behind the multiplicity of life's problems.
It should also be noted that although most scholars would agree that eonspiracy theories are a form of explanation, the distinguished social psychologist Serge Moscovici begs to differ. His objection is worth considering:
But, you will say, conspiracy theories grow out of the need to explain, which is the function of any theory...In order for any explanation to be valid, however, one must be willing to recognize certain limits to its applicability. If one can trace all effects to the same cause, one believes that one has explained everything. But a theory that explains everything really explains nothing. Thus I suggest that the function of conspiracy theory is not to explain an event through a cause. Rather, it responds to the need to integrate one's image of society in one cause...m other words, the import of the theory in question is that it integrates people's mind-set and prevents any "rupture" in their mentality...It is like saying "You see, everything is dear," or "There is nothing bizarre or disconcerting about this; you are familiar with all this." (1987, pp. 156-157)
Moscovici is correct that the function of conspiracy theories is not really to explain, if we mean investigating a phenomenon and then discovering its true cause. On the contrary, conspiracy theories „explain away" phenomena, particularly those events that might disrupt the ontological security of the members of a particular society. For example, many socially and politically backward countries blame their economic troubles on conspiracies by Western imperialists, thus explaining away those unpleasant facts about themselves that urgently need to be addressed, but if addressed would cause social disruption. Although Moscovici does not use the phrase „explain away," or reductionism, it lies at the heart of his critique.
On the other hand, Moscovici is incorrect in distinguishing conspiracy theories from other theories on that basis, for in truth, to explain is always to explain away, and this is something that all theories do, more or less. They explain away anything that is unintelligible, such as color and sound, by taking these phenomena out of the object, and placing them in that repository for ‚unreal’ appearances, known as the subject.
Naturally, some theories do more explaining away, are more reductionistic and, consequently, further afield of appearances, than others. But conspiracy are way out on the far side of reductionism. They do not ignore appearances, but they radically interpret them.
Conspiracy theories offer a curious type of causal explanation for events whose outcome would otherwise not seem to be predetermined. For example, it would certainly appear that buyers and sellers in the stock market determine the price of stocks, that it is a free market. The Securities and Exchange Commission does not have the staff to monitor
thousands of individual securities, as well as the millions of transactions that occur every day. Insider trading is notoriously difficult to prove. Consequently, individual stocks have, at times, been manipulated. Furthermore, as happened in the case of Enron, the financial statements of a company can be falsified to deceive investors of a companies net worth. Enron was not the first, nor will it be the last, case of such fraud and investor deception, and for every Enron there have been many more such conspiracies that have never been exposed.
But it would be almost inconceivable that the entire-market could be manipulated, that a group of conspirators could force the Dow, the S & P 500, and all else to go up or to go down at their command, without their collusive efforts being detected. After all, large scale trades are required to be reported to the Security and Exchange Commission. Even without that reportage, it would be virtually impossible to keep such major manipulations a secret for very long. All the same, there have always been conspiracy theorists who have c1aimed that the market is manipulated. They have asserted, more specifically, that the entire stock market - not merely individual securities - is manipulated by a cabal of wealthy financiers, who conspire to manipulate prices for their personal gain, while maintaining the illusion of a free market.
But to a rigid person, the unusual or unexpected is threatening simply because it is unusual or unexpected, aside from whatever eIse it may be. And it is not a concrete danger, but surprise that a suspicious person dreads most. What is the anxiety over being surprised essentially about?
It would appear that the conspiracy theorist feels ungrounded by the notion that the stock market and, for that matter, the entire global eeonomy is not in the secure hands of a select group of highly ethical people with both superior knowledge and intelligence. On the contrary, the stock market is founded on something that is unplanned, open, indeterminate, and uncontrollable: the differing opinions and decisions of millions of buyers and sellers, each with a limited grasp of situations and events. It sounds like a recipe for a chaotic and anxious state of affairs.
It may, indeed, appear that the markets are always on the edge of chaos, but part of the conspiracy theorist's arodety, in that regard, derives from a failure to understand, and to appreciate, how the world really works.
But neither the totalitarian, nor the conspiracy theorist believes that order can come about through individuals acting spontaneously without the imposition of a commanding intelligence. If the totalitarian, fearing chaos, believes that order must be imposed from without, the conspiracy theorist, similarly fearing chaos, believes that order already exists, behind the scenes, and is in full control of our world, even if it is the evil order of conspiratorial collusion. Neither has faith that order can emerge unplanned.
It may be that a disbelief in the possibility of order, intelligence, and life emerging unplanned out of accident and contingency is ripe soll for the growth of the paranoid vision. The suspiciousness and distrust endemie to the paranoid vision, and the underlying anxious ontological insecurity, compel a person who sees life this way to fear unstructured situations, or to delusively imagine that control exists where, in fact, it does not. Disbelief in the possibility of unplanned order is likely a consequence of a lack of trust in life itself, for contingency lies at the very heart of life.
The dreadful encounter with contingency gives rise to conspiracy theories not only in the economic domain, but in the realm of history too.Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the tolls of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. Indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits !rom the misery he has produced.
For example the French Revolution as is known today, was the result of a number of forces social, politieal, economic, cultural, and intellectual - that had long been brewing, and which finally converged one fateful day in 1789. Of course, the fact that all of those factors converged when they did, and how they did, and with certain people leading the revolution, are all contingent factors. There was no historical necessity, for example, for the reign of terror occurring. Thus history is a combination of the determinacy of long term trends mated with indeterminacy. But, conspiracy theorists claimed back in the eighteenth century, and still claim today, the contrary thesis, that the French Revolution had been preplanned by the Bavarian Illuminati, an occult secret society. Yet accidents, contingencies, chance, and tricks of fate are the stuff of life. They defeat the conspiracy theory notion of history, which is founded on faith in the efficacy of perfect planning.
Thus while for example such factors as military genius, shrewd planning, intelligence, belief in the nobleness of one's cause, and sheer daring playa significant role in the success of any military campaign, the history of warfare indicates that simply managing to make fewer errors than the enemy also plays a very significant role. For example, Stalin was foolish enough to trust Hitler, when Hitler claimed that he wanted peace with Russia, despite the fact that Hitler had amassed over a million German soldiers on the Russian border! Yet Stalin still managed to win because Hitler was the bigger fool by attacking Russia during the winter, while being at war with England, and then by declaring war on America, thus waging a war simultaneously on three fronts. Here, then, it is evident that chance, accident, human stupidity, ignorance, delusion, play a major role in history, contrary to the notion, shared by conspiracy theorists, that just about everything is planned.
Is history, then, nothing but aseries of accidents? Certainly not. Most historians will not deny that there are historical laws and that some sense can be made of affairs most of the time, although it is easier to do so retrospectively. Nor are they denying the existence of conspiracy theories. They are merely contending that the contingent, accidental dimension of spatiotemporal existence be taken into account in any attempt to understand the dynamics of history.
Even if it were somehow true that the evils that befall one were not a function of chance - but were prearranged to occur by a group of conspirators wielding enormous power, who could significantly influence the course of history - the very existence of the conspirators would be contingent upon the accidental circumstances endemie to spatiotemporal existence, and thus lack necessity. There is not a necessary reason why any particular person, group or organization - nefarious or otherwise - is destined to exist and to play a decisive role in shaping world events. Rooted in the vicissitudes of current events and history, the existence of a secret caballacks both the time-transcending universality, as weil as the necessity required to serve as a satisfactory explanation of the evil, injustiees, and suffering that one experiences.
That said, how is it that conspiracy theories do, in fact, have enormous explanatory power for many people, capturing their emotions, luring believers to suspend their critical thinking capacities, and sometimes propeiling them into violent action? The explanatory power of conspiracy theories derives from the fact that they make an implicit claim to universality and necessity. Absurd though it may seem, their subtext is often that the alleged conspirators are the universal, necessary, and ultimate, source of evil in the world or, at least, the group of conspirators are believed to be Satan's earthly agents. Usually, the more malevolent the conspiracy theory, the more ultimate is the implicit metaphysical claim. Sometimes this claim to universality is even explicit, as in the conspiracy theory about Jewish plans for world domination - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
How is it that conspiracy theories have been, and still are - despite their often being completely counterintuitive, if not downright absurd - powerfully persuasive to so many people, even to highly intelligent people? The answer lies in the symbolic, or mythic, power of conspiracy theories as a mode of explanation. To understand symbolic thinking, it might help to compare it to metaphorical thinking. In metaphorical thinking, a metaphor's meaning (its tenor) has been clearly discriminated from its vehic1e (that which embodies its meaning.) One might say, for example, that a lion represents courage. Thus, in metaphorical thinking, the particular animal called a lion and the concept of courage have clearly been distinguished.
But in the type of cognition characterized as symbolic - which is also called "mythic," or "archetypal" - the meaning of a symbol has not been distinguished from its particular representation. Thus, to a person experiencing life mythically, to eat the heart of a Hon is literally to acquire courage. Similarly, for a devout Christian, baptism is experienced, quite literally, as being rebom. And similarly, in the communion ceremony, the Eucharist wafer does not represent Christ's flesh, and the wine represent Christ's blood; through the miracle of symbolic cognition the blood and the wine are experienced as literally Christ' s flesh and blood. Thus, a person who is in symbolic consciousness does not distinguish the particular (the wafer and the wine,during mass) from its meaning (courage, rebirth, God, etc.)
Conspiracy theories are, actually, a curious hybrid of philosophical explanation and symbolic thinking/ which is why we have suggested that they are a perversion of the explanatory enterprise. That is how it is possible for a conspiracy theory to evoke the sense that a particular group of people do not just have evil ways, but are perceived to be evil incamate. That, then, would account for the curious absurdity of a contingent explanation - for example, "The Masons are behind everything" - appearing to be non-contingent, indeed the universal and necessary explanation of all of the evils in existence.
It is obvious, then, for a conspiracy theory to persuade one of its "truth" in the mythic sense, one cannot remain rational, discriminative, and analytical in one's thinking. One cannot use discursive reasoning to arrive at the truth of a matter for, if one did, one would perceive facts that were incongruent with the theory, wild improbabilities, and glaring contradictions within its logic. One might also question the motives, sophistication, and mental health, of those who were propagating the theory: Are the conspiracy theorists resentful hate mongers? Politically naive? Psychologically unbalanced? Imbued with the paranoid vision? What is their real agenda? All such thoughts would perplex one, prompting one to become skeptical of the conspiracy theory, or at least to entertain serious doubts about its validity.
One can be tempted to believe in conspiracy theories because they provide a facile answer to ultimate questions that all people must face, questions that are difficult and problematic - Job, Arjuna, Ramlet, or Ivan Karamazov type of questions. Life' s temptation is not just to believe in conspiracy theories. It is, more essentially, to regress to symbolic "answers" to life's ultimate questions, of which conspiracy theories are one species.
This conflation of individual and archetypal is akin to idolatry. But rather than worshipping a finite human being or a particular thing as if he, she or it were God incamate, the conspiracy theorist regards a particular group of people, the supposed conspirators, as if they were Satan incarnate, or at least the agents of Satan. This demonization could aptly be called "negative idolatry." Because they are viewed archetypally, and not as regular human beings, powers are attributed to the supposed conspirators which make them larger than life. One such power attributed to them is ubiquity. They seem everywhere, and involved with everything. When for example, one believes that that an allegedly secret society like the Council on Foreign Relations are conspiring to control the world, then wherever one looks - at the international news, or what is occurring locally one will suspect the hidden hand of the Council on Foreign Relations to be controlling events.
Al Qaeda gained no geopolitical advantage. Rather, it took place for mythic reasons, as a product of the fantasy ideology of radical Islam. The United States had become a symbol to them of all that was evil about the modem world.
Paradoxically, the key to understanding a theory is to discern its limits, to ask: What is the theory unable to explain? Where does the theory fail in its claim to universality? There is always some element of reality that lies beyond the purview of a theory, outside the circle of interpretation. For example, the theory of atomism cannot explain human values such as love, justice, charity, and beauty. Efforts by atomists to do so are reductionistic; they attempt to „explain away" these values rather than admitting that their theory has a „leftover,“ that which cannot be explained by the theory. Similarly, the frequent claim made by a certain class of conspiracy theories, that „The Jews are all powerful, and control everything," cannot explain their persecution through the centuries, the Holocaust, nor how Jews are frequent targets of terrorism by Islamic fundamentalists.
What, then, to do with such contradictory evidence? In such realms as philosophy and science, it can be relegated to the realm of appearances, and is dismissed as insignificant. In the realm of conspiracy theories, the most direct way of dealing with it is to simply deny the facts. For example, some conspiracy theorists have adamantly claimed that the Holocaust never occurred, that it is merely a story concocted by certain conspiring Jewish groups to gain sympathy, as a means to gaining power. The same is true of the Turks who deny the existence of the Armenian genocide. If evidence is presented that contradicts the validity of a conspiracy theory, the conspiracy theorist, who uses the tactic of denial, will denigrate the evidence, claiming that it is fabricated and so on. What would happen were one to admit the exceptions to the theory, or to admit facts that contradict the theory?
When qualifications are incorporated into a theory, it makes the theory a good deal more credible. After all, limiting conditions are intrinsic to spatiotemporal existence. The world is infused with contingency. Why then the resistance? The slightest qualification to a theory belies its claim to universality and to completeness, causing the theory to lose its explanatory power.
A qualified way of seeing the world would be more reasonable, but it would fail to satisfy the criteria of universality, completeness, absoluteness, and totality, and thus lose its ability to act as a center, a first principle, for a person's life. A reluctance to admit qualifications therefore is potent in the case of the conspiracy theorist. Were qualifications admitted, the conspiracy theory would fail to impart an emotional drama, sense of conviction, and direction. Consequently, when one gazed upon the world, through the scope of a conspiracy theory - whose paranoiac potential had been diluted by acknowledging limiting conditions - the world so conceived would fail to reflect back to one the paranoid vision. Qualifications, then, precipitate a letdown from the animating paranoid vision into the mundanity of ordinary existence. Of course, in reality, conspiracy theories do not make relative, partial, contingent, explanatory claims, for the paranoid vision is founded upon a kind of fanatical thinking.
Halfway villains won't do. It would be a weak conspiracy theory that contended that a cabal of conspirators did not have control over the entire world, but only controlled part of Northern New Jersey, and then only on weekends, and even then only when the head conspirator's meddlesome mother-in-Iaw was not in town.
There are however, conspiracy theorists who do remain uncertain about the validity of their theories. That is possible since the paranoid vision is not always imbued with malevolence. Thus it is that conspiracy theories, although fully infused with the paranoid vision, are not always malevolent. For example, conspiracy theories about the US Air Force knowing that space aliens landed at Roswell, New Mexico, but covering it up. Such theories are generally benign. The mood is not one of intense hostility, resentment, and anger. It is rather one of longing to know the truth, uncertainty, and frustration over not knowing, coupled with a sense of distrust over a government which is believed to be deceitful.
And the belief that UFOs landed is not in itself a conspiracy theory, but the notion that the government (the Air Force) is covering it up, is one. The openness to doubt, is true of only relatively non-malevolent conspiracy theories, like the ones involving whether there was a cover-up at Roswell. After all, most eonspiracy theories about space aliens are not about finding the ultimate souree of evil. They derive from the longing to make contact with the rest of the universe, which itself is due to that cosmic loneliness endemic to earthlings.
Conspiracy theorists of the malevolent kind, on the other hand, are not ironic, but serious about it all. If they are open at all, it is in regard to the details of their theories, but the basic premises remain intact.
Finally there is also the convoluting of a theory what happens in the realm of conspiracy theories. For example, many Arabs admit that Jews are killed by Palestinian suicide bombings. Does this belief the Arab's notion that the Jews are all-powerful?
Not at all, for they claim that the Israeli secret intelligence service, the Mossad, arranged for the terrorists to set off the bombs, so as to make the Arabs look bad. Thus one could say that conspiracy theorizing is an effort to make sense of the world.But it is desperate, because there is a great deal in life that is inexplicable, that must remain unintelligible.
One joumeys though life, often unsure of the path, unsure of what fortune has in store, and uncertain of the future of the world. How can one plan ahead when the brightest people have been notoriously wrong in their predictions? Major events so often come as a surprise. The fall of the Soviet Union was not predicted by most of the brightest intellectuals. Neither was September 11th. Goethe's Faust is so unhappy over the limits of his ability to know that he considers suicide, but instead makes a pact with the devi1, with the promise that he could attain complete knowledge. Humility and faith are qualities lacking not only in Faust, but also those under the sway of the paranoid vision. Out of their mental desperation, from being unable to attain certitude about life, paranoids begin to hallucinate those cognitive mirages known as conspiracy theories.
Human beings, unlike animals, cannot simply be. They feel compelled to justify their actions, demonstrating how they are necessary, right, valid, and moral. More essentially, justification is the effort to connect one's actions to a higher law or purpose. Even those who commit heinous deeds are not indifferent to questions of good and evil, but seek to defend their actions, both to themselves and to others. Invariably that higher law, upon which they base their justifications, is self-defense. As the genocidal Slobodan Milosevic stated, "There was no Serb aggression... We where merely protecting ourselves."
Also, unlike animals, human beings cannot suffer without earnestly seeking to know why they suffer and, more generally, why anyone suffers. In this case, it is God's ways that are in need of justification. The effort to uncover the meaning of suffering finds expression in myths about the origin of evil, as weIl as in theology and philosophy. Major disasters - such as earthquakes, disease epidemics, tidal waves, and holocausts - invite questions of the role of fate versus chance versus providence in human affairs. Theological arguments, known as theodicies, seek to reconci1e the existence of such disasters, which are considered to be a "natural evil," with the existence of God. Whether such arguments are cogent is another story.
All theologies, and those philosophies that address humanity' s existential concerns, can, therefore, be considered as answers to Job who, in the Biblical story, feIt that his suffering was not justified since he was a good, righteous man. When he asked God for an explanation, his three friends urged him to repent, even though there was no evidence for his culpability. What if Job's three "comforters," as they have been called, had been conspiracy theorists? They would have sought to cut the Gordian knot of the theological conflict by blaming neither Job nor God, but the Canaanites, or one of the other neighboring tribes. That would have been a letdown, for in attributing the problem to their neighbors, they would have prevented the energy of Job's question from
reaching a critical mass, precipitating the moral and religious crisis that it had become, not just for Job, but potentially for anyone who has been deeply perplexed by apparently gratuitous suffering.Conspiracy theories and other products of the paranoid vision - by offering a spurious answer to the question of justification, - have a retarding effect on the evolution of moral and religious consciousness, both in a person and in a society. Actually, even apart from conspiracy theories, the proclivity to assign blame - which is rife is our litigious society - has that retarding effect. The effort to pin blame on certain politicians, after a natural disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, is a way to avoid encountering the tragic dimension of life and the depths of the questions ab out life' s ultimate meaning that start to emerge.
How different is the view of suffering that lies at the root of the paranoid vision. It is not founded on a conviction of original sin, nor on retribution for a transgression that had fractured the very cosmos, as in Greek tragedy. What justification can suffering have when one is fundamentally innocent, good, perfect, pure, and noble, simply by being affiliated with a certain group?After all, self-righteousness - over the sense of having been insulted and injured - is far from uncommon among human beings. On the other hand, this sense of injustice, unfairness, -and victimization readies the ground for the paranoid sense that some group of people, a cabal of conspirators, is the source of one's problems. For example, in 1919, after their defeat in World War I, if the Germans looked inward at all, it was relatively short-lived, for in 1939 they voted the Nazis into power. The Nazis attributed Germany's military defeat to the Jews and other groups, whom they slanderously accused of having betrayed Germany. What is the origin of this sense of being innocent, pure, perfect, and great?
The paranoid vision has its own version of the paradise lost myth. It attributes the fall neither to the gods, nor to natural or cosmic disasters, nor to the deficiencies within human beings, but to oppression by society. "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains," states Rousseau. That society's chains can be broken is his version of "good news for modem man." The next step is to posit that Paradise was lost, not simply because of society in general, but on account of the evil machinations of a particular group of people. The implication is that paradise can be regained by vanquishing that group and destroying their treachery .
The ruthless regime of the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, offers an example of Rousseauan longings for areturn to an original innocence transformed into a horror show. The other totalitarian movements, including fascism, Nazism, and communism, were similarly founded on this quixotic, utopian optimism. Terrorism - from the Jacobinism of the French Revolution's reign of terror, to groups like Al Qaeda in the present century - is rooted in this same facile optimism.
It would, indeed, seem counterintuitive to associate the paranoid vision with idealistic and utopian longings since paranoids are typically angry, bitter, fearful, suspicious, and cynical. How could the Serbs could up a war thgat included rape, murder, and starvation of cities? They feIt sorry for themselves, as we have seen above, they solved their formidable moral problems by declaring themselves the injured party.
It would seem, then, that disappointed expectations first turn into self pity before they erupt into violence. This is because self-pity vindicates self-defense, which provides a type of justification for violence. Often the sense of self-pity takes the form of feeling that one has been treated unfairly.
That, in point of fact, is the reason why Aristotle rejected socialism as a form of government. If the state provides to all who are in need, the act of charity becomes impossible. What is wrong with that state of affairs? Aristotle argues that charity is necessary for one’ s moral perfection. After all the act of charity is a manifestation of the act of sacrifice. Socialistic visions - as well as millenarian and utopian visions in general- derive from a longing to be free of the need for sacrifice, undisturbed by the demands of morality.
For example, it is not unlikely that Mohamed Atta and the other September 11 therrorists - half believed that the reward for their ‚martyrdom' as promised in the Qur’an, would be seventy-two virgins, for each of them. Their reward would be, in essence, a state of guilt-free indulgence, free of the need for sacrifice.
The ruthless totalitarians of the Twentieth Century sought to bring about astate of affairs in which not only they, but everyone as well, would never again have to sacrifice.To bring about this future paradise on earth, they were willing to sacrifice the lives of mi1lions of people. This paradise on earth is the supposed summum bonum that was used to justify the endless backbreaking labor, the 1055 of personal freedom, the separation from family, the resu1tant mass starvation, the torture of those who voiced dissent, as weIl as all the other forms of misery and horror that belonged to such great crusades as the Soviet Five Year Plans, under Stalin, and Mao's cultural revolution, both of which daimed the lives of many millions of people. Behind the longing for utopia is the flight from sacrifice, but behind that flight is the flight from morality.
Another lure related to the paranoid vision is the scapegoat.
Aggression, as it exists in the human realm, is not, simply a function of instinct, animals are neither totalitarians nor fanatics. It would seem, then, that aggression in human beings is not so much biologically driven, as it is the manifestation of certain ways of seeing, such as the paranoid vision.Furthermore, it would appear that not all scapegoating is an effort to repress aggression. For example, Islamic fundamentalists scapegoat the United States so as to deflect attention from the social, economic, and political problems of their own nations. Here scapegoating is not about repressed aggression. If anything is being repressed, it is feelings of humiliation, envy, and resentment. The resultant conspiracy theories can then lead to a host of evils: slander, false accusations and imprisonment, lynchings, pogroms, wars of vengeance, genocide, etc.
It is possible, though, for scapegoating to find less violent channels, when scapegoating exists in comedies, it might consist, for example, in driving an unsodable character out of town.
But any sort of scapegoating, even when it finds a socially acceptable outlet, suggests an inability of a group, organization, or society to come to terms with its darker side. What builds up on account of running from themselves is not pent-up aggression, but pent-up anxiety on account of the increasing higher law or purpose.
But while Hezbollah’s, apocalyptic expectations are well known, Iran is indeed a “conspiracy theory” prone country. And being initially rich and charismatic, why does bin Laden identify so much with feeling humiliated?
Graham E. Fuller of the RAND Corporation notes that while conspiracy-mindedness is "widespread in the Middle East as a whole and in almost any cultures where weakness and suffering at the hands of powerful exterior forces encourage similar attitudes , the art would seem to be raised to a higher level in Iranian culture than in most other countries." So widespread is the assumption of conspiracy, Fuller explains, for an Iranian to ignore it is "(a) to indicate ignorance of the superior forces around oneself or one's nation and (b) to demonstrate the stupidity, naiveté, or insensitivity not to perceive the hidden motives of others." Fuller sees a penchant for the conspiratorial mentality being" a central feature of Iran's political outlook, particularly in international politics" and concludes that "paranoia threatens to insinuate itself into the qualities of a national trait." (Fuller, The Center of the Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran, 1991, pp. 21, 22, 19.)
The conspiracy theorist tends toward an outlook in which the battle zone of Good and Evil has no boundaries. Opponents are agents, mishaps result from plots. A Soviet-American summit in November 1985 prompted Iranian President Khamene'i to explain that the great powers, having already divided up the globe, were meeting to iron out minor disagreements. (Tehran International Service, 7 August 1990.)
A conspiracy theory is the nonexistent version of a conspiracy. Of course during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, conspiracy theories multiplied. The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi refused to see the mass demonstrations in the Iranian streets as signaling hostility to his rule; when talking with President Jimmy Carter, he blamed his troubles on a "well-planned diabolical plot by those who were taking advantage of his liberalization program." (Pahlavi, Answer to History, 1980, p. 154.)
Otherwise, he contemptuously rejected Ayatollah Khomeini's claim to be a genuine opposition leader, arguing that he had emerged as a political leader in June 1963 only due to "secret dealings with foreign agents" and that he thereafter remained a proxy for foreign interests. Which interests? Here the shah could not make up his mind. In 1971 he mentioned the possibility of the Iraqis sponsoring Khomeini. Sometimes he held the Western media responsible for his problems; they "of course, never let an opportunity go to play up acts of violence and make them reflect badly on my rule." He saw the international oil companies as "long-time adversaries" and sometimes accused them of seeking revenge for his leadership in the early 1970s, which caused them to lose their Middle East power and wealth. Most of the time, however, he blamed the great powers-the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom. This line of thinking strongly appealed to the shah. "If you lift up Khomeini's beard," he declared, "you will find MADE IN ENGLAND written under his chin." (Pahlavi, 1980, pp. 145-55.)
And the United States, "Why do they pick on me?" the shah lamented about Americans to his aides in mid-1978. (Quoted in Mansur Rafizadeh, Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal, 1987, p. 264.) Given the topsy-turvy logic of conspiracy theorists, it stands to reason that the power most closely associated with the shah's government should take the lion's share of the blame for his deposition. The U.S. campaign against him supposedly began in 1959, when the oil companies and the CIA jointly organized Iranian student demonstrations against his rule. But why would the Americans want to harm their ally, then or later? Typical of the conspiracy theorist, the shah offered flatly contradictory explanations. Sometimes he feared (as he confessed to the American ambassador, William H. Sullivan) a "grand design" of the Soviets and Americans to divide Iran. (William H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran, New York, 1981, pp. 156-57.)
Whatever the exact motive, he remained "convinced that the Western governments had some plan in mind, some grand conception or overview" that would explain his ouster. Nor were the Pahlavis alone in their fears of Washington. Gary Sick, the National Security Council official who handled Iranian affairs during the Carter administration, tells of the many" sophisticated, well-educated Iranians" who invariably asked him, "Why did the United States want to bring Khomeini to power?" (Sick, All Fall Down: American’s Tragic Encounter with Iran, 1985, p. 34.)
Princess Ashraf of Iran mused on the question why the U.S. government brought down her dynasty in 1979 and concluded, in idiosyncratic English, that they envied what her brother was building in Iran:
I am sure that it couldn't be only the mullahs. It was a concerted effort from the foreigners also. It happened the same thing with my father. It happened the same thing with my brother. There are foreigners who saw that Iran was becoming very important ... and Iran in ten years' time would be another Japan. They couldn't afford another Japan in Asia. (BBC Radio, 16 and 23 March 1982. Quoted in Gary Sick, All Fall Down: America 's Tragic Encounter with Iran, 1985, p. 165-66.)
But definitely conspiracy theories had an even more central place for Ayatollah Khomeini than for the shah. As the shah lay dying in Egypt in June 1980, Radio Tehran speculated that President Carter had paid Anwar as-Sadat to eliminate the shah; perhaps Sadat "has made another deal with Carter and his friends to get rid of the White House's disgrace in these pre-election days." (Radio Tehran, 17 June 1980.)
The death of over 1,400 pilgrims in July 1990 stimulated a no less implausible Iranian response. The Saudi authorities explained the disaster in the pedestrian tunnel of al-Mu'aysim near Mecca as a simple accident: the passageway had been overcrowded, so the fall of some pilgrims from a bridge precipitated panic. King Fahd attributed the deaths by trampling and suffocation to "God's unavoidable will." In accordance with Islamic law, the Saudi authorities buried the corpses within 24 hours. (Saudi Press Agency, 3 July 1990.)
The Iranians rejected out of hand this innocent explanation and elaborated three malign scenarios. In the first, a group of pilgrims spontaneously began chanting loudly and in unison "Death to Israel" and "Death to America." To quell the demonstration, Saudi police trapped the offending pilgrims in a tunnel, then slaughtered them. What exactly they used to kill the innocent pilgrims is a matter of dispute. A Tehran radio station mentioned tear gas canisters and rifles; a newspaper wrote of poison gas and automatic weapons. The Saudis expeditiously buried the incriminating evidence. (Sawt al-Mustad'afin, Iran, 6 July 1990.)
The second explanation began with the premise that Washington desperately fears the politicization of the hajj'rituals, for this spreads radical Iranian ideas throughout the Muslim world. Eager to find a pretext to intimidate radical pilgrims, the Americans pressed their Saudi lackeys to engage in violence. More than that, the Americans actually took charge of security for the haji. (Sawt al-Mustad'afin,Lebanon, 4 July 1990.)
Third, and most ominously, some Iranians accused Riyadh of massacring pilgrims with an eye to cancelling the hajj ceremonies altogether. Alternately, others speculated that, prompted by American intelligence. the Saudis plan to restrict access to Mecca and thereby turn the hajj into a "recreational tour." (Kayban International, 5,8 July 1990.)
Seeing Islam as the ultimate bulwark against foreign encroachment, fundamentalists understand the modern West's deep impact on the Middle East not as the inexorable influence of a leading civilization over a more backward. Ayatollah Khomeini announced that:
In their hearts, Westerners want nothing more than to wreck Arab and Iranian economies. The editor-in-chief of a Baghdad newspaper explained this, referring to the situation before the invasion of Kuwait: "the United States had planned to destroy Iraq completely and return it to the pre industrial age, as both former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and President George Bush had promised." (Salah al-Mukhtar, AL-Jumhuriya, Baghdad, 2 August 1994.)
Khomeini maintained that the U.S. government directs its "all-embracing plots" to undermine Islam. When Juhayman al-'Utaybi and his Islamic fundamentalist followers seized the Great Mosque of Mecca in November 1979, Muslims around the world suspected Western powers of commissioning them to stage a revolt (unwilling, perhaps, to believe that Muslims could commit such an outrage against Islam's holiest sanctuary). It was "not farfetched," Ayatollah Khomeini initially declared, to assume that" criminal American imperialism" had perpetrated the incident. (Radio Tehran, 21 November 1979.) Within a few days, he became more certain: the United States "and its corrupt colony, Israel," stood behind the attempted takeover. (The New York Times, 24 November 1979.)
It is generally accepted that conspiracy theories reveal more about the speaker's unwillingness to take responsibility for himself than about the actual behavior of others. When a person comes upon information at odds with his beliefs, what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" results. (See Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Stanford, 1957, chapters 8·10 on "the role of social support.")
This situation presents him with two unhappy alternatives: adopt new beliefs to fit the new facts, or find ways justifying the old beliefs. The first response is tantamount to an admission of error and so is difficult to do; as a rational step, it does not concern us here. The second response, which entails an insistence on the validity of one's original belief, is highly tempting, for no one likes to admit error. Conspiracy thinking, Marvin Zonis notes, "can be seen as a means for individuals in the throes of a sense-making crisis to construct a meaningful world after a profound disturbance in self-self-object relationships." (Zonis, "Leaders and Publics in the Middle East: Shattering the Organizing Myths of Arab Society," in Stanley A. Renshon, The Political Psychology of the Gulf War, 1993, p. 287.)
Accordingly, conspiracy theories tend to flourish especially among those buffeted by circumstances, including those inhabiting the fringes of political life and those heavily weighed down by problems. The Muslims' anachronistic sense of historical superiority contained within it the seeds of the paranoid style; the arrogance of one age turned into the agony of the next. The sense that history has gone wrong leads many Muslims to see their fall from grace resulting not from the West's achievements but from its treachery and conspiracy. Wilfred Cantwell Smith explains Muslim outrage at the modern predicament with great insight:
The Islamic tradition was formed on the principle that destiny is in the hands of God, It is Allah who controls events. The Mu'tazilah [a group that flourished in the early Islamic period] and others argued the point: some Muslims have felt that, under God, destiny was in their own hands. The recent bitterness was that it seemed to be neither God nor the Muslims who controlled events but the British or Americans -the domineering, discourteous, brash infidels who suddenly pushed themselves noisily on the scene.
The Muslims' anachronistic sense of superiority contained within it the seeds of the paranoid style; the arrogance of one age turned into the conspiracy mentality of the next. Muslims expected the area of their sovereign rule (Dar al-Islam, the area of all previous Muslim sovereignty) to expand without limit, but instead it almost vanished, prompting dire suspicions. Fundamentalist Muslims tend especially to see modern history as one gigantic trick by the West. In a typical observation, Khamene'i of Iran blames the Muslims' predicament on the "materialist, arrogant, powerful unbridled, selfish, haughty, and bullying hands of the arrogant powers." (John Town Albert, Iraqi News Agency, 4 March 1993.)
By thus blaming their problems on Western evil weakened Muslim peoples find solace and the means to cope with crisis. Conspiracism permits them to escape responsibility for weakness and poverty; were it not for Western intrigues against Islam, they tell themselves, Muhammad's people would still enjoy their former superiority over Europe. Conspiracism allows Middle Easterners to see themselves as powerful but naive, as enervated and exploited by conniving Western agents.
Although grand conspiracy theories surfaced in the Middle East only during the late nineteenth century, it was the early twentieth century, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book that portrays Jews as a distinct people who pose a danger to the whole world, that gave anti-Semitism its global underpinnings.
Plots go far to explain how past glories degenerated into today's tribulations. Thus when in 1913 The Young Turks (or, more formally, the Committee of Union and Progress, CUP), deposed, the Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamit II this was explained as a Jewish Conspiracy which would have next inspire the Armenian Holocoast. While all evidence points to the Young Turks being primarily made up of Turkish-speaking, Muslims, even the British ambassador in Istanbul, Gerard Lowther, insisted that the movement was inspired and led by Jews and Freemasons. Middle Eastern Christians first picked up these European notions, then passed them along to Muslims. Already in May 1909, the Syrian Central Committee, a Paris-based Christian group favoring French rule in the Levant, wrote about Jewish and Masonic leadership of the Young Turks; the committee postulated Zionist efforts to destroy the Ottoman Empire in pursuit of a Jewish state in Palestine. Even today, fundamentalists hark back to the Jewish overthrow of Sultan Abdulhamit II as one of the key events in the decline of Islam in modern times and frequently cite it as a leading act of Jewish perfidy. They portray the Ottoman king as a staunch Muslim whom the Jews had to sideline if they were to take over in Palestine.
Yet similar is also claimed otherwise, Bulent Ecevit, the leftist Turkish leader, accused Washington of encouraging Armenians to make territorial demands on both Azerbaijan and Turkey. Why? Because "the United States is planning to give Armenia a role in the Caucasus similar to that played by Israel in the Middle East." (Paraphrased in Mohamed Heikal, The Sphinx and the Commudar: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Influence in the Middle East, New York, 1978, p. 186.) Nakhichevan's President Haydar Aliyev, seeing Armenia as the U.S. base in the Caucasus, also drew the analogy to Israel. This embryonic parallel to the U.S.-Israel nexus suggests that Israel need not be unique in the Middle Eastern imagination; any non-Muslim can enter the same twilight of puppet and puppeteer.
Each view has its own uses. When ties to Moscow were strong, Damascus stressed the dangers of imperialist plots and variously derided Israel as "a U.S. base," America's "big stick, " and "american U.S. aircraft carrier." (Prime Minister 'Abd ar-Ra'uf Kasm, 17 May 1980.) In contrast, when Damascus sought to improve relations with Washington, it blamed "world Jewry" for subverting American decision making. "The United States does not have a policy of its own in the Middle East," but blindly follows directives issued in Tel Aviv. Similarly, Sa'd Jum'a, a Jordanian prime minister known for his pro-U.S. views, found it convenient to blame Washington's policy on Zionist agents, whose "constant efforts mislead the ordinary American citizen."
Each explanation has other uses, too. The imperialist thesis helps explain away Israel's military success against the Arab states. As the British writer, David Pryce-Jones observes, "to have been defeated by Jews is humiliating, but to have been defeated by a conspiracy of all the powers is clearly unavoidable."
But again neither the imperialist or the Zionist interpretation is original to the Middle East; both come from Europe. The notion of Israel as a tool of imperialism goes back to Lenin and the early Bolshevik state. A Soviet document from July 1919 called Zionism" one of the branches of the imperialist counter-revolution " (Quoted in Ran Marom, "The Bolsheviks and the Balfour Declaration 1917-1920," The Wiener Library Bulletin, 29, nos. 37/38, 1976: 22.)
As for the notion of Israel as part of a Jewish world plot, it derives from Nazi ideology. As earlya.s the mid-1920s, Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf of his suspicions about the Zionists' ultimate goals: "They do not think at all of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine to live in it someday; rather, they want a central organization for their international world cheating, withdrawn from others' reach-a refuge for convicted dregs and a college for aspiring swindlers." (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1935), p. 356.) The Nazis found an eager audience in the Middle East for their anti-Semitic message. Hitler's ideology appealed to many there. Already in the mid-1930s, one Arab recalls, Palestinian Arabs "lapped up Fascist and Nazi lies.” (Edward Atiyah, An Arab Tells His Story: A Study in Loyalties, London, 1946, p. 203.)
See also Iran Case Study:
In brief, Middle East politicians still today routinely echo the ideas of Lenin and Hitler, the men who initiated this century's most appalling political experiments. In keeping with the origins of these ideas, leftists tend slightly more to fear an imperialist plot, while those on the right worry more about Zionist conspiracies. Leftists find it natural to make common cause with the Soviet, Chinese, and other bastions of anti-Americanism. The rightist emphasis on the prominent role of American Jews, especially their presence in business, the media, and politics, makes it natural for them to link up with anti-Semitic groups in the West.
Having it two contradictory ways at once recalls The Protocols of the ELders of Zion and Mein Kampf Those writings portray Jews as both the capitalists and middlemen who steal from the workers and as socialists who threaten the bankers.
But where Arabs and Iranians draw their anti-Semitic and anti-imperialist ideas from the West, they also export these same constructs back to the West. This ping-pong of mutual influence leads to a situation in which some conspiracy theories reverberate between the West and the Middle East, losing plausibility but gaining significance as they ricochet, magnifying and colliding as they move back and forth.
Thus shortly before Khomeini issued his last Fatwa, Salman Rushdie was shown in a major feature film, meeting with Elders of Zion. Newspaper articles elaborated specific facts about the Elders-for example, that this group, which numbers 12 men, "controls and directs the affairs of all the world's Jewish individuals and institutions including the State of Israel. It keeps its identity and business absolutely secret and operates through a front organization, the World Zionist Organization. The three-hour Pakistani feature film titled, International Guerrillas, showed the Elders of Zion commissioning The Satanic Verses and the police chief of Islamabad (whose forces in February 1989 shot and killed six anti-Rushdie rioters) receiving a suitcase stuffed with a million rupees ($50,000) in cash immediately before giving the order to shoot.
When European Union solidarity with Rushdie apparently showed the width of the Western conspiracy Rafsanjani explained, "we can see that they wanted to have such an incident and they welcomed it." (Radio Tehran, 15 February 1989.) Khomeini did. In an edict issued on 14 February 1989, called for the execution of Rushdie and "all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents." More, they were to be killed" quickly, wherever they may be found.” (KayhanHava'i, 22 February 1989.)
