{This article was originally posted on the 18th of January 2006 in The Jewish Press}
“A Conspiracy!” cried the delighted lady, clapping her hands. “Of all things, I do like a Conspiracy! It’s so interesting!”
– Lewis Carroll, My Lady, Sylvie and Bruno (1889) “Conspiracism” is probably best characterized as a form of mental illness. Some researchers in psychiatry plainly agree. It is the attribution of control of world events to a hidden cabal of omnipotent conspirators. It is the claim that an organized “hidden hand” lies behind world developments. It is probably best treated in clinics with padded walls.
Perhaps the best example of conspiracism in recent years has been the attempt to dismiss the fact that thousands of eyewitnesses saw passenger planes full of civilians crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 and that the hijackers were all Arab al Qaeda operatives. Crank conspiracists insist instead that the CIA, the Mossad, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Jews, or some other nefarious group was really behind the attacks.
Many of us have a tendency to dismiss people making such conspiracist claims as harmless lunatics and amusing eccentrics. This is all the more true because quite a few conspiracy “theorists” also endorse claims about UFOs and abductions by space aliens. But conspiracism can be quite dangerous, and conspiracism in Israel has played a particularly harmful role in recent years.
It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss all such people as harmless buffoons. Outside Israel, conspiracism is closely linked with anti-Semitism, and many of the “grand cabal” theories of the conspiracists involve supposed plots by Jews (or “Zionists”) to take over the world, or at least American foreign policy.
Conspiracists see “evidence” of an invisible cabal and plotting where none exists. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” Belief in a powerful cabal seems to serve a psychological need for some people. It provides them with an explanation and excuse for their own failures in life. After all, how can one succeed when up against such an omnipotent adversary? It also allows them to pretend to understand a complex world, without the nuisance of having first to study, research, and master analytic tools.
Perhaps the best analysis of the conspiracist mindset is that by Daniel Pipes in his seminal book Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where it Comes From (Free Press, 1997). Pipes defines “conspiracist theories” as “fear of a nonexistent conspiracy” and shows that nonsensical theories of a single institution or cabal plotting to take over the world go back at least 250 years.
Conspiracism, according to Pipes, is a form of paranoid delusion that tends to take over the entire lives and personalities of believers. Embracing conspiracism strongly resembles the totalitarian immersion of cult members into herd thinking. Conspiracism feeds on misrepresentation of facts, outright lying, and tendentious twisting of unrelated factoids into a grand theory.
The Internet is full of websites claiming that footage of the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center reveals explosions of bombs inside the buildings before the planes struck, thus proving the buildings were brought down by controlled explosions” from the inside. Suggesting that Elvis can be seen on the 70th floor in photos of the collapsing WTC would just as thoroughly convince these people that he really was there in his blue suede shoes.
In Israel, a number of conspiracy theories have long enjoyed popularity. Quite a few Israelis grant credence to stories that in the 1950′s the country’s socialist leaders kidnapped Yemenite Jewish babies and turned them over for adoption to Ashkenazi Jews. Not a scrap of real evidence has ever been produced – though journalists and more than one state commission of inquiry have investigated the claims. What actually happened was that some Jews coming to Israel from Yemen, a country with one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates, gave birth in Israel to babies who died in the hospital and records were lost due to the chaotic state of record-keeping at the time.