The Conspiracy Meme

[Ian David]

Column
Ted Goertzel
Volume 35.1, January/February 2011

Many of these theories are clearly absurd, but some are plausible and others actually contain elements of truth.

Conspiracy theories are easy to propagate and difficult to refute. Having long flourished in politics and religion, they have also spread into science and medicine. It is useful to think of conspiracy theorizing as a meme, a cultural invention that passes from one mind to another and thrives, or declines, through a process analogous to genetic selection (Dawkins 1976). The conspiracy meme competes with other rhetorical memes, such as the fair debate meme, the scientific expertise meme, and the resistance to orthodoxy meme.

The central logic of the conspiracy meme is to question, often on speculative grounds, everything the “establishment” says or does and to demand immediate, comprehensive, and convincing answers to all questions. Unconvincing answers are taken as proof of conspiratorial deception. A good example is the film Loose Change 9/11: An American Coup (Avery 2009), which started out as a short fictional 2005 video about the World Trade Center attacks that was marketed as if it were a truth-seeking documentary. The 2005 video went viral on the Internet and has been viewed by over ten million people. Loose Change raises a long series of questions illustrated by tendentious information, such as the fact that the fires in the World Trade Center were not hot enough to melt steel. But no one had claimed that the steel had melted, only that it had gotten hot enough to weaken and collapse, which it did. The video presents the fact that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is keeping certain people's tax returns secret, set to an ominous musical background suggestive of evildoing-despite the well-known fact that the IRS keeps everyone's tax returns secret.

When an alleged fact is debunked, the conspiracy meme often just replaces it with another fact. One of the producers of Loose Change, Korey Rowe, stated, “We don't ever come out and say that everything we say is 100 percent . We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people discredit us and do the research for themselves” (Slensky 2006).

More:
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_conspiracy_meme/