“… yet until that day there had never been a trial for poisoning in Rome.
Their act was regarded as a prodigy, and suggested madness rather than felonious intent.”
(Titus Livius, 8.18.11)
The word “conspiracy” is an additional example of a word losing its meaning, due to sloganeering and propaganda. Its loss of significance happens especially these days, when the word became one of the most googled ones, as well as used on social media. Whether there is a connection between these two facts would also be a good question. I will use the word conspiracy in a neutral way, as it should.
What does the word “conspiracy” mean?
The word itself is Latin-derived, conspiratio, and it etymologically means “breathing together”. The most famous conspiracy in Roman history is the one of Catilina, trying to overthrow the government. Another similar word used by one of its protagonist and narrators, Cicero, was coniura, which has no English literal correspondent, and it means “taking an oath together”. As you can see, there is a component of ‘secret togetherness’. The difference between the two words is not relevant for our purpose.
In ancient sources you can find countless examples of conspiracies, even centuries earlier than Cicero and Catilina. Conspiracies were mostly against the governments and not executed by them, as the ones we are mostly familiar with. I apologize for the anachronistic use of the word “government”. One of the reasons is, and here I will require a brutal generalization, that governments, with not many exceptions, did not need any conspiracy to push their plans and policies on their people. Conspiracies require unacceptability: if an act, because of moral or legal reasons, is not admissible, a conspiracy helps bypass the problem. Not even in such a remote past, governments could literally do whatever they wanted without needing an excuse, and the few protests and revolts always involved mass killings in a more or less brutal and symbolic way, enslaving, imprisonment et similia.
This process of changing the significance of “conspiracy”, started already some time ago, knew a rapid acceleration during the last year. It is de facto becoming exclusively an empty defamatory slogan. There is little doubt that, since the Corona crisis started, an efficient way to defame an antagonist (in politics, science, on social media) is to call them “conspiracy theorist”. My observations are, of course, limited to the so-called Western World, but this does not mean that they are not valid even elsewhere.
Conspiracy theorists are the new MacCarthian communists. Never before the word “conspiracy” had such a negative connotation. Nowadays, being a conspiracy theorist is as immoral as being a conspirator could be, and with the addition of being also stupid and uneducated. “Conspiracy”, from having a neutral meaning, describing “a secret plan on the part of a group to influence events partly by covert action” (more or less, the definition that philosopher Charles Pigden gives), became in the common imaginary “any crazy idea made up by tinfoil hat wearers”. Once anything gets labeled as conspiracy, it magically becomes idiotic, ends up in the big cauldron of absurdities together with e.g. the flat earth theory and negationism (the ‘real’ one, i.e. Holocaust denial), and should deserve no attention.
A reason why this is happening now
This process is particularly evident now because of the extraordinary nature of the situation we live in. With the extreme pressure that it puts on us, as individuals and as society, the Corona crisis is a global one, in a more than ever globalized world. Nothing on a comparable scale has ever occurred before and interested the world as a whole. No war, no pandemic. Nothing.
One of the main historical events of the XXI century will help clarify this by opposition. “Conspiracy”, as everyone knows, is a word strictly connected with the events of the 11th September 2001. They have been brutal and scary, also created polarization and gave space to speculation like the Corona crisis did, but they did not affect the world as a whole, not directly. 9/11 did not personally touch everyone, not even in the Western World, whereas the Corona crisis and its consequences did. We all experienced and still experience it directly: who got sick, who died, who lost family or friends, who lost their job, money and mental health due to the restrictions. Who, sadly, earned money with it.
At this point, it is useful to remember that the 9/11 events have been the result of a conspiracy, and this fact does not make them less real. You might think that it was an inside job or Al-Qaeda. No matter what you think about it, you believe a conspiracy theory, therefore you are a conspiracy theorist, according to the present standards. Because, being a conspiracy theorist, these days, does not only mean to have proposed a conspiracy theory, but also to believe that a conspiracy happened or is happening. This is the kind of nonsense that sloganeering and propaganda spread.
How this is happening
There is, at least in the so-called Western World of the present, a fairly widespread certainty that a government could never allow, let alone cause, intentionally or unintentionally, any harm to its people. It is inconceivable that our government were involved in something illegal or against human rights. This is especially valid, of course, when Western World citizens talk of themselves. If they talk about ‘the others’, whoever these others are, everything starts to quickly look different. The examples are numerous: all Arab countries are terrorist, Russia poisons journalists, China spreads viruses, and so on. It can also be about other countries of the same Western World, e.g. the criticism against Sweden’s Corona crisis strategy. It does not matter, if these facts are true or not, partially or entirely, and it is somehow in human nature to expect worse things from ‘others‘ than from ‘our peers’. “We are civilized, while the others are barbarians at best, or savages.”
This is especially paradoxical, if we consider that that we live in the post-Wikileaks years. Not to mention everything that happened during the Cold War. Despite all of this, the instinctive reaction in front of similar facts is denial: “It cannot be true, it’s crazy!”
The only thing we can do, sometimes, is use our common sense, for the better or worse, because it is the only thing we have left. Nobody who is actually planning anything ill will come and tell you. To reject a theory only because it has been labelled “conspiracy theory” is a mistake.
Some facts
Questioning the authority and challenging the status quo has been the driving force behind most of the advancements in societies: from the birth of democracy in Athens in 508 b.C., to the Magna Carta in England in 1215, to the Spring of Nations in the Europe of 1848. Just to mention a couple of examples you might be familiar with. Dates are only indicative references.
In the XXI century it might appear more rational to blindly follow the guidance of a government, in this complex world we live in. Which, of course, it is more complex than ever. Except that it is not. It might sound more logical to trust a group of qualified people, who have been elected in a democratic way. After all, we have been living in a Rechtsstaat, in a constitutional state, already longer than one century, at least in the Western World. Nothing bad, really bad, could ever happen. Except that it did, it does, and it will again, given the right circumstances.
It is historically observable, as human and constitutional rights develop and raise in numbers and sophistication, how governments started recurring more and more to conspiracies to achieve their goals. Funny and logical, at the same time. As I already mentioned, kings, emperors and oligarchies did not need conspiracies or excuses of any kind in the past. No European government, at least prior 1848 (another reference date to be taken cum grano salis), has ever needed to justify a war in the eyes of its people; on the other hand, just to mention one of the last examples of a long list, the USA and the UK went to war in Iraq on a pretense, and they did so because they had to.
The list would be long. A few, even random, examples might show how, sometimes, reality surpasses fiction. The fact that a theory sounds crazy cannot be an argument to dismiss it. In the 20s, during the prohibitionism, the US government, in an attempt to discourage the consumption of alcoholic beverages, poisoned the industrial alcohols that they knew they would be stolen by bootleggers to produce drinkable spirits; in the 60s the Canadian government developed a machine that allegedly helped detection of homosexuals and, through it, excluded people from services; thanks to once-classified documents released in the past several years, we have learnt how high government officials distorted facts about events that led to the Vietnam War; former president Nixon, after denying any involvement in the Watergate affair, was found guilty and paid no consequences. There are hundreds and hundreds of examples regarding politics, war, food industry, pharmaceutical industry, sports, really anything one could think about, but I would like to shortly mention a last one that, given its proximity to our times, is mostly significant.
Especially after the developing of the Internet and the spread of use of mobile phones, there have been more and more rumours that the US government was spying on its population. As a matter of fact, not only on its population. Anyway, all of these rumours have always been refused by the authorities and ridiculed by the large majority of the population, until the day when, thanks to whistleblower Snowden in 2013, we came to know that the NSA was actually keeping track of millions and millions of people. This is a good example: a crazy theory, denied by the government, labelled as conspiracy and ridiculed publicly by the majority, has been found to be true after years. Still, when confronted with the possibility of governments collecting data on the population, some people would answer: “Why would they do it? It’s crazy, it makes no sense.”
A final note
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt in your philosophy. I always like to quote this. I know what some would say: “Yes, but those were ancient times.” Or: “Yes, those were the 40s, the 60s, the Whatevers.” “Yes, but now it’s different” is what a person who has not studied history, or actively decided to ignore or refuse it, would say.
Humankind lives under the perpetual illusion that we are the apex of civilization and, as a consequence, all the atrocities that happened in the past cannot happen now. This is one of our many errors in judgement: the arrogant approach towards history and cultural heritage that already lead to Operplatz, the obliterations of Mao and ISIS, and much more, until the ‘political correctness’ of the present, where Homer and Dante begin to suffer censorship. It is different, of course, but it comes exactly from the same arrogant and ignorant attitude. These mistakes have been made in the past and, most likely, will be made in the future. This is a general observation, but it does not make it less true or less fitting, even in the present circumstances.
Emperor Domitian, according to Svetonius, “used to say that the lot of emperors was most wretched, because they were not believed about a proven conspiracy unless they were killed.” Today, the significant difference is that many, even after the emperor is dead i.e. even after Snowden talks, still do not believe. Because a conspiracy is something that only tin foil hat wearers would take in consideration. We are more intelligent, more developed, more educated. We are better. Except that we are not.