Good article, and agree with the overall theme. But it belittles many Truths and truthseekers while elevating self. Truth isn’t partisan and is fundamentally Simple. Just my opinion. ❤️✊
For what it's worth, I'm not out to offend anybody -- and I agree that truth shouldn't be a partisan issue. I think we've got an obligation to recognize, however, that there are a lot of folks these days whose beliefs are shaped more by tribal affiliation -- who they want to fit in with -- than the evidence at hand. We can do better.
So the big question for me is, how do we sort True conspiracies from False?
Early in the pandemic the COVID-19 lab leak conspiracy was declared False by mainstream media and major social media platforms and censored from discussion. But evidence is now emerging that this is actually a very likely explanation for COVID-19 emergence, and that scientists initially declaring it False had undeclared conflicts of interest. Social media and major media have done an about-face and are now discussing the theory as possibly True.
I provide this example not to discuss the actual theory, but to show that the powers that be do sometimes suppress Truth and that there is no single reliable source of Truth.
In my experience I do not declare something False until I have thoroughly investigated all of the allegations of both the side I agree with, and most importantly, all of the allegations of the side I disagree with. This last part is difficult, emotionally and intellectually, and a great cause of people believing silly things.
In conclusion I would say to always be willing to question your assumptions of what is True, otherwise you are just parroting someone elses opinion. I would go further to say that you have possibly mislabeled some of the conspiracies mentioned in your article.
Thank you for this discussion Mr. Snowden, you are a hero.
The short answer to your "big question," Jonathan, is *scientifically.*
And there's the rub. What poses as "rational science" is actually scientISM, which in our times is perverted science indentured to USAmerican imperialism at global scale. If it were in the least *rational* (vs. #wetiko, say), would we be undergoing extinction en masse? If it were truly *science,* would it be exclusively, exactly, and entirely directed toward the weaponization of any and all technology?
A better perspective on the imperial parade of naked emperors sees the truth: it's a quasi-religion serving all and only the interests of the apex predator elite whose wealth and power afford them the rule and control of the world -- namely, the UCSA (United Corporate States of America) and the inverted totalitarianism for which it stands. We the people are the hapless hopeless chattel and cattle under their tyranny.
Rationally undertaken, conspiracy *SCIENCE* proceeds on three bearings: deduction, induction, and abduction. Roughly speaking, the first two are logics expressed in maths through rules of inference for self-evident (deductive) in contrast to probabilistic (inductive) inference and reasoning. The third, abduction, is the speculative, conjectural, intuitive, creative realm of practical cognition. It's where hypotheses and guesses come from; it's also the tipping point between our strongest convictions of what is true about reality, on one hand, and our acting on those convictions, on the other. Finally, abduction is where we seek to find the simplest explanations for the factual evidence at hand.
In other words, rational conspiracy science is an exercise in practical forensics.
If one defines a "conspiracy" as a secret agreement to harm others, then the dichotomy between conspiratorial elites and popular consent doesn't hold. Popular consent itself is used as a weapon for legitimizing the infliction of harm on a vast scale, often directed against the vast majority of people in a democratic society.
It is precisely for this reason that the engineering of democratic consent is a major preoccupation of exploitative elites. Secrecy not only shields the conspirators from accountability for the harms that follow, it also sustains the illusion that the victims did it to themselves. The fuss elites make against "conspiracy theories" (even the false ones) is that they threaten this illusion.
Found your substack via your Guardian article. I will subscribe.
Re. this topic... Your analysis is very compelling and helpful, but I still think that the main problem most of us have is... Who are you gonna believe/trust? Which set of offered "facts" is reliable? How can we ever place our trust in an information source with any sense of assurance?
We cannot be expert in every field of knowledge. In the end trusting anyone is a kind of "leap of faith" (and I'm an agnostic!). I think we're doomed to uncertainty and relying on hope.
Thanks for taking your heroic stand for the truth as you see it. You have sacrificed much and it is appreciated.
While difficult, it is possible to dig to the truth. Because, in any controversy between 2 views, one thing happened and the other is a lie. Digging until documents, witnesses, universal principles (like Golden Rule) appear, together can show the truth. But until then--as Edgar Snowden's taxonomy shows--US leaders in conspiracy practice and some voters in conspiracy theories (malevolent falsehoods) keep the truth buried. US voters could establish a cabinet-level Voter Facts Commission. Nothing in the US Constitution prevents voters from requiring the truth. #VietnamWarOrigin
You hit the nail on the head, on citizenship in a conspiracy society not requiring evaluation of a proposed fact for its truth-value. On a huge issue, our leaders' assertion that the Viet Nam War was mainly to oppose communism, citizens never evaluated it, in relation to hidden consular files (in National Archives) that place US corporations and consuls in Viet Nam from 1880s onward, in resource control enabled by violence. These and later records prove that the 1960s war was an attempt to resume those decades of colonial control for US profit, not to counter communist aggression. To this day, the US public has no mechanism to require the facts for an evaluation.
Hi Edward, good article. I must say that in my adolescence I read a lot of conspiracy theories which culminated with the collapse of my belief system (as some one said: "If you shake someone's belief system you shake his world") . But I was able to recover from that and see those conspiracies with more discernment. Someone has to put light in there, and I thank you for trying that in this article. I don't immediately dismiss a conspiracy theory, but also I don't believe all the crap that is out there anymore. It is a balance. If you don't have a lot of facts, it requires patience, experience, intuition to discern the truth from falsehood and to assemble them in a picture. Usually people don't have that skill, maybe because they don't have all the pieces of the puzzle to fit them together. But if we have the facts, all we need is the courage to acknowledge it.
I too have done a great deal of research into conspiracies and sympathize with your experience of the collapse of your belief system. It is a deeply uncomfortable experience, much as Plato's Allegory of the Cave illustrates and I have experienced for myself.
One interesting thing I found in my research is that some people will believe anything that is a conspiracy, and reject out of hand any official explanation, as is well documented by this article. But I found that the opposite is also the case. Namely that a great deal of people will always believe an official explanation for events and always reject out of hand anything labeled as a conspiracy, even in the face of verifiable facts.
One could argue that one group will get things right more often than not, but both positions are equal in their intellectual dishonesty. Courage is indeed in short supply when it comes to finding truth in this world.
Good to know that are out there people with similar experiences. Where I live I haven't met too many people with that. Internet connects us all. I really liked your honesty and your view.
You remain one of the most erudite writers I have read on the practice and consequences of international surveillance. Your new work on conspiracy thinking is a logical extension of this. I want to help you to keep writing so I have subscribed. Stay safe.
There's much to your discussion here in terms of human psychology but "Snowden's working with the Russians/Chinese/facebook" always seemed like the very intentional effort of the American state through their loyal media to discredit you in those early days after you came out and every agency was running around with their heads on fire. That is to say, another conspiracy.
I applaud your embrace of an expanded view of the notion of “conspiracy”.
While I don’t think you’ve uncovered the whole nature of the metastructure—I think you’ve engaged with a line of inquiry that is promising.
A few wrinkles I might add:
Could this set of circumstances emerge if nobody were a witting participant in any of it?
What if instead of Conspiracy in one of its forms enabling individuals to abdicate from the making of truth-value judgments, Conspiracy Practice and Conspiracy Theory emerge from an interwoven tapestry of narratives formed of the truth-value judgments of a multitude of individuals—and only when examined holistically in the context of the knowns and unknowns of history can we see who made good judgments based on true or false facts and who made bad ones.
Retroactively determining goodness and badness then depends on the conspiracy historian’s axiology—which in turn may be influenced by tribe or adopted to obtain tribal membership, or driven by a search for truth or a desire to have faith in a truth as revealed, and will invariably be variable in all the ways individuals are influenced to different degrees by cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
This is a really long-winded way of driving at an intuition that emerges from the fact that all individuals are the protagonists of their own stories—nobody sets out to be a villain (though some have no doubt cast themselves iconoclastic anti-heroes, which can come pretty close to “bad guy” from other individuals’ perspectives).
What if (absent technology-enabled efforts to manipulate the Human Information Umvelt at scale—a factor that has become more potent over the last century or so and has done so especially dramatically in the last decade) we’re actually observing the net effects of a world full of individuals forming truth-value judgments and trying to save the world in a bunch of different directions, and conspiracy is just how we make sense of all the outcomes in hindsight?
I admire you for your courage to speak in the things that so many others are in denial about. You are a true leader, one who has humanity and just cause in the reasoning for risks you have taken. I appreciate it , and honestly hope I see the day where you run for president. In my opinion you are exactly what this country needs.
To the epistemic/existential/social triad I would add "nihilist" or even "eschatological" - the idea that the end of the world (or the current social system) is going to end, and that they deserve to be among the chosen few. Conspirationnal FOMO
What about conspiracies like "space lasers changing votes", which actually made it to a tribunal? And, what about it when something like that comes up as "supporting fact" to a group that is wrapped in a larger conspiracy as is in this particular example? Shouldn't such an obvious fabricated stance serve to fully end the conspiracy itself from within? It shows that there isn't an actual issue with voting as it is in this case, or tampering with the results, but a full will and desire to tie legal systems up with nonsense, as well as to divide society. I still see people supporting the election conspiracies even after that. My personal take when it is that evident, is that those who keep pushing have alternative agendas; support alternative agendas for perhaps strong, personal reasons. Back in time, Nazis and racists had something in common, for example.
Everyone definitely has an agenda, though I suspect there are a lot more people really invested in some of the more zany belief architectures than we might initially be inclined to credit.
The world makes a lot more clean sense if we can attribute a literal form of subtextual intent to stuff people say, but the purely information-warfare mercenaries out there are very likely to have been hired (or had their hirings financed) by true believers.
The civil courts are an expensive place to address grievances, true. But they do have pretty efficient mechanisms to dispense quickly with the nonsensical.
I think your observation that the absurdity doesn’t end conspiracies really goes back to what Ed was saying—the appeal of the truly whack-a-do isn’t in the coherence of supporting facts—rather it is in some other perceived value its adherents derive.
All that said, if I were seeking to discredit a serious accusation, I’d consider using a sock puppet to tie something completely preposterous—e.g. dragging 5G-is-a-COVID-raygun meme—into what ought otherwise be a seriously-taken debate over forced face coverings as a form of compulsory speech and pandemic restrictions on an individual’s right to protest government policy.
It would be pretty easy for one person to do/pay others to do if you really think about it—so conspiracies that accuse policymakers and policy advocates of deploying that tactic are probably worth at least investigating before dismissing.
TLDR: Propaganda + tactical conspiracy meme deployment is a topic that def overlaps with this one, but involves a lot more outside of it than inside of it.
Good article, and agree with the overall theme. But it belittles many Truths and truthseekers while elevating self. Truth isn’t partisan and is fundamentally Simple. Just my opinion. ❤️✊
For what it's worth, I'm not out to offend anybody -- and I agree that truth shouldn't be a partisan issue. I think we've got an obligation to recognize, however, that there are a lot of folks these days whose beliefs are shaped more by tribal affiliation -- who they want to fit in with -- than the evidence at hand. We can do better.
All the best.
So the big question for me is, how do we sort True conspiracies from False?
Early in the pandemic the COVID-19 lab leak conspiracy was declared False by mainstream media and major social media platforms and censored from discussion. But evidence is now emerging that this is actually a very likely explanation for COVID-19 emergence, and that scientists initially declaring it False had undeclared conflicts of interest. Social media and major media have done an about-face and are now discussing the theory as possibly True.
I provide this example not to discuss the actual theory, but to show that the powers that be do sometimes suppress Truth and that there is no single reliable source of Truth.
In my experience I do not declare something False until I have thoroughly investigated all of the allegations of both the side I agree with, and most importantly, all of the allegations of the side I disagree with. This last part is difficult, emotionally and intellectually, and a great cause of people believing silly things.
In conclusion I would say to always be willing to question your assumptions of what is True, otherwise you are just parroting someone elses opinion. I would go further to say that you have possibly mislabeled some of the conspiracies mentioned in your article.
Thank you for this discussion Mr. Snowden, you are a hero.
The short answer to your "big question," Jonathan, is *scientifically.*
And there's the rub. What poses as "rational science" is actually scientISM, which in our times is perverted science indentured to USAmerican imperialism at global scale. If it were in the least *rational* (vs. #wetiko, say), would we be undergoing extinction en masse? If it were truly *science,* would it be exclusively, exactly, and entirely directed toward the weaponization of any and all technology?
A better perspective on the imperial parade of naked emperors sees the truth: it's a quasi-religion serving all and only the interests of the apex predator elite whose wealth and power afford them the rule and control of the world -- namely, the UCSA (United Corporate States of America) and the inverted totalitarianism for which it stands. We the people are the hapless hopeless chattel and cattle under their tyranny.
Rationally undertaken, conspiracy *SCIENCE* proceeds on three bearings: deduction, induction, and abduction. Roughly speaking, the first two are logics expressed in maths through rules of inference for self-evident (deductive) in contrast to probabilistic (inductive) inference and reasoning. The third, abduction, is the speculative, conjectural, intuitive, creative realm of practical cognition. It's where hypotheses and guesses come from; it's also the tipping point between our strongest convictions of what is true about reality, on one hand, and our acting on those convictions, on the other. Finally, abduction is where we seek to find the simplest explanations for the factual evidence at hand.
In other words, rational conspiracy science is an exercise in practical forensics.
Really? Was SARS-v1 leaked from a lab too? What about MERS? Did a lab infect all those camels and make their pee have a deadly virus?
Worth a lot. No argument here my Friend. 😊❤️
Well said!!
Mine as well! : )
If one defines a "conspiracy" as a secret agreement to harm others, then the dichotomy between conspiratorial elites and popular consent doesn't hold. Popular consent itself is used as a weapon for legitimizing the infliction of harm on a vast scale, often directed against the vast majority of people in a democratic society.
It is precisely for this reason that the engineering of democratic consent is a major preoccupation of exploitative elites. Secrecy not only shields the conspirators from accountability for the harms that follow, it also sustains the illusion that the victims did it to themselves. The fuss elites make against "conspiracy theories" (even the false ones) is that they threaten this illusion.
Great call out re: secrecy. Much conspiracy emerges in the filling in of information vacuums.
Found your substack via your Guardian article. I will subscribe.
Re. this topic... Your analysis is very compelling and helpful, but I still think that the main problem most of us have is... Who are you gonna believe/trust? Which set of offered "facts" is reliable? How can we ever place our trust in an information source with any sense of assurance?
We cannot be expert in every field of knowledge. In the end trusting anyone is a kind of "leap of faith" (and I'm an agnostic!). I think we're doomed to uncertainty and relying on hope.
Thanks for taking your heroic stand for the truth as you see it. You have sacrificed much and it is appreciated.
While difficult, it is possible to dig to the truth. Because, in any controversy between 2 views, one thing happened and the other is a lie. Digging until documents, witnesses, universal principles (like Golden Rule) appear, together can show the truth. But until then--as Edgar Snowden's taxonomy shows--US leaders in conspiracy practice and some voters in conspiracy theories (malevolent falsehoods) keep the truth buried. US voters could establish a cabinet-level Voter Facts Commission. Nothing in the US Constitution prevents voters from requiring the truth. #VietnamWarOrigin
You hit the nail on the head, on citizenship in a conspiracy society not requiring evaluation of a proposed fact for its truth-value. On a huge issue, our leaders' assertion that the Viet Nam War was mainly to oppose communism, citizens never evaluated it, in relation to hidden consular files (in National Archives) that place US corporations and consuls in Viet Nam from 1880s onward, in resource control enabled by violence. These and later records prove that the 1960s war was an attempt to resume those decades of colonial control for US profit, not to counter communist aggression. To this day, the US public has no mechanism to require the facts for an evaluation.
Hi Edward, good article. I must say that in my adolescence I read a lot of conspiracy theories which culminated with the collapse of my belief system (as some one said: "If you shake someone's belief system you shake his world") . But I was able to recover from that and see those conspiracies with more discernment. Someone has to put light in there, and I thank you for trying that in this article. I don't immediately dismiss a conspiracy theory, but also I don't believe all the crap that is out there anymore. It is a balance. If you don't have a lot of facts, it requires patience, experience, intuition to discern the truth from falsehood and to assemble them in a picture. Usually people don't have that skill, maybe because they don't have all the pieces of the puzzle to fit them together. But if we have the facts, all we need is the courage to acknowledge it.
I too have done a great deal of research into conspiracies and sympathize with your experience of the collapse of your belief system. It is a deeply uncomfortable experience, much as Plato's Allegory of the Cave illustrates and I have experienced for myself.
One interesting thing I found in my research is that some people will believe anything that is a conspiracy, and reject out of hand any official explanation, as is well documented by this article. But I found that the opposite is also the case. Namely that a great deal of people will always believe an official explanation for events and always reject out of hand anything labeled as a conspiracy, even in the face of verifiable facts.
One could argue that one group will get things right more often than not, but both positions are equal in their intellectual dishonesty. Courage is indeed in short supply when it comes to finding truth in this world.
Good to know that are out there people with similar experiences. Where I live I haven't met too many people with that. Internet connects us all. I really liked your honesty and your view.
You remain one of the most erudite writers I have read on the practice and consequences of international surveillance. Your new work on conspiracy thinking is a logical extension of this. I want to help you to keep writing so I have subscribed. Stay safe.
There's much to your discussion here in terms of human psychology but "Snowden's working with the Russians/Chinese/facebook" always seemed like the very intentional effort of the American state through their loyal media to discredit you in those early days after you came out and every agency was running around with their heads on fire. That is to say, another conspiracy.
I applaud your embrace of an expanded view of the notion of “conspiracy”.
While I don’t think you’ve uncovered the whole nature of the metastructure—I think you’ve engaged with a line of inquiry that is promising.
A few wrinkles I might add:
Could this set of circumstances emerge if nobody were a witting participant in any of it?
What if instead of Conspiracy in one of its forms enabling individuals to abdicate from the making of truth-value judgments, Conspiracy Practice and Conspiracy Theory emerge from an interwoven tapestry of narratives formed of the truth-value judgments of a multitude of individuals—and only when examined holistically in the context of the knowns and unknowns of history can we see who made good judgments based on true or false facts and who made bad ones.
Retroactively determining goodness and badness then depends on the conspiracy historian’s axiology—which in turn may be influenced by tribe or adopted to obtain tribal membership, or driven by a search for truth or a desire to have faith in a truth as revealed, and will invariably be variable in all the ways individuals are influenced to different degrees by cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
This is a really long-winded way of driving at an intuition that emerges from the fact that all individuals are the protagonists of their own stories—nobody sets out to be a villain (though some have no doubt cast themselves iconoclastic anti-heroes, which can come pretty close to “bad guy” from other individuals’ perspectives).
What if (absent technology-enabled efforts to manipulate the Human Information Umvelt at scale—a factor that has become more potent over the last century or so and has done so especially dramatically in the last decade) we’re actually observing the net effects of a world full of individuals forming truth-value judgments and trying to save the world in a bunch of different directions, and conspiracy is just how we make sense of all the outcomes in hindsight?
Caveat: I do not claim complete or superior knowledge of the metastructure.
I admire you for your courage to speak in the things that so many others are in denial about. You are a true leader, one who has humanity and just cause in the reasoning for risks you have taken. I appreciate it , and honestly hope I see the day where you run for president. In my opinion you are exactly what this country needs.
To the epistemic/existential/social triad I would add "nihilist" or even "eschatological" - the idea that the end of the world (or the current social system) is going to end, and that they deserve to be among the chosen few. Conspirationnal FOMO
The greatest conspiracy is the attack on nature — and that this can succeed without also destroying ourselves #eileencrist
Thank you Ed -- dark background and white lettering make is somewhat difficult to save as document but -- fairly ease to solve...
...and right out of the headlines is a right in the open "In your face progressives!" to derail a Sanders like candidate true conspiracy, nothing hidden, right out in the open: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/politics/jim-clyburn-nina-turner.html
When Snowden quotes Rothbard 💛
What about conspiracies like "space lasers changing votes", which actually made it to a tribunal? And, what about it when something like that comes up as "supporting fact" to a group that is wrapped in a larger conspiracy as is in this particular example? Shouldn't such an obvious fabricated stance serve to fully end the conspiracy itself from within? It shows that there isn't an actual issue with voting as it is in this case, or tampering with the results, but a full will and desire to tie legal systems up with nonsense, as well as to divide society. I still see people supporting the election conspiracies even after that. My personal take when it is that evident, is that those who keep pushing have alternative agendas; support alternative agendas for perhaps strong, personal reasons. Back in time, Nazis and racists had something in common, for example.
Everyone definitely has an agenda, though I suspect there are a lot more people really invested in some of the more zany belief architectures than we might initially be inclined to credit.
The world makes a lot more clean sense if we can attribute a literal form of subtextual intent to stuff people say, but the purely information-warfare mercenaries out there are very likely to have been hired (or had their hirings financed) by true believers.
The civil courts are an expensive place to address grievances, true. But they do have pretty efficient mechanisms to dispense quickly with the nonsensical.
I think your observation that the absurdity doesn’t end conspiracies really goes back to what Ed was saying—the appeal of the truly whack-a-do isn’t in the coherence of supporting facts—rather it is in some other perceived value its adherents derive.
All that said, if I were seeking to discredit a serious accusation, I’d consider using a sock puppet to tie something completely preposterous—e.g. dragging 5G-is-a-COVID-raygun meme—into what ought otherwise be a seriously-taken debate over forced face coverings as a form of compulsory speech and pandemic restrictions on an individual’s right to protest government policy.
It would be pretty easy for one person to do/pay others to do if you really think about it—so conspiracies that accuse policymakers and policy advocates of deploying that tactic are probably worth at least investigating before dismissing.
TLDR: Propaganda + tactical conspiracy meme deployment is a topic that def overlaps with this one, but involves a lot more outside of it than inside of it.
Welcome