Accepting and Rejecting Conspiracy Theories

“Highly paranoid” people may see conspiracies when almost anything “wrong” or unexpected happens. “Normally paranoid” people, those with enough paranoia to protect themselves by questioning the intentions of others, may see conspiracies after misfortune, especially when extreme, and when authorities fail to do what is expected of them. Unexpected national disasters foster myths. Given the prevalence of scapegoating, myths with paranoid cores are most dangerous.

As has been amply documented (e.g., Carl Friedrich, The Pathology of Politics, 1972), conspiracy is a basic method by which governments operate. “Conspiracy” means secret planning in concert of a wrongful act—usually an illegal one. It includes—when discovery threatens—a cover-up by manipulating information, hiding and destroying evidence, suborning perjury, and giving perjured testimony. Conspiracy and cover-up are common in government operations throughout the world.

Government conspiracies may be classified according to purpose:

• personal gain (e.g., enrichment of officials)
• partisan political advantage (e.g., Watergate)
• national interest (e.g., Iran-Contra)

Patriotic arrogance, along with government propaganda, led Germans to expect victory in World War I, and they were still expecting it when their government surrendered. The shock and the harsh terms imposed on Germany gave rise to the

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stab-in-the-back myth. Many Germans believed that their nation and its noble soldiers, on the verge of victory, had been betrayed by government leaders. Some believed that those leaders were not really Germans—they were secret Jews engaged in an international conspiracy to destroy Germany. This belief contributed to anti-Semitic measures of the Third Reich, helping prepare the way to the gas chambers.

In 1941 most people in the United States were also biased by patriotic arrogance and a stereotype of Japanese inferiority—especially military inferiority. They thought Japan could be beaten in weeks. The sweeping defeats suffered by the United States beginning with Pearl Harbor on December 7 were experienced as an inexplicable disaster, and fostered two conspiracy theories. In the “highly paranoid” one, Franklin Roosevelt—a secret Jew whose “real name” was said to be Rosenfeld—had engineered the disaster at Pearl Harbor to save Europe’s Jews by getting America into the war against Hitler. In the “normally paranoid” one, the Japanese—an evil, sneaky people—had deceived the United States by mouthing peaceful intentions while preparing and launching surprise attacks. Japanese treachery accounted for their victories.

The thesis that Roosevelt provoked Japan’s attack, seeking an incident to use in manipulating his unwilling nation into the war against Germany, has been dismissed for 60 years as a conspiracy theory. To many people, it has been unthinkable that he—or any President—would do such a thing. Unthinkability is a mark of denial. The world’s history of wars contains many such provocations but, by customary bias, conspiracies are what other nations engage in, not our own. Most people in the United States have only a dim awareness of precedents in their own history.

In history, all things considered “unthinkable”—in the sense of repugnant—have happened. The denial in considering one’s government’s actions unthinkable probably comes from children’s problems with deception and manipulation by the people they most need to trust—their caretakers. The problems persist into adulthood, fostering biases. People who adapt by a hostile-fearful orientation toward their caretakers may generalize it to authorities and see government conspiracies where there are none. People who learn scapegoating may see a conspiracy by an ethnic or other group when things go wrong. People who adapt by extending credulity to their caretakers may deny conspiracies by their government for which evidence is ample.

Scholars show little acceptance of undocumented conspiracy theories. They do, however, tend to dismiss as conspiracy theories documented historical accounts that attribute deception and manipulation to their own government.

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