conspiracy theories

I was trapped for 5 hours listening to a very well educated and well-informed person tell me about the freemasons controlling everything everywhere and killing Stanley Kubrick for making Eyes Wide Shut, 9/11 being a controlled demolition by the US gov’t, Mossadegh, Khomeini, Cheney, Ahmedinejad, Obama, John Lennon, Meryl Streep, Pat Robertson etc are/were all members of the same underground Satanic cult (as evidenced by them caught on camera making Ozzie Ozzborne-style devil horn signs with their hands) with goals so complex as to be beyond the understanding of a simpleton like me. Really though, a lot of his arguments were very well researched and full of real facts and had a good degree of truth to them, eg his argument about the CIA arranging or at least being indifferent to the killing of Abdul Haq, a Pashtun leader executed by the Taliban a few weeks before the US invasion, so that the more obedient Karzai would be left as the most likely candidate to lead the post-Taliban govt was I think—and I did a little online newspaper research this morning on it—mostly true, just not his central argument or the implications drawn from it about secret US motives in Afghanistan.

What’s interesting to me about these grand conspiracy theories to me is that they can be incredibly complex and well-evidenced but are based in such a simplistic misunderstanding of human and organizational behavior. Eg When he was arguing that Bush (again as evidenced by devil horn hand signals) was a member of this satanic super-cult I said Look, one of the most basic human necessities is to believe oneself to be one of the good guys, even when doing terrible things. George Bush has been raised a Christian and especially since being born again has been regularly bombarded with God: Good, Satan: Bad and has spoken in terms of good and evil enough to convince himself. So on a personal level, don’t you think he might have some reservations about secretly worshipping the devil?

Or eg all historical/theoretical evidence suggests that when organizations are underground and/or expansive to include members of ideological and culturally different backgrounds, they fragment into factions and face defections. So even if there are people calling themselves freemasons hanging out in lodges using the same symbols in 15^th century Iran and modern-day France, what suggests that there’s been any true organizational coherency with an unchanging ideologically driven leadership keeping a tight ship?

His response was, as always, to say that I needed to see more documents, keep an open mind, etc, without actually addressing my argument with a rational counterpoint.

That said, he was better informed than me about just about everything, and there was some legitimacy to his annoyance at my making all theoretical arguments to cover my ignorance of hard facts. He claims he reads 32 newspapers a day to piece together the true story—I don’t know if I believe that but liked his parable, drawn from Mowlana Rumi, of a group of blind men in a room with an elephant. Someone asked them to describe what an elephant is like; one, feeling its leg, says an elephant is like a column; another, feeling its trunk, says it’s like a thick snake; etc.

The logic he generally used was to the effect of: freemasons have such-and-such ideological belief (static for 5000 years, I was to believe) and this ideology was evident is the policies or writings of a given person, therefore this person was a freemason.

You don’t need to be a freemason to be elitist or be a member of a secret order to have fantasies about world government.

Yes, but I hadn’t seen the documents he had.

When I said that when 2 theories explain the same phenomenon (eg an anthropological explanation of similarity in elite behavior across time and space vs a massive secret order that’s been ruling everywhere for the past 5000 years without any organizational cracks appearing), he suggested that maybe Occam’s Razor was invented by the freemasons.

It’s particularly amusing how (he showed me some conspiracy theory documents and videos) how genuinely well-meaning and intelligent theorists can without a hint of irony adopt the same methods of propaganda, delegitimizing opposition through emotional appeal rather than logic, etc that they’re so hysterical about the gov’t using. What I would love to do if I had no life is go around catching 9/11 conspiracy theory leaders accidentally making the devil horn sign with their hands, to distribute to their followers just to further mess with their minds.

I escaped at about 1am. Restaurants were just starting the close up and sidewalks around Tajrish were all crowded. Traffic on Valiasr north of Parkvay was slow enough that I more or less kept up at a fast walk before catching a bus for the one-way section of the street.

Conspiracy theories seem much more popular in the Middle East than elsewhere, the reasons for which I think could make a very interesting study. I’ve been lectured by taxi drivers a couple times this summer about the 4000 Israelis who worked in the Twin Towers who didn’t go to work that day, and I regularly hear from both Turks and Persians about US government conspiracies to bring Khomeini into power, cut arms deals with just about anybody, etc.