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Conspiracies Or Institutions: 9-11 and Beyond
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18504June 02, 2002By
Stephen Shalom
 and
Michael Albert
(1) What Is a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory?
The most common definition of a conspiracy is two or more people secretly planninga criminal act. Examples of related conspiracy theories include belief that JFK wasassassinated by rogue CIA elements attempting to ward off unwanted liberalism;that negotiations between the United States government and Iran to releaseAmerican hostages in Carter's last year failed because Reagan aides secretly struck adeal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election; or, more recently, that 9-11 was a plot by a rogue CIA/Mossad team cunningly engineering rightwardalignments in the United States or Israel.A broader definition of conspiracy includes legal acts that are, however, sufficientlymisleading. For example, even if the U.S. president and his top aides could legallyperpetrate the secret 9-11 attacks, doing so would still be a conspiracy. Legalassassination disguised as an accident or secretly pinned on someone else might alsofit the second, broader definition because it's not just secret, but actively deceptive.But no definition of conspiracy, however broad, includes everything secret.People often secretly get together and use their power to achieve some result. But if this is always a conspiracy, then virtually everything that happens is a conspiracy.When General Motors executives get together and decide what kind of Chevy toproduce next year, it would be a conspiracy. Every business decision, every editorial
 
decision, even a university academic department getting together in a closed sessionto make a personnel decision, would be a conspiracy. Conspiracy would be ubiquitousand therefore vacuous. Even in the broadest definition, there must be somesignificant deviation from normal operations. Thus, no one would call all the secretacts of national security agencies conspiracies. Spying is sufficiently normal andexpected that no one calls it a conspiracy.Most business decisions and government policy decisions are made in secret but areonly deemed a conspiracy when they transcend "normal" behavior, either by workingagainst the norms of surrounding institutions, in the narrow definition, or bymanipulating and actively imposing wrong perceptions, in the broader definition. Nomatter what definition we use, we don't talk of a conspiracy to win an election whenthe suspect activity includes only candidates and their handlers working privately todevelop effective strategy. Seeking to win an election, even secretly, is operating"normally" within the bounds of surrounding institutions. We do talk about aconspiracy, however, if the electoral behavior includes stealing the other party'splans, spiking their Whiskey Sours with LSD, having a campaign worker falsely claimhe or she was beaten up by the opposing camp, or other exceptional activitytranscending electoral institutions or actively misleading and manipulating events.
 (2) What characterizes conspiracy theorizing?
Any particular conspiracy theory may or may not be true. Auto, oil, and tirecompanies did conspire to undermine the trolley system in California in the 1930s.Israeli agents did secretly attack Western targets in Egypt in 1954 in an attempt toprevent a British withdrawal. The CIA did fake a shipload of North Vietnamese armsto justify U.S. aggression. Conspiracies do happen.But a conspiracy theorist is not someone who simply accepts the truth of somespecific conspiracies. Rather, a conspiracy theorist is someone with a certain generalmethodological approach and set of priorities.Conspiracy theorists begin their quest for understanding events by looking for groupsacting secretly, either outside usual institutional norms in a rogue fashion, or, at thevery least to manipulate public impressions, to cast guilt on other parties, and so on.Conspiracy theorists focus on conspirators' methods, motives, and effects.Personalities, personal timetables, secret meetings, and conspirators' joint actionsclaim priority attention. Institutional relations largely drop from view.Thus, conspiracy theorists ask "Did Clinton launch missiles at Sudan in 1998 in orderto divert attention from his Monica troubles?" rather than seeking a basicunderstanding of U.S. foreign policy. They ask "Did a group within the CIA killKennedy to prevent his withdrawing from Vietnam?" rather than examining theshared Vietnam assumptions and policies of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, as anexamination of institutions would emphasize.Because personalities matter so much in conspiracy theories, attention focuseslargely on what one individual said to another, whether a phone conversationimplicates so and so, the credibility of this or that witness, and who knew whatwhen. Suspicion abounds. For conspiracy theorists, no sooner does something
 
happen, then a conspiracy is suspected. Is there a new disease called AIDS? Abiological warfare lab must have created it. Did Clinton aide Vincent Foster appear tocommit suicide? Someone must have killed him. Did flights TWA 800 and Airbus 587crash? There must have been a missile involved.
 (3) What characterizes institutional theorizing?
An institutional theory emphasizes roles, incentives, and other institutional dynamicsthat promote or compel important events and, most important, have similar effectsover and over. Institutional theorists of course notice individual actions, but don'televate them to prime causes. The point of an institutional explanation is to movebeyond proximate personal factors to more basic institutional factors. The aim is tolearn something about society or history, as compared to learning about particularculpable actors. If the particular people hadn't been there to do the events, mostlikely someone else would have.To the institutional theorist, the behavior of rogue elements is far less important thanthe ways in which the defining political, social, and economic forms lead to particularbehaviors. An institutional theory of the U.S. missile attacks on Sudan or the Iran-Contra affair focuses on how and why these activities arose due to the basicinstitutions of U.S. society, not on the personal quirks of a womanizing Clinton or aloose-cannon Ollie North.
 (4) Can thinking about conspiracies ever be institutional? Can thinkingabout institutions ever highlight conspiracies?
There are, of course, complicating borderline cases. A person investigating personalproximate causes of some occurrence in what appears to be a conspiracy-mindedway could do so to make a larger institutional case. Thus, a person trying to discovera CIA role in 9-11 could be trying to verify a larger (incorrect) institutional theory --that the U.S. government is run by the CIA. Or, more subtly, a person might betrying to demonstrate that some set of U.S. institutions propels actors towardconspiring. Someone studying Enron, for example, may be doing so not as aconspiracy theorist concerned with condemning the proximate activities of the boardof Enron, but rather to make a case (correctly) that U.S. market relations instillmotivations and provide the contexts that make conspiracies against the public bymajor corporate decision makers highly probable. The difference is between, on theone hand, trying to understand some broad claim about society by understanding itsinstitutional dynamics, and, on the other hand, trying to understand some singularevent by understanding the activities of the direct actors in it.
 (5) What are the relative features and attributes of conspiracy theorizingand institutional theorizing?
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k3nd00d

Wow, this paper and it's authors are pretty idiotic and ill rationalized. According to the thinking displayed in this paper, there must not ever be any actual conspiracies, there must not be any organizations out there with grandiose agendas, no such thing as propaganda or complicity in crimes. No wait, they acknowledge precisely and only the conspiracies heretofore deemed real by various media as of this day, but no more and no less. I suppose the authors dismiss all claims of JFK murder conspiracies despite the fact that the GODs of government found, in the late 70s, that there was likely a conspiracy (unfortunately they stopped at that point). At this point I'd like to invoke Ockham's Razor, as so many try to do against my point of view. Ockham's Razor tells me (if I must do this for demonstration purposes) that the simplest explanation, and thus most probable, is that there are concerted efforts to manipulate the American populace to be the support and engine behind global imperialism and control. Upon this grand chess board (written about by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "The Grand Chessboard") there are many smaller skirmishes and manipulations directed toward the larger end goals of the game. Finally, in regard to Ockham's Razor, it is absurd to invoke, in reality, because any so called "simplest answer" is firstly subjective and secondly may simply be incorrect and the assignment of a default degree of probability is foolish and ignorant.

reply07 / 29 / 2009
k3nd00d

Wow, this paper and it's authors are pretty idiotic and ill rationalized. According to the thinking displayed in this paper, there must not ever be any actual conspiracies, there must not be any organizations out there with grandiose agendas, no such thing as propaganda or complicity in crimes. No wait, they acknowledge precisely and only the conspiracies heretofore deemed real by various media as of this day, but no more and no less. I suppose the authors dismiss all claims of JFK murder conspiracies despite the GOD of government found, in the late 70s, that there was likely a conspiracy (unfortunately they stopped at that point). At this point I'd like to invoke Ockham's Razor, as so many try to do against my point of view. Ockham's Razor tells me (if I must do this for demonstration purposes) that the simplest explanation, and thus most probable, is that there are concerted efforts to manipulate the American populace to be the support and engine behind global imperialism and control. Upon this grand chess board (written about by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "The Grand Chessboard") there are many smaller skirmishes and manipulations directed toward the larger end goals of the game. Finally, in regard to Ockham's Razor, it is absurd to invoke, in reality, because any so called "simplest answer" is firstly subjective and secondly may simply be incorrect and the assignment of a default degree of probability is foolish and ignorant. k3nd00d@yahoo.com

reply07 / 28 / 2009
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