people believe conspiracy theories because people conspire

I was reading this The American Conservative longread about elite university admissions, income inequality, and "meritocracy" last night. Like a lot of what TAC publishes, it mixes some really great analysis with an unfortunate proximity to creepiness. It also references Jerome Karabel's The Chosen, which I really cannot recommend enough. Combine it with Timothy Weiner's Legacy of Ashes and you'll understand much more about American elite culture.

I was struck by this passage:

During the 1920s, the established Northeastern Anglo-Saxon elites who then dominated the Ivy League wished to sharply curtail the rapidly growing numbers of Jewish students, but their initial attempts to impose simple numerical quotas provoked enormous controversy and faculty opposition. Therefore, the approach subsequently taken by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and his peers was to transform the admissions process from a simple objective test of academic merit into a complex and holistic consideration of all aspects of each individual applicant; the resulting opacity permitted the admission or rejection of any given applicant, allowing the ethnicity of the student body to be shaped as desired.

This describes a conspiracy. And it occurred to me once again how stupid the supposedly savvy take on conspiracies and conspiracy theories is. People believe in conspiracy theories because people conspire. For every ludicrous conspiracy theory out there, there is some illegitimate scheme being perpetrated by those in power who conspire together. Often enough, I'm sure, we just haven't heard about it yet. You only need to look at the history of the crack epidemic and the CIA, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, MK Ultra, or similar to understand that conspiracies are not some unheard of phenomenon that only crazies could think about. The fact that there are many conspiracy theories that are looney tunes and persist against all evidence (say, the supposed Apollo 11 hoax) doesn't mean that people should be nearly as quick to dismiss all allegations of conspiracy as the work of cranks. After all, 9/11 was a conspiracy. It just happened to have been a conspiracy undertaken by Al Qaeda.

Now many people will tell you that the conspiracy among elite colleges to exclude Jews is not of the same kind as the ones typically discussed by the less evidence-based conspiracy theorists out there. But I think that's actually a mistake, an analytical mistake. Part of the point here is that you don't have to posit a shadowy cabal to argue that there is a conspiracy afoot. These college admissions officer probably weren't meeting in secret rooms while wearing robes and swearing oaths. Rather, they were engaged in an organic expression of bigotry against one of the most maligned and oppressed groups in history. By making conspiracy a matter of secretive cults and nonexistent organizations like the Illuminati, both conspiracy theorists and their critics underestimate the ways in which petty bigotries and self-interest can congeal quite suddenly into ugly, illegitimate crime.

Which brings us to Benghazi. I haven't discussed it, in large part because as a frequent critic of the Obama administration, my complaints would be easily dismissed as a matter of grinding an axe against it. And indeed, that's the tack that most defenders of the State Department and its handling of Benghazi has taken: those who bring up that bizarre string of connected incidents are merely out to attack Obama. Well, I've got to tell you, there's a lot of smoke, there, in a part of the world where we have an enormous amount of history telling us to suspect American misbehavior. And this is a perfect example of a situation where you don't have to posit some secretive taskmasters planning everything out in advance to think that there is conspiring going on. I don't think that the Benghazi attack was planned by the Obama administration or anything similar. I suspect that they were up to no good, some things went wrong, they panicked, and are now covering up various illegal and illegitimate actions. They weren't pulling all the strings from the very beginning. But that doesn't mean they didn't conspire and aren't conspiring now.

My suspicion is that there are more people who think that Benghazi doesn't pass the smell test, but are worried about saying so. And I don't think that it's pure partisanship that keeps them from saying so. I think, in fact, that what keeps them from speaking out is a fear of not looking savvy. Because if there's anything people in our political class are interested in defending, it's their commitment to appearing to be savvy insiders who are concerned about the right things. Few things get you considered a naif or a kook quicker than alleging conspiracy in a way that seems to elide with the conservative media. That's a mistake; letting other people's self-interested, bad analysis dictate your own is no way to better understand the world. Constant incredulity about the claims of one wing of the media merely makes you overly credulous about the claims of different wings. Once again, people are made naive by their desire to appear nothing but.