the credulity divide

This piece at Gawker by Max Read is indicative of one of the hardest parts of getting people to wrestle with our country's horrific violence, what I call the credulity divide. The credulity divide refers to the distance between the factual information that Americans will recognize and their default stance towards critiques and accusations leveled against the government. So Read is a guy who seems very informed and reasonably accepting of the vast amount of misdeeds that our government has done, in the recent and distant past. He has to be, like anyone has to: the declassification of old documentation has again and again revealed that our intelligence services and military have been guilty of just about every "conspiracy theory" leveled against them. From the Bay of Pigs to the Gulf of Tonkin to the Shah to the Year of Living Dangerously to Honduras to MK Ultra to cocaine trafficking in Los Angeles to rendition, on and on and on. All dismissed, at one point or another, as the sort of thing our government would never do. All confirmed beyond reasonable doubt with evidence.

I see no reason to believe that Michael Hastings's death was anything other than a sad and terrible car accident, the kind that kills 180 Americans a day. And I understand why people are sensitive to these accusations. I've never been one to talk about taste or what's "appropriate" myself, but I get why people who knew and loved Hastings personally would be put out. Evidence has to come first. But read most of the comments on that piece, and you'll see that's not the spirit in which they're written. Instead, they are mostly merely mocking of conspiracy theorists as a category. What's strange is that I'm sure the large majority of them would admit the long litany of crimes the United States has committed: assassinations, renditions, torture, the destablizing of legitimate governments, the support of illegitimate governments, funneling weaponry into civil wars, providing intelligence to secret police.... That's the credulity divide: how acceptance of the fact of US misdeeds does not influence assumptions about who is or is not credible, or what claims deserve to be dismissed out of hand.

People believe in conspiracy theories about the American government because the American government has never not been involved in violent conspiracies, since at least the end of World War II. I would like to see the default assumption switch from mockery of those alleging conspiracy to suspicion of the government. Evidence still has to come first. But when you're constantly assuming the worst of people making allegations, you make yourself overly credulous towards a government that does not deserve credulity.