Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 In my course I offer the class a particular reason that conspiracy theorists are very difficult to argue with: the same rules that apply to us in arguing, i.e. facts, standards of evidence, and the rules of argumentation; do not apply to them. The most important rule that we have that they do not is: not to make things up. I call it argumenta ex ficta; an argument from fiction. Conspiracy theorists have two methods of doing this: the first is presenting known fictional works as fact. People like David Icke think The Matrix is a documentary, or The Truman Show, or any other work like that. Conspiracy theorists during the Covid Years talk about "med beds" from the movie Elysium.  The second type of method is just to create the argument out of nothing. Fabricate the entire body of evidence and the skeptic will get bogged down trying to separate out the claims. In an online argument, they might even get a skeptic to waste a considerable amount of time trying to find the sources

A problem that I keep having with these super-conspiracy theories is that they are logistically problematic. I mentioned this in the last book but it bears repeating: the day-to-day operations of a conspiracy group is important. With the Robison book, I mentioned the problem was in the bookkeeping. The Illuminati also ran the German Union and they placed all the money collected in the same pool distributed based on need. While most organizations operate like that they also have a paper trail. There is an actual book where the accounts are kept and someone is in charge of that. There are receipts and an actual flow of literal money back in the 18th century.  Cooper highlights a different issue. Cooper's issue is one that I bring up frequently in my course on conspiracy theories. I've touched on the issue already in the beginning of the previous chapter. The absurdity of handing out chapter 1 to new recruits and, if what Cooper is claiming was true, these people just nodding alon

This is the chapter where Cooper is going to impart to us the secret of the secret societies. A good portion of this is likely going to be familiar to long-time readers of this blog because the Robison book, "Proofs of a Conspiracy..." was all about this. Cooper has two hundred years of development to improve upon the utter dreadful arguments raised by Robison. The trick for Cooper is to make this more interesting than Robison...which shouldn't be hard because of how boring the Robison book turned out to be. Yet, the advantage of this type of conspiracy writer is that they can rely on complete fabrication to dazzle the reader.  History is replete with whispers of secret societies. Accounts of elders or priests who guarded the forbidden knowledge of ancient peoples. Prominent men, meeting in secret, who directed the course of civilization are recorded in the writings of all people.  Notice the bait and switch that is happening here. First, we are talking about a secret gro

 " ...there is a power so organized, so subtle, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it."--President Woodrow Wilson If I had to take a guess, I would say that this quote is one of the most cited in conspiracy literature from a major political figure. This is a competitive field too: we have the fake quote from Hitler concerning gun control, lots of fake quotes from Clinton and Obama, Obama's real but entirely out of context "You didn't build that," and Trump's "the storm..." comment that gave Q-anon a reason to exist. Wilson's quote here is one for serious conspiracy theorists, not these current hacks that live off of memes and tweets.  The only quote that I can think of that is more popular amongst conspiracy literature was taken from a speech given by George H. W. Bush on September 11th, 1991, this is where he utters the phrase "new world order." The full