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The Looming Tower: Another Book Conspiracy Theorists Will Never Read.
Author: Muertos
Date: Jun 16, 2011 at 02:42
By Muertos (muertos@gmail.com)
This blog was originally published here.
Just the other day I finished reading Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). I've been meaning to read this book, for which Wright won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, since it came out but my schedule (which is very heavy on reading) only just lightened up enough for me to get through it. The Looming Tower is an extremely impressive book, one which probably deserved to win the Pulitzer, and it's required reading for anyone with an interest in 9/11, terrorism, Al-Qaeda or the modern history of the Middle East in general. What is particularly interesting about this book, at least from my perspective, is what it can tell us about the ubiquitous and very hard-to-eradicate conspiracy theories that continue to linger on about September 11, now nearly ten years after its occurrence.
The Looming Tower is not about 9/11 conspiracy theories. It's only tangentially about 9/11 itself; the event, while the narrative climax of the book, is only briefly described in the second-to-last chapter. Its focus is on the origins and rise of Al-Qaeda as well as a semi-biography of its (thankfully) deceased leader, Osama bin Laden. However, what The Looming Tower does―without expressly setting out to―is demonstrate just how far removed from reality "9/11 Truth" theories really are. The Looming Tower is an exhaustive study of the background of the 9/11 event and what led up to it. This background is totally missing from conspiracy theorists' shallow views of the 9/11 attacks, but it is key to any rational person who wishes to understand why Osama and his group attacked us, what they hoped to accomplish, and―crucially―why the United States was caught blindsided on that fateful day.
Indeed, although it was not conceived as a piece to debunk the ridiculous conspiracy theories still pushed by 9/11 Twoofers (I call them that to emphasize that they believe in woo, or irrational and unsupportable things), The Looming Tower offers some excellent rejoinders to some of the Twoofers' most oft-repeated memes. I'll deal with a few in this blog.
1. "Al-Qaeda doesn't really exist!"
Twoofers see 9/11 as a comparatively simple event: a bunch of evil people, usually members of the Bush administration, Israeli intelligence services or "the Illuminati," decided to blow up the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and blame the attack on a terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. This simple narrative becomes much less complicated if the Twoofers can assert, as many do, that Al-Qaeda doesn't really exist and is a figment of the conspirators' imagination or some sort of propaganda stunt. Another especially ludicrous assertion is that Al-Qaeda doesn't exist because supposedly the words "al qaeda" mean "the toilet" in Arabic and no terrorist group would name itself after a toilet. I'm not kidding, some Twoofers actually make this claim. The Looming Tower shuts down this asinine supposition right off the bat.
Al-Qaeda very much exists, and its history is extremely complicated―reflecting a level of historical, political and religious complexity that Twoofers generally cannot perceive. Wright traces the development of the group from its intellectual and political roots in Islamist thought (note: Islamist is not synonymous with Islamic) and particularly the role of Egyptian political dissidents who, beginning in the 1940s, became increasingly unsatisfied with what they viewed as the corrupt secularism of a series of Egyptian governments, from King Farouk to General Nasser and eventually to Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. Indeed Egypt, not Afghanistan, was the real cradle of Al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden was merely the last and most radical of a long line of Islamists who called for the unity of Islamic countries along strict religious lines and who ultimately came to blame the problems of the Middle East on external enemies―at first Israel but increasingly the United States. In tracing this progression Wright relies upon the written words of various Islamist figures themselves, interviews with people who knew them and contemporary news articles stretching back to the 1940s. It would be extremely difficult to fake these sources. It's especially interesting that very few of the sources Wright relies on were produced by the U.S. government, thus undermining one of the Twoofers' blanket assertions, that everything we supposedly know about Al-Qaeda is what the evil government has told us. Just browsing Wright's many pages of notes and his extensive bibliography shows that there aren't many government sources at all. Hmm, could it be because the existence and history of Al-Qaeda is well-documented independently of government say-so?
2. "Osama bin Laden is/was a CIA agent in the 1980s [or beyond.]"
This is one of the most common misconceptions about bin Laden, and it's not limited to conspiracy theorists―many people I know who clearly do not believe that 9/11 was an "inside job" still repeat the claim that Osama was a CIA agent as if it was true. It isn't. Not only does everything we know about bin Laden's philosophy, theology, personality and political orientation indicate that the last thing he would ever have done was work for an American intelligence agency, but in fact American intelligence had never even heard of bin Laden until years after the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s was over. Based on the history of bin Laden in the Afghan war presented in The Looming Tower, it is extremely difficult to make a case that he was ever any type of Western intelligence asset, much less a CIA stooge.
The myth that bin Laden worked for the CIA is born out of conflation and reduction from a few key facts. It is clearly true that the CIA and the U.S. government funded and armed the Afghan rebels who were fighting the Soviets, who invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a tottering Marxist client state. It is also clearly true that bin Laden and other Islamists, such as Al-Zawahiri, went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets alongside the mujahedin (the Afghan resistance). However, the mujahedin was not monolithic, and just because bin Laden was supposedly on "our side" doesn't mean the CIA funded him or knew anything about him. In fact The Looming Tower makes the case that bin Laden and his Arabic friends (Afghans are not Arabs) were small fries in the Afghan insurgency. They only took part in a few battles against the Soviets, one of which was a major defeat, and these foreign fighters cannot be credited with turning the tide of the war. The vast majority of rebel activity was directed and carried out by indigenous Afghan groups who were receiving Western aid that was funneled through Pakistan's ISI intelligence service. Bin Laden and his friends were much more of an annoyance to the mujahedin than a help. The idea that bin Laden would have been on the CIA payroll is utterly laughable.
Furthermore, what would bin Laden have stood to gain? In the 1980s Osama bin Laden was quite wealthy, one of many sons of Mohammed bin Laden, an engineer and contractor who literally built modern Saudi Arabia and was one of the Saudi royal family's closest friends. (Mohammen bin Laden, who died in the early 1960s, had nothing to do with terrorism or Islamist ideology). Osama brought his own money to Afghanistan and wanted to use it to fund jihad against the Soviets. He could buy his own guns from the Pakistanis, and wouldn't have needed to get them from the CIA. A supposed alliance between bin Laden and the CIA doesn't make sense from the CIA's standpoint either. By the time the war ended in 1989 bin Laden was barely thirty years old, didn't have a lot of followers, and carried no clout among the mujahedin. It is difficult to see what the CIA would have stood to gain by funding him. Since there isn't an iota of evidence to suggest a bin Laden-CIA cooperation anyway, it is very safe to conclude that there never was any cooperation.
Bin Laden was not a CIA agent―not in 1987, 1997 or 2001. The claim simply isn't true.
3. "There is very little evidence linking Al-Qaeda or Osama to 9/11."
In the strange world of 9/11 Twoofers, the projection of blame for 9/11 onto Al-Qaeda is random and arbitrary, as if the conspirators fingered an innocent (or nonexistent) group and then sold a shoddy, flimsy case to the public about bin Laden's guilt. Twoofers love to present "evidence" supposedly showing how flimsy this case is. This ass-backwards reasoning leads to inveterate clangers such as various "sacred lists" argumentslike, "9/11 isn't even on Bin Laden's wanted poster!" or "The hijackers don't appear on the flight manifests!" I've blogged before about how silly these arguments are. In The Looming Tower, Wright makes clear not only that there was never any other suspect for who carried out the 9/11 attacks, but that the attacks were themselves an unmistakable calling card of Al-Qaeda's philosophy, tactics, objectives and modus operandi.
Indeed, Al-Qaeda's history is a long progression leading directly to 9/11. Wright lays out the evolution of Al-Qaeda's reach and how they built successively on each one of their successes and failures, as well as the successes and failures of other terrorists. For example, Al-Qaeda's obsession with the World Trade Center can be seen in the February 1993 bombing, which used truck bombs in the basements and was plotted, not by bin Laden directly, but by fellow Islamists who traveled in the Al-Qaeda orbit. In the early 1990s Al-Qaeda began the tactic of using suicide missions; the direct targeting of civilians, the lack of political demands and no direct claims of responsibility also evolved in this period. Bin Laden and his allies learned from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and essentially replicated it in suicide-mission form in the 1996 Khobar Towers and the 1998 embassy blasts in Tanzania and Kenya. (Astonishingly, there are Twoofers out there who have never even heard of these prior terrorist attacks). The idea to use planes grew out of several attacks proposed, but not carried out, in the 1990s in the Philippines as well as the "Millennium Plot," where Al-Qaeda planned to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on the U.S. West Coast on December 31, 1999. Khaled Shiekh Mohammed, an Al-Qaeda terrorist now in U.S. custody, put all the pieces together for what became the 9/11 attacks and sold the idea to bin Laden. It's no secret that Mohammed planned the attacks. He admitted it to an Arabic TV network in 2002 of his own free will. At the time he admitted it, Mohammed was a free man--the interview was given before he was captured by U.S. forces, which means that his confession was not extracted by torture, as 9/11 Twoofers often like to claim. The fact that bin Laden himself clearly and unequivocally confessed to being the mastermind behind the attacks merely rounds out what we already know: that Al-Qaeda did 9/11, beyond any shadow of doubt.
Furthermore, the analysis provided in The Looming Tower focuses on the uniqueness of Al-Qaeda and the singularity of its deadly vision. There was, quite simply, no other terrorist group in the entire world that could have carried out the 9/11 attacks. Suicide attacks have been used by Palestinian terrorists since the 1990s on a small scale, but before 9/11 no other terrorist group in the world had attempted to utilize suicide bombs on such a large scale--but Al-Qaeda had done so four times (the attacks mentioned in the above paragraph as well as the USS Cole attack in Yemen in October 2000). No other terrorist group in the world had sleeper agents inside the United States--but Al-Qaeda did, and one of them, Zacarias Moussaoui, was in jail in the U.S. at the time of the attacks. No other terrorist group in the world had tried to attack the World Trade Center--but Al-Qaeda and its allies did, in 1993. Most tellingly, no other terrorist group had agents training at U.S. flight schools in the summer of 2001--but Al-Qaeda did, and U.S. intelligence services were following up those leads (quite poorly) even before the attacks took place.
From the moment the 9/11 attacks occurred there simply were no credible suspects other than Al-Qaeda. The investigations that occurred within days after the attacks--not four years, as Twoofers claim when they throw stones at the 9/11 Commission Report, but within days--confirmed beyond all doubt the suspicions that everybody had at the moment the attacks took place. Some of these immediate investigations are detailed inThe Looming Tower. Wright describes an interview between an FBI investigator and a Yemeni terrorist named Abu Jandal, three days after the attacks, in which Jandal admitted Al-Qaeda was responsible. This confession was not brought out under torture either. The long road to 9/11 was so unmistakable that it took merely a few confirmations after the attacks to confirm responsibility.
Twoofers' claims that there is little evidence linking Al-Qaeda to 9/11 is a toxic mixture of willful blindness and outright falsehood. You can't come away from The Looming Tower with any other impression.
4. "The U.S. government knew about the attacks in advance but let them happen anyway."
Most Twoofers subscribe to a conspiracy theory we call MIHOP--Made It Happen On Purpose, meaning they believe the attacks were deliberately carried out by someone else and blamed on Al-Qaeda who was wholly innocent. A minority of Twoofers subscribe to LIHOP--Let It Happen On Purpose, which means that they concede Al-Qaeda did it, but that the U.S. government deliberately allowed it to happen. Sometimes conspiracy theorists who have been brutally refuted by the mountains of evidence linking Al-Qaeda to the attacks will retreat to a LIHOP position as a last resort, or they'll throw it as a sop to debunkers because they think (erroneously) that it sounds more reasonable. LIHOP is definitely a minority position and not the desired one in Twoofer orthodoxy, so I'm not sure belief in it is really very strong, but you do hear it from time to time.
The Looming Tower puts LIHOP theories to bed too. Wright's book is not just a history of Al-Qaeda, but it also chronicles the U.S. government's efforts to respond to the threats emerging in the late 1990s as bin Laden began to ramp up his activities. The picture that the reader gets is one of incompetence, bureaucratic infighting, and failure to think creatively. If the counterterrorism bodies of the U.S. government, especially the FBI and the CIA, had been functioning properly, we might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, if we were lucky. They weren't functioning, and we weren't lucky. The Looming Tower explains how agencies used intelligence as bargaining chips or even weapons against one another and how the rigid structures of investigation and response prevented people from taking action to follow up leads that could conceivably have led to the plot being discovered. Not surprisingly, that the counterterrorism arm of the government was fatally broken in 2001 was exactly the same conclusion that the 9/11 Commission came to. You don't hear Twoofers talk very much about that conclusion.
The reason LIHOP doesn't work is because it presumes that these agencies functioned perfectly, or at least well enough to detect the 9/11 plot before it happened, and then that some authority from on high (who? President Bush? Condi Rice?) decreed that nothing would be done about it. If this was true, the evidence that Wright describes of bureaucratic infighting and inertia, the leads not followed, and the advice of far-seeing agents not being implemented would all have to be false. Either the FBI and the CIA really did ferret out the plot and were overruled, or somebody else (who?) figured it out without the FBI and the CIA knowing about it and communicated that knowledge to whoever made the decision to let it go forward. The evidence Wright presents are totally inconsistent with both of those scenarios.
After reading The Looming Tower, I'm not convinced, frankly, that we could have discovered the plot beforehand in the detail that would have been necessary to foil it. Al-Qaeda functions through personal loyalty, family and clan affiliations, and trust. If you're an infiltrator, you can't buy your way in, and even if you share their philosophy they won't trust you just on that alone. This is the difference between gathering intelligence on a terrorist group such as this and spying on an established government, the Mafia or some other organization where money or ideological conviction are the main requirements for membership.
To foil a terrorist attack you must know where and exactly when it will take place, how it's going to be done, and who's going to do it. Unless you have a mole inside the organization itself, it's very difficult to piece all of that information together from external sources. Clearly the U.S. government could have done a much better job of that, and it's remotely possible that they might have gained a clear enough picture to be able to take some steps to prevent the attacks. But I doubt it. The LIHOP scenario is simply not logical, and Wright's look at how counterterrorism really functioned in the days before 9/11 underscores that conclusion.
5. "We don't (or can't) know what really happened on 9/11."
Some Twoofers--often those who don't want to admit they're Twoofers--will try to take an agnostic position about 9/11, and claim that debating what happened is pointless because "we can't ever know." The Looming Tower demolishes this idiocy too. We can know, and we do. It's all there.
We know who planned the attack. We know who came up with the idea. We know the evolution of the planners' thinking and strategies. We know their religious backgrounds and their political motivation. We know how they got to be in the positions that they were. We know how they financed the attacks. We know how they recruited those who carried them out. We know when and where they entered the United States. We know how, when and where the hijackers who had flight training received it, how the training was paid for and what they planned to do. For each and every one of the participants in 9/11, from Osama bin Laden down to Hani Hanjour, we know the personal histories that brought them to the point of committing this terrible act. We know all of these things, and it's all out there in the public domain--this information was not, as Twoofers believe, disseminated to us by government sources. We're not taking somebody's word for it. It's all there in Wright's text, in his footnotes and most importantly in his sources.
Indeed--what relevant facts about 9/11 don't we know? Honestly I can't think of any.
The assertion that "we don't know what really happened" is a dishonest claim from someone who either hasn't investigated the facts of 9/11, or, more likely, by someone who has investigated them but doesn't like what he or she found, so they'd rather just wish it away by claiming it doesn't exist. This is how Twoofers think, but it's not how rational people operate in the real world.
Why The Looming Tower will not convince a single conspiracy theorist to abandon their beliefs.
The Looming Tower is not new. It was published five years ago. Lawrence Wright has gone on to other highly-acclaimed projects. This book is certainly not news. Why, then, did it fail to convince Twoofers that their beliefs about 9/11 being an "inside job" were nothing but paranoid delusions?
The answer is simple: the Twoofers didn't read it. Furthermore, they never will.
Conspiracy theorists are notoriously unwilling to do any real scholarly investigation into the subjects that they claim they're passionate about. If it's not on the Alex Jones show, in the movie Zeitgeist or (better yet) on YouTube, they don't want to have anything to do with it. They love spurious sources that can't be verified, which are mostly pseudoscientists and other conspiracy theorists. They hate academic researchers with a passion. Consequently, a book like The Looming Tower will never mean anything to them, even if it ever crosses their event horizon at all.
I've never heard of a single Twoofer who has read this book. My guess is that any Twoofers reading this article now will simply sneer and dismiss the book out of hand by saying something like, "Lawrence Wright is a disinfo agent" or "he's part of the mainstream media, so naturally he'd support the official story."
But actually read it? Actually engage with the sources to determine their veracity? Conduct some sort of logical analysis about what the book argues, whether it is plausible, and whether its argument is supported by the material Wright cites? That is asking far too much of your typical conspiracy theorist. No; it's easier to hunker down, bellow that anyone who disagrees with 9/11 conspiracy theories is a "shill" or a "sheeple," or a paid government agent, and simply pretend that the very professional, academic and scholarly analysis engaged in by a writer with Wright's credentials simply doesn't exist.
Herein lies the irony. Without even specifically addressing a single 9/11 conspiracy theory, The Looming Tower demonstrates that all of those theories lie completely beyond the realm of reality or possibility. Therefore, the Twoofers will never acknowledge it. It does not exist in their world. And it's likely to stay that way.
Thanks for reading.
This blog was originally published here.
Just the other day I finished reading Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). I've been meaning to read this book, for which Wright won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, since it came out but my schedule (which is very heavy on reading) only just lightened up enough for me to get through it. The Looming Tower is an extremely impressive book, one which probably deserved to win the Pulitzer, and it's required reading for anyone with an interest in 9/11, terrorism, Al-Qaeda or the modern history of the Middle East in general. What is particularly interesting about this book, at least from my perspective, is what it can tell us about the ubiquitous and very hard-to-eradicate conspiracy theories that continue to linger on about September 11, now nearly ten years after its occurrence.
The Looming Tower is not about 9/11 conspiracy theories. It's only tangentially about 9/11 itself; the event, while the narrative climax of the book, is only briefly described in the second-to-last chapter. Its focus is on the origins and rise of Al-Qaeda as well as a semi-biography of its (thankfully) deceased leader, Osama bin Laden. However, what The Looming Tower does―without expressly setting out to―is demonstrate just how far removed from reality "9/11 Truth" theories really are. The Looming Tower is an exhaustive study of the background of the 9/11 event and what led up to it. This background is totally missing from conspiracy theorists' shallow views of the 9/11 attacks, but it is key to any rational person who wishes to understand why Osama and his group attacked us, what they hoped to accomplish, and―crucially―why the United States was caught blindsided on that fateful day.
Indeed, although it was not conceived as a piece to debunk the ridiculous conspiracy theories still pushed by 9/11 Twoofers (I call them that to emphasize that they believe in woo, or irrational and unsupportable things), The Looming Tower offers some excellent rejoinders to some of the Twoofers' most oft-repeated memes. I'll deal with a few in this blog.
1. "Al-Qaeda doesn't really exist!"
Twoofers see 9/11 as a comparatively simple event: a bunch of evil people, usually members of the Bush administration, Israeli intelligence services or "the Illuminati," decided to blow up the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and blame the attack on a terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. This simple narrative becomes much less complicated if the Twoofers can assert, as many do, that Al-Qaeda doesn't really exist and is a figment of the conspirators' imagination or some sort of propaganda stunt. Another especially ludicrous assertion is that Al-Qaeda doesn't exist because supposedly the words "al qaeda" mean "the toilet" in Arabic and no terrorist group would name itself after a toilet. I'm not kidding, some Twoofers actually make this claim. The Looming Tower shuts down this asinine supposition right off the bat.
Al-Qaeda very much exists, and its history is extremely complicated―reflecting a level of historical, political and religious complexity that Twoofers generally cannot perceive. Wright traces the development of the group from its intellectual and political roots in Islamist thought (note: Islamist is not synonymous with Islamic) and particularly the role of Egyptian political dissidents who, beginning in the 1940s, became increasingly unsatisfied with what they viewed as the corrupt secularism of a series of Egyptian governments, from King Farouk to General Nasser and eventually to Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak. Indeed Egypt, not Afghanistan, was the real cradle of Al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden was merely the last and most radical of a long line of Islamists who called for the unity of Islamic countries along strict religious lines and who ultimately came to blame the problems of the Middle East on external enemies―at first Israel but increasingly the United States. In tracing this progression Wright relies upon the written words of various Islamist figures themselves, interviews with people who knew them and contemporary news articles stretching back to the 1940s. It would be extremely difficult to fake these sources. It's especially interesting that very few of the sources Wright relies on were produced by the U.S. government, thus undermining one of the Twoofers' blanket assertions, that everything we supposedly know about Al-Qaeda is what the evil government has told us. Just browsing Wright's many pages of notes and his extensive bibliography shows that there aren't many government sources at all. Hmm, could it be because the existence and history of Al-Qaeda is well-documented independently of government say-so?
2. "Osama bin Laden is/was a CIA agent in the 1980s [or beyond.]"
This is one of the most common misconceptions about bin Laden, and it's not limited to conspiracy theorists―many people I know who clearly do not believe that 9/11 was an "inside job" still repeat the claim that Osama was a CIA agent as if it was true. It isn't. Not only does everything we know about bin Laden's philosophy, theology, personality and political orientation indicate that the last thing he would ever have done was work for an American intelligence agency, but in fact American intelligence had never even heard of bin Laden until years after the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s was over. Based on the history of bin Laden in the Afghan war presented in The Looming Tower, it is extremely difficult to make a case that he was ever any type of Western intelligence asset, much less a CIA stooge.
The myth that bin Laden worked for the CIA is born out of conflation and reduction from a few key facts. It is clearly true that the CIA and the U.S. government funded and armed the Afghan rebels who were fighting the Soviets, who invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a tottering Marxist client state. It is also clearly true that bin Laden and other Islamists, such as Al-Zawahiri, went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets alongside the mujahedin (the Afghan resistance). However, the mujahedin was not monolithic, and just because bin Laden was supposedly on "our side" doesn't mean the CIA funded him or knew anything about him. In fact The Looming Tower makes the case that bin Laden and his Arabic friends (Afghans are not Arabs) were small fries in the Afghan insurgency. They only took part in a few battles against the Soviets, one of which was a major defeat, and these foreign fighters cannot be credited with turning the tide of the war. The vast majority of rebel activity was directed and carried out by indigenous Afghan groups who were receiving Western aid that was funneled through Pakistan's ISI intelligence service. Bin Laden and his friends were much more of an annoyance to the mujahedin than a help. The idea that bin Laden would have been on the CIA payroll is utterly laughable.
Furthermore, what would bin Laden have stood to gain? In the 1980s Osama bin Laden was quite wealthy, one of many sons of Mohammed bin Laden, an engineer and contractor who literally built modern Saudi Arabia and was one of the Saudi royal family's closest friends. (Mohammen bin Laden, who died in the early 1960s, had nothing to do with terrorism or Islamist ideology). Osama brought his own money to Afghanistan and wanted to use it to fund jihad against the Soviets. He could buy his own guns from the Pakistanis, and wouldn't have needed to get them from the CIA. A supposed alliance between bin Laden and the CIA doesn't make sense from the CIA's standpoint either. By the time the war ended in 1989 bin Laden was barely thirty years old, didn't have a lot of followers, and carried no clout among the mujahedin. It is difficult to see what the CIA would have stood to gain by funding him. Since there isn't an iota of evidence to suggest a bin Laden-CIA cooperation anyway, it is very safe to conclude that there never was any cooperation.
Bin Laden was not a CIA agent―not in 1987, 1997 or 2001. The claim simply isn't true.
3. "There is very little evidence linking Al-Qaeda or Osama to 9/11."
In the strange world of 9/11 Twoofers, the projection of blame for 9/11 onto Al-Qaeda is random and arbitrary, as if the conspirators fingered an innocent (or nonexistent) group and then sold a shoddy, flimsy case to the public about bin Laden's guilt. Twoofers love to present "evidence" supposedly showing how flimsy this case is. This ass-backwards reasoning leads to inveterate clangers such as various "sacred lists" argumentslike, "9/11 isn't even on Bin Laden's wanted poster!" or "The hijackers don't appear on the flight manifests!" I've blogged before about how silly these arguments are. In The Looming Tower, Wright makes clear not only that there was never any other suspect for who carried out the 9/11 attacks, but that the attacks were themselves an unmistakable calling card of Al-Qaeda's philosophy, tactics, objectives and modus operandi.
Indeed, Al-Qaeda's history is a long progression leading directly to 9/11. Wright lays out the evolution of Al-Qaeda's reach and how they built successively on each one of their successes and failures, as well as the successes and failures of other terrorists. For example, Al-Qaeda's obsession with the World Trade Center can be seen in the February 1993 bombing, which used truck bombs in the basements and was plotted, not by bin Laden directly, but by fellow Islamists who traveled in the Al-Qaeda orbit. In the early 1990s Al-Qaeda began the tactic of using suicide missions; the direct targeting of civilians, the lack of political demands and no direct claims of responsibility also evolved in this period. Bin Laden and his allies learned from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and essentially replicated it in suicide-mission form in the 1996 Khobar Towers and the 1998 embassy blasts in Tanzania and Kenya. (Astonishingly, there are Twoofers out there who have never even heard of these prior terrorist attacks). The idea to use planes grew out of several attacks proposed, but not carried out, in the 1990s in the Philippines as well as the "Millennium Plot," where Al-Qaeda planned to hijack planes and crash them into buildings on the U.S. West Coast on December 31, 1999. Khaled Shiekh Mohammed, an Al-Qaeda terrorist now in U.S. custody, put all the pieces together for what became the 9/11 attacks and sold the idea to bin Laden. It's no secret that Mohammed planned the attacks. He admitted it to an Arabic TV network in 2002 of his own free will. At the time he admitted it, Mohammed was a free man--the interview was given before he was captured by U.S. forces, which means that his confession was not extracted by torture, as 9/11 Twoofers often like to claim. The fact that bin Laden himself clearly and unequivocally confessed to being the mastermind behind the attacks merely rounds out what we already know: that Al-Qaeda did 9/11, beyond any shadow of doubt.
Furthermore, the analysis provided in The Looming Tower focuses on the uniqueness of Al-Qaeda and the singularity of its deadly vision. There was, quite simply, no other terrorist group in the entire world that could have carried out the 9/11 attacks. Suicide attacks have been used by Palestinian terrorists since the 1990s on a small scale, but before 9/11 no other terrorist group in the world had attempted to utilize suicide bombs on such a large scale--but Al-Qaeda had done so four times (the attacks mentioned in the above paragraph as well as the USS Cole attack in Yemen in October 2000). No other terrorist group in the world had sleeper agents inside the United States--but Al-Qaeda did, and one of them, Zacarias Moussaoui, was in jail in the U.S. at the time of the attacks. No other terrorist group in the world had tried to attack the World Trade Center--but Al-Qaeda and its allies did, in 1993. Most tellingly, no other terrorist group had agents training at U.S. flight schools in the summer of 2001--but Al-Qaeda did, and U.S. intelligence services were following up those leads (quite poorly) even before the attacks took place.
From the moment the 9/11 attacks occurred there simply were no credible suspects other than Al-Qaeda. The investigations that occurred within days after the attacks--not four years, as Twoofers claim when they throw stones at the 9/11 Commission Report, but within days--confirmed beyond all doubt the suspicions that everybody had at the moment the attacks took place. Some of these immediate investigations are detailed inThe Looming Tower. Wright describes an interview between an FBI investigator and a Yemeni terrorist named Abu Jandal, three days after the attacks, in which Jandal admitted Al-Qaeda was responsible. This confession was not brought out under torture either. The long road to 9/11 was so unmistakable that it took merely a few confirmations after the attacks to confirm responsibility.
Twoofers' claims that there is little evidence linking Al-Qaeda to 9/11 is a toxic mixture of willful blindness and outright falsehood. You can't come away from The Looming Tower with any other impression.
4. "The U.S. government knew about the attacks in advance but let them happen anyway."
Most Twoofers subscribe to a conspiracy theory we call MIHOP--Made It Happen On Purpose, meaning they believe the attacks were deliberately carried out by someone else and blamed on Al-Qaeda who was wholly innocent. A minority of Twoofers subscribe to LIHOP--Let It Happen On Purpose, which means that they concede Al-Qaeda did it, but that the U.S. government deliberately allowed it to happen. Sometimes conspiracy theorists who have been brutally refuted by the mountains of evidence linking Al-Qaeda to the attacks will retreat to a LIHOP position as a last resort, or they'll throw it as a sop to debunkers because they think (erroneously) that it sounds more reasonable. LIHOP is definitely a minority position and not the desired one in Twoofer orthodoxy, so I'm not sure belief in it is really very strong, but you do hear it from time to time.
The Looming Tower puts LIHOP theories to bed too. Wright's book is not just a history of Al-Qaeda, but it also chronicles the U.S. government's efforts to respond to the threats emerging in the late 1990s as bin Laden began to ramp up his activities. The picture that the reader gets is one of incompetence, bureaucratic infighting, and failure to think creatively. If the counterterrorism bodies of the U.S. government, especially the FBI and the CIA, had been functioning properly, we might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks, if we were lucky. They weren't functioning, and we weren't lucky. The Looming Tower explains how agencies used intelligence as bargaining chips or even weapons against one another and how the rigid structures of investigation and response prevented people from taking action to follow up leads that could conceivably have led to the plot being discovered. Not surprisingly, that the counterterrorism arm of the government was fatally broken in 2001 was exactly the same conclusion that the 9/11 Commission came to. You don't hear Twoofers talk very much about that conclusion.
The reason LIHOP doesn't work is because it presumes that these agencies functioned perfectly, or at least well enough to detect the 9/11 plot before it happened, and then that some authority from on high (who? President Bush? Condi Rice?) decreed that nothing would be done about it. If this was true, the evidence that Wright describes of bureaucratic infighting and inertia, the leads not followed, and the advice of far-seeing agents not being implemented would all have to be false. Either the FBI and the CIA really did ferret out the plot and were overruled, or somebody else (who?) figured it out without the FBI and the CIA knowing about it and communicated that knowledge to whoever made the decision to let it go forward. The evidence Wright presents are totally inconsistent with both of those scenarios.
After reading The Looming Tower, I'm not convinced, frankly, that we could have discovered the plot beforehand in the detail that would have been necessary to foil it. Al-Qaeda functions through personal loyalty, family and clan affiliations, and trust. If you're an infiltrator, you can't buy your way in, and even if you share their philosophy they won't trust you just on that alone. This is the difference between gathering intelligence on a terrorist group such as this and spying on an established government, the Mafia or some other organization where money or ideological conviction are the main requirements for membership.
To foil a terrorist attack you must know where and exactly when it will take place, how it's going to be done, and who's going to do it. Unless you have a mole inside the organization itself, it's very difficult to piece all of that information together from external sources. Clearly the U.S. government could have done a much better job of that, and it's remotely possible that they might have gained a clear enough picture to be able to take some steps to prevent the attacks. But I doubt it. The LIHOP scenario is simply not logical, and Wright's look at how counterterrorism really functioned in the days before 9/11 underscores that conclusion.
5. "We don't (or can't) know what really happened on 9/11."
Some Twoofers--often those who don't want to admit they're Twoofers--will try to take an agnostic position about 9/11, and claim that debating what happened is pointless because "we can't ever know." The Looming Tower demolishes this idiocy too. We can know, and we do. It's all there.
We know who planned the attack. We know who came up with the idea. We know the evolution of the planners' thinking and strategies. We know their religious backgrounds and their political motivation. We know how they got to be in the positions that they were. We know how they financed the attacks. We know how they recruited those who carried them out. We know when and where they entered the United States. We know how, when and where the hijackers who had flight training received it, how the training was paid for and what they planned to do. For each and every one of the participants in 9/11, from Osama bin Laden down to Hani Hanjour, we know the personal histories that brought them to the point of committing this terrible act. We know all of these things, and it's all out there in the public domain--this information was not, as Twoofers believe, disseminated to us by government sources. We're not taking somebody's word for it. It's all there in Wright's text, in his footnotes and most importantly in his sources.
Indeed--what relevant facts about 9/11 don't we know? Honestly I can't think of any.
The assertion that "we don't know what really happened" is a dishonest claim from someone who either hasn't investigated the facts of 9/11, or, more likely, by someone who has investigated them but doesn't like what he or she found, so they'd rather just wish it away by claiming it doesn't exist. This is how Twoofers think, but it's not how rational people operate in the real world.
Why The Looming Tower will not convince a single conspiracy theorist to abandon their beliefs.
The Looming Tower is not new. It was published five years ago. Lawrence Wright has gone on to other highly-acclaimed projects. This book is certainly not news. Why, then, did it fail to convince Twoofers that their beliefs about 9/11 being an "inside job" were nothing but paranoid delusions?
The answer is simple: the Twoofers didn't read it. Furthermore, they never will.
Conspiracy theorists are notoriously unwilling to do any real scholarly investigation into the subjects that they claim they're passionate about. If it's not on the Alex Jones show, in the movie Zeitgeist or (better yet) on YouTube, they don't want to have anything to do with it. They love spurious sources that can't be verified, which are mostly pseudoscientists and other conspiracy theorists. They hate academic researchers with a passion. Consequently, a book like The Looming Tower will never mean anything to them, even if it ever crosses their event horizon at all.
I've never heard of a single Twoofer who has read this book. My guess is that any Twoofers reading this article now will simply sneer and dismiss the book out of hand by saying something like, "Lawrence Wright is a disinfo agent" or "he's part of the mainstream media, so naturally he'd support the official story."
But actually read it? Actually engage with the sources to determine their veracity? Conduct some sort of logical analysis about what the book argues, whether it is plausible, and whether its argument is supported by the material Wright cites? That is asking far too much of your typical conspiracy theorist. No; it's easier to hunker down, bellow that anyone who disagrees with 9/11 conspiracy theories is a "shill" or a "sheeple," or a paid government agent, and simply pretend that the very professional, academic and scholarly analysis engaged in by a writer with Wright's credentials simply doesn't exist.
Herein lies the irony. Without even specifically addressing a single 9/11 conspiracy theory, The Looming Tower demonstrates that all of those theories lie completely beyond the realm of reality or possibility. Therefore, the Twoofers will never acknowledge it. It does not exist in their world. And it's likely to stay that way.
Thanks for reading.
The Zeitgeist Movement: Where Does the Fraudulence Truly Lie?
Author: Theo J
Date: Dec 05, 2010 at 03:22
(Originally written April 12th, 2010)
My focus for this article is the followers of The Zeitgeist Movement and their leader (if you like), Peter Joseph. I used to be an avid conspiracy theorist, but while I am still sceptical of the major political parties, capitalism and the media etc. I don't hold that the arguments of the Zeitgeist films are accurate.
I am actually a supporter of the Venus Project and so it may seem strange to some that I am against its so-called 'activist arm'. The Zeitgeist Movement at its core is a conspiracy theory movement. The majority of followers believe the claims Peter Joseph makes. I want conspiracy theorists reading this to consider three relevant questions:
Question 1 (see Muerto's excellent article for more detail)
Peter Joseph claims that he gives no weight to 'credentialism' as people with credentials have merely gone through pre-approved processes, jumping through academic hoops. [1] I am trained in history and since most conspiracy theories are historically-based it is important to evaluate this assertion.
Peter Joseph isn't talking from an informed perspective and is, of course, speculating. He wrongly assumes that experts think inside the box, but as 'Muerto' has shown, there's actually little incentive for that. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that the higher you go up through the education system for history (and presumably other subjects) the more independent you become. In fact, it's actually hard to get into the higher mark boundaries at university level and onwards unless your work is original.
When Alex Jones pointed out that Peter Joseph made mistakes in the first part of 'Zeitgeist: The Movie' he replied 'I do my research as best as I can'. [2] But while he may denounce experts you'd think he would be able to at least know some basic historical techniques for research. I can only presume that Joseph doesn't know the difference between primary and secondary sources. He hasn't looked beyond some dubious secondary sources. If he did his research as well as possible he would have looked for the primary sources available. This is, in general, one of the biggest problems with conspiracy theories- its reliance on secondary sources. When sources are used at all that is.
He points out how great thinkers have excelled outside the 'establishment'. Yes, but those people challenged the establishment, they didn't dismiss it. Conspiracy theorists practically never show how scholars are wrong, just how they're 'right' (not that it's demonstrated with frequent referencing to sources...)
Question 2
The second question is an important one. So many conspiracy theorists are inflexible in the way they think and refuse to consider alternatives to their beliefs. This seems ridiculous since they call people who disagree with them sheep. These people I describe as 'sheep switching sides'. The fact that I investigated the claims for my self put me in a tiny minority of conspiracy theorists.
Indeed conspiracy theorists often have religious levels of conviction. It's dangerous to claim certainty on these kinds of issues, but since it is so fanatical in nature, it seems to reflect a psychological rather than a rational certainty. Maybe their beliefs reflect their psychological states?
Professor Chris French and Dr Patrick Leman's research [3] has found that you are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if:
a) You have low levels of trust.
b) You are alienated from society.
c) You are prone to assumption
Interestingly, I believed in the Zeitgeist films when I was depressed and the friend who recommended the film, who used to believe in David Icke's theories, told me that since he got a girlfriend, became more popular at school and so on- he stopped believing those ideas entirely.
Zeitgeist and Money
Peter Joseph has made out like debunkers are motivated purely by profit. [4] However, he is profiting from the sale of Zeitgeist DVDs and T-shirts. He claims that he has generously chosen to sell the DVDs for $5 instead of $20. However, in total that would probably mean making less money. He states: 'The DVD sales (and T-shirts I add parenthetically) are obviously a part of my income. I denote that that they're not for profit meaning that the money does go into other projects which it has'.
Based on what he says there, it's pretty clear it's for both profit and projects. How much for each is not clear. Those 'projects' by the way are basically just a few publicising ventures. It can't be that costly.
'Activism'
Joseph acknowledges that for things to keep going money is needed. Yet there is no mention or encouragement for people to donate money to charities, or links between certain charities and The Zeitgeist Movement. When you look at it objectively you see that the movement is actually about as 'activist' as a sloth- it's barely even encouraging activism. How much work has been done alongside charities who are actually committed to tackling the world's horrendous injustices? Hitherto, all the projects have been based on publicising the movement. Not one is aimed at directly solving a specific problem.
Conclusion
Few of the followers of The Zeitgeist Movement have been sceptics regarding what they've seen in the films. The movement is based on false pretences. I've always considered myself outside the political, educational systems etc. but the system you should also take on and challenge constantly is your belief system.
I really hope The Zeitgeist Movement get off their arses soon. I think things like preventable and unnecessary poverty and famine are tragic realities but Peter Joseph and most of his followers have simply furthered their identities and profits based on those injustices. Wearing a T-shirt isn't going to bring about seismic change.
If you want to really help then take action, help a charity out or a positive cause of your own. If you're too busy give some money to charity. As yet at least, The Zeitgeist Movement and most its followers have shown no such interest.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw9IHJNB75E
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My9MMMcoF2g&feature=related
[3] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3082712932054125675# 34:11- 45:30
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw9IHJNB75E
My focus for this article is the followers of The Zeitgeist Movement and their leader (if you like), Peter Joseph. I used to be an avid conspiracy theorist, but while I am still sceptical of the major political parties, capitalism and the media etc. I don't hold that the arguments of the Zeitgeist films are accurate.
I am actually a supporter of the Venus Project and so it may seem strange to some that I am against its so-called 'activist arm'. The Zeitgeist Movement at its core is a conspiracy theory movement. The majority of followers believe the claims Peter Joseph makes. I want conspiracy theorists reading this to consider three relevant questions:
- Why do no respected scholars or experts endorse the views of conspiracy theories?
- Why is it easy to find an abundance of debunking articles against conspiracy theories but virtually impossible to find any which debunk said articles?
- Why, as the case may be, are you so unprepared to challenge your beliefs?
Question 1 (see Muerto's excellent article for more detail)
Peter Joseph claims that he gives no weight to 'credentialism' as people with credentials have merely gone through pre-approved processes, jumping through academic hoops. [1] I am trained in history and since most conspiracy theories are historically-based it is important to evaluate this assertion.
Peter Joseph isn't talking from an informed perspective and is, of course, speculating. He wrongly assumes that experts think inside the box, but as 'Muerto' has shown, there's actually little incentive for that. Personally, I can vouch for the fact that the higher you go up through the education system for history (and presumably other subjects) the more independent you become. In fact, it's actually hard to get into the higher mark boundaries at university level and onwards unless your work is original.
When Alex Jones pointed out that Peter Joseph made mistakes in the first part of 'Zeitgeist: The Movie' he replied 'I do my research as best as I can'. [2] But while he may denounce experts you'd think he would be able to at least know some basic historical techniques for research. I can only presume that Joseph doesn't know the difference between primary and secondary sources. He hasn't looked beyond some dubious secondary sources. If he did his research as well as possible he would have looked for the primary sources available. This is, in general, one of the biggest problems with conspiracy theories- its reliance on secondary sources. When sources are used at all that is.
He points out how great thinkers have excelled outside the 'establishment'. Yes, but those people challenged the establishment, they didn't dismiss it. Conspiracy theorists practically never show how scholars are wrong, just how they're 'right' (not that it's demonstrated with frequent referencing to sources...)
Question 2
The second question is an important one. So many conspiracy theorists are inflexible in the way they think and refuse to consider alternatives to their beliefs. This seems ridiculous since they call people who disagree with them sheep. These people I describe as 'sheep switching sides'. The fact that I investigated the claims for my self put me in a tiny minority of conspiracy theorists.
Indeed conspiracy theorists often have religious levels of conviction. It's dangerous to claim certainty on these kinds of issues, but since it is so fanatical in nature, it seems to reflect a psychological rather than a rational certainty. Maybe their beliefs reflect their psychological states?
Professor Chris French and Dr Patrick Leman's research [3] has found that you are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if:
a) You have low levels of trust.
b) You are alienated from society.
c) You are prone to assumption
Interestingly, I believed in the Zeitgeist films when I was depressed and the friend who recommended the film, who used to believe in David Icke's theories, told me that since he got a girlfriend, became more popular at school and so on- he stopped believing those ideas entirely.
Zeitgeist and Money
Peter Joseph has made out like debunkers are motivated purely by profit. [4] However, he is profiting from the sale of Zeitgeist DVDs and T-shirts. He claims that he has generously chosen to sell the DVDs for $5 instead of $20. However, in total that would probably mean making less money. He states: 'The DVD sales (and T-shirts I add parenthetically) are obviously a part of my income. I denote that that they're not for profit meaning that the money does go into other projects which it has'.
Based on what he says there, it's pretty clear it's for both profit and projects. How much for each is not clear. Those 'projects' by the way are basically just a few publicising ventures. It can't be that costly.
'Activism'
Joseph acknowledges that for things to keep going money is needed. Yet there is no mention or encouragement for people to donate money to charities, or links between certain charities and The Zeitgeist Movement. When you look at it objectively you see that the movement is actually about as 'activist' as a sloth- it's barely even encouraging activism. How much work has been done alongside charities who are actually committed to tackling the world's horrendous injustices? Hitherto, all the projects have been based on publicising the movement. Not one is aimed at directly solving a specific problem.
Conclusion
Few of the followers of The Zeitgeist Movement have been sceptics regarding what they've seen in the films. The movement is based on false pretences. I've always considered myself outside the political, educational systems etc. but the system you should also take on and challenge constantly is your belief system.
I really hope The Zeitgeist Movement get off their arses soon. I think things like preventable and unnecessary poverty and famine are tragic realities but Peter Joseph and most of his followers have simply furthered their identities and profits based on those injustices. Wearing a T-shirt isn't going to bring about seismic change.
If you want to really help then take action, help a charity out or a positive cause of your own. If you're too busy give some money to charity. As yet at least, The Zeitgeist Movement and most its followers have shown no such interest.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw9IHJNB75E
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My9MMMcoF2g&feature=related
[3] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3082712932054125675# 34:11- 45:30
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw9IHJNB75E
Herding Cats: How And Why Conspiracy Theorists Are Wrong About Experts and Academicians
Author: Muertos
Date: Nov 13, 2010 at 03:04
By Muertos (muertos@gmail.com)
Originally posted here.
It is a question that drives conspiracy theorists, and other traffickers in fringe beliefs, batty: "Why don't more experts and academicians agree with me?"
It's a fair question. If a conspiracy theorist or other fringe believer, who is typically not an academician him or herself, has been convinced of something nutty--that 9/11 was an inside job, that Christianity is a false construct, that aliens visited the earth in ancient times, that global warming is a hoax, that colloidal silver cures cancer, etc.--it is difficult to understand why experts in various fields aren't convinced by the same "evidence." Usually the answer in the conspiracy theorist's mind comes down to a dismissal of the value, independence, or honesty of experts and academicians: "They are all part of the Establishment. The truth I believe in fundamentally challenges the Establishment. Therefore, they're either unable to recognize that it's true, or afraid to endorse it."
This blog will explain why this position is incorrect, and even absurd. I will do so by utilizing three case studies of fringe believers who can't get any legitimate experts to sign on to their theories: Acharya S./D.M. Murdock, who claims that Christianity is a hoax; Erich von Däniken, who promotes the "ancient astronaut" theory; and Steven Jones, who maintains that the World Trade Center towers were blown up on 9/11 by "controlled demolition."
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">1. How Academia Really Works
First, the groundwork. Conspiracy theorists and fringe believers generally think that academia and the world of experts is a small, close-knit, elitist club where an "official" orthodoxy is rigidly enforced and extreme peer pressure maintains order. In this ivory tower that conspiracy theorists think academicians live in, the slightest deviation from the "official line" is a career-destroying move for any expert. He or she will be blacklisted, unable to publish, drummed out of faculty departments and brutally ridiculed by his or her former colleagues. In the world of conspiracy theorists and fringe believers, this orthodoxy holds fast even if the facts it is based on are demonstrably false--comparisons are often drawn to the geocentric view of astronomy that Copernicus challenged in the sixteenth century, or the (actually incorrect) assertion that "before Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat."
There's just one problem with this view. It simply isn't true.
I am formerly a lawyer, but I now work in academia. My colleagues and superiors are well-trained and respected historians. They have put in years of research and are well-versed in the methodology of history in everything from medieval Japan to U.S. nuclear policy in the 1960s. But getting them to agree on <em style="font-style: italic;">anything is impossible.
Academics have a reputation for being idiosyncratic and curmudgeonly. Sometimes that is true. Anyone who's ever attended a faculty meeting, though, knows immediately that trying to drive academicians in any particular direction is like trying to herd cats. You just can't do it. So the idea that there is some sort of rigid orthodoxy, especially one that's artificially imposed by a government or other "Establishment" actor, is simply laughable.
Furthermore, not only is the research of academicians <em style="font-style: italic;">not intended to reinforce any sort of "official line" on anything, but most of them actively<em style="font-style: italic;">seek to expand the boundaries of their field in new and previously undiscovered directions. After all, being the pioneer of a new line of study ensures academic immortality. Einstein is famous, and justly so, for being the first physicist to describe relativity. Everyone's heard of Maynard Keynes because he pioneered a new type of economics. Doing something new, different and revolutionary is every academician's dream. They constantly seek new avenues of inquiry in all fields from science to sociology. Closing yourself off to new ideas is the kiss of death for an academician.
But what is also the kiss of death--an even quicker and more final death--is to commit academic malpractice. Academicians are, after all, professionals in their field. They don't get there by ignoring the tenets on which their expertise is based. If those tenets turn out to be flawed, part of the academician's job is to question and reexamine them. But if the tenets are sound, ignoring them is, by definition, the mark of a bad expert.
Let's use two quick, simple examples. Suppose I break my arm and go see a medical doctor. How bones break, and how they heal, is clearly understood by medical science. It is not inconceivable that in the future medical science may develop some technology to re-grow broken bones faster or in a more efficient and healthful way. Perhaps, if I was lucky and willing to take a risk, my broken arm could be healed by such a revolutionary new method. But that method would rest upon, and be consistent with, what's already known about how bones break and how they heal. Whether the doctor puts my arm in a cast (the old-fashioned way) or grows me a new humerus with fancy stem cells (the revolutionary new way), my arm is still going to heal using the same biological processes as have been understood for a long time about how broken bones heal.
Now say, instead of going to a doctor for either an old-fashioned cast or a new-fangled cure, I see a doctor who promises that my bone will heal by doing nothing other than dabbling colloidal silver on it. Perhaps the doctor has some arcane theory as to how colloidal silver re-grows bones. Obviously my arm isn't going to heal. Equally obviously, the doctor who prescribes colloidal silver for a broken arm is a quack. Why? Because colloidal silver as a treatment for broken bones does not rest upon, and does not comport with, anything that medical science knows about healing bones. A doctor who prescribes colloidal silver, and nothing else, for broken bones isn't going to remain a doctor for long. He'll be drummed out of the profession quickly because--no matter how fervently he may believe his theory about colloidal silver--he's committing malpractice.
Think of it this way: if colloidal silver really <em style="font-style: italic;">did work to heal broken bones, wouldn't medical science have at least <em style="font-style: italic;">some inkling of it? Why would the quack know this and no legitimate doctor wouldn't? Even if they couldn't explain how or why it works, wouldn't somebody in the medical profession be saying, "Hey, you know, I'm not sure how this colloidal silver works, but it appears to be effective"? In short: if there was anything to the quack's theory, wouldn't someone <em style="font-style: italic;">other than the quack have said something about it?
This is an extreme example, but keep the principle in mind as we examine the following case studies.
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">2. Acharya S./D.M. Murdock: Pseudohistorian.
"Acharya S." is the pen name of one D.M. Murdock, an author from Seattle whose claim to fame is the advancement of the "Christ myth theory:" basically the idea that Jesus never existed and Christianity is a hoax constructed by ancient political and religious leaders from various pagan practices, especially sun worship. Murdock first advanced her theory in a 1999 self-published book <em style="font-style: italic;">The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, which she has followed up with numerous books since then which all harp on the same theory. Murdock/Acharya is well known to conspiracy theorists. Her views on the supposed nonexistence of Christ were a cornerstone of Peter Joseph Merola's 2007 conspiracy theorist film <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist: The Movie, which itself spawned the Zeitgeist Movement, a movement whose main (but not officially acknowledged) goal is the dissemination of conspiracy theories.
Murdock is not really an academic in the classic sense. She holds no advanced degrees. She has a bachelor's degree in classics from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and attended for a year an archaeological institute in Greece. (cite) As she passionately espouses on her website, she believes these credentials are sufficient to qualify her to rewrite the history of Judeo-Christian civilization. (In fact, at the start of her passionate defense of her own credentials, she charges that any attempt to question her work based on her lack of them is an "ad hominem attack." Conspiracy theorists love the words <em style="font-style: italic;">ad hominem).
Murdock believes Christ never existed and that evil power-hungry political and religious leaders thought him up, cribbing from Egyptian sun myths, the life of Buddha and other sources. She gets there, as all pseudohistorians do, by cherry-picking sources and drawing very strained interpretations of ancient history and astronomy. Her books are not peer-reviewed. They are self-published through her own press, Stellar House Publishing. So far as I can tell, Stellar House Publishing publishes no other authors other than Murdock. Searching on JSTOR and other academic databases at my university, I couldn't even find a <em style="font-style: italic;">review of any of Murdock's books--not even to denounce them. The legitimate academic community doesn't even care enough about Murdock to waste a page in some journal refuting her.
Yet, there are thousands of historians, archaeologists and researchers out there with advanced degrees in classics, ancient history, archaeology, and religious studies--degrees that Murdock does not have--and each and every one of them would <em style="font-style: italic;">love to have something new, cutting-edge and revolutionary to write about. Strangely, not one of them is writing about what Murdock is writing about. No dissertations or research theses are being churned out of the Notre Dame or Berkeley history departments that even <em style="font-style: italic;">remotely comport with Murdock's theories. With as desperate as academics are for cutting-edge stuff, you'd think that one of them would have found her by now, or would at least be nibbling at the edges of the body of work she claims to have interpreted correctly. But they aren't. Why? Because to advance the "Christ conspiracy" theory is academic malpractice. Why is it malpractice? Because it isn't true.
Murdock and the <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the reason legitimate academia pays no attention to her is because her theories are "too radical" and violate the orthodoxy of academic study in ancient history, or because it's somehow "taboo" to claim that Christ never existed or isn't holy. One need not remind Murdock and the Zeitgeisters that there are more than just Christians researching ancient history. Learned universities in the Islamic world and in Asia employ historians, archaeologists and researchers every bit as competent as the ones in the West. Strangely those people--who, being Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintos or atheists, certainly have no personal or professional attachment to the idea of Christ--haven't picked up on Murdock's theories either.
So the idea of Christ not existing is <em style="font-style: italic;">so taboo that the devout Muslim head of the history department at the University of Cairo is quaking in his boots to take on the topic? Who's not going to publish <em style="font-style: italic;">him for taking that stance? Who's not going to give <em style="font-style: italic;">him a grant for doing that sort of research?
There must, therefore, be another reason why no one in the academic community is talking about Murdock's ideas. You don't have to look hard to find it: they're not talking about her ideas because her ideas have no factual merit. They're so obviously identifiable as false, the unvetted work of an amateur, that even the devoutly Muslim head of the history department at the University of Cairo wouldn't touch them. <em style="font-style: italic;">Any academic advancing them would be advancing a falsehood. If they weren't false, somebody <em style="font-style: italic;">other than Murdock would be working on them. Just as if colloidal silver cured broken bones, somebody legitimate within the medical science field would be working on it--somebody, somewhere, at some institution.
Because the total academic indifference to Acharya S. cannot be explained by anything <em style="font-style: italic;">other than the notion that her ideas and research are so wrong as to constitute academic malpractice to assert them, it is entirely legitimate and appropriate to dismiss them. Acharya S. isn't ignored by the academic community because her work violates some "taboo." Even if that were the case--and remember I told you that academia doesn't work that way anyway--ancient historians and archaeologists would be writing article after article dismissing her. Acharya S. is ignored by the academic community because her theories are ridiculous. She's the classic example of a pseudohistorian.
Acharya S. has a lot of supporters, especially conspiracy theorists in the Zeitgeist Movement. I will probably get hate mail regarding this blog to the effect of, "You haven't debunked anything! You haven't disproven a <em style="font-style: italic;">single claim of Acharya S.!" This criticism is asinine and betrays the fundamental misunderstanding by conspiracy theorists such as Zeitgeisters of the academic process. <em style="font-style: italic;">In academia, someone's assertions are not judged on a "true unless proven otherwise" standard. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. Your assertions are judged to be a tissue of lies until they've been thoroughly vetted by the peer-review process. This is why graduate students have to defend their dissertations. You're judged to be a liar until you prove you are correct.
The question, therefore, is not, what does Acharya S. get wrong, but what does she get <em style="font-style: italic;">right? The burden of proof is on her to show that her theories hold any water. She cannot meet that burden. Until she can, no one is obligated to give her the time of day.
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">3. Erich von Däniken: Pseudohistorian and Pseudoarchaeologist.
D.M. Murdock is one in a long line of pseudohistorians whose work strikes a chord with the public but who is shunned by the academic community. The granddaddy of them all is Swiss author Erich von Däniken, whose famous 1968 book <em style="font-style: italic;">Chariots of the Gods? proposed the idea that extraterrestrials visited Earth in prehistoric times, helping primitive humans build such things as Stonehenge or the Nazca Lines. <em style="font-style: italic;">Chariots of the Gods? was a runaway bestseller and is still in print. The "ancient astronauts" idea has achieved such cultural resonance that it has become a central plot element of many books and movies, most notably the 2008 film <em style="font-style: italic;">Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The most amazing thing about von Däniken is that he's taken as "seriously" as he is. His credentials are even thinner than D.M. Murdock's--in researching this blog I looked for some notation of any professional degrees held by von Däniken and have found nothing. Even his own homepage doesn't list any degrees. You would think if he was trained, for instance, as an archaeologist or an Egyptologist he'd trumpet it from the rooftops. So we can assume, unless someone can correct me, that von Däniken has no degrees in what he claims to specialize in.
As for his claims themselves, they scarcely need refutation here. (If you want refutation try this and this). Suffice it to say that von Däniken's theories rest upon shallow and ethnocentric assumptions about ancient peoples: that, simply because they were ancient and more "backwards" than we, they couldn't have built the pyramids or Stonehenge with the technology they possessed. Of course this is ridiculous. They could, and they did. The belief that modern technology is the <em style="font-style: italic;">sina qua non of civilization is a dangerous ideology called "high modernism," a viewpoint that I blogged on at length earlier (here). The Egyptians were no less brilliant architects and engineers than the people who built the World Trade Centers. In fact they may have been considerably more so. Von Däniken's reasoning is shallow and simply silly.
Yet he sells books. Still, more than 40 years later. Again think of the quack doctor and his colloidal silver. If von Däniken had a point, wouldn't someone <em style="font-style: italic;">other than von Däniken be making it? If there really <em style="font-style: italic;">was any evidence of "ancient astronauts," wouldn't Carl Sagan, the founder of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), have been interested in that? Wouldn't it have validated his entire life's ambition, which was to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? In fact Sagan denounced von Däniken publicly and notoriously. If von Däniken's theories had <em style="font-style: italic;">anycredibility, Sagan could have built his career on bringing them into the mainstream. He didn't. Ever wonder why that is?
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">4. Steven Jones: Pseudoscientist.
Our final case study involves Steven E. Jones, the former Brigham Young University physicist who had, not one, but <em style="font-style: italic;">two high-profile flirtations with pseudoscience, the latter resulting in the end of his career. If you troll in the conspiracy underground you've no doubt heard of Jones. He's one of only two people with significant scientific degrees who are out there claiming that 9/11 was an inside job. The other, for the record, believes the towers were destroyed by super duper beam weapons from outer space.
Jones, unlike Murdock and von Däniken, at least <em style="font-style: italic;">was a real academic. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Vanderbilt University and once worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Long before 9/11, though, he got into a bit of trouble by claiming he and some other BYU professors had observed "muon-catalyzed fusion"--popularly known as cold fusion. Whether or not cold fusion is a scientific possibility, the bottom line was that Jones's experiments couldn't be replicated, although other scientists later discovered why they thought Jones came to the conclusions that he did. Jones would not be known as a pseudoscientist if he'd left it at this, though he probably wishes he could have.
Then, 12 years after the cold fusion controversy, Osama bin Laden's hijackers attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Jones became the poster boy for the 9/11 Truth movement when he began advocating for the "controlled demolition" hypothesis and then later published a paper claiming he found "iron microspheres" in paint chips from the World Trade Center, which he convinced himself was somehow evidence of controlled demolition. What happened? BYU cashiered him in 2006.
You can read all about why Jones's theories are wrong here. That's not the point of this blog. Note, however, that Jones's paper was not published in a peer-reviewed journal--he paid $800 to have it published in an obscure Korean journal that does not use traditional peer-review processes--and that his thesis has been denounced by other scientists who (curiously) have <em style="font-style: italic;">not been canned from their universities. Here we have the same pattern as Acharya S. and Erich von Däniken: either academic indifference, or active refutation by legitimate academics. But nowhere is there the hint of legitimate academia finding any support for Jones's theories.
Conspiracy theorists claim that academics are afraid to support Jones, even though he is supposedly right, because they fear some sort of official retribution. Once more this assumption is revealed as silly when you think of who actually comprises academic departments. Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that scientists exist in total lockstep with government orthodoxy, and any deviation from the "official line" brings horrible consequences. (Some even claim what happened to Jones is an example of those horrible consequences--as if somehow George W. Bush or whoever is supposed to have blown up the WTC towers called the BYU faculty and told them to can Jones. Yeah, right). If 9/11 <em style="font-style: italic;">was an inside job, though--meaning, if Jones's theory had any validity--the scientist(s) who exposed it would be lauded as national heroes and brave patriots. Why would they have any interest in helping the government cover up the murder of 3,000 innocent people? In all of academia there isn't <em style="font-style: italic;">one scientist--excepting Steven Jones--who has one ounce of decency or morality? Not <em style="font-style: italic;">one?
Steven Jones's own behavior demonstrates the fallacy of this argument. We can assume that Steven Jones honestly believes the towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Look how tenaciously <em style="font-style: italic;">he defends the conspiracy theory. Despite years of being debunked, Jones continues to hammer his tinfoil hat theories. He seems to have no problem going against "orthodoxy," so why should other academicians? In order for the conspiracy theorists' conception of academia to be true, Jones must be, by definition, qualitatively different in ethics, morality and professional courage than every other physicist in the United States (if not the world). If you assume that Jones's theories are actually true, he is automatically <em style="font-style: italic;">more moral, ethical and courageous than every single other physicist in the world. If you accept Jones's theory as fact you have no choice but to believe this no matter how arrogant it sounds. What, then, sets Jones apart from all his other colleagues--the "sheeple" who are supposedly so cowed by this official academic orthodoxy that they'll avoid speaking out against a factually untrue story and a monstrously unjust act of murder? Is Steven Jones <em style="font-style: italic;">that different, in courage and moral character, from all of his other colleagues?
He may believe he is--and 9/11 Truthers would certainly maintain that he is--but I venture to say that what's different about Jones as opposed to his colleagues isn't the same thing. The difference is this: all of them realize he's wrong, but he doesn't. For whatever reason he can't see the scientific, logical and empirical flaws in his ridiculous theory. He is the outlier--whereas, to hear conspiracy theorists tell it, Jones is the only one who's right and <em style="font-style: italic;">every other physicist in the world is wrong. Yes, <em style="font-style: italic;">every other one.
Let's assume there are 8 million physicists in the world total. Which is more likely? That Steven Jones is factually correct and more morally and professionally courageous than 7,999,999 of his colleagues? Or that <em style="font-style: italic;">Jones is the one that's wrong, and the 7,999,999 physicists who don't believe in controlled demolition have the better argument?
What's really happening here is very clear. Jones got drummed out of the profession because he committed academic malpractice. None of his colleagues want to follow him out on that limb, not because they're afraid of peer pressure or the big bad government, but because they can't get behind a demonstrably false theory. Jones is wrong. The academics who shun him are right.
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">Conclusion
The real world of academics and experts bears little resemblance to the one imagined by conspiracy theorists and fringe believers. In reality there is no rigid orthodoxy, no brutal peer pressure to conform to false realities, no swift and terrible retribution for standing up against an arbitrary officially-derived "party line." Academics hunger for something new, different and paradigm-shifting. If there was any possible chance that the routes of inquiry urged on them by conspiracy theorists and fringe believers had any validity, academics would jump all over it in an attempt to be the first to expand the boundaries of their own discipline, and thus attain academic and intellectual immortality.
In our world of increasingly specialized functions and mountains of information, expert opinion <em style="font-style: italic;">does matter. Academics exist for a reason. Advanced degrees are difficult and expensive to get on purpose, to make sure that the people who obtain them have what it takes to do good work in their respective fields. Conspiracy theorists and fringe believers see none of this. To them, amateur understanding is on par with, or even superior to, expert opinion. The divinity of Christ can be disproven by a self-published author from Seattle. A Swiss ufologist with no expert training can rewrite all of human history. A screwy physicist who fell for a conspiracy theory can be morally and ethically superior to every other one of his colleagues on the planet.
That is the Bizarro world in which conspiracy theorists dwell. They may take great comfort in their delusions, but the real world should be left to the experts. It just might be that they're experts for a reason.
Originally posted here.
It is a question that drives conspiracy theorists, and other traffickers in fringe beliefs, batty: "Why don't more experts and academicians agree with me?"
It's a fair question. If a conspiracy theorist or other fringe believer, who is typically not an academician him or herself, has been convinced of something nutty--that 9/11 was an inside job, that Christianity is a false construct, that aliens visited the earth in ancient times, that global warming is a hoax, that colloidal silver cures cancer, etc.--it is difficult to understand why experts in various fields aren't convinced by the same "evidence." Usually the answer in the conspiracy theorist's mind comes down to a dismissal of the value, independence, or honesty of experts and academicians: "They are all part of the Establishment. The truth I believe in fundamentally challenges the Establishment. Therefore, they're either unable to recognize that it's true, or afraid to endorse it."
This blog will explain why this position is incorrect, and even absurd. I will do so by utilizing three case studies of fringe believers who can't get any legitimate experts to sign on to their theories: Acharya S./D.M. Murdock, who claims that Christianity is a hoax; Erich von Däniken, who promotes the "ancient astronaut" theory; and Steven Jones, who maintains that the World Trade Center towers were blown up on 9/11 by "controlled demolition."
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">1. How Academia Really Works
First, the groundwork. Conspiracy theorists and fringe believers generally think that academia and the world of experts is a small, close-knit, elitist club where an "official" orthodoxy is rigidly enforced and extreme peer pressure maintains order. In this ivory tower that conspiracy theorists think academicians live in, the slightest deviation from the "official line" is a career-destroying move for any expert. He or she will be blacklisted, unable to publish, drummed out of faculty departments and brutally ridiculed by his or her former colleagues. In the world of conspiracy theorists and fringe believers, this orthodoxy holds fast even if the facts it is based on are demonstrably false--comparisons are often drawn to the geocentric view of astronomy that Copernicus challenged in the sixteenth century, or the (actually incorrect) assertion that "before Columbus, everyone thought the world was flat."
There's just one problem with this view. It simply isn't true.
I am formerly a lawyer, but I now work in academia. My colleagues and superiors are well-trained and respected historians. They have put in years of research and are well-versed in the methodology of history in everything from medieval Japan to U.S. nuclear policy in the 1960s. But getting them to agree on <em style="font-style: italic;">anything is impossible.
Academics have a reputation for being idiosyncratic and curmudgeonly. Sometimes that is true. Anyone who's ever attended a faculty meeting, though, knows immediately that trying to drive academicians in any particular direction is like trying to herd cats. You just can't do it. So the idea that there is some sort of rigid orthodoxy, especially one that's artificially imposed by a government or other "Establishment" actor, is simply laughable.
Furthermore, not only is the research of academicians <em style="font-style: italic;">not intended to reinforce any sort of "official line" on anything, but most of them actively<em style="font-style: italic;">seek to expand the boundaries of their field in new and previously undiscovered directions. After all, being the pioneer of a new line of study ensures academic immortality. Einstein is famous, and justly so, for being the first physicist to describe relativity. Everyone's heard of Maynard Keynes because he pioneered a new type of economics. Doing something new, different and revolutionary is every academician's dream. They constantly seek new avenues of inquiry in all fields from science to sociology. Closing yourself off to new ideas is the kiss of death for an academician.
But what is also the kiss of death--an even quicker and more final death--is to commit academic malpractice. Academicians are, after all, professionals in their field. They don't get there by ignoring the tenets on which their expertise is based. If those tenets turn out to be flawed, part of the academician's job is to question and reexamine them. But if the tenets are sound, ignoring them is, by definition, the mark of a bad expert.
Let's use two quick, simple examples. Suppose I break my arm and go see a medical doctor. How bones break, and how they heal, is clearly understood by medical science. It is not inconceivable that in the future medical science may develop some technology to re-grow broken bones faster or in a more efficient and healthful way. Perhaps, if I was lucky and willing to take a risk, my broken arm could be healed by such a revolutionary new method. But that method would rest upon, and be consistent with, what's already known about how bones break and how they heal. Whether the doctor puts my arm in a cast (the old-fashioned way) or grows me a new humerus with fancy stem cells (the revolutionary new way), my arm is still going to heal using the same biological processes as have been understood for a long time about how broken bones heal.
Now say, instead of going to a doctor for either an old-fashioned cast or a new-fangled cure, I see a doctor who promises that my bone will heal by doing nothing other than dabbling colloidal silver on it. Perhaps the doctor has some arcane theory as to how colloidal silver re-grows bones. Obviously my arm isn't going to heal. Equally obviously, the doctor who prescribes colloidal silver for a broken arm is a quack. Why? Because colloidal silver as a treatment for broken bones does not rest upon, and does not comport with, anything that medical science knows about healing bones. A doctor who prescribes colloidal silver, and nothing else, for broken bones isn't going to remain a doctor for long. He'll be drummed out of the profession quickly because--no matter how fervently he may believe his theory about colloidal silver--he's committing malpractice.
Think of it this way: if colloidal silver really <em style="font-style: italic;">did work to heal broken bones, wouldn't medical science have at least <em style="font-style: italic;">some inkling of it? Why would the quack know this and no legitimate doctor wouldn't? Even if they couldn't explain how or why it works, wouldn't somebody in the medical profession be saying, "Hey, you know, I'm not sure how this colloidal silver works, but it appears to be effective"? In short: if there was anything to the quack's theory, wouldn't someone <em style="font-style: italic;">other than the quack have said something about it?
This is an extreme example, but keep the principle in mind as we examine the following case studies.
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">2. Acharya S./D.M. Murdock: Pseudohistorian.
"Acharya S." is the pen name of one D.M. Murdock, an author from Seattle whose claim to fame is the advancement of the "Christ myth theory:" basically the idea that Jesus never existed and Christianity is a hoax constructed by ancient political and religious leaders from various pagan practices, especially sun worship. Murdock first advanced her theory in a 1999 self-published book <em style="font-style: italic;">The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, which she has followed up with numerous books since then which all harp on the same theory. Murdock/Acharya is well known to conspiracy theorists. Her views on the supposed nonexistence of Christ were a cornerstone of Peter Joseph Merola's 2007 conspiracy theorist film <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist: The Movie, which itself spawned the Zeitgeist Movement, a movement whose main (but not officially acknowledged) goal is the dissemination of conspiracy theories.
Murdock is not really an academic in the classic sense. She holds no advanced degrees. She has a bachelor's degree in classics from Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and attended for a year an archaeological institute in Greece. (cite) As she passionately espouses on her website, she believes these credentials are sufficient to qualify her to rewrite the history of Judeo-Christian civilization. (In fact, at the start of her passionate defense of her own credentials, she charges that any attempt to question her work based on her lack of them is an "ad hominem attack." Conspiracy theorists love the words <em style="font-style: italic;">ad hominem).
Murdock believes Christ never existed and that evil power-hungry political and religious leaders thought him up, cribbing from Egyptian sun myths, the life of Buddha and other sources. She gets there, as all pseudohistorians do, by cherry-picking sources and drawing very strained interpretations of ancient history and astronomy. Her books are not peer-reviewed. They are self-published through her own press, Stellar House Publishing. So far as I can tell, Stellar House Publishing publishes no other authors other than Murdock. Searching on JSTOR and other academic databases at my university, I couldn't even find a <em style="font-style: italic;">review of any of Murdock's books--not even to denounce them. The legitimate academic community doesn't even care enough about Murdock to waste a page in some journal refuting her.
Yet, there are thousands of historians, archaeologists and researchers out there with advanced degrees in classics, ancient history, archaeology, and religious studies--degrees that Murdock does not have--and each and every one of them would <em style="font-style: italic;">love to have something new, cutting-edge and revolutionary to write about. Strangely, not one of them is writing about what Murdock is writing about. No dissertations or research theses are being churned out of the Notre Dame or Berkeley history departments that even <em style="font-style: italic;">remotely comport with Murdock's theories. With as desperate as academics are for cutting-edge stuff, you'd think that one of them would have found her by now, or would at least be nibbling at the edges of the body of work she claims to have interpreted correctly. But they aren't. Why? Because to advance the "Christ conspiracy" theory is academic malpractice. Why is it malpractice? Because it isn't true.
Murdock and the <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist conspiracy theorists would have you believe that the reason legitimate academia pays no attention to her is because her theories are "too radical" and violate the orthodoxy of academic study in ancient history, or because it's somehow "taboo" to claim that Christ never existed or isn't holy. One need not remind Murdock and the Zeitgeisters that there are more than just Christians researching ancient history. Learned universities in the Islamic world and in Asia employ historians, archaeologists and researchers every bit as competent as the ones in the West. Strangely those people--who, being Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintos or atheists, certainly have no personal or professional attachment to the idea of Christ--haven't picked up on Murdock's theories either.
So the idea of Christ not existing is <em style="font-style: italic;">so taboo that the devout Muslim head of the history department at the University of Cairo is quaking in his boots to take on the topic? Who's not going to publish <em style="font-style: italic;">him for taking that stance? Who's not going to give <em style="font-style: italic;">him a grant for doing that sort of research?
There must, therefore, be another reason why no one in the academic community is talking about Murdock's ideas. You don't have to look hard to find it: they're not talking about her ideas because her ideas have no factual merit. They're so obviously identifiable as false, the unvetted work of an amateur, that even the devoutly Muslim head of the history department at the University of Cairo wouldn't touch them. <em style="font-style: italic;">Any academic advancing them would be advancing a falsehood. If they weren't false, somebody <em style="font-style: italic;">other than Murdock would be working on them. Just as if colloidal silver cured broken bones, somebody legitimate within the medical science field would be working on it--somebody, somewhere, at some institution.
Because the total academic indifference to Acharya S. cannot be explained by anything <em style="font-style: italic;">other than the notion that her ideas and research are so wrong as to constitute academic malpractice to assert them, it is entirely legitimate and appropriate to dismiss them. Acharya S. isn't ignored by the academic community because her work violates some "taboo." Even if that were the case--and remember I told you that academia doesn't work that way anyway--ancient historians and archaeologists would be writing article after article dismissing her. Acharya S. is ignored by the academic community because her theories are ridiculous. She's the classic example of a pseudohistorian.
Acharya S. has a lot of supporters, especially conspiracy theorists in the Zeitgeist Movement. I will probably get hate mail regarding this blog to the effect of, "You haven't debunked anything! You haven't disproven a <em style="font-style: italic;">single claim of Acharya S.!" This criticism is asinine and betrays the fundamental misunderstanding by conspiracy theorists such as Zeitgeisters of the academic process. <em style="font-style: italic;">In academia, someone's assertions are not judged on a "true unless proven otherwise" standard. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. Your assertions are judged to be a tissue of lies until they've been thoroughly vetted by the peer-review process. This is why graduate students have to defend their dissertations. You're judged to be a liar until you prove you are correct.
The question, therefore, is not, what does Acharya S. get wrong, but what does she get <em style="font-style: italic;">right? The burden of proof is on her to show that her theories hold any water. She cannot meet that burden. Until she can, no one is obligated to give her the time of day.
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">3. Erich von Däniken: Pseudohistorian and Pseudoarchaeologist.
D.M. Murdock is one in a long line of pseudohistorians whose work strikes a chord with the public but who is shunned by the academic community. The granddaddy of them all is Swiss author Erich von Däniken, whose famous 1968 book <em style="font-style: italic;">Chariots of the Gods? proposed the idea that extraterrestrials visited Earth in prehistoric times, helping primitive humans build such things as Stonehenge or the Nazca Lines. <em style="font-style: italic;">Chariots of the Gods? was a runaway bestseller and is still in print. The "ancient astronauts" idea has achieved such cultural resonance that it has become a central plot element of many books and movies, most notably the 2008 film <em style="font-style: italic;">Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The most amazing thing about von Däniken is that he's taken as "seriously" as he is. His credentials are even thinner than D.M. Murdock's--in researching this blog I looked for some notation of any professional degrees held by von Däniken and have found nothing. Even his own homepage doesn't list any degrees. You would think if he was trained, for instance, as an archaeologist or an Egyptologist he'd trumpet it from the rooftops. So we can assume, unless someone can correct me, that von Däniken has no degrees in what he claims to specialize in.
As for his claims themselves, they scarcely need refutation here. (If you want refutation try this and this). Suffice it to say that von Däniken's theories rest upon shallow and ethnocentric assumptions about ancient peoples: that, simply because they were ancient and more "backwards" than we, they couldn't have built the pyramids or Stonehenge with the technology they possessed. Of course this is ridiculous. They could, and they did. The belief that modern technology is the <em style="font-style: italic;">sina qua non of civilization is a dangerous ideology called "high modernism," a viewpoint that I blogged on at length earlier (here). The Egyptians were no less brilliant architects and engineers than the people who built the World Trade Centers. In fact they may have been considerably more so. Von Däniken's reasoning is shallow and simply silly.
Yet he sells books. Still, more than 40 years later. Again think of the quack doctor and his colloidal silver. If von Däniken had a point, wouldn't someone <em style="font-style: italic;">other than von Däniken be making it? If there really <em style="font-style: italic;">was any evidence of "ancient astronauts," wouldn't Carl Sagan, the founder of Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), have been interested in that? Wouldn't it have validated his entire life's ambition, which was to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence? In fact Sagan denounced von Däniken publicly and notoriously. If von Däniken's theories had <em style="font-style: italic;">anycredibility, Sagan could have built his career on bringing them into the mainstream. He didn't. Ever wonder why that is?
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">4. Steven Jones: Pseudoscientist.
Our final case study involves Steven E. Jones, the former Brigham Young University physicist who had, not one, but <em style="font-style: italic;">two high-profile flirtations with pseudoscience, the latter resulting in the end of his career. If you troll in the conspiracy underground you've no doubt heard of Jones. He's one of only two people with significant scientific degrees who are out there claiming that 9/11 was an inside job. The other, for the record, believes the towers were destroyed by super duper beam weapons from outer space.
Jones, unlike Murdock and von Däniken, at least <em style="font-style: italic;">was a real academic. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Vanderbilt University and once worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Long before 9/11, though, he got into a bit of trouble by claiming he and some other BYU professors had observed "muon-catalyzed fusion"--popularly known as cold fusion. Whether or not cold fusion is a scientific possibility, the bottom line was that Jones's experiments couldn't be replicated, although other scientists later discovered why they thought Jones came to the conclusions that he did. Jones would not be known as a pseudoscientist if he'd left it at this, though he probably wishes he could have.
Then, 12 years after the cold fusion controversy, Osama bin Laden's hijackers attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Jones became the poster boy for the 9/11 Truth movement when he began advocating for the "controlled demolition" hypothesis and then later published a paper claiming he found "iron microspheres" in paint chips from the World Trade Center, which he convinced himself was somehow evidence of controlled demolition. What happened? BYU cashiered him in 2006.
You can read all about why Jones's theories are wrong here. That's not the point of this blog. Note, however, that Jones's paper was not published in a peer-reviewed journal--he paid $800 to have it published in an obscure Korean journal that does not use traditional peer-review processes--and that his thesis has been denounced by other scientists who (curiously) have <em style="font-style: italic;">not been canned from their universities. Here we have the same pattern as Acharya S. and Erich von Däniken: either academic indifference, or active refutation by legitimate academics. But nowhere is there the hint of legitimate academia finding any support for Jones's theories.
Conspiracy theorists claim that academics are afraid to support Jones, even though he is supposedly right, because they fear some sort of official retribution. Once more this assumption is revealed as silly when you think of who actually comprises academic departments. Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that scientists exist in total lockstep with government orthodoxy, and any deviation from the "official line" brings horrible consequences. (Some even claim what happened to Jones is an example of those horrible consequences--as if somehow George W. Bush or whoever is supposed to have blown up the WTC towers called the BYU faculty and told them to can Jones. Yeah, right). If 9/11 <em style="font-style: italic;">was an inside job, though--meaning, if Jones's theory had any validity--the scientist(s) who exposed it would be lauded as national heroes and brave patriots. Why would they have any interest in helping the government cover up the murder of 3,000 innocent people? In all of academia there isn't <em style="font-style: italic;">one scientist--excepting Steven Jones--who has one ounce of decency or morality? Not <em style="font-style: italic;">one?
Steven Jones's own behavior demonstrates the fallacy of this argument. We can assume that Steven Jones honestly believes the towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Look how tenaciously <em style="font-style: italic;">he defends the conspiracy theory. Despite years of being debunked, Jones continues to hammer his tinfoil hat theories. He seems to have no problem going against "orthodoxy," so why should other academicians? In order for the conspiracy theorists' conception of academia to be true, Jones must be, by definition, qualitatively different in ethics, morality and professional courage than every other physicist in the United States (if not the world). If you assume that Jones's theories are actually true, he is automatically <em style="font-style: italic;">more moral, ethical and courageous than every single other physicist in the world. If you accept Jones's theory as fact you have no choice but to believe this no matter how arrogant it sounds. What, then, sets Jones apart from all his other colleagues--the "sheeple" who are supposedly so cowed by this official academic orthodoxy that they'll avoid speaking out against a factually untrue story and a monstrously unjust act of murder? Is Steven Jones <em style="font-style: italic;">that different, in courage and moral character, from all of his other colleagues?
He may believe he is--and 9/11 Truthers would certainly maintain that he is--but I venture to say that what's different about Jones as opposed to his colleagues isn't the same thing. The difference is this: all of them realize he's wrong, but he doesn't. For whatever reason he can't see the scientific, logical and empirical flaws in his ridiculous theory. He is the outlier--whereas, to hear conspiracy theorists tell it, Jones is the only one who's right and <em style="font-style: italic;">every other physicist in the world is wrong. Yes, <em style="font-style: italic;">every other one.
Let's assume there are 8 million physicists in the world total. Which is more likely? That Steven Jones is factually correct and more morally and professionally courageous than 7,999,999 of his colleagues? Or that <em style="font-style: italic;">Jones is the one that's wrong, and the 7,999,999 physicists who don't believe in controlled demolition have the better argument?
What's really happening here is very clear. Jones got drummed out of the profession because he committed academic malpractice. None of his colleagues want to follow him out on that limb, not because they're afraid of peer pressure or the big bad government, but because they can't get behind a demonstrably false theory. Jones is wrong. The academics who shun him are right.
<strong style="font-weight: bold;">Conclusion
The real world of academics and experts bears little resemblance to the one imagined by conspiracy theorists and fringe believers. In reality there is no rigid orthodoxy, no brutal peer pressure to conform to false realities, no swift and terrible retribution for standing up against an arbitrary officially-derived "party line." Academics hunger for something new, different and paradigm-shifting. If there was any possible chance that the routes of inquiry urged on them by conspiracy theorists and fringe believers had any validity, academics would jump all over it in an attempt to be the first to expand the boundaries of their own discipline, and thus attain academic and intellectual immortality.
In our world of increasingly specialized functions and mountains of information, expert opinion <em style="font-style: italic;">does matter. Academics exist for a reason. Advanced degrees are difficult and expensive to get on purpose, to make sure that the people who obtain them have what it takes to do good work in their respective fields. Conspiracy theorists and fringe believers see none of this. To them, amateur understanding is on par with, or even superior to, expert opinion. The divinity of Christ can be disproven by a self-published author from Seattle. A Swiss ufologist with no expert training can rewrite all of human history. A screwy physicist who fell for a conspiracy theory can be morally and ethically superior to every other one of his colleagues on the planet.
That is the Bizarro world in which conspiracy theorists dwell. They may take great comfort in their delusions, but the real world should be left to the experts. It just might be that they're experts for a reason.
Seeing Like a State: Why Zeitgeist's World-Changing Visions Are A Recipe For Disaster
Author: Muertos
Date: Oct 24, 2010 at 17:09
By Muertos
Originally posted on Muertos's blog (link)
I've blogged several times before about the Zeitgeist Movement. This bizarre organization, based almost exclusively on the Internet and spawned from the <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist series of Internet films, is primarily aimed at spreading conspiracy theories, but another objective of the movement is to implement a total top-down reordering of society along the lines of a neo-utopian vision called the Venus Project. In this blog I'm not going to take on the conspiracy aspects of the Zeitgeist Movement, because I think I've covered that topic well already. Instead, I'm going to discuss their utopian ideology, a subject which hasn't interested me much in the past; however, a book I read recently did a fantastic job of articulating and fleshing out the doubts I always had about the Zeitgeisters' ambitious plans for humanity's future. Therefore, in this blog I intend to explain why the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project's utopian vision for the future of humanity is, at best, doomed never to get off the ground, and at worst is a recipe for a catastrophe that could potentially claim millions of lives.
First, the basic background. In the 1970s Jacque Fresco, who bills himself as an "industrial designer," came up with what he thought was a great idea for human progress: let's all live in specially-designed circular cities and put computers in charge of the world to distribute resources according to the scientific method. Since the seventies, and particularly since Fresco fell in with <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist director and conspiracy theorist Peter Joseph Merola, Fresco and his followers have championed what they call a "resource-based economy" (RBE). We'll all be happier, say Merola and Fresco, abolishing our horrible "money system" and living in an RBE. All needs will be met, all wants pacified, and all desires fulfilled--by robots and computers. It's difficult to find a group of utopians with bigger <em style="font-style: italic;">cajones than the Zeitgeist Movement.
In 1998 James C. Scott, a professor who specializes in agrarian studies with a sociological bent, published a ground-breaking book called <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (You can find it on Amazon here). This book, which commanded a great deal of attention from sociologists, agriculturalists, and historians, examines a few of the great social engineering disasters of the 20th century, including Stalin's forced collectivization in Russia in the 1930s and the Quixotic plan of a dictator in Tanzania in the 1970s to relocate most of his population to efficient, government-run farm villages. In <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State, Scott analyzes the causes of these failures, which are naturally complex but they can be boiled down to a few common elements. The most important element is what Scott refers to as "high modernist ideology," which he defines thusly:
This definition describes the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project perfectly. The departure point of Zeitgeisters' belief system--aside from conspiracy theories, of course--is the assumption that all the material needs of the world's people can be provided at our current level of technology, if only we change our social and economic system to allow it. Zeitgeisters embody Scott's definition of high modernist ideology in several interesting ways. First, there is the blind and virtually unquestioning acceptance of the concept of superabundance, which Zeitgeisters believe is technologically created. Second, Zeitgeisters' ideology explicitly refers to the "scientific method," which they say is the bedrock of how their system will organize the world. Thirdly, they insist that human nature is mutable and will be subordinated to ideology in an RBE order. Finally, their visions--lavishly illustrated in artist's depictions of circular cities and YouTube videos--unabashedly wallow in technological and aesthetic fetishism. Any one of their designs could have been torn from a sketchbook from the 1930s film <em style="font-style: italic;">Things To Come, depicting a utopian future world where denizens of an automated city are pampered by ubiquitous machinery.
Scott's analysis, however, does not bode well for high modernist projects. The thesis of <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State is that high modernist ideology ignores the complexity, expansiveness, and functional chaos of systems and social structures that develop organically--such as our "money system" that Zeitgeisters want to abolish. In simpler terms, high modernist projects are doomed to fail because they are profoundly naïve about human behavior, institutions and culture. High modernists simply assume that people and their behaviors can be neatly crammed into well-ordered boxes that will operate efficiently. Their contempt for the idea of human nature is a by-product of this myopia. History shows, however, that these types of projects <em style="font-style: italic;">always fail. When a high modernist project is undertaken by an authoritarian state, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, the zeal to achieve unrealistic goals combined with the state's increasing efforts to streamline the process often results in death and suffering on a colossal scale.
Let's take an example, one that doesn't involve mass murder: the city of Brasília. In the 1950s, the government of Brazil was eager to forge a totally new capital city, one that would be functional, efficient, beautiful and above all ultra-modern. The government cleared a tract of jungle in the interior and went right to work, utilizing the best city planners who envisioned broad open squares, spacious apartment buildings, and easy access of the city's residents (mostly government bureaucrats) to places of work as well as cultural facilities. When it opened in 1960, Brasília was the most modern and remarkable city on the globe.
Sounds great, right? Well, not so much. In fact Brasília was a dismal failure. No one congregates in the broad open squares because there's nothing to do there--no shops, no places of social interaction, no <em style="font-style: italic;">reason to go there other than to <em style="font-style: italic;">be there. Everyone hates the apartment buildings because they're bland, blocky and utterly devoid of any sort of character. Traffic is a nightmare because the streets are all highways designed for a single purpose: to take people from their homes to workplaces. There are no side streets, no neighborhoods, none of the character of an urban city. As a result, Brasília's residents are frustrated and depressed, and the place has the reputation of being bleak and oppressive, like Batman's Gotham City if it were designed by Ayn Rand's fictional architect Howard Roarke. High modernist planning certainly failed the people of Brasília.
Another and more sinister example: Stalin's forced collectivization. In the late 1920s, Stalin wanted to modernize the Soviet Union and streamline its process of agricultural production, thus ending Russia's age-old problems of feeding itself. (He also wanted to crush the peasant class, but that's beside the point). His high modernism was administrative in nature, involving lumping all the peasants in a village together in one commune with specific production quotas. The project was a disaster on a virtually genocidal scale. Millions of people starved to death between 1929 and 1934, and when Stalin's quotas weren't met, brutal repression and crackdown were the result. The Soviet state was ideologically incapable of recognizing that its high modernist ideology simply couldn't replace the culture, micro-economies and behavior patterns of Russian peasants. In a conflict between those peasants and ideology, the peasants paid the price. The soil of Russia today is littered with their bones.
What does this all have to do with the Zeitgeist Movement? Just this: <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist wants the entire human race to adopt a high modernist ideology regarding the production and distribution of resources. Peter Merola's and Jacque Fresco's plans for the future are far grander than Brasília or even the collectivization of Stalin's peasant masses. Zeitgeisters demand nothing less than radical transformation of the <em style="font-style: italic;">entire earth. Not that this goal will ever come even remotely within their reach, but Scott's book very clearly explains why the goal itself is naïve, misguided and ultimately dangerous. It's the ultimate pinnacle of high modernist folly, and would invariably collapse into a disaster so bloody and chaotic that it would make Stalin's forced collectivization look benign by comparison.
Scott explains how high modernist projects almost invariably tempt authoritarian measures in their implementation:
If the Zeitgeisters ever got their way, this would be the inevitable result. The change they envision for society is so massive, so sweeping and so total that the only way it could ever be implemented would be by force--probably by the force of a large authoritarian government or perhaps multi-national coalition. To be fair, Zeitgeisters do not now advocate the use of force to achieve their Resource Based Economy, at least so far as I know. Also, do not misunderstand me as stating that I think Zeitgeisters <em style="font-style: italic;">intend a bloody result to their designs; clearly they don't. However, it's plain that the temptation to use force to achieve their goals lies on the other side of the inevitable realization that a Resource Based Economy isn't going to happen by itself and that it's not likely to be adopted voluntarily by significant sectors of the world's population. As in Stalin's Russia, the ideology will inevitably be valued over the people who resist it, whether they resist willingly or by accident. Zeitgeisters already operate with disturbing ease in the realm of "ends justify the means" arguments--just ask one why it's justifiable to push demonstrably false conspiracy theories in the service of talking up a Resource Based Economy and you will experience this phenomenon.
Even without the addition of an authoritarian implementation, the Zeitgeisters' RBE model is a recipe for mass suffering. High modernist projects that attempt to tinker with peoples' basic means of food and sustenance are particularly dangerous, because even slight mistakes in the ideological model of distribution usually translate into starving bellies somewhere. One can easily imagine the RBE model failing to supply food and necessities because the high modernists who thought it up have done so without regard to the way our organic and chaotic system of resource management--imperfect as it clearly is--actually works on the ground. Zeitgeisters would be reluctant to undermine their own ideology by allowing the old "money system" economics to backstop their bold plans for fear that people would come to rely on the backstopping and that ultimately nothing would change. Here again the temptation to ignore or rationalize mass suffering to avoid admitting ideological failure is probably irresistible. Even without any nefarious designs, therefore, the Zeitgeist program for a better world is ominous.
High modernist projects fail because they fundamentally devalue organically-created social structures, and they invariably victimize people because this process of devaluation is, in itself, profoundly dehumanizing. In high modernist schemes the residents of Brasília, the peasants of 1930s Russia or the farmers of Tanzania are reduced to nothing more than interchangeable cogs in a gigantic machine, designed by people who profess to know better and who demand compliance with their better way. This is the essence of the Zeitgeist Movement's social vision for the future. The pretty pictures of circular cities and neatly-trimmed parks and gardens look great in YouTube videos, but they do not show the profound suffering and staggering human cost that adopting such a lifestyle would necessarily entail. They don't show those things because Zeitgeisters are fundamentally incapable of conceiving that their ideology <em style="font-style: italic;">could have that effect. They're as blind as the overzealous architects, city planners and Soviet revolutionaries described in <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State. Given the colossal scale of Zeitgeist's designs, their dangerous naïvete far outstrips any of those examples.
Fortunately, in the real world we don't have to worry about Zeitgeisters implementing their designs, because they'll never get anywhere close to achieving them. Zeitgeist is a fringe movement existing mostly on the Internet. Oddly, its internal cohesion seems to owe more to its reliance on conspiracy theories than on any conscious unification behind the RBE concept (despite what many of its followers say to the contrary). Not a single economist, sociologist or government official, to my knowledge, has associated him or herself with the Zeitgeist Movement. The leader of the movement, Peter Joseph Merola, holds no position of power and isn't likely to in the future. But it's worth thinking about why the Zeitgeist Movement's defective ideology, and other schemes like it that will invariably be proposed in the future, hold attraction for some people. High modernist plans have been with us for a long time and will probably continue to be implemented in the future--and they will fail as spectacularly, and often as bloodily, as the past schemes detailed in <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State. What we can learn from these failures, and from Scott's book, is how to recognize these projects when some future politician, revolutionary or industrial designer proposes them and demands we follow them. Analyzing the failure of such past schemes arms us with invaluable knowledge on how to resist future ones. In that sense, <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State is a very important book, and one that deserves to be read by anyone who, like the Zeitgeisters, dreams of a bold new future for humanity. They may learn that the infinitesimal chances of success of such bold futures often come at an appalling and tragic human cost.
Originally posted on Muertos's blog (link)
I've blogged several times before about the Zeitgeist Movement. This bizarre organization, based almost exclusively on the Internet and spawned from the <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist series of Internet films, is primarily aimed at spreading conspiracy theories, but another objective of the movement is to implement a total top-down reordering of society along the lines of a neo-utopian vision called the Venus Project. In this blog I'm not going to take on the conspiracy aspects of the Zeitgeist Movement, because I think I've covered that topic well already. Instead, I'm going to discuss their utopian ideology, a subject which hasn't interested me much in the past; however, a book I read recently did a fantastic job of articulating and fleshing out the doubts I always had about the Zeitgeisters' ambitious plans for humanity's future. Therefore, in this blog I intend to explain why the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project's utopian vision for the future of humanity is, at best, doomed never to get off the ground, and at worst is a recipe for a catastrophe that could potentially claim millions of lives.
First, the basic background. In the 1970s Jacque Fresco, who bills himself as an "industrial designer," came up with what he thought was a great idea for human progress: let's all live in specially-designed circular cities and put computers in charge of the world to distribute resources according to the scientific method. Since the seventies, and particularly since Fresco fell in with <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist director and conspiracy theorist Peter Joseph Merola, Fresco and his followers have championed what they call a "resource-based economy" (RBE). We'll all be happier, say Merola and Fresco, abolishing our horrible "money system" and living in an RBE. All needs will be met, all wants pacified, and all desires fulfilled--by robots and computers. It's difficult to find a group of utopians with bigger <em style="font-style: italic;">cajones than the Zeitgeist Movement.
In 1998 James C. Scott, a professor who specializes in agrarian studies with a sociological bent, published a ground-breaking book called <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (You can find it on Amazon here). This book, which commanded a great deal of attention from sociologists, agriculturalists, and historians, examines a few of the great social engineering disasters of the 20th century, including Stalin's forced collectivization in Russia in the 1930s and the Quixotic plan of a dictator in Tanzania in the 1970s to relocate most of his population to efficient, government-run farm villages. In <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State, Scott analyzes the causes of these failures, which are naturally complex but they can be boiled down to a few common elements. The most important element is what Scott refers to as "high modernist ideology," which he defines thusly:
"[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and technology."
This definition describes the Zeitgeist Movement/Venus Project perfectly. The departure point of Zeitgeisters' belief system--aside from conspiracy theories, of course--is the assumption that all the material needs of the world's people can be provided at our current level of technology, if only we change our social and economic system to allow it. Zeitgeisters embody Scott's definition of high modernist ideology in several interesting ways. First, there is the blind and virtually unquestioning acceptance of the concept of superabundance, which Zeitgeisters believe is technologically created. Second, Zeitgeisters' ideology explicitly refers to the "scientific method," which they say is the bedrock of how their system will organize the world. Thirdly, they insist that human nature is mutable and will be subordinated to ideology in an RBE order. Finally, their visions--lavishly illustrated in artist's depictions of circular cities and YouTube videos--unabashedly wallow in technological and aesthetic fetishism. Any one of their designs could have been torn from a sketchbook from the 1930s film <em style="font-style: italic;">Things To Come, depicting a utopian future world where denizens of an automated city are pampered by ubiquitous machinery.
Scott's analysis, however, does not bode well for high modernist projects. The thesis of <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State is that high modernist ideology ignores the complexity, expansiveness, and functional chaos of systems and social structures that develop organically--such as our "money system" that Zeitgeisters want to abolish. In simpler terms, high modernist projects are doomed to fail because they are profoundly naïve about human behavior, institutions and culture. High modernists simply assume that people and their behaviors can be neatly crammed into well-ordered boxes that will operate efficiently. Their contempt for the idea of human nature is a by-product of this myopia. History shows, however, that these types of projects <em style="font-style: italic;">always fail. When a high modernist project is undertaken by an authoritarian state, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin, the zeal to achieve unrealistic goals combined with the state's increasing efforts to streamline the process often results in death and suffering on a colossal scale.
Let's take an example, one that doesn't involve mass murder: the city of Brasília. In the 1950s, the government of Brazil was eager to forge a totally new capital city, one that would be functional, efficient, beautiful and above all ultra-modern. The government cleared a tract of jungle in the interior and went right to work, utilizing the best city planners who envisioned broad open squares, spacious apartment buildings, and easy access of the city's residents (mostly government bureaucrats) to places of work as well as cultural facilities. When it opened in 1960, Brasília was the most modern and remarkable city on the globe.
Sounds great, right? Well, not so much. In fact Brasília was a dismal failure. No one congregates in the broad open squares because there's nothing to do there--no shops, no places of social interaction, no <em style="font-style: italic;">reason to go there other than to <em style="font-style: italic;">be there. Everyone hates the apartment buildings because they're bland, blocky and utterly devoid of any sort of character. Traffic is a nightmare because the streets are all highways designed for a single purpose: to take people from their homes to workplaces. There are no side streets, no neighborhoods, none of the character of an urban city. As a result, Brasília's residents are frustrated and depressed, and the place has the reputation of being bleak and oppressive, like Batman's Gotham City if it were designed by Ayn Rand's fictional architect Howard Roarke. High modernist planning certainly failed the people of Brasília.
Another and more sinister example: Stalin's forced collectivization. In the late 1920s, Stalin wanted to modernize the Soviet Union and streamline its process of agricultural production, thus ending Russia's age-old problems of feeding itself. (He also wanted to crush the peasant class, but that's beside the point). His high modernism was administrative in nature, involving lumping all the peasants in a village together in one commune with specific production quotas. The project was a disaster on a virtually genocidal scale. Millions of people starved to death between 1929 and 1934, and when Stalin's quotas weren't met, brutal repression and crackdown were the result. The Soviet state was ideologically incapable of recognizing that its high modernist ideology simply couldn't replace the culture, micro-economies and behavior patterns of Russian peasants. In a conflict between those peasants and ideology, the peasants paid the price. The soil of Russia today is littered with their bones.
What does this all have to do with the Zeitgeist Movement? Just this: <em style="font-style: italic;">Zeitgeist wants the entire human race to adopt a high modernist ideology regarding the production and distribution of resources. Peter Merola's and Jacque Fresco's plans for the future are far grander than Brasília or even the collectivization of Stalin's peasant masses. Zeitgeisters demand nothing less than radical transformation of the <em style="font-style: italic;">entire earth. Not that this goal will ever come even remotely within their reach, but Scott's book very clearly explains why the goal itself is naïve, misguided and ultimately dangerous. It's the ultimate pinnacle of high modernist folly, and would invariably collapse into a disaster so bloody and chaotic that it would make Stalin's forced collectivization look benign by comparison.
Scott explains how high modernist projects almost invariably tempt authoritarian measures in their implementation:
"First and foremost, high modernism implies a truly radical break with history and tradition....All human habits and practices that were inherited and hence not based on scientific reasoning--from the structure of the family and patterns of residence to moral values and forms of production--would have to be reexamined and redesigned...
The sources of this view are deeply authoritarian. If a planned social order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age. Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the new scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside."
If the Zeitgeisters ever got their way, this would be the inevitable result. The change they envision for society is so massive, so sweeping and so total that the only way it could ever be implemented would be by force--probably by the force of a large authoritarian government or perhaps multi-national coalition. To be fair, Zeitgeisters do not now advocate the use of force to achieve their Resource Based Economy, at least so far as I know. Also, do not misunderstand me as stating that I think Zeitgeisters <em style="font-style: italic;">intend a bloody result to their designs; clearly they don't. However, it's plain that the temptation to use force to achieve their goals lies on the other side of the inevitable realization that a Resource Based Economy isn't going to happen by itself and that it's not likely to be adopted voluntarily by significant sectors of the world's population. As in Stalin's Russia, the ideology will inevitably be valued over the people who resist it, whether they resist willingly or by accident. Zeitgeisters already operate with disturbing ease in the realm of "ends justify the means" arguments--just ask one why it's justifiable to push demonstrably false conspiracy theories in the service of talking up a Resource Based Economy and you will experience this phenomenon.
Even without the addition of an authoritarian implementation, the Zeitgeisters' RBE model is a recipe for mass suffering. High modernist projects that attempt to tinker with peoples' basic means of food and sustenance are particularly dangerous, because even slight mistakes in the ideological model of distribution usually translate into starving bellies somewhere. One can easily imagine the RBE model failing to supply food and necessities because the high modernists who thought it up have done so without regard to the way our organic and chaotic system of resource management--imperfect as it clearly is--actually works on the ground. Zeitgeisters would be reluctant to undermine their own ideology by allowing the old "money system" economics to backstop their bold plans for fear that people would come to rely on the backstopping and that ultimately nothing would change. Here again the temptation to ignore or rationalize mass suffering to avoid admitting ideological failure is probably irresistible. Even without any nefarious designs, therefore, the Zeitgeist program for a better world is ominous.
High modernist projects fail because they fundamentally devalue organically-created social structures, and they invariably victimize people because this process of devaluation is, in itself, profoundly dehumanizing. In high modernist schemes the residents of Brasília, the peasants of 1930s Russia or the farmers of Tanzania are reduced to nothing more than interchangeable cogs in a gigantic machine, designed by people who profess to know better and who demand compliance with their better way. This is the essence of the Zeitgeist Movement's social vision for the future. The pretty pictures of circular cities and neatly-trimmed parks and gardens look great in YouTube videos, but they do not show the profound suffering and staggering human cost that adopting such a lifestyle would necessarily entail. They don't show those things because Zeitgeisters are fundamentally incapable of conceiving that their ideology <em style="font-style: italic;">could have that effect. They're as blind as the overzealous architects, city planners and Soviet revolutionaries described in <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State. Given the colossal scale of Zeitgeist's designs, their dangerous naïvete far outstrips any of those examples.
Fortunately, in the real world we don't have to worry about Zeitgeisters implementing their designs, because they'll never get anywhere close to achieving them. Zeitgeist is a fringe movement existing mostly on the Internet. Oddly, its internal cohesion seems to owe more to its reliance on conspiracy theories than on any conscious unification behind the RBE concept (despite what many of its followers say to the contrary). Not a single economist, sociologist or government official, to my knowledge, has associated him or herself with the Zeitgeist Movement. The leader of the movement, Peter Joseph Merola, holds no position of power and isn't likely to in the future. But it's worth thinking about why the Zeitgeist Movement's defective ideology, and other schemes like it that will invariably be proposed in the future, hold attraction for some people. High modernist plans have been with us for a long time and will probably continue to be implemented in the future--and they will fail as spectacularly, and often as bloodily, as the past schemes detailed in <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State. What we can learn from these failures, and from Scott's book, is how to recognize these projects when some future politician, revolutionary or industrial designer proposes them and demands we follow them. Analyzing the failure of such past schemes arms us with invaluable knowledge on how to resist future ones. In that sense, <em style="font-style: italic;">Seeing Like a State is a very important book, and one that deserves to be read by anyone who, like the Zeitgeisters, dreams of a bold new future for humanity. They may learn that the infinitesimal chances of success of such bold futures often come at an appalling and tragic human cost.
Why the "Truth Movement" have failed
Author: Dave Sorensen
Date: Sep 11, 2010 at 19:01
After nine years of "investigating", speculation and internet gossip, the 9/11 truth movement has yet to present a scintilla of evidence to support the various "theories" they have invented. Their failure could be explained by the fact that muslim extremists conspired to commit the acts on 9/11, or from the absence of good investigating. I'm not arguing that one could dig up evidence of thermite if they just looked harder, but that if you grant certain premises and claims promoted by the truth movement, you would expect the researchers involved to do some kind of follow up. This essay outlines the kinds of research you would expect to hear about if there were good researchers in the 9/11 truth movement.
To start, let's grant the 9/11 Truth community that the nanothermite article written by Steven Jones is sound science. After the research had been completed you would expect the scientists involved to submit their paper to a reputable scientific journal, and to have an independent lab attempt to replicate their findings. Since this is not what the scientists of the nanothermite paper have done, we need to ask ourselves why they have not done this. The most important piece of evidence for their case, the smoking gun that would be great interest to the scientific and historical communities is submitted to a random pay to enter journal in south korea for $800 with no further follow ups.
Second, I'll grant the 9/11 truth community that the 9/11 hijackers are still alive somewhere in the Middle East. It is a well known fact that Richard Gage and David Ray Griffin travel around the world promoting their books and dvds about their 9/11 conspiracy theories. With this in mind, why haven't either of them interviewed one of the living hijackers? Surely this would be damning evidence of a cover up. It is also striking that none of the 9/11 conspiracy researchers have even interviewed any of these living hijackers over the phone.
Third, I'll grant the 9/11 truth community that the architects and engineers for 9/11 truth have great arguments and calculations done to support their controlled demolition theory. You would expect some of them to get together and write an engineering paper to send to a reputable scientific journal. Again, why haven't they done this? What exactly are they waiting for? It's clear that the list of members for AE for 911 truth is nothing more than a conspiracy theory fan club. In a ten year time span, one could find 1000 credulous people in any field to believe just about anything. We musn't forget that even smart people can believe really stupid things.
To conclude this article I would like to knock down a few conspiracy claims one last time. Since these have been covered extensively by skeptics such as Mark Roberts, the JREF forum and other debunking websites, they will be very quick responses.
Controlled Demolition Theory (with bombs): There is no evidence of flying glass, loud explosions that would have been picked up by the three seismograph stations in NYC, accounts of deafening or blast lung, nothing noticed by the thousands of forensic investigators who looked at the steel, no demolition wires or wireless devices found and no video/audio evidence of loud explosions that would have been heard from a mile away. There were also bomb sniffing dogs that were brought in during clean up. Not one detected any bombs. Since we don't see any of these tell-tale signs we can conclude there were no bombs in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Controlled Demolition Theory (Thermite): Thermite has never been used to demolish a building, and would not even work.(1) There is no plausible way to rig up the building to have the thermite burn up at the same time. Thermite cuts gravitationally so if you put it around the columns it would just burn through the floor. The chemical signatures of the dust samples studied by Steven Jones match the primer paint of the columns and do not have the right ignition temperatures as thermite(off by 400 degrees). We can conclude that the red grey chips found are not thermite and are probably primer paint chips. Lastly, none of the forensic investigators reported any kind of thermitic effects on the steel, and none of the bomb sniffing dogs trained to sniff out incendaries (thermite) detected any. (2) There are many other logical problems with the Controlled Demolition theory. How would they rig the building with thermite without any of the security guards, building inspectors, contruction managers finding out? If the security of the WTC buildings let them in, why did some of them die in the building?(surely they would know to leave) And why blow up the towers, putting the conspirators at a huge risk for exposure?
Iron Microspheres: Iron mircospheres could have formed from columns bending or the heating of the columns. These can easily account for the so-called "mysterious" iron microspheres which the other investigations into the dust addressed back in 2003. This is another example of anomaly hunting that conspiracy theorists engage in.
No Planer Theory: The planes could have easily reached the recorded speeds because they came in on a 20,000 foot dive. A perfect example demonstrating this is Egypt Air Flight 990 which reached speeds over 600 MPH before crashing. (3) All of the video evidence, eyewitness testimony and physical evidence of the plane itself show that there were planes that crashed into the WTC buildings.
Reccomended sites and papers that debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories:
http://www.nmsr.org/nmsr911.htm
911myths.com
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/home Mark Robert's website
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/Mackey_drg_nist_review_2_1.pdf Ryan Mackey's White Paper that refutes David Ray Griffin's arguments.
http://sites.google.com/site/911guide/
JREF Forum
Sources:
1)http://nmskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/03/video-jesse-ventura-doesnt-want-world.html
2)http://ronmossad.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-word-on-niels-harrit-nanothermite.html
3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990
To start, let's grant the 9/11 Truth community that the nanothermite article written by Steven Jones is sound science. After the research had been completed you would expect the scientists involved to submit their paper to a reputable scientific journal, and to have an independent lab attempt to replicate their findings. Since this is not what the scientists of the nanothermite paper have done, we need to ask ourselves why they have not done this. The most important piece of evidence for their case, the smoking gun that would be great interest to the scientific and historical communities is submitted to a random pay to enter journal in south korea for $800 with no further follow ups.
Second, I'll grant the 9/11 truth community that the 9/11 hijackers are still alive somewhere in the Middle East. It is a well known fact that Richard Gage and David Ray Griffin travel around the world promoting their books and dvds about their 9/11 conspiracy theories. With this in mind, why haven't either of them interviewed one of the living hijackers? Surely this would be damning evidence of a cover up. It is also striking that none of the 9/11 conspiracy researchers have even interviewed any of these living hijackers over the phone.
Third, I'll grant the 9/11 truth community that the architects and engineers for 9/11 truth have great arguments and calculations done to support their controlled demolition theory. You would expect some of them to get together and write an engineering paper to send to a reputable scientific journal. Again, why haven't they done this? What exactly are they waiting for? It's clear that the list of members for AE for 911 truth is nothing more than a conspiracy theory fan club. In a ten year time span, one could find 1000 credulous people in any field to believe just about anything. We musn't forget that even smart people can believe really stupid things.
To conclude this article I would like to knock down a few conspiracy claims one last time. Since these have been covered extensively by skeptics such as Mark Roberts, the JREF forum and other debunking websites, they will be very quick responses.
Controlled Demolition Theory (with bombs): There is no evidence of flying glass, loud explosions that would have been picked up by the three seismograph stations in NYC, accounts of deafening or blast lung, nothing noticed by the thousands of forensic investigators who looked at the steel, no demolition wires or wireless devices found and no video/audio evidence of loud explosions that would have been heard from a mile away. There were also bomb sniffing dogs that were brought in during clean up. Not one detected any bombs. Since we don't see any of these tell-tale signs we can conclude there were no bombs in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Controlled Demolition Theory (Thermite): Thermite has never been used to demolish a building, and would not even work.(1) There is no plausible way to rig up the building to have the thermite burn up at the same time. Thermite cuts gravitationally so if you put it around the columns it would just burn through the floor. The chemical signatures of the dust samples studied by Steven Jones match the primer paint of the columns and do not have the right ignition temperatures as thermite(off by 400 degrees). We can conclude that the red grey chips found are not thermite and are probably primer paint chips. Lastly, none of the forensic investigators reported any kind of thermitic effects on the steel, and none of the bomb sniffing dogs trained to sniff out incendaries (thermite) detected any. (2) There are many other logical problems with the Controlled Demolition theory. How would they rig the building with thermite without any of the security guards, building inspectors, contruction managers finding out? If the security of the WTC buildings let them in, why did some of them die in the building?(surely they would know to leave) And why blow up the towers, putting the conspirators at a huge risk for exposure?
Iron Microspheres: Iron mircospheres could have formed from columns bending or the heating of the columns. These can easily account for the so-called "mysterious" iron microspheres which the other investigations into the dust addressed back in 2003. This is another example of anomaly hunting that conspiracy theorists engage in.
No Planer Theory: The planes could have easily reached the recorded speeds because they came in on a 20,000 foot dive. A perfect example demonstrating this is Egypt Air Flight 990 which reached speeds over 600 MPH before crashing. (3) All of the video evidence, eyewitness testimony and physical evidence of the plane itself show that there were planes that crashed into the WTC buildings.
Reccomended sites and papers that debunk 9/11 conspiracy theories:
http://www.nmsr.org/nmsr911.htm
911myths.com
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/home Mark Robert's website
http://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/Mackey_drg_nist_review_2_1.pdf Ryan Mackey's White Paper that refutes David Ray Griffin's arguments.
http://sites.google.com/site/911guide/
JREF Forum
Sources:
1)http://nmskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/03/video-jesse-ventura-doesnt-want-world.html
2)http://ronmossad.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-word-on-niels-harrit-nanothermite.html
3)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990