A post from Carl Trueman on conspiracy theories reminded me of several quotes I have collected through the years, all of which make similar statements.
Conspiracy theories have an aesthetic appeal: they make us feel more important in the grand scheme of things than we are. If someone is going to all this trouble to con us into believing in something, then we have to be worth conning; and the impotence we all feel in the face of massive impersonal bureaucracies and economies driven not by democratic institutions so much as multinational corporations is not really the result of our intrinsic smallness and insignificance so much of our potential power which needs to be smothered. Such views play to our vanity; and, to be brutally frank, the kind of virtual solitary vice which so much solipsistic internet activity represents.
Conspiracy theories don’t hold up, though. Nobody is that competent and powerful to pull them off. Even giant bureaucracies are made up of lots of small, incompetent units fighting petty turf wars, a fragmentation which undermine the possibility of the kind of co-ordinated efforts required to pull off, say, the fabrication of the Holocaust. History, humanly speaking, is a tale of incompetence and thoughtlessness, not of elaborate and sophisticated cabals. Evil, catastrophic evil, is not exceptional and brilliant; it is humdrum and banal; it does not involve thinking too much; it involves thinking too little.
-Carl Trueman, Histories and Fallacies
“Many
issues are misconstrued, not because they are too complex for most people to
understand, but because a mundane explanation is far less emotionally satisfying
than an explanation which produces villains to hate and heroes to exalt.
Indeed, the emotionally satisfying explanation may often be more complex than a
mundane explanation that is more consonant with verifiable facts. This is
especially true of conspiracy theories.”
-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society
"My boyfriend, Jim, has so many conspiracy theories. I think he gives people too much credit. I so rarely meet a single person who is very well organized, or with any direction. What are the chances a meeting a whole group?"
Esme Raji Codell, Educating Esme
"Liberal historians often assume that people are
omnicompetent. Because they believe that humans can do anything, they routinely
assume that outcomes are almost always the planned results of some human
intentions. (An aside: this is why conspiracy theories abound. When you think
that men control everything, you assume that every bad thing is the result of
some intentional human plan.) Not true. Fallen humans are both capable and
myopic, both powerful and unwise. The result is that human history is littered
with unintended consequences. The Great War for Empire (a.k.a. the French and
Indian War) shattered the colonists’ largely warm relationship with Great Britain
in the 1760s, but this was accidental and unplanned. Historical events have
causes, but they are often unexpected ones. Indeed, we should not be surprised
when fallen humans misjudge situations and unleash dynamics that yield
surprising results."
-Robert G. Spinney
“During the Cold War…many among the intelligentsia began repeating the old notion that war “solves nothing,” an echo from the 1930s, where the futility of war was proclaimed, among others, by Neville Chamberlain, who said that war “wins nothing, cures nothing, ends nothing”—and who was in turn simply echoing what many among the intelligentsia were saying in his day. But like so much that has been said by the intelligentsia upon so many subjects, the notion that “war solves nothing” had less to do with any empirical evidence than with its consonance with the vision of the anointed, which in turn had much to do with the exaltation of the anointed. Had the battle of Lepanto in 1571 or the battle of Waterloo in 1815 gone the other way, this could be a very different world today. Had the desperate fighting at Stalingrad and on the beaches of Normandy gone the other way during the Second World War, life might not be worth living for millions of human beings today. There have of course been futile wars in which all the nations on both sides ended up far worse off than before—the First World War being a classic example. But no one would make the blanket statement that medical science “solves nothing” because many people die despite treatment and some die because of wrong treatment or even from the remote risks of vaccinations. In short, mundane specifics are more salient in evaluating any particular war than are the sweeping, abstract, and dramatic pronouncements so often indulged in by the intelligentsia.”
