From a UK perspective it seems that the US is SO polarised between left and right that most individuals and the media seem to fit straight down the line into one camp or other. And the response to any suggestion of impropriety or such follows as a knee-jerk. So the lefties leap on it and overblow it into some conspiracy wildly beyond reality whilst the righties see it as nonsense. Yet in many or even most situations there is something at the root of the issue, not necessarily a conspiracy but someone wanting to cover their tracks.

Maybe my sense of a lack of objectivity in America is simply me having a caricatured view myself though!

I'll refer you to a great article on the subject at TCS Daily, We the Sheeple? Why Conspiracy Theories Persist by Edward Feser.

He suggests 2 reasons why this happens more on the left than the right: anti-authoritarianism, which discounts as suspicious whatever comes from those in power; and an attitude that arose from the Enlightenment that says that original, innovative thinking (thinking outside of the box) is always more praise-worthy than going along with the received wisdom.

It's a good read.

Thanks for your thoughts, you guys. And Charlie, wow! That was a very interesting article--exactly what I was looking for! I'm glad I asked the question. That was especially helpful in explaining the roots of a "hermeneutic of suspicion." I thought that came out of Marxism, but I wasn't sure.

I guess the question remains, though--why now? It seems like this has sprung up in the last few years. Or was I just not noticing it before?

I have two thoughts to add. First, I think television has played a big part in this. In the last 10 years or so (probably since The X-Files), conspiracy shows have become increasingly more pervasive on television. By "conspiracy shows" I just mean stories where nothing turns out to be what it seems--as television has to try harder and harder to surprise us. It actually trains us to think in conspiracies. It looks like so-and-so is the murderer, but then, BAM! It turns out there's a vast, surprising story out there to explain it all. The simple story is never the correct one on television. Nothing is ever what it seems. And the viewer learns to expect the unexpected and to try to figure out the real cause, rejecting the simple and obvious explanation offered at the beginning of the show. I can't help but think that the constant watching of shows like these is affecting our society. The philosophical underpinnings described in the article probably led to the rise of this on television, but I think it's also just that the television creators are trying to be entertaining, and to do that, they've got to come up with something new and surprise people. Then, what we see on television just feeds back into the philosophical ideas, making everything worse.

Second, I think that people on the left don't just think conservatives are wrong, they actually believe they're selfish, mean, and untrustworthy, and that all their motives are wrong, and not just their ideas. (I've talked about this a lot before, so I won't go into it again here.) So they're even more likely to suspect some underhanded plot behind anything they do.

It remains to be seen whether the only reason this problem seems to be on the left is because conservatives are in power. Though I think the argument in the article that this problem arises out of leftist thought is a plausible one, it could be that our entire culture has degraded to this point in the last several years, and conservatives simply haven't yet been tested. When/if the left is back in power, we may see conservatives doing the same thing. That is a really disturbing thought.

Your question, "Why now?" is puzzling. It does seem that this love of conspiracies is on the rise. I like your TV explanation, but I'm wondering about chickens and eggs. Did TV begin creating conspiracy shows which led to greater acceptance of conspiracies, or did TV writers sense something that was already happening in the public and take advantage of it?

I go with the latter. And I guess I'd trace the rise of conspiracies to the abandonment of Christianity with its belief in revealed and unalterable Truth for agnosticism and/or spiritual orientations in which adherents create their own truths. Which goes back to post-modernism's belief that no text or message has any absolute meaning, only meaning dependent on the hearer. Perhaps the answer to "Why now?" is that we've reached a tipping point in thought where skepticism is more common than belief.

I know that for a long time now we have trained children to be skeptical of what was previously held as fact. Perhaps this is what a skeptical society does -- it disbelieves everything conventional and embraces everything fantastic.

I think both of those explanations have merit Amy.

But I also think there's something even more deeply rooted historically and psychologically. Many folks who are now susceptible to conspiracy thinking came of age in the 1960s. The 60s were the rebirth of the optimism of progressives whose earlier faith in human progress stemmed from the Enlightenment but was more or less dashed by the combintation of WWI, the Depression, and WWII.

With the 60s progressive/liberal religion, sexual ethics, and politics combined to give a lot of people their worldview fueled by a faith that things were just going to get better and better ("Don't stop believing in tomorrow").

What happened? First Nixon. Imagine what a shock to the system that must have been for him merely to be elected. And then to find out there really was a conspiracy and he really was a crook (albeit a very gifted politician).

But Nixon was only a slap in the face. Reagan was a body slam. 60s era progressives were blown away by how popular Reagan was. This explains, I think, why so many feminists and others were 100% behind Clinton, even after all the sex stuff that would have set them on a Republican like piranahs on Mr. Ed. With Clinton's ascendancy perhaps Reagan too could be described as an aberration.

But with the 94 GOP take over, Bush II, 9/11, the abortion regime falling in popular opinion, etc. etc., the notion that these are merely set-backs and not a sea-change is becoming harder and harder to deny. The notion that the dreams of the 60s are more or less dead and the country has become more conservative is a very difficult pill to swallow.

And some just can't do it. So it must be something else. It can't be that people are genuinely disenchanted with progressive politics (which is more the case than anyone being impressed with GOP politics I'm afraid). So, what can explain it? The paradigm was set with Nixon. There must be dirty tricks going on. Conspiracies. This is much easier to believe than that one's side has actually lost.

Add to this the psychological pull of being part of what Lewis described as the Inner Ring (those who know the real deal, an oddly modern form of gnosticism), and the TV and the accusations of bad faith and false consciousness, and you have a perfect storm for conspiracy mongering.

Micah, I definitely think there's something to what you've said here. I think a lot of the things mentioned in these comments have played a part in this. Maybe, beyond that, people are just bored with reality because we have it too easy here!

And don't forget the "Scholars for Truth" who are promoting the idea that our government was directly responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center.

One of the main intellectuals who questions the conventional view of 9/11 is Steven Jones. He's a physics professor at that bastion of liberal thought, Brigham Young University.

His scepticism is based on his knowledge of physics, which is perfectly understandable, since that is his area of expertise.

Some of his points are:

1. Steel frame buildings like the WTC do not collapse due to fire. The fuel used by airplanes cannot generate a fire hot enough to vaporise steel.

2. The buildings imploded. This is consistent with demolition, not the messy business of aircraft hitting the structure. The nature of the implosion was symmetrical, and consistent with a carefully planned demolition.

3. WTC 7 was not hit by a plane. It fell anyway. It fell at nearly the rate of free fall (the speed of dropping an object from the top of the building).

4. The buildings were reduced to a powdery substance. Could a fire have reduced steel to a floury powder? Apparently some physicists don't think so.

5. "Squibs" were observed, which are consistent with a demolition.

I'm not a physicist, so I can hardly say whether Steven Jones has valid points here. However, he does not seem motivated by a liberal hostility towards Bush. He has advanced knowledge of physics. He seems to be respected by the academic community.

And all this aside, we do not even know for sure who really hijacked those planes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm

I don't know what happened. I just know that what our government is telling us is not the whole story.

I don't blame anyone for taking the blue pill. It is fine to believe the conventional story if that is what seems sensible.

However, I don't think it's fair to say that sceptics are crazy, liberal conspiracy-theorists.

"I don't know what happened. I just know that what our government is telling us is not the whole story."

This is exactly the belief of a great many people, and I find it fascinating. A single physicist claims greater insight than all of the physicists and engineers in the National Institute of Standards, whose report debunks every point your expert makes. But because of distrust of authority, or specifically of the Bush administration, we'd rather believe something fantastic than what the clear weight of evidence demonstrates to be true. Very interesting.

This is exactly the belief of a great many people, and I find it fascinating. A single physicist claims greater insight than all of the physicists and engineers in the National Institute of Standards

Hi Charlie,

Obviously, I am not an expert in physics, and have little or no ability to determine whether the NIS or Steven Jones have persuasive arguments. However, just because Jones is an underdog, that does not mean he's wrong. Committees and institutes of distinguished people are wrong all the time.

As far as 9/11, I am simply claiming that I do not believe that the government's version is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, due to the many pieces of information we have been told that seem questionable, or even absurd.

Five or six of the supposed hijackers whose pictures we saw in the newspaper are alive and the victims of identity theft, according to reputable sources. So who were the hijackers using those false identities? Where were they from? Does it make a difference if we don't even know who some of the hijackers actually were?

Professional pilots have claimed that even highly trained individuals would have had difficulty performing the manuevers those planes had to do to hit the buildings. The flight school trainers who worked with the 9/11 hijackers said they could hardly fly a Cessna.

Sceptics include (from Wikipedia):

Dr. Robert M. Bowman Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for DOD and retired Lt. Col for United States Air Force, a combat pilot who flew 101 missions in the Vietnam War

Andreas von Bülow is a former assistant German defense minister and former Minister for Research and Technology in the cabinet of German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. He served for 25 years as an SPD member of the German parliament and was ranking member of the parliamentary committee on intelligence services.

Bill Christison a former senior official of the CIA, was a National Intelligence Officer and the Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis before he retired in 1979. He has written numerous articles on U.S. foreign policies.

Jean-Pierre Desmoulins is a French engineer, now working as a university professor, who analysed the crash of flight 77 on the Pentagon on 9/11.

Kenneth L. Kuttler, Professor of Mathematics at Brigham Young University, has written a paper WTC 7: A short computation

John Newman spent 21 years in Army Intelligence and served as Assistant to the Director of the National Security Agency. He also served as an attaché in China. He is a history professor at UMD and has been teaching courses on counterterrorism for 10 years.

Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist for the United States Department of Labor during the administration of George W. Bush, is the highest-ranking public official to criticize the government account of 9/11, calling the government story "bogus" and saying the WTC towers most likely fell from a controlled demolition.

Gordon Ross holds degrees in both Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, graduating from Liverpool John Moores University.

Here's a prominent conservative:

"Paul Craig Roberts was the assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan where he developed the theory of economics that came to be called "Reaganomics.". Dr. Roberts is Chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, former contributing editor for National Review."

Roberts says:
"I know many qualified engineers and scientists have said the WTC collapsed from explosives. In fact, if you look at the manner in which it fell, you have to give their conclusions credibility."

Are these people anti-authoritarian fruitcakes? I think not.

Many of them describe their feelings as "disturbed" in the sense that they would prefer to believe the conventional version of 9/11 and do not like to think that their government lied to them.

I personally feel the same way.

I'm not a physicist either, but I don't think I need a PhD to recognize that Steven Jones' premises as presented here are hopelessly flawed. Simply saying that what happened is "consistent with" (I count three uses of that phrase) his explanation has no bearing on whether or not it happened that way. A conspiracy-theorist could just as easily point out that the collapse of the Twin Towers is actually quite "consistent with" the collapse of Barad-dur at the end of The Return of the King, but that in no way comes even close to entailing that the Twin Towers fell because Gollum and the one ring fell into the fires of Mount Doom. The suggestion that the government was complicit in the attacks of 9/11 requires a conspiracy of such magnitude and an execution of such precision (amazing how pilots were able to fly two planes exactly where the demolition experts had already placed the charges) that those of us who accept the official explanation are in no way "taking the blue pill."

The suggestion that the government was complicit in the attacks of 9/11 requires a conspiracy of such magnitude and an execution of such precision...that those of us who accept the official explanation are in no way "taking the blue pill."

Actually, I didn't say that I believed the government as an entity was complicit in the attacks. I just said that there is too much evidence to believe the conventional version of the attacks.

Honestly, if you believe the testimony of the government that one of the passports of a 9/11 hijacker survived the plane crash, ball of fire and subsequent steel-melting inferno, and fluttered to the streets of New York virtually unscathed, then you took the blue pill.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ame/911/911tr/012604.htm

"MS. SUSAN GINSBURG: Beginning with passports. Four of the hijackers passports have survived in whole or in part. Two were recovered from the crash site of United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. These are the passports of Ziad Jarrah and Saeed al Ghamdi. One belonged to a hijacker on American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Satam al Suqami. A passerby picked it up and gave it to a NYPD detective shortly before the World Trade Center towers collapsed. A fourth passport was recovered from luggage that did not make it from a Portland flight to Boston on to the connecting flight which was American Airlines flight 11. This is the passport of Abdul Aziz al Omari.

In addition to these four, some digital copies of the hijackers passports were recovered in post-9/11 operations. Two of the passports that have survived, those of Satam al Suqami and Abdul Aziz al Omari, were clearly doctored. To avoid getting into classified detail, we will just state that these were manipulated in a fraudulent manner in ways that have been associated with al Qaeda."

Given the amount of debris that was projected from the skies at the moment of impact, I don't think the scenario Ginsburg describes is all that far-fetched. Moreoever, she explicitly says that the passports were recovered "in part," which is a far cry from the "fluttered to the streets of New York virtually unscathed" spin. The alternative is that the passport was a plant, in which case the person or persons who were resourceful enough to create a phony al Suqami passport, using similar, fraudulent means which resemble al Qaeda methods for creating passports, were able to get the passport admitted into evidence using a story which is absurd. Now, it seems to me that the people who got the fake passport that far would be able create a much more believable story than that. If it was the government, I'm sure they would have said that it was like al Omari's that was in luggage that didn't make the flight. I think a key point here is in fact that al Omari's passport was kept in his luggage. This was obviously checked luggage, and if Omari's passport was in his checked luggage, Suqami's passport was probably in his checked luggage, which is usually stored beneath the cabin and the fuselage. The passport easily could have been surrounded by luggage and below the flames upon impact, which would account for its having been found on the street below. Although much of my account here is speculative, it is no more so than what you would have to maintain in order to explain the passport being a plant. So, who's taken the blue pill?

And then there's this:

'A small plane carrying New York Yankee Cory Lidle slammed into a 50-story apartment building Wednesday after issuing a distress call, killing the pitcher and a second person in a crash that rained flaming debris onto the sidewalks and briefly raised fears of another terrorist attack.

A law enforcement official in Washington said Lidle - an avid pilot who got his license during last year's offseason - was aboard the single-engine aircraft when it plowed into the 30th and 31st floors of the condominium high-rise on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said both people aboard were killed.

Lidle's passport was found on the street, according to a federal official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.'

The Lidle crash was consistent with a plot by the Bushies to throw the World Series. But if they were as smart as everyone says, you'd think they wouldn't have used the fake-passport-on-the-street trick twice in one administration.