The Clever Badger One lab accident away from being a super villain

Conspiracy!

It's a conspiracy!

It's almost impossible these days to avoid encountering conspiracy theories.  They're everywhere.  President Obama isn't an American citizen!  (Or maybe he's the antichrist...)  Vaccines cause autism and Big Pharma is covering it up!  9/11 was an inside job! The moon landing was faked!

It doesn't take much to start a conspiracy theory.  The required ingredients are few:

1. A fairly complex situation
2. Details that are outside of the expertise of most people
3. Distrust of the authorities involved in the situation
4. Creativity

Let's look at the question of President Obama's birth.  He was born in Hawaii to an American mother and a Kenyan father.  His birth certificate tells us all we need to know to settle the question. He's as much a natural born U.S. citizen as I am.  The question takes about five minutes to resolve.

Only it isn't resolved for some.  Details vary, but the common elements of the Obama "birther" conspiracies are that he isn't a natural born citizen of the U.S. and is therefore unqualified to be President.

That's crazy talk.

Let's think about what would have to be true if there were a conspiracy to shim a foreign national into the office of the U.S. President, which is, after all, what we're really talking about.

1. Sometime before 1961 when Obama was born, some person or group of people would have had to come up with the idea of getting an agent elected President. Richard Condon published The Manchurian Candidate in 1959, which has a somewhat similar plot, so I'll concede this point.¹
2. Obama would have had to have been identified as a potential candidate.  It's important to start building the cover story early in order to minimize the risk of blowing the story.  Everyone that knew his parents before he was born would have to be in on the plot at least to the extent that they knew to keep their mouths shut.  The likelihood of a large number of people effectively keeping a secret like that for close to 50 years is, well, vanishingly small.
3. He'd have had to have been aimed towards a political career from the very start.  Having your potential Presidential shill decide that he wants to be  a lumberjack would never do.  Ensuring that his family, teachers, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances all steered him towards a political career would again require that a huge number of people be complicit in the effort.
4. Ensuring that he got elected would be a major task, particularly since he'd need previous political experience.  Elections would have to be rigged (in his case) at the state level so that he could being to gain national recognition.  Getting someone elected is hard work.  Ensuring that the someone in question gets elected while not calling attention to the effort is harder, and again requires that a lot of people keep quiet.

The bottom line is that to run a conspiracy like this, you've got to ensure that an amazingly large number of people keep quiet.  If you've ever heard someone at a bar trying to pick up anyone, you'll appreciate the difficulty of keeping one person - let alone maybe thousands - quiet.

You also need a reason for undertaking this effort in the first place.   This could get a little tricky.  In the years around Obama's birth, the main Snorklewhacker in the U.S. bedroom closet was Communism.

A Giant Purple Snorkelwhacker

It is difficult to imagine that anyone could have foreseen the sorts of issues facing the U.S. today clearly enough to tailor a candidate to manipulate those issues (in either direction).  Yet, if Obama wasn't tailored to address contemporary issues, then it doesn't make much sense to go ahead and get him elected.   You could posit that perhaps there were many different potential candidates being cultivated over the last several decades, each carefully molded with a worldview and priorities that would make them useful in a variety of different world climates, but then you've taken an already implausible conspiracy and multiplied it.  My head hurts just trying to sort this out for a simple blog post example.

This is generally the way conspiracies like this go - they require a lot of highly implausible, fairly convoluted things to take place, the failure of any one of which would doom the whole enterprise.  Perhaps more importantly, they require the assumption that a large number of people can keep quiet, which is, well, not bloody likely.

Now, conspiracy theories like this have some general appeal in that they usually aren't personal, and for the most part don't impact individuals on a day-to-day.  There's no immediately obvious personal consequence to me if Obama's birth certificate is bogus.  A conspiracy theory like this can, in principle, be debunked, because the salient facts of the matter can be explained and clarified.

There are, of course, conspiracy theories that hit closer to home.  The example I'll use comes from a post I put up a while back in which a local political candidate was making claims that the government was attempting to control her mind with satellites, drones, and her television.  Theories like this involve everything that the others do, plus they add in the requirement of some degree of paranoia.

Thus, in addition to some seriously flawed logic and ignorance being involve, we now have the issue of psychological disorders to consider.  Conspiracies like this are much more difficult.  While the facts of the situation can be addressed - for example the extreme implausibility of controlling someone through drones hovering over their home - the real challenge in this situation is in encouraging the people harboring delusions of this ilk to get help.

That said, the general sort of questions one must ask when evaluating the likelihood of any conspiracy theory are very similar to the sort of questions one must ask when evaluating the likelihood of any extraordinary claim:

• What alternative explanations are there for the given observed facts?
• How likely are those alternatives in comparison to the extraordinary explanation?
• What other things would need to be true (or false) if the extraordinary explanation is true?

You get the idea.

Now if you'll excuse me, there are a couple of gentlemen in black suits and sunglasses at the door...

-Jay
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¹Two direct film adaptations have been made from Condon's book - the first in 1962, the second in 2004.