Conspiracy (theories)
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This is a guest post by Breffni O'Rourke.
In the last couple of years I've noticed people using "conspiracy" where what makes more sense (to me anyway) is "conspiracy theory". Liz Cheney's concession speech had three instances of it:
1. "At the heart of the attack on January 6 is a willingness to embrace dangerous conspiracies that attack the very core premise of our nation."
2. "If we do not condemn the conspiracies and the lies, if we do not hold those responsible to account, we will be excusing this conduct, and it will become a feature of all elections."
3. "Donald Trump knows that voicing these conspiracies will provoke violence and threats of violence."
On the one occasion where she does say "conspiracy theory", "conspiracy" fits better:
4. "To believe Donald Trump's election lies, you must believe that dozens of federal and state courts who ruled against him, including many judges he appointed, were all corrupted and biased, that all manner of crazy conspiracy theories stole our election from us and that Donald Trump actually remains president today."
I wonder if the "conspiracy theory" → "conspiracy" shift results from (a) abbreviation, a bit like "social" for "social media", or (b) conceptual fogginess (people can conspire to promulgate a conspiracy theory, after all, so condemning / embracing a conspiracy theory might entail condemning / embracing the putative conspiracy that manufactured it). My guess would be mostly (a) with sometimes a sprinkling of (b).
Above is a guest post by Breffni O'Rourke.
Cervantes said,
August 18, 2022 @ 7:23 am
Taking a step back, "conspiracy theory" already has shifted in meaning. After all, there are conspiracies and there's nothing wrong in principle with having theories about them. That's what investigators do routinely, and they try to convince judges and juries that they are true. Conspiracy theory has become shorthand for "baseless" or "ridiculous" or "paranoid" conspiracy theory. Why not trim one more word?
GeorgeW said,
August 18, 2022 @ 8:28 am
I don't think "conspiracy theory" any longer requires any secret planning. It has come to mean some commonly held, fanciful explanation for some event.
Robert T McQuaid said,
August 18, 2022 @ 9:29 am
For sixteen months after the disappearance of Malaysia flight 370 there was no trace of debris. During that period one conspiracy theory was that it fell into a black hole.
Falling into a black hole requires no conspiracy between persons. "Conspiracy theory" now merely means "kooky theory".
JJM said,
August 18, 2022 @ 9:49 am
Cheney's use of "conspiracy" rather than "conspiracy theory" is simply a good old-fashioned political trick to present her opinion of events as fact.
It's a method cheerfully used by politicos of all stripes.
Dan Romer said,
August 18, 2022 @ 9:52 am
This is an ongoing discussion within the social science community as to whether what one calls a conspiracy theory is really a theory at all. Most of the time, the assertions about conspiracies are just that and the people who say they believe them may not really be endorsing a theory at all. As a result, people can endorse multiple incompatible conspiracy beliefs, suggesting that they really don't have a theory in mind. They just don't trust authorities and if that's their theory, then spouting a claim about a specific conspiracy doesn't really add much to call it a theory.
VVOV said,
August 18, 2022 @ 10:18 am
I haven’t read Cheney’s entire speech for the full context, but to me it’s very plausible that “conspiracy” in sentences 1-3 refers to the (actual, documented) conspiracy carried out by Trump and colleagues to attempt to overturn the election- not the (falsely claimed) conspiracy *theory* espoused by Trump and colleagues that the election was stolen/fraudulent/rigged.
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 18, 2022 @ 10:25 am
I read "conspiracies and lies" in example #2 as referring to both an actual conspiracy (Trump's efforts to overturn the election) and a conspiracy theory (the lie that Biden stole the election).
carl voss said,
August 18, 2022 @ 2:32 pm
This is reminiscent of the widespread usage of "entitlement" to mean an unearned sense of entitlement. To call someone entitled nowadays generally means that they are in fact not entitled but think they are.
V said,
August 18, 2022 @ 3:43 pm
The newest one is "cold quit" or something like that from a few weeks ago which I initially assumed meant quitting without telling your employer, but turned to be a term for "not doing unpaid overtime when your employer assumes you will". Those nincompoops come up with those terms all the time.
V said,
August 18, 2022 @ 4:34 pm
While Dick Cheney is one level below Joseph Stalin in my "level of horribleness" scale (and a have a visceral hatred for both of them), I don't want to associate them with their daughters, Svetlana and Elizabeth, with them, although Svetlana was also pretty shit, and Elizabeth is now.
Joe said,
August 18, 2022 @ 4:58 pm
carl voss mentioned "entitlement", which nows means what "self-entitlement" used to mean. That's another example of a two-word phrase that was shortened to one. And, I think, another example in which the short version actually means the opposite of what it looks like it means. If we call something a "conspiracy" it sounds like we're endorsing the view that it is a conspiracy, while if we call it a "conspiracy theory" it sounds like we're rejecting that view. If we call someone "entitled" it sounds like we're endorsing their claim that they deserve something, but if we call them "self-entitled" we're rejecting that claim. So by shortening these phrases we've created auto-antonyms.
I wonder if part of the reason we shortened "conspiracy theory" to "conspiracy" is that "conspiracy" isn't a very commonly used word, by itself (and outside certain domains like the practice of law), so there was an emptier slot for a neologism to fit into. Otherwise we might have been better off shortening it to "theory" instead. But other commenters have made a good point that that would still confound it with stricter definitions of "theory".
Rick Rubenstein said,
August 18, 2022 @ 5:12 pm
An additional shift I suspect is happening, and which probably plays into the above: I'm pretty sure some people who use "conspiracy theory" think of the conspirators as being the theorizers, not the perpetrators. One crazy person has a theory; hundreds of crazy people together have a conspiracy theory.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 18, 2022 @ 6:13 pm
I have not noticed this switcheroo, which may be interesting if more general. On the one hand, it seems likely that Ms. Cheney was reading from a prepared text rather than winging it, on the other hand it seems likely she may have been unusually tired or stressed-out and thus error-prone. I suppose reviewing prior speeches she has given on other (perhaps less stressful) occasions to see if the same oddity is present would be one way to check that.
myl's point about meta-conspiracy-theories, i.e. claims that such-and-such conspiracy theory didn't just arise by happenstance but was deliberately fomented and spread by the typical Powerful But Shadowy Forces that level-one conspiracy theories typically posit, is an interesting and perhaps important one.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 18, 2022 @ 6:21 pm
One can find neutral non-pejorative uses of the string "conspiracy theory" in American legal writing, for example a "conspiracy theory" of jurisdiction.* It would be interesting if someone could do some sufficiently methodologically rigorous corpus searching to see if the use of that string has declined in favor of alternative phrasing in recent decades as "conspiracy theory" has become more marked as pejorative in general discourse.
*Meaning e.g. that if A couldn't be sued in a particular forum all on its own but B could be, perhaps A can also be sued in that forum if alleged to have conspired together with B to do whatever it is they are both being sued for.
Alexander Pruss said,
August 18, 2022 @ 11:15 pm
I think that if someone has a conspiracy theory about X, they don't necessarily think X was caused by a conspiracy, but they do think that the true cause of X is being covered up by a conspiracy. If you think a plane was swallowed by a black hole, you may not think the black hole was made by a conspiracy, but you may well think that the establishment is covering up the cause (e.g., to keep us from panicking).
If one doesn't think there is any cover-up, I don't think one has a conspiracy theory, no matter how kooky one's theory.
wanda said,
August 19, 2022 @ 12:09 pm
I agree with Rick Rubenstein and Alexander Pruss. Trump and his associates engaged in a (not terribly well hidden) conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. They are also pushing a conspiracy theory: that Democrats and other people running the election engaged in a conspiracy to improperly elect Biden and hide the fact that Trump won. I think quotes 1 and 2 still makes sense if the "conspiracies" mean the conspiracies Trump has engaged in.
Michael said,
August 19, 2022 @ 12:24 pm
I think the meanings are easily elided. I ran across an old review of mine on Goodreads which has the following sentences:
"According to the receipt I found stashed in this book, I bought it a few scant weeks before 9/11 changed the face of conspiracy theory forever. I had been meaning to read it ever since my interest in conspiracy had been piqued by the old “Illuminatus” card game in the mid-1980s (it was actually recommended in the bibliography for Expansion Pack #1)."
Was my interest in conspiracy or conspiracy theory? Was the face of conspiracy changed or the face of conspiracy theory? Here I'm sliding from one to the other without much reflection – because in the end studying one means pretty much the same thing as studying the other. Cheney's use of the terms seems even more careless to me, but also follows a general pattern of conflicted meanings.
V said,
August 19, 2022 @ 3:07 pm
"Conspiracy" was not a rarely used word, at least in Bulgarian, in the '80s. It was in a childrens' picture book that I read when I was five that I asked my parents about its meaning.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 21, 2022 @ 2:27 pm
See also this new story from NYCs Newspaper of Record, which seems to use "conspiracies" in the headline as synonymous with what are called "conspiracy theories" in the body of the article: https://nypost.com/2022/08/20/princess-diana-death-conspiracies-as-popular-as-ever/
klu9 said,
August 21, 2022 @ 2:32 pm
Fantasies.
People are not really hypothesizing conspiracy theories, they are indulging in conspiracy fantasies.
And if the phrase is to be shortened to one word, it should be neither "conspiracies" nor "theories" but "fantasies".
1. "At the heart of the attack on January 6 is a willingness to embrace dangerous fantasies that attack the very core premise of our nation."
2. "If we do not condemn the fantasies and the lies, if we do not hold those responsible to account, we will be excusing this conduct, and it will become a feature of all elections."
3. "Donald Trump knows that voicing these fantasies will provoke violence and threats of violence."
4. "To believe Donald Trump's election lies, you must believe that dozens of federal and state courts who ruled against him, including many judges he appointed, were all corrupted and biased, that all manner of crazy conspiracy fantasies stole our election from us and that Donald Trump actually remains president today."
From the Wiktionary page for "fantasy":
"See also
cloud-cuckoo-land"