Perhaps never in world history has such an important event, so simple to verify, turned into a lie so quickly. I am, of course, talking about Osama bin Elvis, the new king of conspiracy theories. What should have been an unambiguous military triumph for both President Obama and the U.S. — and a moment of national psychological closure — has turned into “Weekend at Bernie’s.”
There are two competing narratives to official reality: the first, and arguably the more ludicrous, is that Osama had already been killed and then unfrozen and “re-killed” to divert attention from the birthers’ legal assault on Obama’s legitimacy. Look at the timing!
The second and more durable is that Osama is alive and well and — any moment now — will be spotted in a supermarket in Pakistan’s equivalent of Peoria.
In between are the fake photos of a dead Osama that duped several Republican senators and the real photos that aren’t being released because — as America’s foes desperately hope — they must show that the U.S. didn’t kill the real Osama.
That the Obama administration didn’t grasp the importance of getting their story straight before talking to the press might be the only real mystery here, except I’m not sure that even flawless PR and a photogenic lethal gunshot to Osama would have prevented the specter of what the theorist Bruno Latour has aptly called “instant revisionism.”
Instant revisionism occurs when people believe that inconsistency and inaccuracy are never inadvertent in an official narrative — the fog of war is always a smokescreen for politics and puppet-mastery, deceit and devilment.
There are deep cultural forces at work here: As the philosopher Richard Rorty noted back in 1989, literary criticism took the place in our cultural pantheon once occupied by religion, philosophy and science; if everything is now a text that could be deconstructed, the authority of anything except criticism is inherently suspect.
From the lofty heights of theory, it is naïve to think that stories could be solid, simple and true; rather, they are expressions of desire, or power. Life is a monster text rally, and the only way to survive being crushed is to be an ironist.
But the path from literary theory to conspiracy theory was swift, as Latour, one of the architects of the idea that scientific facts are socially constructed, ruefully noted when he found that social constructivism was being used to explain why 9/11 was really an inside job by the CIA and the Mossad.
“The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories are already revising the official account,” he wrote, “adding even more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke. Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naively believed in church, motherhood, and apple pies? Well, things have changed a lot, in my village at least. I am the one now who naively believes in some facts because I am educated, while it is the other guys now who are too unsophisticated to be gullible anymore.”
Still, theory doesn’t fully explain why conspiracy theorizing is such a compulsive behavior for so many otherwise rational people. One answer is prompted by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wondered (for an American newspaper column in 1933) whether we would be able to think quickly enough to cope with the increasing pace of change in the modern world.
Consider, he wrote, that 4,000 years brought as much change to early Egypt as 10 years in the early 20th century brought to the world; accelerate to the 16th century and a hundred years now equaled 10. The key question was whether we could physiologically adapt to this relentless increase in pace or shut down. Russell did not have the insights into cognitive science that we have now (nor did he live to grasp how much change-inducing information we would be capable of producing in the 21st century), but he suspected we would become rather cranky from the “sheer fatigue” of it all.
Given that our brains are wired to see patterns, it is not unreasonable to think that the more we are deluged with signals the more we will see patterns. Making connections is the only way to make sense, to be human, in the constant stream of information. But if you increase the noise-to-signal ratio in a culture primed to “be skeptical,” it’s not difficult to see how one can become stuck in a feedback loop of constant instant-revisionism. And the more spurious connections we make, the more we become conspiracy theorists.
The Internet is aging us — or some of us — into cranks, priming us with the prejudices of the weary. And we and the Web will keep Osama alive forever, or at least until the one numeric fact that can’t be deconstructed — the end of his natural lifespan — means he really, truly, absolutely will be dead.
There are two competing narratives to official reality: the first, and arguably the more ludicrous, is that Osama had already been killed and then unfrozen and “re-killed” to divert attention from the birthers’ legal assault on Obama’s legitimacy. Look at the timing!
The second and more durable is that Osama is alive and well and — any moment now — will be spotted in a supermarket in Pakistan’s equivalent of Peoria.
In between are the fake photos of a dead Osama that duped several Republican senators and the real photos that aren’t being released because — as America’s foes desperately hope — they must show that the U.S. didn’t kill the real Osama.
That the Obama administration didn’t grasp the importance of getting their story straight before talking to the press might be the only real mystery here, except I’m not sure that even flawless PR and a photogenic lethal gunshot to Osama would have prevented the specter of what the theorist Bruno Latour has aptly called “instant revisionism.”
Instant revisionism occurs when people believe that inconsistency and inaccuracy are never inadvertent in an official narrative — the fog of war is always a smokescreen for politics and puppet-mastery, deceit and devilment.
There are deep cultural forces at work here: As the philosopher Richard Rorty noted back in 1989, literary criticism took the place in our cultural pantheon once occupied by religion, philosophy and science; if everything is now a text that could be deconstructed, the authority of anything except criticism is inherently suspect.
From the lofty heights of theory, it is naïve to think that stories could be solid, simple and true; rather, they are expressions of desire, or power. Life is a monster text rally, and the only way to survive being crushed is to be an ironist.
But the path from literary theory to conspiracy theory was swift, as Latour, one of the architects of the idea that scientific facts are socially constructed, ruefully noted when he found that social constructivism was being used to explain why 9/11 was really an inside job by the CIA and the Mossad.
“The smoke of the event has not yet finished settling before dozens of conspiracy theories are already revising the official account,” he wrote, “adding even more ruins to the ruins, adding even more smoke to the smoke. Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naively believed in church, motherhood, and apple pies? Well, things have changed a lot, in my village at least. I am the one now who naively believes in some facts because I am educated, while it is the other guys now who are too unsophisticated to be gullible anymore.”
Still, theory doesn’t fully explain why conspiracy theorizing is such a compulsive behavior for so many otherwise rational people. One answer is prompted by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who wondered (for an American newspaper column in 1933) whether we would be able to think quickly enough to cope with the increasing pace of change in the modern world.
Consider, he wrote, that 4,000 years brought as much change to early Egypt as 10 years in the early 20th century brought to the world; accelerate to the 16th century and a hundred years now equaled 10. The key question was whether we could physiologically adapt to this relentless increase in pace or shut down. Russell did not have the insights into cognitive science that we have now (nor did he live to grasp how much change-inducing information we would be capable of producing in the 21st century), but he suspected we would become rather cranky from the “sheer fatigue” of it all.
Given that our brains are wired to see patterns, it is not unreasonable to think that the more we are deluged with signals the more we will see patterns. Making connections is the only way to make sense, to be human, in the constant stream of information. But if you increase the noise-to-signal ratio in a culture primed to “be skeptical,” it’s not difficult to see how one can become stuck in a feedback loop of constant instant-revisionism. And the more spurious connections we make, the more we become conspiracy theorists.
The Internet is aging us — or some of us — into cranks, priming us with the prejudices of the weary. And we and the Web will keep Osama alive forever, or at least until the one numeric fact that can’t be deconstructed — the end of his natural lifespan — means he really, truly, absolutely will be dead.
