This is going to be an inappropriately brief way to tie together Hannah Arendt, US covert activity, and the militarist turn of the US since the cold war but it’s either this or nothing so let’s go!
In what has to be one of the few brilliant (yet still somehow neglected) pieces of political theory published in a book review magazine, Hannah Arendt’s 1971 “On Lying in Politics” defined secrecy as a fundamental human problem. Her official topic was the release of the Pentagon Papers, a collection of classified US government documents showing that despite its historic levels of needless bloodshed and social disruption, the US government had extensive information showing it was still losing the Vietnam war, information it suppressed. By 1969 the US knew Vietnam was a lost cause (a quick look at Wikipedia shows it remains communist today). Why, then, was our government fruitlessly sacrificing so many human lives to thwart the will of most Vietnamese overseas?
Arendt argued that secrecy itself was a big part of the underlying political problem. Secrecy, and the lying necessary to keep it, is an essential yet essentially toxic feature of political order. In large-scale societies, sooner or later people will want more power, territory, or profit than others are willing to give them. And in the face of economic and military competition, you have to make plans and act on them. This makes secrecy necessary, because letting your competitors know these plans in advance would make it more likely that they can defeat them. Whether it’s an assassination or releasing a new product, keeping certain plans secret requires lying about them: “Plans? We haven’t made any yet… And we’re definitely not going to start on Saturday morning at 4am before anyone’s awake!”
But if the impulse to secrecy has a necessary basis it also has no natural limit, tending to warp and poison its own environment. Because of the feeling of power and exclusiveness that privileged knowledge gives, it tends to take on a magical quality for its possessors, what ancient Romans called the arcana imperii. While it can give its users power, knowing the dirt nobody else is allowed to also naturally makes them unaccountable and alienates them from the people they ostensibly serve. As the historian of science Peter Galison shows, the US government has tended to classify a larger and larger portion of its documents every year, leading to the current absurd reality that because the government produces so many memos and minor documents, there is now more knowledge produced that is annually removed from the public sphere than actually made public.
This, writes Arendt, is why only the US government would have been outraged about publicizing the contents of the Pentagon papers, because that information by 1970 had already been widely circulated in the press via enterprising reporters like Sy Hersh and I.F. Stone. Who, suggested Arendt, could possibly be living in such an artificially curtailed and distorted information environment that they thought nobody but them knew this? Who else but the President?
This brings us to the ontological nature of conspiracy theories: false or unsupported, baseless beliefs about secret plans. Two facts about conspiracy theories have long been noted: first, they are very popular, with some surveys suggesting half of the US population believes in some of the more baseless and/or sinister such as QAnon or a secret UFO base at Area 51. But second, some of the beliefs dismissed as conspiracy theories turn out to be true, such as the CIA’s role in trafficking crack cocaine to black communities in the 1980s. This is why it is hard to get a grip on the concept–if they are inherently fake, what do we call the ones that are based in a suppressed reality, the actual hidden dealings of a state or other powerful group? Rather than illusions, these might represent fundamental realities.
Can we create a bigger picture about what sort of important real world actions would tend to be kept secret, the “conspiracy theories” that turn out to be true? Politically one attempt might connect Vietnam and the increasing tendency toward destructive interventionism by the United States with things like the unwillingness of most US political figures on both sides of the aisle to challenge it. This is surely not the only possible one, but we can follow it as an example. Perhaps, as a recent book on the forgotten female figures around the John F. Kennedy assassination suggests, this big picture is connected with a greater covert investment in such interventionism, and more serious warnings to political leaders who resist it, than publicly known.
Arendt’s analysis of lying in politics suggests that the very concept of the “Conspiracy Theory” involves a false ontology. Due to the inherent nature of competition and politics, government and other groups make secret plans, including audacious or disturbing ones, where available information will be either nonexistent or muddy and incomplete. And not only are the more disturbing plans more likely to be kept secret, but from Galison’s study of government records we know that secrecy tends to increase over time. Ontologically, there are no conspiracy theories, only true or false, plausible or implausible beliefs about secrets–things which by definition we don’t fully know. Our only hope to navigate these competing theories is to have a plausible bigger picture to place them in to see if they fit.
sethlsanders 