Coincidence drives conspiracy theories, not conspiracy theorists
The former BBC correspondent, Jacky Sutton, was found dead, apparently hanged, in a toilet on the 17th of October in Istanbul’s Ataturk airport, Turkey, and was widely reported. The 50 year-old PhD student was acting Iraq director for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. She was acting director because the previous director, Ammar Al Shahbander, was the victim of a car bomb attack in Baghdad on the 2nd of May. Apparently Jacky was returning to Irbil in Northern Iraq from London having attended the memorial service for her predecessor. An investigation is currently being carried out by the Turkish authorities, but a rather pre-emptive-sounding headline from the BBC website read “Jacky Sutton: Briton found dead at Istanbul airport ‘acted alone’ “. This was based on information given to Jacky’s family from the ongoing investigation. Jacky’s sister Jenny said in a statement that after being sceptical about initial reports and based on the information so far, the family believed that Jacky had “acted alone” but also added that more information could come to light.
I have to admit to not being au fait with Turkish police investigations. However, I’ve never heard of an ongoing police investigation where information is given on an ad hoc basis to the family of the main protagonist and they’re allowed to make statements based on that information: and at such an early stage. There’s the risk it could prejudice the rest of the investigation and indeed any witnesses that have yet to come forward. This is not to mention the impact on a grieving family of “additional information” overturning the initial assessment. The term ‘acting alone’ implies suicide rather than natural causes, for which the use of the term would seem illogical. The BBC’s headline would also have the same prejudicial effect, particularly with it being unrelated to anything that might be termed official, at least at this stage.
This appears to have all of the makings of a conspiracy theory. On the one hand, the head of an organisation found dead after the previous head was assassinated a few months earlier and on the other, the authorities acting with undue haste, and indeed with apparent procedural laxity, to at least point to a result. The violent manner of death, hanging, is generally much rarer for a woman than a man as a method of suicide, and the occurrence during transit seems to uneasily combine the opportune with the very deliberate.
However, for seekers of the truth, for a story to be recognised as a conspiracy theory is not particularly helpful. The term, along with ‘conspiracy theorists’, seems to have taken on a life of its own, with a pejorative meaning seemingly unrelated to its component words. A conspiracy is just a number of people secretly plotting to do something harmful or illegal. Lying will of course be included in the latter and could be both harmful and illegal, or it could be to prevent people finding out about things harmful or illegal being done by the conspirators. Or it could be as simple as just denying the truth to others for whatever reason. A conspiracy theorist is just someone who surmises there may be a conspiracy. But the fact that such a description of someone should perhaps be synonymous with ‘truth-seeker’ is undermined by the fact that ‘conspiracy theorists’ are frequent subjects for psychological research. The underlying assumption and indeed oft-quoted reason is that ‘not everyone believes in conspiracy theories’, and therefore an apparent predisposition justifies researching what distinguishes believers from non-believers (guided by psychological studies on religion?) and establishing a psychological profile. Unsurprisingly, the results have been inconclusive to say the least. It’s unsurprising because at some level, everyone believes in conspiracy theories because everyone’s been part of a conspiracy. From our earliest schooldays to family life to working in organisations where a ‘party line’ has been followed, we’ve all indulged in some form of conspiracy that in many instances may have been for a justifiable reason as the lesser of evils. Presumably it has to be some better-defined and more significant level of conspiratorial belief that psychologists are trying to differentiate. However, as soon as rigid definitions are laid down there’s the danger it prejudges and constrains any outcome and its significance.
Perhaps it would be better to try and understand what it is about the actual events that lead to conspiracy theories. There seems to be a lot of what might be called ‘gut instinct’ when we feel that explanations we’re given don’t somehow seem right, or even credible. This is the realm between what’s possible and what’s likely, and can be differentiated by the level of coincidence. An extreme example of this would be the concept of entropy, where the level of disorder increases with time. For example if a drop of black ink were introduced into a glass of water it would spread and discolour the water. If this event were filmed and the film reversed, such that the ink coalesced in the liquid to form a drop, we’d know immediately that the film was reversed because such a phenomenon is not within our everyday experience. However, with the random motion of ink and water molecules, it’s not impossible that there could be an exceedingly rare event (maybe representing an occurrence of once every large number of universes) that coincidentally aligns all of the molecules such that the ink forms a drop in the water. Strictly speaking it wouldn’t therefore be impossible, just incredibly unlikely. In general the appearance of coincidence in science, or rather being suspicious of it, is very important in distinguishing unique phenomena or patterns from the banal. Benoit Mandelbrot must have wondered about the coincidence of patterns of blood vessels, trees and river deltas before discovering that nature has its own geometry, and therefore that such similar forms aren’t coincidental.
Pattern recognition and a feeling for when things are subtly outside of the realm of our everyday experience may not just have been useful in scientific discovery, but also an essential survival skill in coming to terms with our environment and those around us. It seems strange that displaying such instinctive feelings, if not actually suspicions, should be regarded as aberrant behaviour by some people. At the risk of being regarded as a conspiracy theorist, maybe it’s those who have the most to hide who regard others as being on some sort of psychological spectrum if they exhibit visceral suspicion of official explanations.
So as for the burning question of the day, is it wrong to generalise about conspiracy theories?
