This video compilation, courtesy of TPM Media and Blip.tv, takes the cake. It’s fascinating, but not for its argument. Several things jump out. One, is the lawyer’s name, Gary Kreep two, is the golden hair of the moderator; three, is the pitch for $30.
More seriously, there is the crazed wish for an inversion of our country’s legal process. The idea is that the lack of evidence of law breaking nevertheless makes it incumbent on the President to prove his innocence of a crime–for which there is zero evidence of its having been committed.
Obviously, our legal system doesn’t work this way.
Still, the birther accusation is fit to the basic structure of a conspiracy theory. Advocates of the theory are sure they possess the truth. They’re also sure that most of those not in possession of it are complicit by way of apathy, ignorance, or willful participation. And, both the lack of evidence and falsification of (their) purported evidence are negated because those aspects are part of the conspiracy. These are the stock-in-trade elements of any conspiracy theory.
It’s interesting to ponder whether or not there has ever come about in history a conspiracy uncovered by a vocal minority in possession of truth, and truths about all those who deny the material facts of the conspiracy. Waging a good fight, this conspiratorial truth is eventually demonstrated by verification of the offered evidence, falsification of the counter evidence, falsification of the falsification. The dim evidence evolves to be dispositive and evolves to certify the original claim beyond any reasonable doubt, based in a preponderance of evidence.
Finally, there came to be the uncovering of the willfully complicit. Concerning the last feature, this means discovery of the organization and mechanics behind the willful complicity. This massive industrial complicity is implied in the birther theory, is paramount to the truthers, comes to a magical and esoteric turn in the long-standing ‘illuminatiarian’ global banking conspiracy theories.
Hmmm. No. There is no such historical example. Perhaps, the greatest conspiracies throughout world history nobody knows about, and they have not aroused any suspicion whatsoever.
Stephen, it is hard to understand how this is spreading like some viral infection through the American populace. I am shocked continuously as more and more stupidity surfaces, not just in America, but in Canada as well. Imagine a Facebook poll on whether or not Obama should be killed. The “Right” is seriously falling into a huge morass of shadow.
There’s no doubt some are in the thrall of what others observe to be Shadow.
We both know, to be in, as you say, the morass of shadow, is not to experience it as such. So, it’s an observation that goes along with noting when it appears a ‘subject’ is magnetized or charmed or is a magical participant in a particularly one-sided collective idea/idealization. Thus, I reprise here how we–you and me–would put it in the surface terms of the analytic psychology.
(Key reference for this is Thomas Kirsch’s concept of the Collective Complex. I’ll note the resource in a blog post.)
However, in noting this, I would say for myself that none of this is hard to understand. I wouldn’t firstly appeal to Analytic Psychology. For me, from the perspective of social psychology, especially via the subset of social cognition, it’s fairly straight forward to suppose what factors of personality, cognition, and cognitive complexity, are (in effect) given by certain manifestations of belief, and, more importantly and more primary, manifestations of specific problematic sensemaking and social constructions of reality. However, “twas ever thus.” (See the post, C.I.N.O. Also, ponder the problem in sensemaking as a religious problem in the Jungian sense.)
This is one reason why introduced the idiosyncratic idea about ‘second order’ apprehension. This is a novel way of of describing a generalization about a ‘type’ of personality coming to be vulnerable to having his or her sense of reality programmed without any further adaptation possible.
This further adaptation may refer to all sorts of critical cognitive capabilities, but in the broadest sense we know it as having that “good bullshit detector.”
It’s understood that belief in something being true is the same as its being true for the believer.
Thanks for adding this to the post as a comment. Great stuff in interesting times.