The Epistemology of Conspiracy: From COVID-19 to JFK and the Moon Landings

- May 30, 2021

What is a conspiracy? Why does the pejorative "conspiracy theorist" have rhetorical power in public consciousness?

Meaning and Morality of Conspiracy
Kindle readers are linked to the 2010 American Oxford Dictionary, which defines conspiracy as "a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful [*1]." Legal definitions for conspiracy vary by jurisdiction, but it's generally an agreement by two or more persons to commit an unlawful or harmful act coupled with an intent to achieve the agreement's objective, often times with an additional requirement of action or conduct that furthers that agreement. Unlike criminal-law conspiracy, civil-law conspiracy is coupled with harm that can be measured in money for a jury to dole out in a way the "conspiracy" rarely matters relative to proof of the act itself. Criminal conspiracies can be prosecuted regardless of harm or even whether or not the act of wrong-doing from the conspiracy itself was committed.

If two or more people joke about committing a crime or causing harm, that would not be a conspiracy. But if two people are serious about it, regardless of whether they are successful or even take a substantial step toward it, we call that a "conspiracy."

Governments decide what is unlawful and isolate, if not outright immunize, their intelligence agencies engaging in "covert operations" from legal liability for otherwise-serious felonies. These include murder or assassination and extortion, fraud, and theft, usually by outsourcing the work to "contractors," keeping all activities plausibly deniable, applying the old adage, "Won't someone rid me of this troublesome priest?" to infer orders from higher-ups. It's possible for government agents to be prosecuted for unlawful acts, but the line gets murky and difficult to prove when we involve the government prosecuting itself. There are many scenarios where two governments agents can agree to do something evil, and it would not legally be a "conspiracy." But if two non-government agents agree to the same thing, it would be. Thus, the broader non-criminal definition regarding a hidden plan by a group to do something harmful is closer to what we mean when we discuss conspiracy theories.

For example, when an American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) U2 spy plane was shot down over the then-Soviet Union in 1960 for violating Soviet law and airspace, then-president Eisenhower was breaking his agreement with the Soviets not to fly spy planes over Russia. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) covered for the CIA and lied to the world by claiming the spy plane was one of their planes conducting weather experiments that drifted off course due to mechanical problems [*2]. NASA even arranged a photo-op with a fake NASA serial number on a plane to give fake evidence of the American government's "innocent" mistake. The lie was quickly exposed.

If a private citizen violated government-restricted airspace with his private plane in order to discover government secrets, and another individual said the plane was his and that it accidentally drifted off course, while showing a doctored aircraft of his as an example, both individuals would be arrested and prosecuted for serious crimes, one of which would be "conspiracy."

Regardless of whether conduct is deemed "lawful" or not, we generally agree on conduct that is immoral. It isn't conspiracies to "harm" another that we object to. We, instead, object to conspiracies that harm in an immoral manner. When police conspire to entrap a child molester, these kinds of conspiracies are encouraged, not shunned, even if the child molester would perceive his entrapment as harm. Even moral-relativist leftists concede this principle, as many tout the virtues of sucker-punching a Nazi.

Ideally, law maps onto a moral order, since, in order for laws to have moral authority and not be obeyed simply out of terror of being prosecuted, they must attach to a universal standard most of the citizens of that jurisdiction agree with [*3].

Whether any organization had the legal authority to kill John F. Kennedy (JFK), we recognize the conduct would be immoral, even if done by a U.S. government agency. Regardless of whether governors abusing their powers by exceeding statutory limits on executive orders in response to "emergencies" of a purported "pandemic" without legislative approval are lawful or not (i.e. allowed by judges), purposefully inflating death numbers to justify perpetual power [*4] and forcing people, especially children in school, to wear masks with dishonest conjecture is immoral [*5].

Sometimes the line gets murkier. If the citizens of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) trespassed their Pyongyang capital building to protest Kim Jong-Un as an illegitimate authority, those citizens would be committing a serious crime and be legally unjustified, since, under North Korean law, Kim Jong-Un is the legally-recognized leader. When American citizens trespassed the U.S. Capitol building to protest Joe Biden as an illegitimate fraudulently-installed authority, our citizens are committing the same serious crime [*6] and are prosecuted by Democrats (and some feckless Republicans) to the fullest extent of the law. Practically all of America would perceive an attempt by North Koreans to overthrow Kim Jong-Un as moral and would object to prosecution of usurpers as immoral. But only half or less of America perceives prosecuting those trespassing into the U.S. Capitol building to protest comically-obvious election fraud to install a senile puppet as immoral.

Whether we can point to words on pieces of paper followed by any jurisdiction around the world that call something "lawful" or not, we recognize that one or more individuals secretly planning to engage in immoral conduct is evil, regardless of harm. In the classic film, The Matrix, humanity is unaware of its enslavement, and the world their slavers fashion for them is materially more pleasant than reality. To free humanity would cause more harm than to leave them enslaved. The audience's thinking is oriented toward the morality of the enslavement as opposed to mere harm.

Thus, when most people discuss "conspiracy theories," they are actually discussing agreements by two or more people, usually connected to a government or powerful business, to engage in immoral, usually wicked [*7], conduct.

Conspiracy Theory as a Stigma
Some point to the CIA as the popularizer of the stigma behind the word "conspiracy theory," [*8] with a 1967 document dispatched to CIA station chiefs, marked for "PSYCH" or psychological operations, seeking to undermine objectors to the Warren Report's findings pertaining to Lee Harvey Oswald as a "lone gunman" in JFK's assassination. One wonders why the CIA found it important to dissuade the public from questioning the official narrative on JFK's death with a psychological-operation document. The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.

When we add the modifier "conspiracy" to "theory," a wholly-new word is formed. Etymology.com defines it as "explanation of an event or situation involving unwarranted belief that it is caused by a conspiracy among powerful forces." The operable word is "unwarranted."

Any time a prosecutor proves up his case for the crime of conspiracy in a criminal matter, he is explaining his theory of the case to a jury. The jury must accept a conspiracy theory in order to convict defendants of the conspiracy charge. Of course, the allegation of the crime itself is also a conspiracy theory, as defendants inferably conspire to do a crime before committing it together.

Conspiracy is often a lesser charge tacked on to a criminal prosecution. If the jury doesn't have the heart to convict a defendant of a more-serious crime, perhaps the jury would settle for a guilty verdict on conspiracy. Ironically, a fallacious "conspiracy theory" of its own is needed for a jury to render a guilty verdict under those circumstances. The jury would have to accept that a few people agreed to do something harmful, and the harm agreed-to was done, but that, also, some other party was coincidentally responsible for the harm and not the conspirators.

This type of thinking reminds me of those that recognize the Apollo photos and videos of men "landing" on the Moon were fraudulent, but assume the record was faked to hide aliens that were found there. Once someone makes a claim, and the evidence supporting his claim is proven fraudulent, like it is for the Apollo missions [*9], it stretches credulity to then assume the person is telling the truth but had to fake his evidence to satisfy a third-party.

It is a "conspiracy theory," by all definitions discussed so far, to allege extraterrestrial beings forced NASA to fake the record of their historic 240,000-some-odd-mile voyage to the Moon, after astronauts landed and discovered aliens, so the aliens could remain hidden. However it isn't a conspiracy theory to point out impossible contradictions in NASA's Apollo photographic and video record and conclude NASA is lying about going to the Moon. Nonetheless, countless search results querying the theory that no man landed on the Moon are dedicated to a "debunking" of the latter as a conspiracy theory.

NASA desperately wants you to believe they have the ability to land men on the Moon, just like it desperately wanted the world (including American citizens) to believe the U2 spy plane was one of theirs, conducting weather research, that malfunctioned and drifted off course. It doesn't matter how you get to the conclusion a charlatan wants you to make, as long as you do so. You are within the realm of allowable opinion if you believe in aliens, as long as you also believe America has the technological ability to land men on the Moon.

In a prior piece, I discussed the media and government's role in manipulating what is socially acceptable for the public to believe versus not in great detail [*10]. But, a more-recent example in the mainstream media makes their wicked inversions patently obvious. In 2020, it was socially unacceptable to discuss the possible origins of COVID-19 from a lab in Wuhan China. Social media would tag any discussion of this a "conspiracy theory" (i.e. unwarranted belief) with their lovely fact-checks. Now, as of May 2021, it is suddenly socially acceptable to discuss the theory despite no new evidence supporting the conspiracy. Why?

"Conspiracy theory" is a term of social branding. People only have so many hours in the day to consider vast quantities of information to plan their day-to-day lives. We use heuristics to omit certain information. The logic goes: if the media and/or bureaucrats in authority are all saying X happened, someone saying Y happened instead is probably wrong. And if the authorities saying X happened call Y a conspiracy theory, then, why should we bother wasting our time considering it? Further, we can ignore claims the theorist makes going forward, as, if he is making false claims about this, he is probably wrong about many other things he will tell us in the future. Labeling something a "conspiracy theory" and/or someone a "conspiracy theorist" is a form of intellectual triage. It allows us to reject or deprioritize a claim and move on to more pressing matters in our lives.

While walking on a clear and sunny day, if a hobo tells you it's going to rain, and you don't have an umbrella, you don't worry about it. If the weather man stops to warn you, maybe you go buy the umbrella. It's not foundational knowledge of the moisture in the air or any scientific indicators of rain that causes you to go buy one; it's, instead, your reliance on the credibility of the weatherman.

This fallacious line of thinking is what originally caused me to question the Moon landings. A YouTube video by a pop-culture scientist I had watched a prior video from appeared on my feed, claiming to debunk conspiracy theorists alleging the Moon landings were faked. At the time, I was unfamiliar with any evidence the Moon landings didn't happen as the historical record claimed. The only argument the guy used in the video: (1) 400,00 people were involved in the Moon landings; (2) it is statistically impossible for 400,000 people to keep quiet for decades; therefore, the Moon landings happened.

I thought, huh? 400,000 peopled worked on the Moon landings? If they were a fraud, why would the orchestrators tell all 400,000 about it as opposed to the common military intelligence procedure of isolating information and leaving things on a need-to-know basis? Why wasn't this guy discussing any evidence skeptics of the landings might point to and explaining how they were wrong?

I then found the second "debunking" case that was more common. "If America faked the Moon landings, the Russians, being their competitors on the race to the Moon, would have told us!" Again, huh? Why not discuss the evidence?

I imagined a wife receiving a video of her husband cheating with another woman, and the husband retorting: "My close friend is very jealous of me and would like to date you. He doesn't think I cheated on you. Therefore, it's not me in this video you see, and I didn't cheat on you." As I've explained before in a deep-dive analysis of Apollo [*11], such a tactic, in light of comically-obvious evidence of fraud, is gaslighting.

Lazy thinkers often dismiss any notion of hidden plots of wrong-doing within government by assuming that if government agents conspired to do something immoral, surely at least one whistle-blower would expose it, and the agents within government would be tried for their crimes. One of the media's favorite "debunkers" of conspiracy even uses a statistical analysis, impressing us with his fancy math skills, by assuming a bewildering number of people, 1,000, would all be in on it. Non-disclosure agreements, criminal laws against leaking classified information, and compartmentalizing projects and information were all oblivious to the statistician, who assumes in large conspiracies, 1,000 people would all know exactly what is going on [*12] and that unknown criminal, civil, and/or extra-legal penalties like threats of bodily harm to families are not used to dissuade those in-the-know from explicitly blowing the whistle.

Our internet searches and social media are seething with contempt and/or ridicule for people who believe in conspiracy theories, desiring to psycho-analyze believers and treat them as if they were mental patients. It doesn't matter what evidence you have. Even a shoeprint on the Moon, appearing only in two photos (AS15-86-11670 and 11671) that doesn't match the overshoe "moonboot" treads in hundreds of others photos [*13], which, by the way, is strong evidence of whistle blowing, isn't good enough to quell their contempt.

Epistemology or Probability of Truth in Conspiracy
Dialectic thinkers, unafraid of the rhetoric and stigma applied to "conspiracy theorists," enjoy debating the probability of truth in explanations for evil they see around the world. Christian thinkers recognize the world is a fallen place ruled by the god of this world and are more susceptible to conceding evil conspiracies exist. Humanity's purpose is to exercise individual free will in rejecting evil (the god of this world), embracing good (the God above), and believing in tenets allowing passage to the kingdom of heaven. As I've discussed in great detail before, if evil ruled the world, it'd be less effective if it made its existence known [*14]. Thus, evil deeds planned and carried out in secret would be far more likely than evil manifesting itself as comically-outward as we were trained to identify it as by watching Saturday-morning cartoons or modern action movies.

Atheist thinkers might be more inclined to reject the concept of evil or distill what others perceive as evil down to biology or genetics and mere human greed. With a tendency toward the left, atheists often point to the failings of capitalism as the root of evil, as profit incentivizes some to take greedy action that harms others. Rather than aim their weapons at evil itself, they may instead take aim at "structural or systemic oppression" and reorienting life to a more-equal or equitable distribution of material needs and wants, which would then eliminate, if not severely mitigate, the effects in the world others call "evil."

Under either view, we recognize conspiracy to harm or engage in immoral conduct is a reality that good people must struggle against. But, not all conspiracy theories are true. If they were, there'd be no need to debate them anymore than debating the color of an orange or the day-time sky.

An old Christian adage, "we see through a glass darkly," belies our struggle to identify conspiracies of evil. We can't have perfect knowledge of the material word, let alone the technology to accurately decipherer the intentions of all men. Even if we could have it, the human mind is capable of error in perception. Two-plus-two equal four in the abstract, but when we add two items to two we see before us, our knowledge of four items is conditional upon our senses and memory properly functioning. Thus, truth isn't measured in absolute but probability. This is why we don't convict criminals on absolutes but reasonable doubt. There can always be doubt. As author Vox Day says, "We see through a glass darkly, but we see enough."

The problem with conspiracy theories isn't so much the evidence they point to of evil but the evidence of who the culprits are.

Who killed JFK? I concede the story of the "lone gunman" is not believable, and, likely, some other group was behind the killing. Was it the mob by itself? Was it then-vice-president Lyndon Johnson? Was it the CIA? Was it a foreign power? I suspect it was the CIA, under direction of Allen Dulles [*15], but I can't state with any probable certainty, let alone absolute.

Who set off COVID-19? Was it a naturally-occurring virus? Does the virus even exist by standards of Koch's postulates? Did the virus come from a lab in Wuhan China? We know the death reports and testing from the virus are grossly overstated and the solutions like vaccines and masks are overstated as well, if not outright dangerous to the human body [*16]. Is the virus a rouse to inject the world with a substance to decrease fertility to achieve goals of depopulation? Perhaps it's a natural or man-made virus greedy pharmaceutical companies that control the media, through advertising, and politicians, through donations, are taking advantage of to profit with a trillion-dollar recurring-market model of annual vaccine requirements for public travel. We can't say for sure which of these possibilities it is, since the official narrative on the topic through social and mainstream media has inverted too many times to be credible [*17]. Whatever the truth is, it isn't what they are telling us. If it was, they wouldn't need to keep changing their story every few months.

There is one "conspiracy theory," however, that explains itself without need for much conjecture on the who-done-it aspect.

A cursory glance of results on the topic from popular search engines reveals the notion that the Moon-landings were faked is, perhaps, the most ridiculed of conspiracy theories. I believe the Earth is certainly round, but even flat-Earth theories garner more credibility since there are far more flat-Earth resources than from those like me, who believe the Earth is round, manned-space-travel to low-Earth orbit only is currently possible, and that American-government agencies pretended they could land men on the Moon as a psychological operation to project technological dominance during the Cold War to keep third-world nations allied with United States as the superior power to support [*18].

The fraudulent Moon-landings are the linchpin to conspiracy as an act of evil. Once fraud in the photographic and video records is conceded, it becomes likely NASA faked the evidence in order to pretend they could land men on the Moon when they couldn't. This revelation has startling implications. It was one thing for NASA to lie to the Soviet Union, an enemy, seeing as communism, by definition, seeks to establish a global empire ruled by "the workers" (i.e. the Soviet elites making up their government). It's another thing for NASA to lie to the American people funding it.

Since, at least, 1969, the American people have been given gross misinformation by their own government in making voting decisions, making the ideals of representative democracy effectively impossible. Since the crimes of NASA have gone unexposed for this long, as top scientists and academics assume the landings happened, it sends a message to evil people that, if they play their cards smart, they can get away with anything.

The old adage attributed to Mark Twain, "It's easier to fool a man than convince him he's been fooled." Evil knows this. When the boomers grew up watching the famous "landings" on TV, they were taught by their government that somehow they were part of it. There was a reason "400,000" people are alleged to have contributed to the Moon landings, all contractors from states around the country. Everyone knows someone who "helped" Americans get to the Moon. Hence, the common phrase in America, said with pride and attributed to our national identity, is to say, "We went to the Moon."

A similar strategy is deployed in the masking and vaccine nonsense responding to the 2020-? pandemic the world was sold on. Once you wear a mask for a long-enough period of time, the virus du jour becomes a part of your identity. It's less painful to accept the dangers of the virus du jour as a fact than it is to deal with pain of admitting you are irrationally being forced to wear a face-diaper as an act of control and humiliation and that removal of your face-diaper is contingent upon your willingness to get an experimental vaccine where the makers are immune from liability.

In sum, conspiracy, as we think of it, is evil. Wicked [*19] evil. Evil is afraid of sunlight. To analyze "conspiracy theories" is to to shine light upon the evil of this world or, if one prefers, the god of this world. It is our duty to analyze them, to identify evil and fight it. Accept the stigma of "conspiracy theorist" by the lazy thinkers among us. It is your duty, at the very least, to identify the wicked and expose it.

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FOOTNOTES
[*1] The New Oxford American Dictionary (Kindle Location 111261). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
[*2] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/multimedia/imagegallery/U-2/U-2_proj_desc.html
[*3] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/take-off-bow-tie-stop-pretending-your.html

[*4] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-broken-thumb-heuristics-in-fall-of.html
[*5] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-politics-of-masks-virtuous.html
[*6] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/take-off-bow-tie-stop-pretending-your.html
[*7] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/02/what-is-wicked.html
[*8] https://www.topsecretwriters.com/2018/02/cia-invented-term-conspiracy-theory-discredit/
[*9] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2019/10/on-musty-boomer-lunacy.html
Some examples:
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