Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies For Dummies

Christopher Hodapp, Alice Von Kannon

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118052020
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

What do Skull and Bones, the Kennedys, and UFOs all have in common? They're all shrouded in mystery and conspiracies

Entering the world of conspiracy theories and secret societies is like stepping into a distant, parallel universe where the laws of physics don't apply and everything you know is wrong: black is white, up is down. If you want to understand what's really going on — from fluoridated water and chemtrails to alien autopsies, free electricity, and more — you need a good reference book, and that's where Conspiracy Theories & Secret Societies For Dummies comes in.

Whether you're a skeptic or a true believer, this fascinating guide, packed with the latest information, walks you through some of the most infamous conspiracy theories — such as Area 51, the assassination of JFK, and reptilian humanoids — and introduces you to such mysterious organizations as the Freemasons, the Ninjas, the Illuminati, the Mafia, and Rosicrucians. This behind-the-curtain guide helps you separate fact from fiction and provides insight into the global impact these mysterious events and groups have had on our modern world. Discover how to:

• Test a conspiracy theory
• Spot a sinister secret society
• Assess the Internet's role in fueling conspiracy theories
• Explore world domination schemes
• Evaluate 9/11 conspiracy theories
• Figure out who "they" are
• Grasp the model on which conspiracy theories are built
• Figure out whether what "everybody knows" is true
• Distinguish one assassination brotherhood from another
• Understand why there's no such thing as a "lone assassin"

Additionally, you can read about some conspiracy theories that turned out to be true (like the CIA's LSD experiments), theories that seem beyond the pale (such as the deliberate destruction of the space shuttle Columbia), and truly weird secret societies (Worshippers of the Onion and nine more). Grab your own copy of Conspiracy Theories & Secret Societies For Dummies and decide for yourself what is fact and what is a conspiracy.

Part I

Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies: The Improbable Wedded to the Inscrutable

In this part . . .

About 99.9 percent of all respectable conspiracy theories are tied hand and foot to some sort of secret society or organization. This secret society or organization is the they, as in “they hid the wrecked alien spacecraft in Roswell in 1947.” This section lays out easy-to-understand models, with no cryptic double talk, about all the “theys” out there, and all the dark conspiracies behind them.

Chapter 1

Everything You Know Is Wrong

In This Chapter

Believing the unbelievable: The age of conspiracy theories and secret societies

Figuring out what’s worth believing

Touring the world, one conspiracy at a time

Journalist H. L. Mencken once said, “The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

A conspiracy theory is the idea that someone, or a group of someones, acts secretly, with the goal of achieving power, wealth, influence, or other benefit. It can be as small as two petty thugs conspiring to stickup a liquor store, or as big as a group of revolutionaries conspiring to take over their country’s government. Individuals, corporations, churches, politicians, military leaders, and entire governments can all be conspirators, in plots as evil as secretly developing nuclear weapons, as creepy as smuggling stolen human transplant organs, or as annoying as cornering the market on neighborhood $4-coffee joints.

The conspiracy theory is absolutely inseparable from the secret society. They go together like Minneapolis and St. Paul. Face it: Everyone hates secrets. You didn’t like it when the kids kept secrets from you in gym class, and you’ve never gotten over it. Neither have we.

Secret societies are the repositories of the hidden knowledge that spins the conspiracy theory. But the term secret society covers a lot of ground — everything from college fraternities and the lodge your grandpa belonged to, to the lesser known, powerful groups that stay out of the eyes of the press, like the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the legendary Illuminati (if they really exist at all).

This chapter begins the process of teaching you how to tell the truth from the manure, at least where conspiracy theories and secret societies are concerned. Throughout this book, we also set out to simplify what at least sounds staggeringly confusing. We clarify conspiracy theories that are coming at you from all sides nowadays on everything from the Mafia running the Vatican to aliens landing in New Mexico (or is it the aliens in the Vatican and the Mafia in New Jersey?). Consider this chapter your warm-up exercise!

Living in the Age of Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies

The popularity of the conspiracy theory as a way of explaining society and world events is a pretty recent phenomena, a product of the time since the French Revolution of 1789, which was the first real marriage of paranoia and the printing press. But it’s just within the last 40 years that the philosophy of conspiracism has become like a wall of noise, an assault on the collective consciousness, and the most common way to explain complex world events. In many respects, conspiracies are a way of simplifying history into good and bad, right and wrong.

A conspiracy theory is a way of looking at a single event and postulating that maybe there’s a lot more to it than can be seen on the surface, with darker forces behind the whole thing. Conspiracism expands on this, becoming an entire philosophy, as a way of viewing the world. For the professional conspiracist, a person who studies the conspiracies, there isn’t much going on in the world that doesn’t have darker forces behind it, from the price of a gallon of gasoline to the three ounces of hand lotion you can’t ever seem to extract from the bottom of a 16-ounce bottle. Of course, in a way, even the term conspiracism is too respectable to apply to much of what is floating around the Internet and the tabloids these days. Since the middle of the last century, academic, postmodernist researchers have found it fashionable to refer to all psychological states and moods in German. It’s a Sigmund Freud thing. Author Thom Burnett in the Conspiracy Encyclopedia (2005, Chamberlain Bros.) points out that the Germans have a great term, Verschworungsmythos, which means Conspiracy Myth, and in many ways, it has lots to recommend it as a descriptive label.

“Perhaps the conspiracy world is an updated version of ancient myths,” Burnett says, “where monsters and the gods of Olympus and Valhalla have been replaced by aliens and the Illuminati of Washington and Buckingham Palace.” In other words, the new wave of jitters over conspiracies and secret societies has beaten up the zeitgeist with their weltschmerz over weltpolitik (the spirit of our times has had the crap kicked out of it by anxiety over global domination). See, we can do the German thing too. Gesundheit.

What makes the study of conspiracy theories and secret societies unusual is, when boiled down to their most common elements, the overwhelming majority have grown or been adapted from the same few original sources. Historian Daniel Pipes has said that almost all conspiracy theories have as their origin the same two boogeymen — Jews and secret societies, most notably the Freemasons. They have simply been recycled and renamed, again and again, as events have transpired over the last 250 years.

For example, if you take almost any conspiracy about the Jews from the 19th century, and erase “Jews” and substitute “military-industrial complex” or “neocons,” you find that very same theory in dozens of books and on hundreds of Web sites about the sinister forces behind the 9/11 “conspiracy.” In many ways, it shows a criminal lack of originality. On the other hand, conspiracists would claim, plots around the world and the evildoers who engage in them haven’t changed much over the centuries. They’ve only gotten more ambitious.

What’s Worth Scrutinizing, and What’s Not

Between books, the Internet, and cable television, the average American comes into contact with a lot of ideas that are no longer sifted through “established media.” A bigger and bigger chunk of these ideas challenges the status quo — the beliefs of stodgy academics and of society in general. Such thoughts also assert that organizations, from the government to the Illuminati (see Chapter 11), are in cahoots to make sure that no one yet knows the truth. But just because an appealing idea comes from the “alternative’ media instead of the mouths of TV anchors or White House spokesmen doesn’t always make it true.

As professional conspiracists write book after book, raking in the money faster than they can count it, most care very little about the confusion and fear they leave behind. Internet Web-meisters who peddle this stuff care even less. But we care about it, a lot. Don’t fear — you can acquire the skills you need to digest it all and discern the information. In Chapter 2, in particular, we help you decide between information that’s worth paying attention to and information you should ignore, and why.

Connecting the dots

There’s a very important point about exploring conspiracy theories. It is not enough to just lay out facts or events, like dots on a page, and scream “aha!” at the mere “fact,” for example, that over 100 people “involved” in the assassination of John F. Kennedy are dead. “Involved” often meaning as little as they were standing in the crowd in Dallas. It’s been almost 40 years, and of the thousands of people peripherally involved in the case, it’s not a big shock for more than 100 of them to have died. Now, if 75 of them had been wrapped in plastic and duct tape and dumped into a Dallas reservoir, you might have something.

The point we are making is that a box fu...