The Month That Is; How I Wrote Richard Faraday, Ghost Detective - January 12th 2012 - A

On the bus into work today my brain was going into overdrive. I know how the book is going to end and I know what's going to happen in the next one. I know where every character is going to be at the end of the final chapter and I know where they're going to go in the first of the second book.

Blimey.

Anyway, I was on Warren Ellis' website and he linked to this interview with William Gibson (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson) and I thought you might find it interesting, I did:

- - -

INTERVIEWER:

How do you begin a novel?

GIBSON:

I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

INTERVIEWER:

You won't have planned beyond that one sentence?

GIBSON:

No. I don't begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.

E. M. Forster's idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who's fully in control of the characters hasn't even started to do the work. I've never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I'm working optimally I'm in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don't trust, as a reader, smell of homework.

- - -

I think I'll respond to that thought process when I'm home, it's bloody fascinating though.

Bomb Spirit

A medium at the site of Hiroshima, her spirit out of her body, the
nuclear detonation slaughtering hundreds of thousands, the trauma and
pain filling her empty shell, becoming a sentient nuclear wound on the
world, a force of destruction long sleep, awakened for some reason in
the present day... Kills with a glance, leaves the silhouette of her
victims burned into the wall behind them...

TateShots: Maurice Sendak

For posterity, I'm posting this here, too.

Dream #1

I'm vaguely aware of Alphas and I think I just had a dream regarding the show. Nothing too concrete, just concepts and ideas that stemmed from catching a few too many promos for it and not taking the time to actually get into it.

I think they're doing it wrong, of course.

In my dream, the framing sequence is the introduction of the "mutated" folk through an interview with the POV character-- a police detective?-- and the history of the program being given like that. Characters include a telepath/an invulnerable geek kind of fellow/super speed loser. Their training would be shown, including a scene with dozens of zombies linked together and they have to get to the other side... the geek catapults himslef to the other side... then there's a room of zombies (I don't know how zombies came into it) they have to get from one side to the other of, and the person who is directing the team, who has watched them suffer, who has been in their heads, she decides to help, goes around distracting zombies and twatting them in the head... and then the POV character would say that's all well and good but why has HE been called here.

Some mutated folk were trained differently. They were let out into the world, adopted, and the world shaped them. The detective (hyper-intuitive), the olympic swimmer (hyper-metabolism), the fireman (fearless), etc. The core group of characters, really.

The detective is one of them. He's shocked, but things make sense to him (thanks to his deductive reasoning powers). What he  also wants to know is why the scientist in charge of the program is so battered and bruised...

Six mutated subjects escaped recently. Horrific mutations with names taken from nursery rhymes... The Spider ("...Itsy Bitsy..."), The Wolf, The Headsman, Hansel & Gretel... and they're going to kill everyone because they hate humanity for experimenting on them. The Spider is the ring leader of this group. He induced a change in the subjects, made them shed their skin and break free from their bonds-- nano bonds?-- and unleash hell. They destroyed the labs, killed dozens of the more passive subjects and the scientists, and then left. All apart from The Spider. The lead scientist arrived in the lab and found it in chaos. The Spider was waiting. The scientist picked up a discarded weapon, hides in a toilet cubicle, while The Spider monologues. The bullets ricochet off of The Spider, who mocks the scientist as he tears the door off the toilet. He then proceeds to take a DNA sample of the scientist and then one of himself. He swaps them and injects a into b and b into a.

The subjects are all the scientist's children-- he experimented on himself decades ago and his power was his super-power giving biological make-up. The Spider contaminates his body with his own DNA, twisting any potential super-children into copies of himself-- genetic clones?-- so no more can be made. And with the scientist's DNA in him... The Spider might be able to breed super-powered creatures (imagine a story where a pregnant woman is found in a hotel, her bloated, stretched belly bursting with dozens of mutated foetuses...).

So. The detective needs to bring these monsters in. He needs to take The Spider alive so they can undo the genetic damage done to the scientist so the program can continue. He intuits that the DNA might be changing the scientist but chooses to trust him, and then he assembles his team!

So that would be the story. Dollhouse-meets-Alphas?

I could write that.

get down, make love

I have Chapter Seventy Six of my novel floating in my inbox, waiting to be attacked. It demands a massive rewrite. Just need to find the right time. I have this niggling want to incorporate a sex scene but it strikes me as potentially ill-placed... But then it makes the earlier sex scene a weird punctuation point, without a thread of thematic/stylistic continuance in the novel.
Problems problems.

nightmare fuel?

I'm listening to Nine Inch Nail's cover of Queen's Get Down, Make Love and the intro is pure nightmare fuel.

Amazingly, brutally haunting.

Thanks Trent :l

1960s

There's something about the aestheric of the 60s, The Avengers, The Champions, Department S, etc, that really piques my interest. The look of the characters, the way they act, you can't get away with the stories you told then if you put them in a modern setting. Makes you think what you could do with those haircuts, those fashions, those characters, if you wrote something along those lines now.

1960s and all.

Maybe I'll find out?

Island of Terror: Department S

Island of Terror: Department S:

Of all the ITC action series, ‘Department S’ is my favourite. It is helped immeasurably by introducing the immortal Jason King, of course, but it is also tautly scripted, superbly acted and well written.

The central idea, that Department S are brought in when Interpol are baffled, was a fairly familiar one, but this show did something with it, relishing in portraying bizarre cases with equally odd conclusions. Storylines included an airliner touching down without either passengers or crew, the assassination of a dummy, the murder of a man with a clown’s mask glued to his face, and an astronaut who appears on a busy London street and suffocates inside his suit before anyone can help him.

Jason King, the novelist playboy with a sad past, would be a memorable character under any circumstances, but the casting of Peter Wyngarde in the role is pure genius. It’s easy to like Jason King because he’s camp and silly and has fantastic hair but there’s more to him than that: yes, Wyngarde occasionally plays it for laughs, but he gives a nuanced, complex performance that transcends his moustache and trousers and shorty dressing gowns. He’s a marvellous creation and only Wyngarde could have made the character so interesting. He’s one of my heroes.

From the very interesting and absorbing Island of Terror blog, reposted here for inspiration's sake.

Something isn't right here...

I quite urgently need to wrap up this project, because I know what my next one is going to be.

Need to get my screenplay hat on, it's about to get interesting.

G'night.

A man's work is never done.

Have sat down with Sam and worked through the timeline of my novel, and am working on amendments and additions to enhance the plot.

The target now is 100,000 words.

Fucking come on, fucking fuck.

"Have you thought what it means to be a god?" asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. "It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to recreate you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable."

Update--!

I'm writing again, though it's probably a bit too early to see if anything comes of it, but it's mostly thanks to Claire's input and acting as a sounding board (check out her blog here) when I needed someone to bounce off of. Quite psyched to get this done, and hopefully I've finally found something that I can put into a future issue of Zenith!. Christ.

"Hell, or Hidden?"

I'm writing a lot of ideas down recently, filling up a book with them, just so I can have something to look to when I have a moment. There's the obvious stuff, the stuff I always turn to when I'm thinking... the Tunguska Impact, for one, that whole incident fascinates me so it's an idea that I mine when it's appropriate... science, as a whole, is a well that I go to every now and then-- mad science, real science, speculative science, anything like that. Of course, due to my bastard novel, I'm now fascinated with looking at anything in regards to angels and demons and monsters-- but that could also be because I'm a big Supernatural fan. So yeah, I'm working on lots of stuff right now, have lots of ideas fermenting, and below are two projects that I'm bobbing in and out of.

The most important to me, right now, I think, is my screenplay. I've written it before for coursework but then I, uh, well I lost it. I lost the piece and it's probably somewhere in my room or on a computer or a memory stick, but as I can't find it I'm rewriting and expanding on it from memory. It's a bugger, because I was really happy with it (but not happy enough with it, I guess, to save it anywhere memorable, buh) but this is giving me a chance to just do it straight off again, without having to keep looking back at what happened before. If it was memorable and striking it stays, but obviously, if I can't remember it in the first place it can't be very good. So that's how I roll today with this.

The second most important (after getting my novel rewritten after the edits come in) is this stupid little science fiction story I have in my head involving the edge of the universe and the end of all time but it's stupid and hard to write because there has to be internal logic to it and the first big stepping stone is the fact that there has to be space ship that can run for billions upon billions upon trillions of years without hitting planets or just falling apart but that just doesn't make sense so I'm stuck thinking. Phew. There's also the engine idea I had, which is intrinsic to the second (there's more than one, ugh) "twist" to the story, but like I said, it needs to be worked on.

Finds #3

This isn't mine. This wasn't written by me. This is research, as per.

Note: This paper was published in Political Psychology 15: 733-744, 1994. This is the original typescript sent to the journal, it does not include any editorial changes that may have been made. The journal itself is not available online, to my knowledge.

Belief in Conspiracy Theories

Ted Goertzel[1]

Running Head: Belief in Conspiracy Theories.

KEY WORDS: conspiracy theories, anomia, trust

A survey of 348 residents of southwestern New Jersey showed that most believed that several of a list of ten conspiracy theories were at least probably true. People who believed in one conspiracy were more likely to also believe in others. Belief in conspiracies was correlated with anomia, lack of interpersonal trust, and insecurity about employment. Black and hispanic respondents were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories than were white respondents. Young people were slightly more likely to believe in conspiracy theories, but there were few significant correlations with gender, educational level, or occupational category.

Reports in the mass media suggested that belief in conspiracies was particularly acute in the United States in 1991 and 1992 (Krauthammer, 1991; Krauss, 1992). The release of the movie J.F.K. triggered a revival of popular interest in America's "conspiracy that won't go away" (Oglesby, 1992). A national survey by the New York Times (1992) showed that only 10% of Americans believed the official account that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assass­inating President John F. Kennedy, while 77% believed that others were involved and 12% didn't know or declined to answer.

Belief in the Kennedy conspiracy has always been strong but seems to have increased as the event became more distant. In 1966, 36% of the respondents in a Gallup poll believed that Oswald acted alone. The percent was 11% in both the 1976 and 1983 Gallup polls and 13% in a 1988 CBS poll (Times, 1992). This increase in belief in the conspiracy has taken place despite the fact that the accumulation of evidence has increasingly supported the lone assassin theory (Moore, 1991).

Perhaps more surprising was the widespread belief, particularly in the African-American and gay communities, that the AIDS epidemic was a deliberate conspiracy by government officials (Bates, 1990; Cooper, 1990; Douglass 1989). A survey of African-American church members by the Southern Christian Leadership Council found that 35% believed AIDS was a form of genocide, while 30% were unsure (Thomas and Quinn, 1991: 1499). 34% of the respondents believed that AIDS is a manmade virus, while 44% were unsure. AIDS specialists say that there is no convincing evidence for this argument, but many African-Americans see a parallel between AIDS and the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments conducted from 1952-1972.

Another conspiracy theory current in 1991 was the "October Surprise," the belief that George Bush and other Republicans conspired with Iranian officials to delay the release of American hostages until after the 1980 elections. This theory, like many others, failed to hold up to careful scrutiny (Barry, 1991), but it continued to be viewed as plausible by many people on both the right and the left.

A number of other conspiracy theories were also current in 1991. Focus group discussions with students at a New Jersey public university, identified the following as widely believed: the conspiracy of Anita Hill and others against Clarence Thomas, the conspiracy by government officials to distribute drugs in American minority communities, the conspiracy of Japanese business­men against the American economy, the conspiracy of the Air Force to conceal the reality of flying saucers, and the conspiracy of the F.B.I. to kill Martin Luther King.

There has been no published information about the prevalence of belief in any these conspiracies. Nor has anyone addressed the question of to what extent belief in conspiracies is a generalized ideological trait, i.e., how likely people who believe in one conspiracy are to believe in others. Nor has there been any previous attempt to discover the psycho­logical or sociological correlates of belief in conspiracies.

Survey Results

A telephone survey was conducted in April, 1992, of 348 randomly selected residents of Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties in southwestern New Jersey. These counties, which are part of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, are racially, ethnically and sociologically diverse, including inner city underclass neighborhoods and working and middle class suburbs. The sample was stratified to over-represent the impoverished minority community residing in the city of Camden, and the percentages were weighted to reflect the demographic balance in the region as a whole. Two hundred eleven of the respondents were white, 74 were black, 44 were Hispanic, and 19 were Asian or members of other groups. Interviews were conducted by students in a university research methods class, and carefully verified by a staff member. This sample size provides a margin of error of approximately 5.3%.

The first question was "There has recently been a good deal of interest in the assassination of President John Kennedy. Do you think it likely that President Kennedy was killed by an organized conspiracy, or do you think it more likely that he was killed by a lone gunman? Sixty-nine percent of the respondents thought it likely that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy, 14% by a lone gunman and 17% volunteered that they were uncertain. These figures are close to those in the New York Times/CBS News national survey (Times, 1992) which used very similar question wording.

The respondents were then asked their opinions about nine other conspiracies which had been in the news lately. A four point scale was used, ranging from "definitely true" and "probably true" to "probably false" and "definitely false." "Don't know" was not offered as an alternative, but was recorded when the respondents volunteered it. This question wording encouraged respndents to give their best guess as to the truth of a conspiracy, while relying the distinction between "probably" and "definitely" to distinguish between hunches and strong beliefs. The items and the weighted percentages are in Table One.

Table One

Responses to Survey Items on Conspiracies

2. "Anita Hill was part of an organized conspiracy against Judge Clarence Thomas." Definitely True: 10%. Probably True: 22%. Don't Know (volunteered): 14%. Probably False: 31%. Definitely False: 23%.

3. "The AIDS virus was created deliberately in a government laboratory."

DT: 5% PT: 10% DK: 12% PF: 25% DF: 48%.

4. "The government deliberately spread the AIDS virus in the homosexual community." DT: 3% PT: 8% DK: 9% PF: 26% DF: 54%.

5. "The government deliberately spread the AIDS virus in the black community." DT: 4% PT: 6% DK: 8% PF: 26% DF: 56%.

6. "The Air Force is hiding evidence that the United States has been visited by flying saucers." DT: 12% PT: 29% DK: 11% PF: 25% DF: 23%.

7. "The FBI was involved in the assassination of Martin Luther King."

DT: 9% PT: 33% DK: 16% PF: 22% DF: 20%.

8. "Ronald Reagan and George Bush conspired with the Iranians so that the American hostages would not be released until after the 1980 elections.

DT: 16% PT: 39% DK: 12% PF: 23% DF: 11%.

9. "The Japanese are deliberately conspiring to destroy the American economy." DT: 16% PT: 30% DK: 8% PF: 30% DF: 16%.

10. "The American government deliberately put drugs into the inner city communities." DT: 7% PT: 14% DK: 9% PF: 29% DF: 41%.

Figure 1 shows the number of conspiracies that the respondents believed to be definitely or probably true. Very few (6.2%) of the respondents thought that none of the conspiracies were at least probably true, while 21% thought that two were true and 19% that three were true. These percentages were weighted to correct for the disproportionate sampling of minority respondents.

1Fig. 1. Path Analysis of Determinants of Belief in Conspiracies

African-American respondents were more likely than white or Hispanic respondents to believe in the conspiracies which specifically affected their community. Sixty-two percent of the black respondents believed that it was definitely or probably true that the government deliberately put drugs in black communities. Sixty-eight percent believed that the F.B.I. had been involved in the killing of Martin Luther King. Thirty-one percent believed that the government deliberately put AIDS into the African-American communities. These percentages are reasonably consistent with those from a survey of black church members (Thomas and Quinn, 1991), although our sampling and question wording were different. Because of the smaller number of respondents, percentages based only on the black respondents are subject to an approximate 11% margin of sampling error.

Belief in Conspiracies as a Generalized Dimension

There is remarkably little psychological literature on belief in conspiracy theories. Graumann (1987: 245) observed that this is a "topic of intrinsic psychological interest that has been left to history and to other social sciences." Historians (Groh, 1987) and sociologists (Lipset and Raab, 1970) find that conspiratorial thinking has been central to anti-semitic and other author­itarian belief systems, and to many social movements in both Europe and the United States. A well known historical discussion by Hofstadter (1965) argued that there is a distinct paranoid "style" in American politics. Despite this historical evidence, conspiratorial thinking was not part of the author­itarianism syndrome as originally conceptualized by Adorno, et al. (1950), and has not been addressed in the subsequent research on author­itarianism or related social psychological constructs.

Given this lack of prior empirical research, our first goal was to determine to what extent there is a generalized tendency to believe in conspiracies. The matrix of correlations between the nine conspiracy theory items is shown in Table Two. The table shows a moderate to high level of correlation between many of the items, including several that have no strong logical or topical connection. Most of the correlations are statistically significant, as indicated in the table. A factor analysis determined that the first principal factor explained 37.8% of the variance common to these items. (For the white respondents alone, the first principal factor explained 32.5% of the variance; for the black alone it explained 39.9%). These findings offer strong support for the hypothesis that belief in conspiracies is a generalized ideological dimension.

Table Two

Correlations Between Belief in Specific Conspiracies

Theory 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

1. Kennedy

2. Anita Hill .08

3. Aids Govlab .22** .28**

4. Aids-Gays .11 .24* .69*

5. Aids-Blacks .15* .24** .67* .78**

6. Flying Saucers .24** .15* .21* .19 .11

7. FBI-King .27** .27* .35* .33** .42** .16*

8. Iran Hostages .16* .11 .32** .31** .32** .17** .34**

9. Japanese Econ .07 .29** .20** .23** .22* .03 .24** .17**

10. Drugs-Gov .08 .34** .52** .54** .56** .19** .44** .29** .29**

N of cases: 348 One‑tailed significance: * < .01, ** < .001

Correlates of Belief in Conspiracies

These ten items were used to construct a summated scale of Belief in Conspiracies. This scale had a reliability coefficient (alpha) of .78, confirming that the items have enough variance in common to justify treating them as a scale for this population. The scale was then used to investigate some of the correlates of belief in conspiracies as an attitude dimension.

Belief in Conspiracies was not significantly correlated with gender, educational level or occupational category. There was a weak (r = -.21) negative correlation with age (all correlations mentioned in the text are significant at the .001 level). Attendance at the movie JFK was not correlated with Belief in Conspiracy scores. There was a strong correlation (r = .44) with minority status (defined as white=1, hispanic=2, black=3) and with black race as a dummy variable (r = .42).

The minority status variable was treated as linear for purposes of correlational analysis since this made sense conceptually (hispanics are less stigmatized as a minority than are blacks) and empirically (hispanics were intermediate between whites and blacks in their scores on the variables used in this study). Although the Census treats race and Hispanic ethnicity as two different variables, the sociological reality, at least in New Jersey, is that these are three distinct social groups.

Belief in Conspiracies was significantly correlated (r = .43) with a three-item scale of "Anomia" (alpha = .49) made up of items taken from the General Social Survey of 1990. These items measured the belief that the situation of the average person is getting worse, that it is hardly fair to bring a child into today's world, and that most public officials are not interested in the average man. These items tapped into feelings of discontent with the established institutions of contemporary society which were widely observed by pollsters and pundits in 1991 and 1992. A comparison of scores from this sample with those from the national 1990 sample confirmed that Anomia in this sense was higher in 1992 than in 1990.

The Belief in Conspiracies scale was significantly correlated (r = -.37) with a three-item scale of trust (alpha = .57), which asked whether respon­dents felt that they could trust the police, their neighbors or their relatives. The Belief in Conspiracies scale was also significantly correlated (r = .21) with the item "thinking about the next 12 months, how likely do you think it is that you will lose your job or be laid off."

Table Three shows the means scores of each of the racial/ethnic groups on each of the attitude scales.

Table Three

Means Scores of Racial/Ethnic Groups on Attitude Scales

White Hispanic Black

Scale

Belief in Conspiracies 2.5 2.8 3.3

Anomia 3.4 3.8 4.1

Trust 3.7 3.3 3.1

Note: All scales varied from 1 to 5, with 3 as a neutral score.

Group differences on all three scales were statistically significant at the .001 level by analysis of variance test.

In a multivariate regression analysis of the determinants of Belief in Conspiracies, age and economic insecurity were not statistically significant. The variables which retained significance were minority status, anomia and trust. The multivariate relationships are shown most clearly in the path analysis in Figure 2. Minority status and Anomia are clearly the strongest determinants of Belief in Conspiracies. Minority status is also strongly correlated with Anomia and with lower levels of interpersonal Trust. The correlation between Trust and Belief in Conspiracies was weakened when anomia and minority status were controlled, but it retained statistical sig­nificance.

The correlation between minority status and Belief in Conspiracies was elevated by the fact that our questions included several conspiracies alleged to have been directed specifically at blacks. Black respondents were much more likely to believe in these conspiracies than were white or hispanic respondents. However, the data in Table Four show that minority status was positively correlated with belief in several of the conspiracies which had nothing to do with minorities, such as the Iran Hostage conspiracy and the Japanese conspiracy against the American economy. Minority status was not, however, correlated with the belief that President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy or that the Air Force is hiding evidence about flying saucers. Belief in the Kennedy conspiracy seems to have become part of the conventional wisdom in all sectors of society, while the flying saucers item may tap into a "new age" belief system not measured by the other items.

Among white respondents, belief in the AIDS conspiracies and the Martin Luther King conspiracy were negatively correlated with educational level. There were no other significant bivariate correlations between education and belief in conspiracies. There was no evidence of an interaction effect between educational level and anomia which might have caused an especially high level of belief in certain conspiracies among highly educated anomics. Multivariate regression did show, however, that both education and anomia were significant as determinants of belief in the Kennedy conspiracy for the sample as a whole.

Table Four also shows the correlations between the scales of Anomia and Trust and the ten conspiracy items. The Anomia scale is significantly correlated with all of the items except the one about flying saucers, which supports the idea that this item may tap into a different belief system. The Trust scale is significantly correlated with most of the conspiracies, although the correlations are lower and do not achieve statistical significance in the case of the Kennedy, Anita Hill and flying saucer conspiracies.

Table Four

Correlations of Minority Status, Anomia and Trust with Conspiracy Items

Minority Anomia Trust

Status

Kennedy .03 .17** ‑.10

Anita Hill .28** .18** ‑.10

Aids-govt .43** .36** ‑.31**

Aids-gays .39** .35** ‑.30**

AIDS-blacks .38** .35** ‑.32**

Flying Saucers ‑.05 .11 ‑.11

FBI-King .31** .34** ‑.26**

Iran Hostages .23** .43** ‑.16*

Japanese .19** .28** ‑.19**

Drugs-govt .55** .43** ‑.40**

N of cases: 329 One‑tailed significance: * ‑ .01 ** ‑ .001

Discussion

These data confirm that conspiracy theories are alive and well in contemporary American society. Most respondents are inclined to believe that several of a list of conspiracies are probably or definitely true. The tendency to believe in conspiracies is correlated with anomia, with a lack of trust in other people, and with feelings of insecurity about unemployment. It is also more common among black and hispanic respondents than among white respondents, at least for this New Jersey sample. The correlations with minority status do not disappear when anomia, trust level and insecurity about unemployment are controlled, although it is true that minorities in the sample are more anomic, distrustful and insecure about their job opportunities.

The strong correlation with the scale of Anomia indicates that Belief in Conspiracies is associated with the feelings of alienation and disaffection from the system. Volkan (1985) suggests that during periods of insecurity and discontent people often feel a need for a tangible enemy on which to externalize their angry feelings. Conspiracy theories may help in this process by providing a tangible enemy to blame for problems which otherwise seem too abstract and impersonal. Conspiracy theories also provide ready answers for unanswered questions and help to resolve contradictions between known "facts" and an individual's belief system.

Theoretical Implications

It is puzzling that conspiratorial thinking has been overlooked in the extensive research on authoritarianism which has dominated quantitative work in political psychology since the 1950s. One possible explanation is that much of this work focuses on right-wing authoritarianism (Altmeyer, 1988), while conspiratorial thinking is characteristic of alienated thinkers on both the right and the left (Citrin, et al., 1975; Graumann, 1987; Berlet, 1992). Even more surprisingly, however, conspiratorial thinking has not been a focus of the efforts to measure "left-wing authoritarianism" (Stone, 1980; Eysenck, 1981; LeVasseur & Gold, 1993) or of research with the "dogmatism" concept (Rokeach, 1960) which was intended to overcome the ideological bias in authoritarianism measures.

On a more fundamental level, the difficulty with existing research traditions may be their focus on the content of beliefs rather than the resondent's cognitive processes or emotional makeup. As I have argued elsewhere (Goertzel, 1987), most studies of authoritarianism simply ask people what they believe and then assume that these beliefs must be based on underlying psychological processes which go unmeasured. Since these scales ask mostly about beliefs held by those on the right, it is not surprising that they find authoritarianism to be a right-wing phenomenon. Research with projective tests (Rothman and Lichter, 1982) and biographical materials (Goertzel, 1992), on the other hand, has confirmed that many aspects of authoritarian thinking can be found on both the left and the right.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence, chaos theory and neuropsychology are providing a framework which may enable political psychologists to go beyond this focus on the content of beliefs (Eiser, forthcoming). In Chaotic Logic, Benjamin Goertzel (forthcoming) develops a mathematical model of belief systems as part of a larger model of the structure and evolution of intelligence (B. Goertzel, 1993a, 1993b). In this model, he shows that belief systems can be characterized as dialogical or monological. Dialogical belief systems engage in a dialogue with their context, while monological systems speak only to themselves, ignoring their context in all but the shallowest respects. This mathematical model quantifies the philosophical distinction between the "open" and "closed" mind.

Conspiratorial beliefs are useful in monological belief systems since they provide an easy, automatic explanation for any new phenomenon which might threaten the belief system. In a monological belief system, each of the beliefs serves as evidence for each of the other beliefs. The more conspiracies a monological thinker believes in, the more likely he or she is to believe in any new conspiracy theory which may be proposed. Thus African- Americans, who are more likely to be aware of the Tuskeegee syphillis conspiracy, are predisposed to believe that AIDS may also be a conspiracy, while this idea may seem absurd to people who are unfamiliar with past medical abuses.

Of course, conspiracies are sometimes real and not all conspiracy theories are rooted in monological belief systems. Today, everyone acknowledges the reality of the Watergate cover-up conspiracy because the tape recordings provided such strong evidence. The key issue is not the belief in a specific conspiracy, but the logical processes which led to that belief. As with other belief systems, conspiracy theories can be evaluated according to their productivity (B. Goertzel, forthcoming). To the extent that they are productive, belief systems generate new patterns of thought in response to new issues and problems. Some conspiracy thinkers are productive in this sense. They develop highly idiosyncratic theories and gather extensive evidence to test them. Brock (1993), for example, has recently uncovered a great deal of factual evidence relevant to a hypothesized conspiracy to defeat Clarence Thomas's confirmation to the United States Supreme Court. Although Brock could be characterized as a conspiracy theorist, at least with regard to this case, the structure of his argument is less monological than that of many opponents of this particular conspiracy theory who rely on discussions of wider societal issues which add no new information about the particular case (Morrison, 1992). Of course, dialogical thinkers who sympathize with Anita Hill can find flaws in Brock's case and cite other facts in Hill's defense (Mayer and Abramson, 1993).

Dialogical conspiracy theories, which include extensive factual evidence and details, are testable and may even be disconfirmed by new evidence. On rare occasions, a conspiracy expert may even become a turncoat, abandoning a belief which is not supported by the preponderance of evidence (Moore, 1990). Many people seem to respond to dialogical conspiracy arguments according to their ideological scripts (Goertzel, 1992). In just the New York Times, for example, reviewers of and commentators on Brock's book about Anita Hill found it to be "sleaze with footnotes" (Lewis, 1993), "a book that sinks beneath its bias" (Quindlen, 1993), "well written, carefully researched and powerful in its logic" (Lehmann-Haupt, 1993) and a book with "opinionated and sloppily presented arguments" which nonetheless "badly damages [Anita Hill's] case" (Wilkinson, 1993). A Washington Post reviewer characterized it as "the first salvo in a long and salutary search for the truth of an affair that is taking place alongside the Kennedy assassination and Watergate as one of the nation's unsolved political mysteries" (Shales, 1993).

Monological conspiracy thinkers do not search for factual evidence to test their theories. Instead, they offer the same hackneyed explanation for every problem - it's the conspiracy of the Jews, the capitalists, the patriarchy, the communists, the medical establishment, or whatever. In these cases, the proof which is offered is not evidence about the specific incident or issue, but the general pattern, e.g., the X conspiracy has been responsible for all of our other problems so it is obvious that they must be responsible for this one as well. For example, Crenshaw (1992) observed that black women have been racially and sexually abused by the white male power structure throughout American history. She then simply assumed that Anita Hill's allegations should be viewed as an example of this pattern, never stopping to examine the factual basis for the particular allegations at hand.

To fully test the model of conspiratorial thinking as part of a monological belief system, we would need time series data to determine how change in belief about one conspiracy effects change in belief in another. On a more qualitative level, we would predict that monological conspiracy thinkers would be more likely to defend their beliefs about a given case by citing evidence about other cases. They would be less likely to rely on evidence which is available to everyone in public sources, and more likely to depend on untestable suppositions and abstract principles. It would be difficult to test these hypotheses with questionnaire data, but they could be tested with content analyses of published literature or with depth interviews.

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[1]Rutgers University, Camden NJ 08102.

"Steal it!"

"I think, fundamentally, music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomach-ache afterwards."
-- Trent Reznor (09/29/2005)

Bad-luck wind been blowing on my back...

"Back in my hotel room to write this talk, and I put Glastonbury up on the tv while I write. Springsteen's on. Not a huge fan of the man, though I admire his industry. The man puts in a day's work on stage. And he's sweating, working hard. Got his foot up on an amp as he sings. It's just him, right now, the stage is blacked out, and there's one spot behind him. And he's hot, and it's cold night out there, and he's steaming. And he's just blown the authenticity thing and gone into supermystification, because it looks like he's got an electromagnetic halo, curls of glowing, pearly white light rising up from and playing around his head and shoulders while he stands there in near-silhouette....

He looks like he's The Last Rock Star, the Ascended Master who glows in the dark."

-- Warren Ellis on Bruce Springsteen's Glastonbury 2009 performance.