Words only mean what we understand them to mean, and if we use them to mean all sorts of things at once, they end up meaning nothing.
“Conspiracy” is the word that has been stretched the most in recent years on the torture racks of social media and the internet.
National Public Radio recently ran a headline that would have been incomprehensible, or at least shocking, just 15 years ago: “Haley’s rise in polls draws Trump’s birther conspiracy, again.”
The author, discussing former President Donald Trump’s baseless speculations that former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley might be a foreigner ineligible to run for president, alternates between calling Trump’s unhinged rantings a “conspiracy” and a “conspiracy theory.”
“Conspiracy,” for a few hundred years, described a plan hatched, usually in secret, and executed by many people working together. A “conspiracy theory” was the claim that a “conspiracy” was behind something officially chalked up to chance, nature, or a lone actor. It is a “conspiracy theory” that the CIA created crack cocaine, and it is a “conspiracy theory” that Jews control the weather.
Nowadays, though, writers use “conspiracy” and “conspiracy theory” interchangeably. This is as revealing as it is unfortunate. It almost presumes that there are no actual conspiracies in the world and that any talk of a “conspiracy” is simply a “conspiracy theory.”
This raises the question: Why should “conspiracy theory” be a term of derogation?
Tasmanian professor David Coady explored this. “The bad reputation of conspiracy theories is puzzling,” Coady recently wrote in the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory.
“After all, people do conspire. That is, they engage in secretive collective behavior which is illegal or morally questionable. Conspiracies are common in all societies throughout history, and have always been particularly common in politics. Most people conspire some of the time, and some people (e.g., spies) conspire almost all the time.”
Theft from department stores these days is often not a lone-wolf crime but part of an organized crime ring — a conspiracy. Street gangs and the KKK exist, and the people in these little platoons conspire to do bad things.
What’s more, Trump’s birther theory about Haley doesn’t posit any conspiring by anyone.
In the muddy parlance of our muddled times, a theory can become a “conspiracy theory” without any theorizing about multiple people getting together to do a bad thing or cover up anything. Now, a “conspiracy theory” just means a “wacko theory,” and this gets shortened, at NPR at least, to “conspiracy.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
But we can go further back — the Latin roots of “conspire” are not at all negative. Con is about people doing things together, and spire comes from the same word for breathing, for hope — the root of inspiration. Hoping together with could be a positive thing.
Nowadays, though, a conspiracy doesn’t involve any con or spiring. It’s yet another word to lose its meaning, making it harder to communicate clearly. I wonder who’s behind this pernicious trend.
