Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational by Michael Shermer

Author:Michael Shermer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

There is no doubt whatsoever that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and anyone who would join a Fair Play for Oswald Committee needs a reality check. What conspiracists contend is that someone else, or several others, also shot Kennedy, or conspired to order the hit, or bankrolled the job, or orchestrated the shooters in Dealey Plaza, or something. (For those who think Oswald was a patsy set up by the CIA, the KGB, or the Mob, one need only recall the above facts about the man and ask yourself, “Who in their right mind would select someone this unstable and deranged to carry out an assassination of this magnitude?”) Since there is no solid evidence fingering anyone other than Oswald, conspiracists have to go anomaly hunting to find something that does not quite seem to fit the lone-assassin theory. What should we do with such anomalies? Nothing. No theory explains everything, and here our conspiracism principle applies: never attribute to malice what can be explained by randomness or incompetence.

A perfect example of this is the man who shot Oswald, Jack Ruby, who has also been a prime suspect for conspiracists, particularly because of his affiliation with the Mob. Ruby told investigators exactly why he shot Oswald: in order to save “Mrs. Kennedy the discomfiture of coming back to trial.” He said his decision was a spur of the moment thing after recovering from two days of grief-stricken sadness, saying of Kennedy, whom Ruby loved as his president, that he did not understand “how a great man like that could be lost.” Those who knew Ruby described him as temperamental and periodically violent. Vincent Bugliosi summarized what many people said about Oswald’s assassin: “FBI agents may have interviewed close to one hundred people who knew Ruby well, and in their published reports in the Warren Commission volumes the reader would be hard-pressed to find one interviewee who did not mention Ruby’s temper, or at least how ‘very emotional’ he was.”24

So much of conspiracy theorizing depends on eyewitness accounts, but we know from decades of research in cognitive psychology that memories are not an accurate, high-fidelity recording of events. As psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown in experimental settings and real-world cases, peoples’ memories can be easily manipulated by simple suggestion. For example, the choice of adjectives eyewitnesses to an automobile accident used to describe it—such as “smashed” instead of “collided”—influenced the witnesses’ estimates of the speed at which they remembered the cars traveling.25 Loftus’s most famous experiment involved planting a false memory in an adult of getting lost in a mall as a child. A third of her subjects “remembered” being lost in the mall, most filling in rich details of what the mall looked like, what people were wearing, what happened and when, and even the emotions of being lost and then found.26 This for an event that never even happened!

Emotionally charged events distort memory even more—and being present during the assassination of a president whose head is blown open by a bullet surely counts as an affecting event.

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