The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [115]
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How to Test a Conspiracy Theory: The Truth About the 9/11 Truthers
My experience with the 9/11 truthers will serve as a case study in how to test the validity of a conspiracy theory. It began after a public lecture in 2005, when I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Mooreish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11.
“You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.
“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said.
“Who is they?” I queried.
“The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment.
“But didn’t Osama and some members of al-Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?”
“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”
“How do you know?” I inquired.
“Because of all the unexplained anomalies surrounding 9/11,” he answered.
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.”
At this point I ended the conversation and declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next—if I cannot explain every single minutia about the events of that fateful eleventh day of September 2001, that lack of knowledge equates to direct proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be financed by GOD (gold, oil, drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor–like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. The evidence is in the details, he explained, handing me a faux dollar bill (“9-11” replacing the “1” and Bush supplanting Washington) chockablock with Web sites. Where had I heard all this before?
In the early 1990s I launched a full-scale investigation of the Holocaust deniers, initially as the cover story for Skeptic magazine and subsequently expanded into a book-length treatment, Denying History.2 The deniers employ this tactic of anomalies-as-proof to great effect. David Irving, for example, claims that there are no holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. So what? So plenty, he says. No holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 means that the eyewitness account of SS guards climbing up on the roof and pouring Zyklon-B gas pellets through the holes and into the gas chamber below is wrong, which means that no one was gassed in Krema 2, which means that no one was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which means that no one was gassed at any prison camp, which means that no Jews anywhere were systematically exterminated by the Nazis. In short, “no holes, no Holocaust,” says David Irving. The slogan was emblazoned on the T-shirts of his supporters at his London trial in which he sued a historian for calling him a Holocaust denier.
No holes, no Holocaust. No melted steel, no al-Qaeda attack. The parallels are equal, and equally flawed. And just as I never imagined that Holocaust denial would wend its way into the mainstream press (Irving’s trial was front-page news for months), after my above conversation with the filmmaker I never imagined that 9/11 denial would get media legs. But now it has legs for days, and so Skeptic magazine published a full rebuttal of all the 9/11 truthers’ claims.3
The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking. It is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts