The News: Between Facts and Conspiracies

In the face of shocking events, many people let themselves be seduced by what scholars have described as the conspiracy theory. According to Popper’s definition, it is the “erroneous conception according to which, any time something bad happens, this must absolutely be blamed on the perverse will of an evil power.” Examples abound. The most striking is that of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon. Conspiracy theorists have gone wild and continue to produce their imaginary theories to demonstrate that, behind those brutal acts of international Islamic terrorism, in fact lies the government of the United States.

Where does this tendency come from? What are the underlying reasons? Why does it still have hold today? In a brief and illuminating text entitled The Syndrome of the Conspiracy, in a book of collected writings that concern September 11 (the impossible conspiracy), Umberto Eco argues that “the psychology of conspiracy stems from the fact that the most clear explanations for many disturbing facts do not satisfy us, and often they do not satisfy us because it hurts to accept them.”

Hannah Arendt, in her masterly The Origins of Totalitarianism, already warned that the masses “don’t believe in the reality of the visible world, of their own experience; they don’t trust their eyes and ears, but only their imagination, that could be blamed on what is apparently universal and consistent in itself.”

To theorize a plot, a conspiracy of evil powers behind facts that are hurting us, is to offer to people’s imagination a more satisfying response than those given ordinarily by a bare and crude description of reality. An alleged secret design fascinates the human mind more than just randomness as a key to the interpretation of events.

It was seen in recent days both in the attack of a deranged man against Silvio Berlusconi and in that, also of a deranged person, against the pope. Not even in these circumstances did the conspiracy theorists hold themselves back. Modern technology (look at the internet) allows us to easily insinuate doubts and suspicions of the providers of information: An adept manipulation or even just a suggested reading, guided, of some images is enough to build conspiracy theories that prevail over the cold and detached observation of facts.

Not even the failed Christmas terrorist attack on the Airbus of Delta Airlines flying from Amsterdam to Detroit escapes from this sort of attention. Some analysts have voiced doubts, given the fact that the name of the inexperienced terrorist from the school of al-Qaida figures in the USA’s list of suspected people. Which is true, but with a minor detail that is not so minor; the list has the large number of 555,000 individuals, and therefore, it is completely plausible that one of them could slip through the controls today, however loose, without setting off any alarm.

Fortunately, modern technology also allows us to expose conspiracy theories. We need someone who makes it their business to verify every piece of information and every theory, and to find the true explanations, getting rid of those that are fabricated and untrue, geared at proving the validity of the theory of conspiracy. The comparison at a distance, even, and especially, on the internet, between conspiracy theorists and non-conspiracy theorists of September 11 is a real task. We are trying to understand the risks that come tied to information in a society that is constantly bombarded with information.

A couple of weeks ago, the conspiracy theorists, that is the supporters of the thesis according to which the terrorist attacks of September 11 were in fact desired by the United States itself, believed they found new proof in support of their thesis in some data coming from a black box of the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon. The case is very interesting because it proves well the mechanisms that can lead many people, in good faith, to believe more in their imagination than their own eyes.

The data from the black box of Flight 77 would indicate that neither openings nor closures in the access door to the pilot cabin of the aircraft were registered; the indication that is registered is in fact that it was closed. The door, therefore, would have remained closed for the whole flight, which means that no terrorist could have been able to access the cabin. Who piloted the airplane into the Pentagon? Faced with such data, the imagination begins to run; everyone can have fun as they please.

But what is the real truth? The side of the anti-conspiracy theorists of September 11 and that of the buffalo hunter Paolo Attivissimo Il Disinformatico (whom we all should regularly consult to really understand how many things are) explain it very well.

The data relative to the access door to the pilot cabin for Flight 77 is listed among the non-functioning parameters. Why? Because, very simply, on the airplane model in question (a Boeing 757 built in 1991), the sensors of the access door to the pilot cabin were not mounted. Sensors were added only to models built after 1997. For this reason, the opening of the door of the cabin could not be reported; there was no sensor. And in such a way, the black box registered it as always being closed even when it wasn’t. The same piece of data “closed” results, in fact, for prior flights of the same aircraft: Approximately 40 hours of flight without the door of the pilot cabin ever being opened, precisely because there was no sensor that revealed when it was opened.

The information given by the conspiracy theorists of September 11, thanks to the counter-information of the anti-conspiracy theorists, therefore has revealed itself for what it really is: a sensational hoax. But in the meantime, cast in the net and picked up by many, it has spread new suspicion.

Whoever would have the patience to analyze all the information on September 11 would realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of cases like this and that no conspiracy interpretation stands the test of facts. Nonetheless, the proponents of this theory, more than 8 years after the event, do not think themselves defeated.

How much other “information” now spread on a global level, but also local (one thinks of the presumed sightings of extraterrestrial objects close to earth), is also a hoax, that is, false news, spread with secondary objectives and not with the goal of correctly informing the population? Certainly, many; too many. There is only one remedy; activate the critical spirit, doubt, do not take as gospel all that glitters, go to verify, always look for another possibility. It is a very difficult and demanding exercise for information professionals; let us imagine it for the people who do not produce information, but only receive it, every day, every hour, every minute.