Every Monday I do a podcast with my chum Toby Young called London Calling. Really, though, it ought to be renamed ‘Cock up or conspiracy?’ because that is the essence of the debate we play out ad nauseam to the surprise and delight of our many listeners each week.
The Team James view is that the war on farmers, the vaccine shenanigans, the looming Central Bank Digital Currencies, the proxy war in Ukraine, the transgender movement and so on are all part of a well co-ordinated conspiracy, planned over decades, by a diabolical Predator Class which wants to kill most of us ‘useless eaters’ and turn the remainder into slaves.
And Team Toby’s view is that it’s all perfectly innocent and well-meaning: just a bunch of bumbling politicians and excitable trillionaires trying to make the world a better place but making a few perfectly excusable mistakes on the way, like, say, killing children with experimental mRNA therapy they don’t need, reinventing the Holodomor in Sri Lanka and transforming Canada, Australia and Ireland into North Korea.
Because the scale of the evil ranked against us is now so blatant I find it increasingly difficult to take Tobes’s version of events seriously. And he doesn’t really help himself when, as he did recently on his free speech website the Daily Sceptic, he cites in support of his argument the phrase ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.’
The phrase, Tobes tells us, is known as ‘Hanlon’s Razor.’ I presume that by giving it a label he wants to persuade us that the phrase has the properties of an axiom - one of those handy rules-for-life which, though unprovable, is so self-evidently true to most reasonable people that it is capable of making a case without the need for complex supporting argument.
But ‘Hanlon’s Razor’ is arrant bollocks. One reason you can tell that it is arrant bollocks is that the phrase makes just as much sense if you reverse it to mean the opposite.
‘Never dismiss as stupidity that which can conceivably be explained by malice.’
Though I’ve adjusted the phrasing slightly to give it a more epigrammatic feel, I think you’ll agree that the axiom - let’s call it Delingpole’s Razor - is no less plausible a proposition than Hanlon’s.
And just who was Hanlon anyway? Was he, perhaps, a philosopher/theologian like William of Ockham, the 13th century Franciscan friar who gave us Occam’s Razor? Was he a great philosopher/scientist in the traditions of Sir Francis ‘Knowledge is Power’ Bacon? Was he a distinguished historian and poet like Robert Conquest, who gave us the still-apposite ‘Law’ that ‘Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing’?
Why no. Turns out - at least so Wikipedia says - that he was just some random bloke, Robert J Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who submitted the statement to a 1980 joke book called Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong. It was later popularised when in 1990 it was included in the Jargon File, a glossary of computer programmer slang.
So: a flippant contribution to a toilet book sequel by someone from the town most famous for being the home of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company has, in the space of four decades, somehow magically acquired the status of a lapidary truth so powerful that merely to brandish it in a sentence is instantly to prove your point.
Hmm. Something fishy here, don’t you think?
Let us, for a moment, conduct a thought experiment. Suppose that this global conspiracy I keep banging on about really does exist: it would require a quite spectacular amount of deviousness and cunning on the part of the people responsible, right?
We can also, I think, agree that the kind of people capable of such a conspiracy would be unimaginably wealthy (as you would be if, say, you’d been quite literally printing your own money from the Federal Reserve every day since 1913) and that they would consequently have more than enough power and influence at their disposal to shape popular discourse via think tanks, advertising, Hollywood, TV, the media, activist pressure groups and so on.
Indeed, we have evidence of this. As Exhibit A, I present the phrases ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’. These originate from a 1967 CIA document, classified ‘Secret’, circulated by ‘Chief, (CA Staff)’ to ‘Chief, Certain Stations and Bases’, headlined ‘Countering Criticism of the Warren Report’. Though its existence has been questioned by the usual suspects as yet another ‘conspiracy theory’, you can read the document here. https://ia800705.us.archive.org/30/items/COUNTERINGCRITICISMOFTHEWARRENREPORT/COUNTERING%20CRITICISM%20OF%20THE%20WARREN%20REPORT.pdf
The document was circulated in the wake of the Warren Commission Report into the assassination of John F Kennedy. It begins: ‘Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy’s assassination there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission’s published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticising the Commission’s findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved…’
It goes on to propose ways of countering this supposed misinformation. ‘Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organisation, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material for countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.’
Among the proposed methods are: ‘to discuss the publicity problem with liaison and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors'); ‘to employ propaganda assets to answer and refuse the attacks of the critics’ [by smearing them as ‘politically interested’, ‘financially interested’ ‘hastily and inaccurate in their research’ etc.]
There’s one paragraph that might have been especially written for Toby Young and his fellow ‘Nothing to see here’ cock-up theorists: ‘Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc.’ How many times have you heard Normie poo-pooing the notion of massive conspiracies because there’s no way the participants would be able to keep them secret? And how many of them are aware that they are simply parroting the talking points laid out for them in a CIA document marked ‘DESTROY WHEN NO LONGER NEEDED’?
But perhaps the most germane parts of the document are the ones concerning ‘friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors’ and ‘propaganda assets.’ Here is clear evidence that the CIA (and similar intelligence organisations) uses the mainstream media and exploits tame journalists (whether unwitting or otherwise) to advance its propaganda narrative. It has hardly beyond the wit of man to infer from this that, besides the phrases ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘conspiracy theory’, the CIA also succeeded in introducing into popular parlance phrases or concepts like ‘Given the choice between cock-up and conspiracy, I’ll always plump for cock-up’ or, indeed, the one Tobes cites as some kind of unimpeachable authority, ‘Hanlon’s Razor.’
Having been a mainstream media journalist myself, I know how these things work. Journalists and columnists are like magpies: if a handy new phrase catches our fancy, we’ll soon start employing them in our own articles even to the point of cliche. One of the more benign examples of this is ‘virtue signalling’, a phrase first used in The Spectator by James Bartholomew which subsequently went global. Then there are established classics, like, ‘As the old Chinese curse has it, ‘May you live in interesting times!’’ Ideally, these phrases should exude an air of dispassionate authority or homespun wisdom; also, it helps if they can pithily sum up in a single sentence a concept that the author can then enlarge on in the course of his well-honed think piece.
Columnists are naturally drawn to variations on the ‘I prefer cock up to conspiracy’ for at least two reasons. One, it makes them sound worldly, amused and nobody’s fool. Here they are laughing at the absurdity of humanity, the incompetence of bureaucracy, the unintended consequences of the best laid plans. And two, it positions them comfortably within the confines of the Overton Window - demonstrating to their editors and their readership that they are not some crazy crank but reliably mainstream.
Again, I know this because I have been there myself. If, for example, you go back through my old Spectator columns, you will surely find cases where I distance myself from conspiracy theorists like ‘9/11 Truthers’. Did I dismiss ‘conspiracy theorists’ because I’d looked carefully into their arguments and found them wanting? Why no! Which busy mainstream media journalist has time to do that? No, I dismissed them for much the same reason as a very right-wing MP might alight on some liberal cause in order to rebut the charge that he is a rabid extremist. ‘Sure I may be a bit out there and eccentric,’ my rejection of ‘conspiracy theories’ would have signalled to my editor and my readers, ‘But I’m not one of those tin-foil hat nutcases who thinks 9/11 was an inside job!’
One of the biggest logical errors made by Cock Up Theorists is to assume that the people who really run the world - The Powers That Be; the Predator Class; what you will - have managed to amass all that money and power while yet somehow remaining at once benign and incompetent. This logical error is grist to the Predator Class’s mill. That’s why they inserted the phrase ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity’ into popular discourse. They know that a lie repeated often enough soon acquires the status of a self-evident truth.
