The dull razor

Ben Bowlin, Matt Frederick, and Noel Brown, in Stuff They Don't Want You to Know, give the distinction I want. Conspiracy realism: some theories have a partial basis in something that actually happened, and then a story grows a pearl around that grain. The grain is often ugly and public. Tuskegee, where Public Health Service doctors watched men go blind and die and did not treat them. Eugenics statutes. Human experimentation. Coups that were later admitted. A phrase, "conspiracy theory," that began as a description and became a way to end a conversation. Most grand theories overshoot. The overshoot is fed by the proven cases the institutions will not sit with. Mocking the pearl and refusing the grain is not reason. It is loyalty to the office that grew the grain.

Here is the razor, and why the popular use of it is dull. Occam's principle says do not multiply entities beyond necessity. It does not say the explanation that names the fewest living people is always the true one. Accident is not a simpler entity than a plan. It is a different claim about human nature. Human beings conspire. They do it in families, in firms, in parties, in churches, in intelligence services, and in lobbies. They do it for profit, for doctrine, for blood, for safety, and for spite. A skepticism that treats coordination as the extraordinary hypothesis, and drift as the ordinary one, has already decided that people stop being people when they get a letterhead. That is not caution. It is a fairy tale with a lab coat.

A lobby is a useful test, because the honest books refuse the cartoon and still refuse the accident. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, define the lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organizations working to move American policy in a pro-Israel direction. They say it is not one movement, that its pieces sometimes fight, and that the agenda defines it. They argue the exceptional aid and diplomatic cover cannot be fully explained as strategy or as moral duty, and that the policies encouraged have been bad for American interests and, on their view, bad for Israel's long-term security. Elvira King's The Pro-Israel Lobby in Europe studies the same kind of pressure inside the European Union. Lenni Brenner's 51 Documents collects the paper of a specific 1930s bargain, the Haavara transfer. I can read those books without pretending a coalition is a weather system, and without pretending every person in a census category is the coalition. Power is particular. It runs through gifts, marriages, fortunes, and stated goals. A surname can matter enormously inside a house. A surname is not a spell that makes every cousin the same man. Both of those sentences are true, and the polite academy usually wants me to drop the first one.

Bloodline is not a detour from this razor. It is one of the ways a plan lasts longer than a meeting. Dynasties hand down money, nerve, doctrine, and access. Philanthropy is often a family wearing a foundation. The workers study is the training arm of that fact: fund the school, fund the journal, call the rival anti-science, and produce a population that can staff the plant. The dull razor is the alibi told about the result. It was an accident. Noticing a foundation is the same hobby as noticing lizard people. I do not think you are a child for noticing. I think the accidental theory is the child's theory, and it has been marketed to adults as sophistication.

What I owe the page is the same thing I owe any other file. Name the office, the gift, the marriage, the statute, the budget. Weigh the pearl. Keep the grain. Do not invent a villain species so the story has a face. Do not invent an accident so the story has no face. I am not the last court on any of these books. I am a reader who thinks coordination is normal, inheritance is normal, and the flinch is the tell.