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| Cartoon by Robert Crumb |
We've had a few 'dirty foul, ref!' moments since the 18th September. Oddities at the counting, unexplained fire alarms, confusion over YES and NO piles, ballot papers blank on the back. After the fact, these are shown in fuzzy images shared on social media. We all get a bit twitched by it.
I'm certain we need to look into things like this but the key thing is evidence. Investigate, build the case, put up the evidence. Let's face it, the first rule in conspiracy is cover-up. The next is plausible deniability. The third is these people are deluded fanatics and can't believed, about anything. If there had to be a fourth, it's break rule number one, leave a fuzzy trail so you can use two and three against your opponents. Five, if you really want a fifth, is distraction.
So there's the challenge, how to unpick the several allegations carefully and rationally without appearing hysterical and deranged. Be informed, be aware, but above all, keep a calm sough.
Now here's another caveat. All politics is based on conspiracy. We form a world view and from it structure the world as we believe it should be. We choose to interpret the work, events and the people in it according this structure. It colours our behaviour and the way we understand the behaviour of others. Nothing wrong with that. It's the human condition.
We form communities, societies, political parties out of this, of course. We live in communities and societies and conformity is a subtle pressure for most of us. There's room for variation and, all being well, live and let live prevails. Politically, though, the motivation is to mould society and community and to garner the power to do it with. People sign up, toe the party lines and there you have a collective of individuals agreeing to interpret the world in a broadly similar way; agreeing to trying to make the world into their image of it. To me, that's a conspiracy.
An uncritical acceptance of the given world view begets the party hack, the unprincipled apparatchik, the prevaricator, the dissembler and, in the end, the bigot, the zealot and the fanatic. That's why I believe we can never uncritically accept demands of loyalty from any political leaders. We have to make loyalty dynamic, a process of inter-related loyalty, us to them, them to us. Otherwise, political belief and commitment, become blind faith. Applied unconditionally, it can lead to the worst of conspiratorial behaviour. Blind eyes, sleight of hand, half-truths and falsification.
What I believe, too, is that truth wins out because it's self-consistent. It is what it is. Lies and attempts to pervert the truth introduce inconsistency. When what you say is true, or you believe it honestly to be so, whatever you say is basically consistent. Of course, argument arises around facts and interpretation, feelings and their expression but, fundamentally you have no need to twist your story to fit a construct. Liars leak their inconsistency as they try to maintain the shape of their imposed construct. Look at Gordon Brown's body language with Dimbleby. More than nerves, that, the sheer effort of a man trying to avoid the pitfalls of his own fabrications.
That's why I think conspiracy is not the opposite of cock-up but its progenitor. The effort of lying is so great that liars end up exhausted keeping up the facade. They thrash themselves against honesty and fair-mindedness until their mendacity is plain to see. As that unravels we have to be sympathetic to those snagged in their net of manipulation, the ones made complicit because they believed the fabrications and became the second hand proponents of it.
So, in the world of referendum conspiracy, let's be sanguine. Some of what we've heard may reflect our own misunderstanding of the process*, or be within a normal margin of human error. It could be the work of misguided individuals or even some clandestine part of a bigger picture. In the last of these, my concern is: the smartest conspiracy of all would set out to feed our suspicions, leak these fuzzy images until we leap up with anger, fuel the indignation until we're distracted. Then they would deny it, call us deranged, take over the moral high ground and leave us mired in an argument manufactured to kill our focus and energy.
So, I repeat, gather information, find facts, the evidence and quietly build a case. You need to have a grasp of the processes and the rules and be able to lay them out. Until then, keep it quiet until there's enough for you to speak out.
In the meantime, we should watch the collected political conspiracies of Westminster. We should be vigilant. I've no doubt they'd rather we were still arguing with the referee while they're trying to break from the pack for a run at the goal.
* Wings Over Scotland published a piece on this, by Douglas Daniel, an official referendum agent for Wings. He said:
"Believe me, if anything dodgy had been happening, this vile cybernat would have been screaming it from the rafters."On lying: an article in the US journal, The Atlantic, Is Lying Bad for Us? discusses why. On page 1, near the end, and on page 2, it touches on how stressful it is and how it distorts the liar's world view.
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