Everyone Is a Conspiracy Theorist: Rethinking a Loaded Term

The following is adapted from The Flying Oil Tanker by Zagloul Kadah.

Language evolves. The meaning of words shifts constantly to reflect the demands of society and culture, which is why dictionaries never stop changing. Yet few phrases have transformed as dramatically as "conspiracy theory," which went from a neutral, harmless description into one of the most divisive terms in the English language.

The phrase seems to have first appeared in America in 1883, when Charles Astor Bristed used it in a letter to The New York Times. Back then it simply meant a plausible postulate of a conspiracy, carrying none of the scorn it often carries today. That changed in the sixties, after the Warren Commission Report on the Kennedy assassination, when the term was suddenly deployed to dismiss any explanation that strayed from the official one.

In this book, we use the phrase in its original, honest sense, following philosopher Charles Pigden. As Pigden observes, calling someone a conspiracy theorist is meant to suggest that he is irrational, paranoid, or perverse, and that his ideas are too silly to deserve a serious response. But this is intellectually dishonest. A conspiracy theory, Pigden reminds us, is simply a theory that posits a conspiracy, a secret plan by some group to influence events through partly secret means.

By that neutral definition, every historically literate person is a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who accepts what happened on the Ides of March, or the assassinations of Archduke Franz Ferdinand or Tsar Alexander II, subscribes to a conspiracy theory. You cannot mount a coup or an assassination without conspiring.

This reframing changes everything about how we discuss 9/11. There are not one but two conspiracy theories at play. The first is the official account upheld by the United States government: that nineteen young members of al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, hijacked four airliners. The second is the account offered by the 9/11 truth movement. Both are conspiracy theories. The only honest question is which one is more plausible, not whether one deserves the label at all.

Once we see that clearly, the pejorative use of the term collapses into what it has always been: a propaganda tool. Media outlets have hailed one theory as truth while branding the other delusion or even treason. The Huffington Post once removed an article by Jesse Ventura for promoting a conspiracy theory, apparently never noticing that its own policy would also forbid endorsing the government's account.

So, encouraged by thinkers like Pigden, Cass Sunstein, and David Ray Griffin, we will use the word conspiracy without fear. We will simply place the two theories side by side and let you decide, adding a little flavor by calling our story the veritable conspiracy.

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For more on how the term "conspiracy theory" shapes what we are allowed to question, you can find The Flying Oil Tanker on Amazon.

Serial entrepreneur, engineer, and scholar of Islamic theology Zagloul Kadah has founded several successful companies and written three books about comparative religion and Islam. Born and raised in Syria, Zag came to the United States to earn a BS degree in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MS degree in electronics from San José State University. A silver life master in bridge, Zag has a passion for theology that has driven him to write three books about comparative religion and Islam. He presently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family, including three sons and eight grandchildren.