TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 03, 2009
New Zealand politics and conspiracy theories
My second essay for the Conspiracy Theory paper I enrolled in this semester answered the question, "What is the evidence (if any) that conspiracy belief is increasing, and why might this be the case?" To answer this question I studied the increasing popularity of conspiracy theories in political discourse, with a particular focus on the 2005 election.
Although the paper is a philosophy paper, the second half of our course looked at thepsychological reasons people become attracted to conspiracy theories. While my first essay looked at the question of whether we can evaluate a conspiracy theory to be true, this essay addresses the question of why such theories emerge in the first place - whether true or false.
In this essay I address a lot of theories that I, personally, have been open to and even committed to in the past, and which I am still partial to at present. Indeed, the idea that organised groups of people are discreetly acting for their own gain in the public domain, or for the purpose of one specific lobby, is not exactly foreign to at least the mindset of the generation I belong to. I can remember very clearly that careers advice at school suggested politics as a good forum in which to advocate for rights you believe in, rather than a forum to discuss and represent some sort of common good.
Indeed, some of the psychological theories presented in this article implicitly assume that groups of people are very consciously and publicly asserting themselves for a certain post-materialist, ideological agenda. The irony is they do so believing it is in the interests of the community as a whole, and thus think the term "conspiracy" is not appropriate. What is certain is that politics today is dominated by strategies very conscious of PR (public relations) and PC (political correctness). In embracing these strategies parties choose to keep some things as secret as possible knowing that public knowledge would be adverse to progress.
Nefarious and evil-minded conspiracies? Maybe not. But conspiracies nonetheless.
Secret agendas
The rise of the paranoid style in New Zealand politics
Allan Chesswas
30 October 2009
“Politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers…[demonstrating] how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority…a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing…a paranoid style, because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”
- Richard Hofstadter, 1964
These could easily have been the words of a New Zealand political commentator following the 2005 election. The Labour party was allegedly at the mercy of a “formidable political machine,” a group of “front bums” aka “The Labour Party Wimmins Division,” responsible for an anti-men agenda at the heart of government policy. But that wasn’t all – Labour were also accused of a “radical homosexual agenda” which called even the sexual orientation of the prime minister and her husband into question (Wishart, 2005; 2006; 2007; 2008; Tamaki, 2005).
But, just in case anyone thought the National party was safe, just two weeks out from the election they, too, were accused of harbouring conspiracy. Leader Don Brash was not only fronting a far-right wing conspiracy of ACT and business roundtable members – he was also working closely with the fundamentalist sect The Exclusive Brethren (Hager, 2006). Both Ian Wishart, commenting on the left, and Nicky Hager, commenting on the right, proceeded to publish # 1 best sellers detailing these conspiracies.
But this was no strange flash-in-the-pan as far as conspiracy theories endemic to New Zealand are concerned. Both Wishart and Hager had been publishing bestselling conspiracy non-fiction since the mid-1990s, and Wishart had founded his Investigate magazine in 2000. It would be fair to say, though, that the general elections of September 2005 saw something of a climax for conspiracy theory in New Zealand. Wishart and Hager were certainly prominent already, but in the build up to the 2005 election their work and rhetoric became increasingly popular. What’s more, in the same month as the election pornography mogul Steve Crowe teamed up with the controversial Jonathan Eisen to launch Uncensored, New Zealand’s first conspiracy theory magazine.
A flourishing style
The growing popularity of conspiracy belief has been observed by academics in a wide range of fields, from media studies, cultural studies and anthropology, to history, philosophy and psychology (Arnold, 2008; Marcus, 1999; Knight, 2002; Pipes, 1997; Keeley, 1999; Basham, 2001; Goertzel, 1994; Leman & Cinnirella, 2007).
Arnold (2008), reflecting on much of the conspiracy theory literature, surveys the increased use and popularity of conspiracy theory themes in film in television since the post-war period. He argues that increased interest in themes of conspiracy theory resulted initially from the paranoid climate of the Cold War period, with a focus on the “Red Menace.” Conspiracy themes in film and television then entered a second phase, a more introspective and cynical phase, rsulting from the exposure of government cover-ups surrounding the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair. Finally, a third phase began in the 1990s which is not only cynical, but reflects a strong sense of disaffection. Productions such as JFK, The X-Files, The Trueman Show and The Matrix portrayed “conspiracies of enormous scale and complexity suggest not only that some parts of society should not be trusted, but that engaging with them at all is almost pointless” (p170, 171).
While Arnold’s thesis seems compelling, it must be observed that the postwar period also saw the rapid growth of the use of television and film as a medium of popular thought. Before this time, access to such media was still a luxury. The comparative absence of conspiracy themes might have reflected the lack of a populist audience – conspiracy theory has long been identified as a populist phenomenon. While conspiracy themes were absent from film, television and newsmedia, they may well have been rife at the pub and in the pulpit. Arnold’s project takes advantage of written and recorded evidence that the oral examples of the bar and the church can never afford us.
It could also be argued that the absence of conspiracy theory in media was due to the dominance of conspiracy beliefs in actual life and politics, in the early years of film and television. From the paranoid concerns of alliance and axis powers which sparked the Great War, to the conspiracy theories inspired across Europe by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax, to the actual conspiracies of Soviets and Nazis in the mass genocides of the age. For conspiracy theories to also then dominate film and television would surely have been something of an overkill.
However, Arnold’s observation, that themes in conspiracy theory have become increasingly cynical and disaffected in relation to the powers meant to represent their interests, adds immense value to his thesis. Psychological literature on the subject argues for an increased sense of disaffection as a leading motivation for people to adopt a conspiratorial view of the world, and employ the language of conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy belief in New Zealand
Right-wing conspiracies
An attempt to answer the question of whether or not conspiracy belief has increased at a global level, or in the West, or in the USA, seems a rather ambitious project, and the authors referred to should be commended. In this essay I will focus on the New Zealand context, particularly cultural and political discourses employed in the media in the last 20 years, with reference also to important publications and institutions referred to in the media. I will use this analysis to demonstrate an increase in conspiracy beliefs in New Zealand over this time. I will also explore how the psychological literature on the topic confirms that this is exactly what we should expect.
The lineage of 21st Century New Zealand political conspiracy theories can be traced back to the 1994 Winebox Inquiry, sparked by Winston Peters’ allegations of serious international fraud on the part of both business and government agencies. The details were published in Wishart’s 1995 book The Paradise Conspiracy.
The Winebox Inquiry of Peters and Wishart set the tone for right-wing conspiracy plots. In 1996 Nicky Hager published Secret Power - New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network, revealing New Zealand’s role in an international intelligence organization. This organization could, as David Lange observed in the forward, “command compliance from us while withholding from us the benefits of others" intelligence.” Hager went on to publish a number of books addressing similar right-wing conspiracies: Secrets and Lies (1999), Seeds of Distrust (2002) andThe Hollow Men (2006).
Secrets and Lies served as an expose of political lobbying by state-owned-enterprise Timberlands, and was capitalized on by the Green Party, who made the termination of Timberlands party policy, as did Labour. Three years later, again at election time, Hager published Seeds of Mistrust, a conspiracy theory about a government cover-up of a case of GE contamination. News affairs presenter John Campbell quickly took up the case with Helen Clark, without her being prepared, and was the first to suffer Clark’s “little creep” invective (Clark also described Wishart as a creep four years later) (Orsman, 2002; Berry, 2006). The Greens again took advantage of Hager’s work, calling the government to account for what became known as “Corngate,” and refusing to support any party in coalition that would lift the moratorium on genetic engineering.
Pink Think
Theories of left-wing conspiracies on the other hand, though already in circulation, certainly did not have the same profile. Helen Clark’s successful challenge for Mike Moore’s Leadership of the Opposition, after the 1993 election, was “characterized as a “pointy-headed lesbian plot,” and a discursive chain of equivalence was constructed between the challengers in the Labour Party, homosexuality, feminism, socialism, intellectualism, and “political correctness”” (Ingraham, 2004). It was this 1993 “pointy-headed lesbian plot” theory that in time became the 2005 “radical homosexual agenda,” obsessed with “political correctness” and “social engineering.” So compelling was this theory that in 2005 it was at least alluded to by everyone from the leadership of the opposition to a member of Clark’s own cabinet. It became a dominant theme of Investigatemagazine, and of Wishart’s bestselling Eve's Bite (2007) and Absolute Power (2008).
New Zealand’s Fifth Labour government came to power under Helen Clark in November 1999. Before the year was out the anti-socialist slogan Helengrad was already coined, and in the New Year Wishart founded his Investigate Magazine (Cresswell, 2008). The terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001, often said to have upped-the-ante of conspiracy beliefs considerably across the globe, had the same effect on New Zealand. In the wake of the attacks Jenny Shipley was ousted by Bill English as Leader of the Opposition, criticized for failing to respond adequately in expressing united support for the US after the events (Mold, 2001). As issues of race and immigration came to the forefront of political debate, “political correctness” became a useful invective against a government unwilling to address the issues, when politicians felt they were being shut down. With the 2002 election approaching Winston Peters in particular picked up on this. He described the nation’s apology to Samoa for colonial injustices as “politically correct,” and described the country as “cowed into a cringing silence by the dictates of misguided politeness and political correctness” (Ward, 2002; Peters, 2002).
But it wasn’t until 2003, with the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act, that the charge of “social engineering” became a common invective against the Labour party. The term had a well-established history already, but it was United Future leader Peter Dunne who made particular mileage with the term. Dunne was leading a party which, like New Zealand First, had taken advantage of the MMP system, and drawn support from Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians disaffected by the two-party system. Embarrassed as coalition partner with the government’s legislation, Dunne accused Labour of “prioritising political correctness over political reality” (2003).
The success of Dunne and United Future came at the same time as the Maxim Institute emerged as a force in conservative political discourse. The Prostitution Reform Act had the effect of sending the conservative vote into overdrive. Political correctness became more than just a buzzword or a slogan. Political correctness “expert” Frank Ellis featured in Investigate in 2003, and the following year was a guest speaker at Maxim’s annual forum, titled Political correctness: End of an error. Well-known televangelist Brian Tamaki prophesied his church would put an end to the nation’s godlessness and rule New Zealand within 5 years, and quickly established the Destiny New Zealand party with Richard Lewis as leader. Tamaki accused the government of harbouring a “"sinister" gay agenda” driven by a “spirit of homosexuality” (Tunnah, 2003).
But concern about political correctness and social engineering wasn’t confined to the religious right. At the same time Boxing Bill English became the Leader of the Opposition, Kiwi blokedom went through something of a revival. West Coast brewer and long-time humourist Paddy Sweeney published Good Bastards Book One: The Larrikins Guide to Success in November 2001, and began the weekly Good Bastards News which often criticized political correctness as the bane of good sense and good humour.
At the same time Marc Ellis was demonstrating his own form of Larrikinism on Ric Salizzo’sSports Café. Ellis became famous for his risqué adage “sweating like a rapist,” for founding “national nude day,” his appearance drunk on Sports Café, enticing streakers with financial incentives, and then offering greater rewards for women streakers (Rae, 2002; Taylor, 2008). And when he was accused of being sexist and politically correct he’d offer even more to a “black” “female” “midget”. This echoed Winston Peters’ proximate criticism of policy surrounding the immigration of homosexuals, quipping “We are going to have a blonde dwarf category shortly” (2002).
In October 2006 Ellis released his autobiography Crossing the Line, and in doing so criticized New Zealanders for embracing political correctness with “such bloody vigour.” As journalist Diana Wichtel observed, “If anything has him losing his sense of humour it’s the whole PC world gone mad…disappointingly conventional coming from the man who launched International Nude Day, once won top sporting honours for chasing a giant cheese downhill and has a penchant for moustaches” (2006). The following month Waikato University released Sports Comedy Shows and New Lad Culture in New Zealand: The Sportscafe Guide to Kiwi Masculinity, and claimed that Ellis was part of a global phenomenon of “new laddism,” in which shows like Sports Café were preserved as “"the last bastion where men are safe from the threat of women", as represented by female political leaders and feminism generally,” and that “the highlighting of discourses around toughness in Sportscafe embodies a reassertion, if not desperate clinging to, values that are culturally perceived to be under threat.”
It was into this climate that David Benson-Pope introduced the Civil Union Bill in June 2004 (Benson-Pope, 2004). Brian Tamaki quickly organized the famous Enough Is Enough rally and in August marched on parliament with thousands in tow (Armstrong, 2004). Earlier in the year Wishart had published an article which profiled gay Labour MP Tim Barnett, his personal policy agenda with regards to homosexual rights, and Helen Clark’s willingness to encourage government support to it. The Civil Union Act was successfully passed into legislation at the end of the year (Thomson & Berry, 2004). Inducing much the same effect as the Prostitution Reform Act, the stage was set for the 2005 election.
The Tamihere Interview
Early in 2005 Wishart struck again, publishing an interview with John Tamihere in the April edition of Investigate. Tamihere had recently resigned from cabinet after suffering what he called an “orchestrated campaign to bring him down.” The Wishart interview was his revenge.
Wishart & Tamihere began the interview reflecting on the tension between the “union” and “activist” factions in the Labour party, and the ascendancy of the latter under Clark.
Then Wishart asked this question;
“This goes back to the great conspiracy theory. Most people like you and I can’t get our heads around the idea that someone can sit in a darkened room and figure out where they want to be in fifteen years. Where do they get the time to do that?”
Tamihere responded with anecdote after anecdote detailing his take on the “‘machine’ on the ninth floor”:
“They don’t have families. They’ve got nothing but the ability to plot. I’ve gotta take my kid to soccer on Saturday, they don’t. So they just go and have a parlez vous francais somewhere and a latte, whereas we don’t get to plot, we’re just trying to get our kids to synchronise their left and right feet. They don’t even think about that.”
“It’s formidable. It’s got apparatus and activists in everything from the PPTA all the way through. It’s actually even built a counterweight to the Roundtable – Businesses for Social Responsibility. Its intelligence-gathering capabilities are second to none.”
When asked to identify “the most powerful network in the Labour executive,” Tamihere observed:
“The Labour Party Wimmins Division. Whether it’s bagging cops that strangle protestors they should be beating the proverbial out of, or – it’s about an anti-men agenda…”
“Where else in the world do Amazons rule?... I don’t mind front-bums being promoted, but just because they are [women] shouldn’t be the issue. They’ve won that war.”
Tamihere’s observations echo the Waikato University thesis quoted earlier, of a surge in female political power so strong that mens’ very identity and idea of masculinity was under threat, let alone their political power. The media bore the brunt of Tamihere’s outburst along with the Labour Party, described as “utterly and totally useless, sycophantic.” Perhaps this was why media coverage was devoted more to scolding a politically incorrect and rebellious Tamihere than to the content of his confessions.
The appearance of two separate biographical articles profiling Ian Wishart two weeks later certainly suggested the interview had attracted much attention (Barton, 2005; Masters & Dixon, 2005). What was notable about these articles, though, was the labeling of Wishart as a conspiracy theorist. To be fair, Chris Barton did this quite self-consciously, observing “there are two popular ways to undermine the credibility of Ian Wishart's works - by branding him a conspiracy theorist or a member of the religious right.” Barton’s article was saturated with a latent understanding of the conspiracy theory dynamic. Even the title – Jumping at every shadow – suggested an understanding of the role of hyperactive agency detection in conspiracy theorizing.
While Barton’s article was quite critical and patronising, Masters & Dixon’s was more optimistic. Former TV3 chief-of-staff and colleague Steve Bloxham was quoted as saying that while “maybe three out of four conspiracy theories remain conspiracy theories…[but] when you hit that fourth, it's a big story. I mean, Watergate was once a conspiracy - that's probably what I'm saying.” Bloxham’s observation echoes the pragmatic “studied agnosticism” of philosophers of conspiracy theory such as Pigden (1995), Basham (2001) and Coady (2003). But less optimistic was an observation of NBR editor and colleague Neville Gibson, when asked about the demise of his relationship with Wishart since the launch of Investigate. He pointed to Wishart's swing to a “fundamentalist line, particularly on issues such as the Creation,” and observed that “someone who undergoes such a shift in ideas usually turns their journalism to suit those ideas.”
Tammy Bruce and Brian Tamaki
It is clear, though, that many accepted the interview at face value. In May a Herald article explored the question “Have today's women got the jump on men?” and in June ex-NOW lesbian and famed author Tammy Bruce visited New Zealand to speak about “the fact that today's feminist leaders are more concerned with pursuing a socialist agenda than actually helping women” (Collins, 2005; Paterson, 2005).
In a review of Bruce’s The New Thought Police and The Death of Right and Wrong, Kiwi journalist Sandra Paterson quoted Bruce;
“I have seen first-hand how the agendas of feminism, black power, multiculturalism and gay advocacy have been consciously used to break down morals and values that the activists saw as obstructions to their achieving, first, cultural acceptance and, ultimately, cultural domination.”
Paterson observed;
“[Bruce] still considers herself a liberal - but wants to rescue that label from the people she calls the Left Elite: that is, the decision-makers in feminist, gay and civil rights movements as well as many of those in the judiciary, the entertainment industry, the media and American university faculties.”
“Bruce talks about how people are increasingly afraid to say what they really think, lest they offend someone or be branded homophobic, racist or sexist. Unless of course the topic of conversation is the religious and/or conservative, who she describes as the new, approved target.”
And while Tammy Bruce was touring the country, Brian Tamaki was busy with his Nation Under Siege tour, promoting his new party Destiny New Zealand and promising to rescue the nation from “a government gone evil,” “a radial homosexual agenda,” a “modern day witchcraft media,” and the general “retreat of religion in New Zealand” (Tamaki, 2005) This sudden flourishing of exteme rhetoric and conspiracy theory left National MP Wayne Mapp’s observations that same month, onThe Problem of Political Correctness, seem mild by comparison (Mapp, 2005). Opposition Leader Don Brash also took the opportunity to present the National Party as representing “mainstream New Zealand” in contrast to Labour’s focus on the cares and concerns of minority sector groups at the expense of the interests of the majority (Berry, 2005). Indeed, Brash loved Mapp’s speech so much that before the year was out he’d appointed him the National Party Political Correctness Eradicator (Thomson, 2005).
The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
July and August came and went relatively calmly in contrast, at least until the last weekend of August. Sunday newspapers carried stories claiming Brash’s successful coup of the National Party leadership was due to Act and the Business Roundtable backing. The source of the story turned out to be Nicky Hager, who published it a year later as The Hollow Men.
However the Green Party, traditionally quick to latch onto Hager conspiracy theories, was quickly overtaken by another conspiracy. Responding to a widely publicized flyer critical of the Greens, The Green Delusion, the party quickly assumed National Party responsibility for what was considered a highly inaccurate and inflammatory piece of work (Fitzsimmons, 2005). The flyer proffered yet another hidden socialist agenda conspiracy theory, this time aimed at the Greens instead of Labour. When it was discovered to be the work of the Exclusive Brethren, of all people, collusion was quickly assumed. Although Brash denied knowledge that the Brethren were responsible for the $500,000 campaign, he later admitted to having met with the Brethren (Thomson, Young & Dye, 2005). Though not as sophisticated as the theories of Wishart and Hager, media and lobby groups went out of their way to exploit this connection in the same vein.
So, whether Wishart or Tamihere, Bruce or Tamaki, Hager or Fitzsimmons, New Zealanders entering the polling booths on September 17 must have been aware of at least one of these conspiracy theories. It is telling just how conspiratorial peoples’ beliefs had become, that only days before the election New Zealand’s first ever conspiracy theory magazine, Uncensored, was launched. It was also telling that the chief financier behind this was New Zealand’s biggest (only) pornography mogul. And within a week of the election a photograph was distributed among the right showing the prime minister’s husband Peter Davis kissing a well-known gay Aucklander, alluding to long-running conspiracy theories about Clark and Davis’ marriage as a PR front for two “heterosexuals” with an unusually strong interest in gay rights (Wishart, 2006).
The psychological literature
A number of themes identified by social and political commentators reporting these events reflect what much of what the psychological literature has to say on the subject of conspiracy belief (Billig, 1984; 2001; Kruglanski, 1987; Inglehart, 1987; Moscovici, 1987; Goertzel, 1994; Irwin, 1999). Taken together, these authors suggest conspiracy beliefs are typically caused by what Kruglanski describes as an attributional error – ascribing fault for undesirable states of affairs externally, usually to minority groups, in order to protect one’s own sense of self-esteem. A plan of action against the conspirators is thus promoted by the theorist, typically a political plan. A heroic course of action is imagined that exposes and brings down the conspiracy, again enhancing the theorist’s sense of self-esteem. These political projects most commonly appear at the extreme Right and extreme Left of the political spectrum, and the use of conspiracy theory serves as a rhetorical device to fuel political debate, particularly among those who Inglehart describes as “Postmaterialist.”
Quoting Zuckerman (1979), Kruglanski observes that attribution errors often result from anxiety to protect one’s self-esteem, where “success tends to be ascribed internally, and failure externally” (p222). He notes that conspiracy theories are often formed to satisfy “one’s wish to have a clear-cut unambiguous answer concerning a given topic.” This need for epistemic structure prompts the “freezing of the epistemic process upon an early conception rather than inducing an extensive probing and validation process in which this conception is critically examined against alternative possibilities” (p226). Kruglanski observes this need for structure “is likely to be heightened in circumstances in which urgent action is required necessitating cognitive orientation and guidance. A conspiracy theory that forewarns the members of a group concerning an advanced plot aiming against them introduces just that kind of urgency, and therefore a need for a structure, in turn disposing the group to accept the theory.” Further, acting on a conspiracy theory and exposing the conspiracy promises not only to bring about a desirable state of affairs, but gives one an opportunity to exhibit resourcefulness and competence, contributing a great deal to one’s sense of self-esteem (p227).
Billig (1984) shows that conspiracy theories as rhetorical devices are powerful for their ability to compel a moralistic response against those accused of conspiracy. Drawing on the use of Zionist conspiracy theories within anti-Semitic discourses, he shows how these theories: a) identify the conspirators as symbols of evil, b) relieve the theorist of any sense of guilt for injustices against the conspirators, c) provide a rhetorical device that is difficult to disprove, and thus difficult to disqualify from debate, and d) extend the boundary markers of opinion. On the latter point, Billig (2001) demonstrates the way that conspiracy theories on extreme white supremist websites make the Klu-Klux-Klan’s website seem mild by comparison.
Moscovici (1987) illustrates the way that conspiracy theories are generally invectives against minority groups, observing “The very existence of a minority already constitutes a conspiracy…the conspiracy mentality is based on this fact, which none can deny or disprove” (p158). But not only is conspiracy theory directed at minority groups, it also typically finds its home within minority groups. Inglehart argues that conspiracy theories typically emerge when groups experience “repeated frustration in their attempts to attain important goals, for reasons that seem inexplicable unless one assumes that the rest of society is united in, or dominated by, some kind of conspiracy” (p231). Echoing Kruglanski, Inglehart (1987) observes “…an alternative to the unwelcome conclusion that one’s goals were not shared by the rest of one’s society would be to attribute one’s frustration to a political conspiracy” (p232). Thus, “the extreme Left would attribute their frustrations to a conspiracy by the forces of the Right, while the extreme Right postulated a conspiracy of the Left…[and therefore] both would perceive their society’s institutions as being controlled by secretive and unfriendly forces” (p233). Inglehart discusses the rise in “postmaterialist values” in society over the previous two decades, and notes that while traditionally the Right and Left both emphasized materialist goals – economic and physical security, the new Postmaterialist generation place greater emphasis on “self-expression.”
Inglehart observes;
“[Postmaterialists] emphasise fundamentally different goals from those that have long prevailed in industrial society, and that continue to be predominant in most of the established social institutions. As a result, Postmaterialists are relatively unlikely to be successful in having their goals adopted by key institutions, and consequently, relatively likely to distrust these institutions or even to perceive them as conspiratorial.”
Citing evidence from surveys carried out in a number of European countries, Ingleheart argues that;
“as a result of the historically unprecedented prosperity and the absence of war in Western countries prevailing since 1945, the postwar generation in these countries would place less emphasis on economic and physical security than older groups, who had experience the hunger and devastation of World War II, the Great Depression, and perhaps even World War I. Conversely, the younger birth cohorts would give higher priority to nonmaterial needs such as a sense of community and the quality of the environment.”
Goertzel (1994) demonstrated, in surveying 348 residents of southwestern New Jersey about belief in well-known conspiracy theories, that alienation and disaffection are strongly correlated conspiratorial belief. Goertzel observed that “minority status and anomia are clearly the strongest determinants of belief in conspiracies,” and that “…belief in conspiracies is associated with the feelings of alienation and disaffection from the system” (p737, 729).
Irwin’s (1999) Introduction to Parapsychology explores four theoretical psychological explanations for belief in the paranormal, and discusses paranormal belief in terms that demonstrate strong transferable value to the psychology of conspiracy belief. Like paranormal beliefs, conspiracy beliefs are often seen to be a “misinterpretation of normal events as paranormal,” and the result of “selective discounting of information not compatible with a paranormal interpretation” (p280). Irwin identifies four main schools of thought in the psychology of paranormal belief: 1) The Social Marginality Hypothesis, 2) The Worldview Hypothesis, 3) the Cognitive Deficits Hypothesis, and 4) the Psychodynamic Functions Hypothesis. The Social Marginality hypothesis concerns the themes of disaffection already discussed. The Worldview hypothesis has strong allusions to Irwin’s study of postmaterialist politics, arguing that paranormal beliefs are the result of a “broader worldview…characterized by a highly subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large” (p285). The Cognitive Deficits hypothesis merely poses stupidity and educational deficits as determinative of paranormal belief, while the Psychodynamic Functions hypothesis argues paranormal beliefs merely serve psychological needs pertaining to “a personal philosophy of life,” “a sense of self-understanding,” or reflecting perhaps a substitute for a sense of social alienation, or alternatively the result of an acute sense of narcissism.
Cause for conspiracy theory
Winebox origins
Most of these theories help in some way to explain the increased popularity of conspiracy belief in New Zealand in the last 20 years, and are reflected in available social and political commentary on the subject. The comments of Business Roundtable Executive Director Roger Kerr and Chairman Douglas Myers on the Winebox Inquiry conspiracy theory are useful in this sense. It is important to note Kerr and Myers are not speaking from an academic platform, as leaders of a pro-business lobby injured by the inquiry. Nonetheless, their explanations for the willingness of Kiwis to embrace conspiratorial thinking have value regardless of whether or not the conspiracy actually occurred.
Kerr (1996) discusses the Winebox affair as one of a genre of “myths about the market…result[ing] from sloppy thinking,” namely “that business is often corrupt, that it manipulates politicians and that there is altogether too cosy a relationship between big business and politics.” He observed “our ranking in the Transparency International survey should be a cause for national pride, yet I would wager that not one New Zealander in a hundred is even aware of it. It has received hardly any publicity here, partly because it contradicts the conspiracy theories held by too many people in the media, in politics and even in academia.” He went on to say that “it is in [this] context…that the transactions in the winebox inquiry are best viewed,” and that reporting of the winebox inquiry has “blurred” the distinction between tax minimisation and tax evasion, inevitably playing into the hands of the conspiracy theory rhetoric of Peters and Wishart.
Myers (1997) developed this rhetoric of conspiracy theory as mythology further, referring to Labour party heavyweight Mike Moore’s description of the Winebox Inquiry as “a dark and ugly period in New Zealand's history, which changed our political, social and business landscape.” He observed “the fallout for business, the economy and our political institutions has been massive.” Myers went on to explain this episode as the result of the “wider political climate,” – a combination of “the economic upheavals of the 1980s, the anti-business mentality of New Zealand's socialistic past, the sharemarket crash of 1987 which brought in its wake heavy investor losses, the belief that businesses were not paying their fair share of tax when in fact their profits were severely depressed, some isolated cases of corporate fraud, and the electorate's disgust with broken political promises and its desire to seek revenge.”
Although Kerr referred to the idea that “under a market economy 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer'” as one of New Zealand’s myths, Myers’ thesis on the causes of New Zealand’s growing cynicism and affair with conspiracy theories highlighted the role of disaffection as a leading cause of conspiratorial thinking. The economic upheavals and sharemarket crash certainly resulted in economic loss and disaffection for a lot of New Zealanders. And it is safe to assume the “anti-business mentality of New Zealand's socialistic past” observed by Myers was owned by non-capitalist New Zealanders not advantaged by the reforms of the 1980s, and further alienated from power as a result.
MMP
Another spring to the watershed of New Zealand conspiracy theory was the impact of MMP voting on the dynamic and rhetoric of the political realm. As with the Winebox Inquiry, they key player in this was Winston Peters.
A populist in the vein of ex-prime minister and good Kiwi bloke Sir Rob Muldoon, Peters became an outspoken critic of National Party policy, though a cabinet member himself, as Minister of Finance Ruth Richardson continued the privatization of government assets and streamlining of the welfare state. Richardson’s budget of July 1991, for which her policies were famously labeled “Ruthanasia,” drew relentless opposition from Peters. He was eventually sacked from cabinet in October 1991, and the following year was discarded by the party as for the Tauranga candidacy. Incensed, Peters resigned from parliament and a local by-election for Tauranga ensued. Winning as an independent, Peters subsequently establishment the New Zealand First Party in July 1993. When a binding referendum on MMP was held at general elections in November later that year, its success was seen to be the result of a general sense of disaffection from the political process, and Peters had become a voice for the disaffected (James, 2007).
According to political commentator Colin James,
"Dismay at the two big parties' use of their single-party parliamentary majorities between 1984 and 1992 to effect reforms unmandated by election manifestos and at odds with their past behaviour was also the deciding factor in the referendum in 1993 which introduced proportional representation."
Thus when Peters arrived at parliament with a winebox full of documents in March 1994, he was about to capitalize on new opportunities provided by an MMP system, in which votes for minor parties like his could actually offer significant political power. And this is exactly what happened. According to James, New Zealand First drew on an electorate of “disaffected National party activists and supporters,” winning enough seats in the first proportional representation election in 1996 to deliver him the deputy prime ministership and the finance minister's portfolio.
But not only was Peters "drawing on the disaffected," he was also capitalizing on conspiracy theory as a means of interpreting the juxtaposition of his political frustrations against his conviction he was actually representing the interests of New Zealanders. He was, in the words of Inglehart, embracing an alternative to the unwelcome conclusion his goals were not shared by society, and attributing his frustration to a political conspiracy. Again, whether the Ruthanasia reforms were the result of a conspiracy against the will of the public or not, interpreting them in this way allowed Peters to hold onto his political convictions in spite of his frustrated political ambitions.
Postmaterialist politics
While Peters illustrates the attributional error, perhaps more fairly labelled an attributional dynamic, discussed by Kruglanski and Inglehart, he was still operating within the ambit of materialist politics, as his concerns tended to focus on the efficient and effective delivery of economic and health services to New Zealanders. The use of conspiracy theory rhetoric in postmaterialist terms didn’t emerge until the coming to power of the Labour Party, firstly in the form of Hager’s Secrets and Lies, espousing a concern for the environment and taken up by “values” party The Greens. Right-wing postmaterialist conspiracy theories, on the other hand, took longer to come to the forefront of political discourse. However, nonmaterialist concerns certainly began to surface quickly, as illustrated by the increasing popularity of the un-PC Sports Café programme, and the growth in criticisms of political correctness spurred on by Investigate and the Maxim Institute. But it wasn’t until the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act and Civil Union Act, seen as significant postmaterialist milestones by both sides of the spectrum, that conspiracy theory rhetoric was adopted and embraced with exponential fervour.
The late development of conspiracy theories directed at the left-wing illustrates well Billig’s presentation of conspiracy theory as first-and-foremost a rhetorical device, and a boundary marker which makes less extreme views more acceptable. For example, in the build-up to the Prostitution Reform Act the recently established Maxim Institute began to receive media attention, but also came under attack and was accused of being “fundamentalist,” and backed by American money. But when Wishart published the Tamihere interview and was subsequently profiled by the Herald, his allegations of full-blown conspiracy made Maxim’s simple ideological critique appear much more palatable. Then when Tamaki launched his Nation Under Siege tour Wishart suddenly looked like a remarkably civil voice in one of the most heated postmaterialist debates this country has seen. In a similar way Hager’s theory of an ACT-business roundtable of the National Party began to look a whole lot more realistic when Fitzsimmons and Cullen began to accuse National of an intimate collusion with the Exclusive Brethren. The increasing intensity of conspiracy theory in the build-up to the election also illustrated they way that conspiracy theories are more likely in circumstances in which urgent action is required necessitating cognitive orientation and guidance.
Finally, the willingness of the religious Right (Wishart, United Future, Maxim Institute, Brian Tamaki) and of the green Left (Nicky Hager, Green Party) to sympathise with conspiracy theory illustrates the correlation between worldview and conspiracy belief as discussed by Irwin. The Christian right and the New Age left both embrace worldviews “characterized by a highly subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, the psychological literature on conspiracy belief can offer a lot to explain the increased popularity of conspiracy theories in New Zealand in the last 20 years. But while disaffection has been the predominant explanation for this phenomenon, the introduction of MMP in 1996 clearly gave groups at the extremes and groups with postmaterialist concerns much more voice and traction in the political sphere. Certainly, though, as even Kerr and Myers discuss, New Zealanders are much further removed from power than they were 30 years ago, due to the privatization of state assets and rise in lobby and activist factions within both the National Party and the Labour Party.
Is this pattern of increased conspiracy beliefs set to continue? According to some commentators, recent times have seen a middling out of both the National Party and the Labour Party.
Colin James observes (2007);
"This saga of splits and lurches (Shipley was replaced by Bill English, a self-styled "modern conservative", in October 2001 and he in turn by radical-liberal Brash two years later) depicts a party dragging its ideological and operational anchors. Only with the formation of a John Key-Bill English leadership team in November 2006 could the party be said to be fully back on its historical course, presenting something akin to the mix of liberal and conservative tendencies which typified it during its domination of politics from 1949 to 1972 but which had been obscured for 30 years since Sir Robert took it down a populist cul de sac."
The increased sense of disaffection of the last two decades has definitely resulted also in increased political activism and engagement with the powers that be. The conspiracy theories discussed here more typically belong to Arnold’s “cynical” Watergate genre rather than being full-blown theories of “disaffection.” The popularity of adding the suffix –gate to major sagas (ie. Paintergate, Corngate, Doonegate) illustrates this well. Barry Smith’s New World Order/Illuminati theories were popular among the evangelical right in the 1980s and 1990s, but since his death in 2002 he has certainly lacked a successor. Perhaps this is a sign of New Zealand maturing as a nation, and avoiding the mass hysterical excesses of US populism. Such optimism finds little value in conspiracy theory rhetoric.
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Although the paper is a philosophy paper, the second half of our course looked at thepsychological reasons people become attracted to conspiracy theories. While my first essay looked at the question of whether we can evaluate a conspiracy theory to be true, this essay addresses the question of why such theories emerge in the first place - whether true or false.
In this essay I address a lot of theories that I, personally, have been open to and even committed to in the past, and which I am still partial to at present. Indeed, the idea that organised groups of people are discreetly acting for their own gain in the public domain, or for the purpose of one specific lobby, is not exactly foreign to at least the mindset of the generation I belong to. I can remember very clearly that careers advice at school suggested politics as a good forum in which to advocate for rights you believe in, rather than a forum to discuss and represent some sort of common good.
Indeed, some of the psychological theories presented in this article implicitly assume that groups of people are very consciously and publicly asserting themselves for a certain post-materialist, ideological agenda. The irony is they do so believing it is in the interests of the community as a whole, and thus think the term "conspiracy" is not appropriate. What is certain is that politics today is dominated by strategies very conscious of PR (public relations) and PC (political correctness). In embracing these strategies parties choose to keep some things as secret as possible knowing that public knowledge would be adverse to progress.
Nefarious and evil-minded conspiracies? Maybe not. But conspiracies nonetheless.
Secret agendas
The rise of the paranoid style in New Zealand politics
Allan Chesswas
30 October 2009
“Politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers…[demonstrating] how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority…a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing…a paranoid style, because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”
- Richard Hofstadter, 1964
These could easily have been the words of a New Zealand political commentator following the 2005 election. The Labour party was allegedly at the mercy of a “formidable political machine,” a group of “front bums” aka “The Labour Party Wimmins Division,” responsible for an anti-men agenda at the heart of government policy. But that wasn’t all – Labour were also accused of a “radical homosexual agenda” which called even the sexual orientation of the prime minister and her husband into question (Wishart, 2005; 2006; 2007; 2008; Tamaki, 2005).
But, just in case anyone thought the National party was safe, just two weeks out from the election they, too, were accused of harbouring conspiracy. Leader Don Brash was not only fronting a far-right wing conspiracy of ACT and business roundtable members – he was also working closely with the fundamentalist sect The Exclusive Brethren (Hager, 2006). Both Ian Wishart, commenting on the left, and Nicky Hager, commenting on the right, proceeded to publish # 1 best sellers detailing these conspiracies.
But this was no strange flash-in-the-pan as far as conspiracy theories endemic to New Zealand are concerned. Both Wishart and Hager had been publishing bestselling conspiracy non-fiction since the mid-1990s, and Wishart had founded his Investigate magazine in 2000. It would be fair to say, though, that the general elections of September 2005 saw something of a climax for conspiracy theory in New Zealand. Wishart and Hager were certainly prominent already, but in the build up to the 2005 election their work and rhetoric became increasingly popular. What’s more, in the same month as the election pornography mogul Steve Crowe teamed up with the controversial Jonathan Eisen to launch Uncensored, New Zealand’s first conspiracy theory magazine.
A flourishing style
The growing popularity of conspiracy belief has been observed by academics in a wide range of fields, from media studies, cultural studies and anthropology, to history, philosophy and psychology (Arnold, 2008; Marcus, 1999; Knight, 2002; Pipes, 1997; Keeley, 1999; Basham, 2001; Goertzel, 1994; Leman & Cinnirella, 2007).
Arnold (2008), reflecting on much of the conspiracy theory literature, surveys the increased use and popularity of conspiracy theory themes in film in television since the post-war period. He argues that increased interest in themes of conspiracy theory resulted initially from the paranoid climate of the Cold War period, with a focus on the “Red Menace.” Conspiracy themes in film and television then entered a second phase, a more introspective and cynical phase, rsulting from the exposure of government cover-ups surrounding the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair. Finally, a third phase began in the 1990s which is not only cynical, but reflects a strong sense of disaffection. Productions such as JFK, The X-Files, The Trueman Show and The Matrix portrayed “conspiracies of enormous scale and complexity suggest not only that some parts of society should not be trusted, but that engaging with them at all is almost pointless” (p170, 171).
While Arnold’s thesis seems compelling, it must be observed that the postwar period also saw the rapid growth of the use of television and film as a medium of popular thought. Before this time, access to such media was still a luxury. The comparative absence of conspiracy themes might have reflected the lack of a populist audience – conspiracy theory has long been identified as a populist phenomenon. While conspiracy themes were absent from film, television and newsmedia, they may well have been rife at the pub and in the pulpit. Arnold’s project takes advantage of written and recorded evidence that the oral examples of the bar and the church can never afford us.
It could also be argued that the absence of conspiracy theory in media was due to the dominance of conspiracy beliefs in actual life and politics, in the early years of film and television. From the paranoid concerns of alliance and axis powers which sparked the Great War, to the conspiracy theories inspired across Europe by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax, to the actual conspiracies of Soviets and Nazis in the mass genocides of the age. For conspiracy theories to also then dominate film and television would surely have been something of an overkill.
However, Arnold’s observation, that themes in conspiracy theory have become increasingly cynical and disaffected in relation to the powers meant to represent their interests, adds immense value to his thesis. Psychological literature on the subject argues for an increased sense of disaffection as a leading motivation for people to adopt a conspiratorial view of the world, and employ the language of conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy belief in New Zealand
Right-wing conspiracies
An attempt to answer the question of whether or not conspiracy belief has increased at a global level, or in the West, or in the USA, seems a rather ambitious project, and the authors referred to should be commended. In this essay I will focus on the New Zealand context, particularly cultural and political discourses employed in the media in the last 20 years, with reference also to important publications and institutions referred to in the media. I will use this analysis to demonstrate an increase in conspiracy beliefs in New Zealand over this time. I will also explore how the psychological literature on the topic confirms that this is exactly what we should expect.
The lineage of 21st Century New Zealand political conspiracy theories can be traced back to the 1994 Winebox Inquiry, sparked by Winston Peters’ allegations of serious international fraud on the part of both business and government agencies. The details were published in Wishart’s 1995 book The Paradise Conspiracy.
The Winebox Inquiry of Peters and Wishart set the tone for right-wing conspiracy plots. In 1996 Nicky Hager published Secret Power - New Zealand's Role in the International Spy Network, revealing New Zealand’s role in an international intelligence organization. This organization could, as David Lange observed in the forward, “command compliance from us while withholding from us the benefits of others" intelligence.” Hager went on to publish a number of books addressing similar right-wing conspiracies: Secrets and Lies (1999), Seeds of Distrust (2002) andThe Hollow Men (2006).
Secrets and Lies served as an expose of political lobbying by state-owned-enterprise Timberlands, and was capitalized on by the Green Party, who made the termination of Timberlands party policy, as did Labour. Three years later, again at election time, Hager published Seeds of Mistrust, a conspiracy theory about a government cover-up of a case of GE contamination. News affairs presenter John Campbell quickly took up the case with Helen Clark, without her being prepared, and was the first to suffer Clark’s “little creep” invective (Clark also described Wishart as a creep four years later) (Orsman, 2002; Berry, 2006). The Greens again took advantage of Hager’s work, calling the government to account for what became known as “Corngate,” and refusing to support any party in coalition that would lift the moratorium on genetic engineering.
Pink Think
Theories of left-wing conspiracies on the other hand, though already in circulation, certainly did not have the same profile. Helen Clark’s successful challenge for Mike Moore’s Leadership of the Opposition, after the 1993 election, was “characterized as a “pointy-headed lesbian plot,” and a discursive chain of equivalence was constructed between the challengers in the Labour Party, homosexuality, feminism, socialism, intellectualism, and “political correctness”” (Ingraham, 2004). It was this 1993 “pointy-headed lesbian plot” theory that in time became the 2005 “radical homosexual agenda,” obsessed with “political correctness” and “social engineering.” So compelling was this theory that in 2005 it was at least alluded to by everyone from the leadership of the opposition to a member of Clark’s own cabinet. It became a dominant theme of Investigatemagazine, and of Wishart’s bestselling Eve's Bite (2007) and Absolute Power (2008).
New Zealand’s Fifth Labour government came to power under Helen Clark in November 1999. Before the year was out the anti-socialist slogan Helengrad was already coined, and in the New Year Wishart founded his Investigate Magazine (Cresswell, 2008). The terrorists attacks of September 11, 2001, often said to have upped-the-ante of conspiracy beliefs considerably across the globe, had the same effect on New Zealand. In the wake of the attacks Jenny Shipley was ousted by Bill English as Leader of the Opposition, criticized for failing to respond adequately in expressing united support for the US after the events (Mold, 2001). As issues of race and immigration came to the forefront of political debate, “political correctness” became a useful invective against a government unwilling to address the issues, when politicians felt they were being shut down. With the 2002 election approaching Winston Peters in particular picked up on this. He described the nation’s apology to Samoa for colonial injustices as “politically correct,” and described the country as “cowed into a cringing silence by the dictates of misguided politeness and political correctness” (Ward, 2002; Peters, 2002).
But it wasn’t until 2003, with the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act, that the charge of “social engineering” became a common invective against the Labour party. The term had a well-established history already, but it was United Future leader Peter Dunne who made particular mileage with the term. Dunne was leading a party which, like New Zealand First, had taken advantage of the MMP system, and drawn support from Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians disaffected by the two-party system. Embarrassed as coalition partner with the government’s legislation, Dunne accused Labour of “prioritising political correctness over political reality” (2003).
The success of Dunne and United Future came at the same time as the Maxim Institute emerged as a force in conservative political discourse. The Prostitution Reform Act had the effect of sending the conservative vote into overdrive. Political correctness became more than just a buzzword or a slogan. Political correctness “expert” Frank Ellis featured in Investigate in 2003, and the following year was a guest speaker at Maxim’s annual forum, titled Political correctness: End of an error. Well-known televangelist Brian Tamaki prophesied his church would put an end to the nation’s godlessness and rule New Zealand within 5 years, and quickly established the Destiny New Zealand party with Richard Lewis as leader. Tamaki accused the government of harbouring a “"sinister" gay agenda” driven by a “spirit of homosexuality” (Tunnah, 2003).
But concern about political correctness and social engineering wasn’t confined to the religious right. At the same time Boxing Bill English became the Leader of the Opposition, Kiwi blokedom went through something of a revival. West Coast brewer and long-time humourist Paddy Sweeney published Good Bastards Book One: The Larrikins Guide to Success in November 2001, and began the weekly Good Bastards News which often criticized political correctness as the bane of good sense and good humour.
At the same time Marc Ellis was demonstrating his own form of Larrikinism on Ric Salizzo’sSports Café. Ellis became famous for his risqué adage “sweating like a rapist,” for founding “national nude day,” his appearance drunk on Sports Café, enticing streakers with financial incentives, and then offering greater rewards for women streakers (Rae, 2002; Taylor, 2008). And when he was accused of being sexist and politically correct he’d offer even more to a “black” “female” “midget”. This echoed Winston Peters’ proximate criticism of policy surrounding the immigration of homosexuals, quipping “We are going to have a blonde dwarf category shortly” (2002).
In October 2006 Ellis released his autobiography Crossing the Line, and in doing so criticized New Zealanders for embracing political correctness with “such bloody vigour.” As journalist Diana Wichtel observed, “If anything has him losing his sense of humour it’s the whole PC world gone mad…disappointingly conventional coming from the man who launched International Nude Day, once won top sporting honours for chasing a giant cheese downhill and has a penchant for moustaches” (2006). The following month Waikato University released Sports Comedy Shows and New Lad Culture in New Zealand: The Sportscafe Guide to Kiwi Masculinity, and claimed that Ellis was part of a global phenomenon of “new laddism,” in which shows like Sports Café were preserved as “"the last bastion where men are safe from the threat of women", as represented by female political leaders and feminism generally,” and that “the highlighting of discourses around toughness in Sportscafe embodies a reassertion, if not desperate clinging to, values that are culturally perceived to be under threat.”
It was into this climate that David Benson-Pope introduced the Civil Union Bill in June 2004 (Benson-Pope, 2004). Brian Tamaki quickly organized the famous Enough Is Enough rally and in August marched on parliament with thousands in tow (Armstrong, 2004). Earlier in the year Wishart had published an article which profiled gay Labour MP Tim Barnett, his personal policy agenda with regards to homosexual rights, and Helen Clark’s willingness to encourage government support to it. The Civil Union Act was successfully passed into legislation at the end of the year (Thomson & Berry, 2004). Inducing much the same effect as the Prostitution Reform Act, the stage was set for the 2005 election.
The Tamihere Interview
Early in 2005 Wishart struck again, publishing an interview with John Tamihere in the April edition of Investigate. Tamihere had recently resigned from cabinet after suffering what he called an “orchestrated campaign to bring him down.” The Wishart interview was his revenge.
Wishart & Tamihere began the interview reflecting on the tension between the “union” and “activist” factions in the Labour party, and the ascendancy of the latter under Clark.
Then Wishart asked this question;
“This goes back to the great conspiracy theory. Most people like you and I can’t get our heads around the idea that someone can sit in a darkened room and figure out where they want to be in fifteen years. Where do they get the time to do that?”
Tamihere responded with anecdote after anecdote detailing his take on the “‘machine’ on the ninth floor”:
“They don’t have families. They’ve got nothing but the ability to plot. I’ve gotta take my kid to soccer on Saturday, they don’t. So they just go and have a parlez vous francais somewhere and a latte, whereas we don’t get to plot, we’re just trying to get our kids to synchronise their left and right feet. They don’t even think about that.”
“It’s formidable. It’s got apparatus and activists in everything from the PPTA all the way through. It’s actually even built a counterweight to the Roundtable – Businesses for Social Responsibility. Its intelligence-gathering capabilities are second to none.”
When asked to identify “the most powerful network in the Labour executive,” Tamihere observed:
“The Labour Party Wimmins Division. Whether it’s bagging cops that strangle protestors they should be beating the proverbial out of, or – it’s about an anti-men agenda…”
“Where else in the world do Amazons rule?... I don’t mind front-bums being promoted, but just because they are [women] shouldn’t be the issue. They’ve won that war.”
Tamihere’s observations echo the Waikato University thesis quoted earlier, of a surge in female political power so strong that mens’ very identity and idea of masculinity was under threat, let alone their political power. The media bore the brunt of Tamihere’s outburst along with the Labour Party, described as “utterly and totally useless, sycophantic.” Perhaps this was why media coverage was devoted more to scolding a politically incorrect and rebellious Tamihere than to the content of his confessions.
The appearance of two separate biographical articles profiling Ian Wishart two weeks later certainly suggested the interview had attracted much attention (Barton, 2005; Masters & Dixon, 2005). What was notable about these articles, though, was the labeling of Wishart as a conspiracy theorist. To be fair, Chris Barton did this quite self-consciously, observing “there are two popular ways to undermine the credibility of Ian Wishart's works - by branding him a conspiracy theorist or a member of the religious right.” Barton’s article was saturated with a latent understanding of the conspiracy theory dynamic. Even the title – Jumping at every shadow – suggested an understanding of the role of hyperactive agency detection in conspiracy theorizing.
While Barton’s article was quite critical and patronising, Masters & Dixon’s was more optimistic. Former TV3 chief-of-staff and colleague Steve Bloxham was quoted as saying that while “maybe three out of four conspiracy theories remain conspiracy theories…[but] when you hit that fourth, it's a big story. I mean, Watergate was once a conspiracy - that's probably what I'm saying.” Bloxham’s observation echoes the pragmatic “studied agnosticism” of philosophers of conspiracy theory such as Pigden (1995), Basham (2001) and Coady (2003). But less optimistic was an observation of NBR editor and colleague Neville Gibson, when asked about the demise of his relationship with Wishart since the launch of Investigate. He pointed to Wishart's swing to a “fundamentalist line, particularly on issues such as the Creation,” and observed that “someone who undergoes such a shift in ideas usually turns their journalism to suit those ideas.”
Tammy Bruce and Brian Tamaki
It is clear, though, that many accepted the interview at face value. In May a Herald article explored the question “Have today's women got the jump on men?” and in June ex-NOW lesbian and famed author Tammy Bruce visited New Zealand to speak about “the fact that today's feminist leaders are more concerned with pursuing a socialist agenda than actually helping women” (Collins, 2005; Paterson, 2005).
In a review of Bruce’s The New Thought Police and The Death of Right and Wrong, Kiwi journalist Sandra Paterson quoted Bruce;
“I have seen first-hand how the agendas of feminism, black power, multiculturalism and gay advocacy have been consciously used to break down morals and values that the activists saw as obstructions to their achieving, first, cultural acceptance and, ultimately, cultural domination.”
Paterson observed;
“[Bruce] still considers herself a liberal - but wants to rescue that label from the people she calls the Left Elite: that is, the decision-makers in feminist, gay and civil rights movements as well as many of those in the judiciary, the entertainment industry, the media and American university faculties.”
“Bruce talks about how people are increasingly afraid to say what they really think, lest they offend someone or be branded homophobic, racist or sexist. Unless of course the topic of conversation is the religious and/or conservative, who she describes as the new, approved target.”
And while Tammy Bruce was touring the country, Brian Tamaki was busy with his Nation Under Siege tour, promoting his new party Destiny New Zealand and promising to rescue the nation from “a government gone evil,” “a radial homosexual agenda,” a “modern day witchcraft media,” and the general “retreat of religion in New Zealand” (Tamaki, 2005) This sudden flourishing of exteme rhetoric and conspiracy theory left National MP Wayne Mapp’s observations that same month, onThe Problem of Political Correctness, seem mild by comparison (Mapp, 2005). Opposition Leader Don Brash also took the opportunity to present the National Party as representing “mainstream New Zealand” in contrast to Labour’s focus on the cares and concerns of minority sector groups at the expense of the interests of the majority (Berry, 2005). Indeed, Brash loved Mapp’s speech so much that before the year was out he’d appointed him the National Party Political Correctness Eradicator (Thomson, 2005).
The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy
July and August came and went relatively calmly in contrast, at least until the last weekend of August. Sunday newspapers carried stories claiming Brash’s successful coup of the National Party leadership was due to Act and the Business Roundtable backing. The source of the story turned out to be Nicky Hager, who published it a year later as The Hollow Men.
However the Green Party, traditionally quick to latch onto Hager conspiracy theories, was quickly overtaken by another conspiracy. Responding to a widely publicized flyer critical of the Greens, The Green Delusion, the party quickly assumed National Party responsibility for what was considered a highly inaccurate and inflammatory piece of work (Fitzsimmons, 2005). The flyer proffered yet another hidden socialist agenda conspiracy theory, this time aimed at the Greens instead of Labour. When it was discovered to be the work of the Exclusive Brethren, of all people, collusion was quickly assumed. Although Brash denied knowledge that the Brethren were responsible for the $500,000 campaign, he later admitted to having met with the Brethren (Thomson, Young & Dye, 2005). Though not as sophisticated as the theories of Wishart and Hager, media and lobby groups went out of their way to exploit this connection in the same vein.
So, whether Wishart or Tamihere, Bruce or Tamaki, Hager or Fitzsimmons, New Zealanders entering the polling booths on September 17 must have been aware of at least one of these conspiracy theories. It is telling just how conspiratorial peoples’ beliefs had become, that only days before the election New Zealand’s first ever conspiracy theory magazine, Uncensored, was launched. It was also telling that the chief financier behind this was New Zealand’s biggest (only) pornography mogul. And within a week of the election a photograph was distributed among the right showing the prime minister’s husband Peter Davis kissing a well-known gay Aucklander, alluding to long-running conspiracy theories about Clark and Davis’ marriage as a PR front for two “heterosexuals” with an unusually strong interest in gay rights (Wishart, 2006).
The psychological literature
A number of themes identified by social and political commentators reporting these events reflect what much of what the psychological literature has to say on the subject of conspiracy belief (Billig, 1984; 2001; Kruglanski, 1987; Inglehart, 1987; Moscovici, 1987; Goertzel, 1994; Irwin, 1999). Taken together, these authors suggest conspiracy beliefs are typically caused by what Kruglanski describes as an attributional error – ascribing fault for undesirable states of affairs externally, usually to minority groups, in order to protect one’s own sense of self-esteem. A plan of action against the conspirators is thus promoted by the theorist, typically a political plan. A heroic course of action is imagined that exposes and brings down the conspiracy, again enhancing the theorist’s sense of self-esteem. These political projects most commonly appear at the extreme Right and extreme Left of the political spectrum, and the use of conspiracy theory serves as a rhetorical device to fuel political debate, particularly among those who Inglehart describes as “Postmaterialist.”
Quoting Zuckerman (1979), Kruglanski observes that attribution errors often result from anxiety to protect one’s self-esteem, where “success tends to be ascribed internally, and failure externally” (p222). He notes that conspiracy theories are often formed to satisfy “one’s wish to have a clear-cut unambiguous answer concerning a given topic.” This need for epistemic structure prompts the “freezing of the epistemic process upon an early conception rather than inducing an extensive probing and validation process in which this conception is critically examined against alternative possibilities” (p226). Kruglanski observes this need for structure “is likely to be heightened in circumstances in which urgent action is required necessitating cognitive orientation and guidance. A conspiracy theory that forewarns the members of a group concerning an advanced plot aiming against them introduces just that kind of urgency, and therefore a need for a structure, in turn disposing the group to accept the theory.” Further, acting on a conspiracy theory and exposing the conspiracy promises not only to bring about a desirable state of affairs, but gives one an opportunity to exhibit resourcefulness and competence, contributing a great deal to one’s sense of self-esteem (p227).
Billig (1984) shows that conspiracy theories as rhetorical devices are powerful for their ability to compel a moralistic response against those accused of conspiracy. Drawing on the use of Zionist conspiracy theories within anti-Semitic discourses, he shows how these theories: a) identify the conspirators as symbols of evil, b) relieve the theorist of any sense of guilt for injustices against the conspirators, c) provide a rhetorical device that is difficult to disprove, and thus difficult to disqualify from debate, and d) extend the boundary markers of opinion. On the latter point, Billig (2001) demonstrates the way that conspiracy theories on extreme white supremist websites make the Klu-Klux-Klan’s website seem mild by comparison.
Moscovici (1987) illustrates the way that conspiracy theories are generally invectives against minority groups, observing “The very existence of a minority already constitutes a conspiracy…the conspiracy mentality is based on this fact, which none can deny or disprove” (p158). But not only is conspiracy theory directed at minority groups, it also typically finds its home within minority groups. Inglehart argues that conspiracy theories typically emerge when groups experience “repeated frustration in their attempts to attain important goals, for reasons that seem inexplicable unless one assumes that the rest of society is united in, or dominated by, some kind of conspiracy” (p231). Echoing Kruglanski, Inglehart (1987) observes “…an alternative to the unwelcome conclusion that one’s goals were not shared by the rest of one’s society would be to attribute one’s frustration to a political conspiracy” (p232). Thus, “the extreme Left would attribute their frustrations to a conspiracy by the forces of the Right, while the extreme Right postulated a conspiracy of the Left…[and therefore] both would perceive their society’s institutions as being controlled by secretive and unfriendly forces” (p233). Inglehart discusses the rise in “postmaterialist values” in society over the previous two decades, and notes that while traditionally the Right and Left both emphasized materialist goals – economic and physical security, the new Postmaterialist generation place greater emphasis on “self-expression.”
Inglehart observes;
“[Postmaterialists] emphasise fundamentally different goals from those that have long prevailed in industrial society, and that continue to be predominant in most of the established social institutions. As a result, Postmaterialists are relatively unlikely to be successful in having their goals adopted by key institutions, and consequently, relatively likely to distrust these institutions or even to perceive them as conspiratorial.”
Citing evidence from surveys carried out in a number of European countries, Ingleheart argues that;
“as a result of the historically unprecedented prosperity and the absence of war in Western countries prevailing since 1945, the postwar generation in these countries would place less emphasis on economic and physical security than older groups, who had experience the hunger and devastation of World War II, the Great Depression, and perhaps even World War I. Conversely, the younger birth cohorts would give higher priority to nonmaterial needs such as a sense of community and the quality of the environment.”
Goertzel (1994) demonstrated, in surveying 348 residents of southwestern New Jersey about belief in well-known conspiracy theories, that alienation and disaffection are strongly correlated conspiratorial belief. Goertzel observed that “minority status and anomia are clearly the strongest determinants of belief in conspiracies,” and that “…belief in conspiracies is associated with the feelings of alienation and disaffection from the system” (p737, 729).
Irwin’s (1999) Introduction to Parapsychology explores four theoretical psychological explanations for belief in the paranormal, and discusses paranormal belief in terms that demonstrate strong transferable value to the psychology of conspiracy belief. Like paranormal beliefs, conspiracy beliefs are often seen to be a “misinterpretation of normal events as paranormal,” and the result of “selective discounting of information not compatible with a paranormal interpretation” (p280). Irwin identifies four main schools of thought in the psychology of paranormal belief: 1) The Social Marginality Hypothesis, 2) The Worldview Hypothesis, 3) the Cognitive Deficits Hypothesis, and 4) the Psychodynamic Functions Hypothesis. The Social Marginality hypothesis concerns the themes of disaffection already discussed. The Worldview hypothesis has strong allusions to Irwin’s study of postmaterialist politics, arguing that paranormal beliefs are the result of a “broader worldview…characterized by a highly subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large” (p285). The Cognitive Deficits hypothesis merely poses stupidity and educational deficits as determinative of paranormal belief, while the Psychodynamic Functions hypothesis argues paranormal beliefs merely serve psychological needs pertaining to “a personal philosophy of life,” “a sense of self-understanding,” or reflecting perhaps a substitute for a sense of social alienation, or alternatively the result of an acute sense of narcissism.
Cause for conspiracy theory
Winebox origins
Most of these theories help in some way to explain the increased popularity of conspiracy belief in New Zealand in the last 20 years, and are reflected in available social and political commentary on the subject. The comments of Business Roundtable Executive Director Roger Kerr and Chairman Douglas Myers on the Winebox Inquiry conspiracy theory are useful in this sense. It is important to note Kerr and Myers are not speaking from an academic platform, as leaders of a pro-business lobby injured by the inquiry. Nonetheless, their explanations for the willingness of Kiwis to embrace conspiratorial thinking have value regardless of whether or not the conspiracy actually occurred.
Kerr (1996) discusses the Winebox affair as one of a genre of “myths about the market…result[ing] from sloppy thinking,” namely “that business is often corrupt, that it manipulates politicians and that there is altogether too cosy a relationship between big business and politics.” He observed “our ranking in the Transparency International survey should be a cause for national pride, yet I would wager that not one New Zealander in a hundred is even aware of it. It has received hardly any publicity here, partly because it contradicts the conspiracy theories held by too many people in the media, in politics and even in academia.” He went on to say that “it is in [this] context…that the transactions in the winebox inquiry are best viewed,” and that reporting of the winebox inquiry has “blurred” the distinction between tax minimisation and tax evasion, inevitably playing into the hands of the conspiracy theory rhetoric of Peters and Wishart.
Myers (1997) developed this rhetoric of conspiracy theory as mythology further, referring to Labour party heavyweight Mike Moore’s description of the Winebox Inquiry as “a dark and ugly period in New Zealand's history, which changed our political, social and business landscape.” He observed “the fallout for business, the economy and our political institutions has been massive.” Myers went on to explain this episode as the result of the “wider political climate,” – a combination of “the economic upheavals of the 1980s, the anti-business mentality of New Zealand's socialistic past, the sharemarket crash of 1987 which brought in its wake heavy investor losses, the belief that businesses were not paying their fair share of tax when in fact their profits were severely depressed, some isolated cases of corporate fraud, and the electorate's disgust with broken political promises and its desire to seek revenge.”
Although Kerr referred to the idea that “under a market economy 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer'” as one of New Zealand’s myths, Myers’ thesis on the causes of New Zealand’s growing cynicism and affair with conspiracy theories highlighted the role of disaffection as a leading cause of conspiratorial thinking. The economic upheavals and sharemarket crash certainly resulted in economic loss and disaffection for a lot of New Zealanders. And it is safe to assume the “anti-business mentality of New Zealand's socialistic past” observed by Myers was owned by non-capitalist New Zealanders not advantaged by the reforms of the 1980s, and further alienated from power as a result.
MMP
Another spring to the watershed of New Zealand conspiracy theory was the impact of MMP voting on the dynamic and rhetoric of the political realm. As with the Winebox Inquiry, they key player in this was Winston Peters.
A populist in the vein of ex-prime minister and good Kiwi bloke Sir Rob Muldoon, Peters became an outspoken critic of National Party policy, though a cabinet member himself, as Minister of Finance Ruth Richardson continued the privatization of government assets and streamlining of the welfare state. Richardson’s budget of July 1991, for which her policies were famously labeled “Ruthanasia,” drew relentless opposition from Peters. He was eventually sacked from cabinet in October 1991, and the following year was discarded by the party as for the Tauranga candidacy. Incensed, Peters resigned from parliament and a local by-election for Tauranga ensued. Winning as an independent, Peters subsequently establishment the New Zealand First Party in July 1993. When a binding referendum on MMP was held at general elections in November later that year, its success was seen to be the result of a general sense of disaffection from the political process, and Peters had become a voice for the disaffected (James, 2007).
According to political commentator Colin James,
"Dismay at the two big parties' use of their single-party parliamentary majorities between 1984 and 1992 to effect reforms unmandated by election manifestos and at odds with their past behaviour was also the deciding factor in the referendum in 1993 which introduced proportional representation."
Thus when Peters arrived at parliament with a winebox full of documents in March 1994, he was about to capitalize on new opportunities provided by an MMP system, in which votes for minor parties like his could actually offer significant political power. And this is exactly what happened. According to James, New Zealand First drew on an electorate of “disaffected National party activists and supporters,” winning enough seats in the first proportional representation election in 1996 to deliver him the deputy prime ministership and the finance minister's portfolio.
But not only was Peters "drawing on the disaffected," he was also capitalizing on conspiracy theory as a means of interpreting the juxtaposition of his political frustrations against his conviction he was actually representing the interests of New Zealanders. He was, in the words of Inglehart, embracing an alternative to the unwelcome conclusion his goals were not shared by society, and attributing his frustration to a political conspiracy. Again, whether the Ruthanasia reforms were the result of a conspiracy against the will of the public or not, interpreting them in this way allowed Peters to hold onto his political convictions in spite of his frustrated political ambitions.
Postmaterialist politics
While Peters illustrates the attributional error, perhaps more fairly labelled an attributional dynamic, discussed by Kruglanski and Inglehart, he was still operating within the ambit of materialist politics, as his concerns tended to focus on the efficient and effective delivery of economic and health services to New Zealanders. The use of conspiracy theory rhetoric in postmaterialist terms didn’t emerge until the coming to power of the Labour Party, firstly in the form of Hager’s Secrets and Lies, espousing a concern for the environment and taken up by “values” party The Greens. Right-wing postmaterialist conspiracy theories, on the other hand, took longer to come to the forefront of political discourse. However, nonmaterialist concerns certainly began to surface quickly, as illustrated by the increasing popularity of the un-PC Sports Café programme, and the growth in criticisms of political correctness spurred on by Investigate and the Maxim Institute. But it wasn’t until the passing of the Prostitution Reform Act and Civil Union Act, seen as significant postmaterialist milestones by both sides of the spectrum, that conspiracy theory rhetoric was adopted and embraced with exponential fervour.
The late development of conspiracy theories directed at the left-wing illustrates well Billig’s presentation of conspiracy theory as first-and-foremost a rhetorical device, and a boundary marker which makes less extreme views more acceptable. For example, in the build-up to the Prostitution Reform Act the recently established Maxim Institute began to receive media attention, but also came under attack and was accused of being “fundamentalist,” and backed by American money. But when Wishart published the Tamihere interview and was subsequently profiled by the Herald, his allegations of full-blown conspiracy made Maxim’s simple ideological critique appear much more palatable. Then when Tamaki launched his Nation Under Siege tour Wishart suddenly looked like a remarkably civil voice in one of the most heated postmaterialist debates this country has seen. In a similar way Hager’s theory of an ACT-business roundtable of the National Party began to look a whole lot more realistic when Fitzsimmons and Cullen began to accuse National of an intimate collusion with the Exclusive Brethren. The increasing intensity of conspiracy theory in the build-up to the election also illustrated they way that conspiracy theories are more likely in circumstances in which urgent action is required necessitating cognitive orientation and guidance.
Finally, the willingness of the religious Right (Wishart, United Future, Maxim Institute, Brian Tamaki) and of the green Left (Nicky Hager, Green Party) to sympathise with conspiracy theory illustrates the correlation between worldview and conspiracy belief as discussed by Irwin. The Christian right and the New Age left both embrace worldviews “characterized by a highly subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, the psychological literature on conspiracy belief can offer a lot to explain the increased popularity of conspiracy theories in New Zealand in the last 20 years. But while disaffection has been the predominant explanation for this phenomenon, the introduction of MMP in 1996 clearly gave groups at the extremes and groups with postmaterialist concerns much more voice and traction in the political sphere. Certainly, though, as even Kerr and Myers discuss, New Zealanders are much further removed from power than they were 30 years ago, due to the privatization of state assets and rise in lobby and activist factions within both the National Party and the Labour Party.
Is this pattern of increased conspiracy beliefs set to continue? According to some commentators, recent times have seen a middling out of both the National Party and the Labour Party.
Colin James observes (2007);
"This saga of splits and lurches (Shipley was replaced by Bill English, a self-styled "modern conservative", in October 2001 and he in turn by radical-liberal Brash two years later) depicts a party dragging its ideological and operational anchors. Only with the formation of a John Key-Bill English leadership team in November 2006 could the party be said to be fully back on its historical course, presenting something akin to the mix of liberal and conservative tendencies which typified it during its domination of politics from 1949 to 1972 but which had been obscured for 30 years since Sir Robert took it down a populist cul de sac."
The increased sense of disaffection of the last two decades has definitely resulted also in increased political activism and engagement with the powers that be. The conspiracy theories discussed here more typically belong to Arnold’s “cynical” Watergate genre rather than being full-blown theories of “disaffection.” The popularity of adding the suffix –gate to major sagas (ie. Paintergate, Corngate, Doonegate) illustrates this well. Barry Smith’s New World Order/Illuminati theories were popular among the evangelical right in the 1980s and 1990s, but since his death in 2002 he has certainly lacked a successor. Perhaps this is a sign of New Zealand maturing as a nation, and avoiding the mass hysterical excesses of US populism. Such optimism finds little value in conspiracy theory rhetoric.
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