Misunderstanding Power
Refuting and Explaining the Popularity of Conspiracy
by Paul Street
(snip)
There is not space here to list and refute the various specific claims of 9-11 conspiracy theories, but three points of rebuttal should suffice. First, it is incredibly unlikely that the necessary network of players and operatives would or could have undertaken such a complicated and insanely risky enterprises as conducting the attacks or even of covering up evidence of their likely occurrence. Even on the incredibly dubious assumption that the required high-level players were so uneasy in their very privileged pre-September lives that they felt compelled to concoct such schemes of mass murder on American soil, the likelihood of discovery would have made it
prohibitively dangerous.
(snip)
Third, the idea that the elitist consequences of 9-11 - more wealth and power for the few and less of both for the many - somehow prove that 9-11 was the product of an elite US conspiracy is incredibly naïve. Conspiracy theorists of the sort who sneered at me fail to understand that aristocratic outcomes from crises are basically written into America's economic and sociopolitical structure. Democracy is a political system where each person has an equal vote and equal policy influence. It cannot meaningfully exist in a society structured along the lines of the contemporary US, where 1 percent of the population owns 47 percent of the nation's wealth and considerably more of its politicians, policymakers, and media. It cannot exist where ordinary people lacking cohesive organization, meaningful institutions of autonomous power, popular expression, and democratic organization, and even a sense of common interests face off against highly organized and extremely class-conscious wealthy interests. It cannot exist where such people are worked, commuted, and shopped to the point of exhaustion and must rely on a highly concentrated privately owned media for basic information. It is especially absent from the making of foreign policy, which is even more insulated from popular influence than domestic policy and whose largely hidden conception and execution carries vast consequences for the entire planet without anything but the slightest input from world citizens.
(snip)
As when applied to other events, conspiracy theories regarding 9-11 reflect two core misunderstandings of power and how it operates in the US. The first, broadly encouraged by the American educational, political, and media establishments, holds that the US is in fact a democracy. People who accept this fairy tale - the Founding Fathers' (most of whom agreed with John Jay that "those who own the country ought to run it") and the modern business class's ultimate shared nightmare - cannot easily grasp policy outcomes that dramatically serve the interests of the few over the many. For them, the temptation is strong to see such outcomes as the product of a dark conspiracy operating behind the back and against the wishes of their elected representatives and other leaders of the society's main institutions. The second misunderstanding is of a different, even opposite nature. It wraps itself in an all-knowing sneer of cynicism yet holds a curiously wide-eyed and fantastic view of the masters or at least some part of the ruling class. Common among those who have been disabused of democratic myths and feel especially powerless in the face of concentrated power, it holds that dastardly elites manipulate the course of history from on high, pretty much in accordance with their own wishes. Little happens in the course of human events, some conspiracy theorists think, without the approval and intervention of an all-powerful but strangely secret elite.
http://www.zmag.org/content/TerrorWar/streetct.cfm
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