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Washington can't run grand conspiracies
Washington is a complicated place to operate, particularly these days. Looking behind the curtain, as in The Wizard of Oz, rarely reveals a careful plan or a careful conspiracy. That is just not the way government works.
Conspiracy theories also carry a comfort. A villain is someone to blame, and a villain means someone is in charge, pulling the strings. For normal Americans thinking about national security, spies and surveillance are scary and comforting at the same time.
William Burns served six presidents, three Republicans and three Democrats. Most of his colleagues at the CIA and the State Department checked their political affiliations at the door. They had their own opinions and they voted, but they were committed to serving whomever the elected leadership was.
Why do people believe in grand conspiracies?
Psychologists Rebecca Leman and Marco Cinnirella reported in 2007 that people expect big events to have big causes. In their experiments, readers found a conspiracy more believable when an event, such as a president's assassination, had large consequences. This proportionality bias makes an ordinary cause feel too small to explain a major outcome. A hidden plot offers an explanation that matches the size of the event.
Why does losing control make people see patterns?
In a 2008 study in the journal Science, Jennifer Whitson and Adam Galinsky found that people made to feel a lack of control saw more patterns in random noise. They also became more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. The researchers proposed that finding a pattern restores a feeling of order. A plan with a villain behind it supplies that order.
How did the US build a nonpartisan civil service?
Before the 1880s, federal jobs in the United States were handed out largely as political rewards. After President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881 by a disappointed office seeker, Congress moved to change the system. The Pendleton Act of 1883 created the Civil Service Commission and made hiring for many federal jobs depend on exams.
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