Conspiracy theory

50 years ago a publishing house was founded in France, called "alternative et parallèles", it published "le Catalogue des Ressources", the French translation of the "Whole Earth Catalog", a wonderful annual publication, ancestor of the internet according to its editor Stewart Brand. They also published in 1979 the French translation of "Shelter" by Lloyd Kahn, which they translated as "Habitats - constructions traditionnelles et marginales". This glorious publishing house has published many excellent books, including the first Earth Construction Manual written by CraTerre -probably the first earth construction manual in the world, and still one of the best- and still exists, under the name "éditions alternatives".

The French painter Pierre Fournier wrote in the first editorial of La Gueule Ouverte in 1972, "Very quickly readers wrote to me to urge me to found, and quicker than that, a "Rousseauist party" intended to "gather the marginals". The marginals - how right they are! not wanting to be gathered, and especially not within a party, whatever its -ism, there was probably better to do".

At the time we were longing to be "marginal" and "different", the "Autrement" (literally, "Differently") publishing house also started in 1975!

"Parallel" schools, "alternative" medicines were cool.

Today, you are no longer "alternative" or "parallel" but "sectarian" or "conspiracy theorist"!

What happened?

Many theories declared unscientific by the authorities (washing your hands before operating on a patient, the idea that cigarettes or asbestos cause cancer, or that the continents move, etc.) have turned out to be true, and many conspiracy stories put forward by the authorities (that Iraqi soldiers took babies out of incubators in 1991, that Saddam Hussein's anthrax rockets could reach London in 45 minutes in 2003, that Covid-19 appeared in a wild animal market, etc.) have turned out to be false.

How do you separate truth from falsehood? In my experience there is no recipe, and no short-cut to actual work. Sometimes you have to not be afraid of making mistakes, and examine a question as freely as possible. And when you understand that you have made a mistake, correct yourself.

I believed, at least once, in a conspiracy theory that I finally recognized was false. And my memory is playing tricks on me! I was quite surprised to discover, in 2008, one of my emails in which I made fun of a friend who said that no plane had crashed into New York on September 11, 2001. I advised her not to spread gossip. In 2008! I thought I had understood long before. Well, no. In 2008, I firmly believed it. Without ever having thought about it, in fact. I was sure of it, that's all. No time to waste on that. I don't know when I started to think about it. In 2010 I had changed my mind. Maybe thanks to this friend, in fact. The problem with beliefs is that we don't notice them. Neither when they arrive, nor when they go away. So "common sense" is not a reliable enough guarantee, and there are surely still false conspiracy theories that I believe in, that I am not yet aware of... After all, this is what Gandhi, René Girard, Jacques Derrida, Julian Assange and many others less well-known have pointed out: To fight structural violence you first have to uncover it, and this process of uncovering (that Gandhi called non-violence) is at the receiving end of a self-righteous and exacerbated violence, that we were more comfortable keeping unnoticed. The uniquely paradoxal song by Pink Floyd, 'comfortably numb', describes this desire to be unaware, this desire for numbness. The paradox is that the song invites a heightened awareness of this desire for numbness, which usually remains unnoticed... and so comfortably so!

The discovery that traditions, if honestly worked with, can come to the rescue of the marginals, is a paradox only in apparence, and this is what "Éditions alternative et parallèles" and others, like architect Hassan Fathy thrived in, what philosopher Jacques Derrida theorised, and it is what Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon called, 14 years ago, "the reversal of the reversal" ('The Event in Science, History, Philosophy and Art').

But there is one thing that today prevents us from discovering our own errors: Denouncing all criticism as a "conspiracy theory". This expression is a convenient refuge for our laziness, the mother of lies!

Joel Sternheimer said that science is the daughter of ethics. Lies are the sons of laziness...