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Does Believing in Big Conspiracies Cause Small Conspiracy Theories, or Do Small Conspiracy Theories Cause People to Believe in Big Conspiracies?
Or: Why the Fuck is Luka a Laker?
I’ve always thought that one of the primary philosophical values of athletics is that it is a direct connection to capital R reality, in a way that is otherwise possible to avoid for many people. When I was in law school was when I got really serious about weightlifting, for the same reason that a lot of my friends got very into drinking: 1L year is a hell of feeling unmoored from any evidence of how you are doing. Traditionally, as my school did things, you have no feedback until finals. You are working all day every day studying, but you only really ever get tested on it in a cold call, which more depends on your professor’s mood and style for how it goes than it does on how good you actually are. And you might only get cold called ten times a semester anyway across all your classes. You’re working constantly and you have no real idea how you’re doing. But, as Henry Rollins put it, The Iron Doesn’t Lie to You. You can lift the weight, or you can’t. So I got really into the Olympic lifts. The Snatch, the Clean and Jerk, the Clean and Press (I’m old school). The numbers went up, or they didn’t, every day in my notebook. And if they went up I could feel good about myself, regardless of the fact that I was sure I was going to fail CivPro (I didn’t). Lifting weights, or running, or biking, gives you instant feedback on where you stand. You have a number you can pin your ego to, a baseline reality. You can lie about it, you can cheat, but you’re only cheating yourself: you know you’re a fake. In law school I needed that anchor to reality to keep me sane, to keep me from getting lost in my anxieties about things that I could not have knowledge of or control over.
Competition of course, is the ultimate reality check. I’ll confess to having become a bit of a hermit in my workout habits over the years. I have a very extensive home gym setup, the only time I worked out socially was the occasional climbing trip. Switching to BJJ has gotten me obsessed with fitness in a way I haven’t been in years, in that every time I go to the gym I’m getting my ego crushed. I’m getting dominated, submitted, and that’s reality: there was nothing I could have done to stop it. But, the victories are as real as the defeats. I can feel myself improving, and when I get a minor win, it means nothing it’s just a casual roll in a suburban strip mall in Eastern Pennsylvania, no one gives a shit. But it’s real, it happened.
And I think that athletics are necessary for that reason: they provide a tie to reality. There’s a reason that the study of decision making in economics has come to be known as Game Theory: you create a circumscribed ruleset for competition and use it to model greater decision making. This has value both in personal practice of athletics, and in the greater world of spectator sports and athletics. Moneyball taught more people about statistical analysis and strategy than any textbook. Sports are the one real thing on TV, you watch it and something happens, or it doesn’t. Your team wins, your team loses. This is important in that it keeps people grounded, it tells people things about reality. It teaches kids growing up to accept defeat, that sometimes the breaks beat the boys, that sometimes bad things happen. Sport was so important to national and ethnic pride, to civil rights movements, over the years, because sporting success is an inevitable fact. Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson were, and remain, so important because he went on the field and did it. When they went in against whites and won, the lie that no black man could do that was untenable. There was no denying that reality. Trans competitors in girls' sports has been such a controversy, not because anyone gives a damn about the purity of high school girl's track, it's because it is undeniable. Contact with reality. Black and white.
Unless, of course, the product on the field is fake. The ultimate crime against the public, as Fitzgerald put it:
Then sport becomes just another case of one’s emotions being manipulated by some power on high.
I bring all this up in reference to the recent blockbuster NBA trade that came out of nowhere over the weekend. In the middle of the night on Saturday, the Dallas Mavericks chose to trade Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis and a 2029 First Round Pick, plus some spare change going around. This trade is so off the wall that many people assumed that the reporter who first put it out had been hacked. It simply makes no sense by standard NBA strategy: normally a team will never part with a top-5 player in their prime like Luka under any circumstances. If they did choose to trade a guy like that, then the team would accept that their current project was torpedoed and sell everything for future value, young players and draft picks to build the next great team. The Mavericks did neither: they got older and worse switching from Luka to AD, without acquiring any high end draft capital to help them build in the future. They lost a potential all-time talent, a face of the franchise and the NBA, a player who had just lead them to the NBA Finals as a number one option last year; and in exchange they got a slightly worse player several years older. It makes no sense. Writers call it The Dumbest Move I’ve Ever Seen. The Lakers have a player who virtually guarantees them a competitive team for the next ten years, and for it they gave up an aging star who was a key piece on a championship team five years ago, but didn’t look likely to win one this year.
And inexplicably, Mav’s GM Nico Harrison didn’t try to shop his player around at all. The players involved heard at the same time everyone else did, from a twitter account they thought had been hacked. Luka bought a house in Dallas less than a month ago. Players around the league reacted with shock. Fans are apoplectic. Had Luka been shopped, it is likely that Dallas could have stocked their team with bright young players and future picks to build a juggernaut years from now. A package vastly better than AD and change. They chose this very specifically. Leading many fans to ask why?
Conspiracy theories popped up immediately. From the mundane, Luka is injured or Luka is about to be MeToo’d or Luka fucked the owner/GM’s wife. To the more baroque: the Mavs chose to make this trade at the behest of TPTB within the NBA, who wanted their marquee franchise in LA to get a fresh star with the LeBron era winding down. Send the best young player in the league, and certainly the best looking most photogenic and charismatic player in the top ten, to the traditional top franchise in the league. The Mavs perfidious new owners, the (((Adelsons))) went along with this because they want to move the team from Dallas (a small market I guess?) to Las Vegas, and they needed to destroy the franchise and its fanbase Major League style in order to do it.
And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it. I wander, if one polled /r/nba fans, what would the correlation be between believing that the Luka trade was fixed and believing in RussiaGate?
Now we reach another question where Sports is a low-stakes microcosm of life: assume that the uproar was so severe that it actually threatened the legitimacy of the league. That so many fans were so convinced that the Luka trade was fixed by the NBA, that it threatened to ruin the NBA’s ratings and destroy the fanbase. Assume also, that it isn’t true, that Nico Harrison really just thought he was that much smarter than everyone. You are the NBA commissioner. Do you exercise your power to rescind the trade, in order to preserve the appearance of fairness, or do you allow it to go through, knowing that it will create the appearance of unfairness?
I've been loosely keeping an eye on this, as there's something inherently hilarious about grown men malding and melting down over a stranger wearing different laundry to put an inflated orange ball through a metal rim, impotently posting screenshots of canceled season tickets, and/or declaring that they will now switch to be a fan of team [X] instead of the Mavericks like a twelve-year-old girl. /r/Mavericks is/was looking like /r/GuyCry.
Another theory is that Luka is a raging alcoholic, hence the increased bloating and fatness over the years despite the calorie-burning of a professional athlete, and the Mavericks have had enough. Supposedly there's a video floating around of former-Mav Michael Finley snatching a beer out of Luka's hand, but there are also counterclaims that The Snatch was for NBA sponsorship reasons and the beer was later returned to Luka in an unlabeled cup.
I saw a funny comment in a sports subreddit to the paraphrased tune of "Alcoholic? I don't care if Luka is a heroin addict. You let him find a vein at halftime, keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't die, and wait for the offseason to try and get him clean."
And I suppose in any case, even if Luka is a raging alcoholic, heroin and Overwatch addict, and Diddy and Drake party enjoyer, you can get a better haul for him than Anthony Davis, a first round pick, and some random NBA redshirt. Or at least try to, instead of adding to the Laker plot armor with what appears to be, at least for now, a generational gift.
This trade doesn't help the conspiracy theory angle in a sports league that's seen the Knicks alleged frozen envelope, Jordan's first retirement, that Lakers-Kings Game 6, Durant's "Save" (which may have been the worst no-call in NBA history if Harden hadn't deviated from the script). The whole Tim Donaghy thing certainly doesn't help either.
Yeah, I saw speculation on Cracked that Michael Jordan's brief stint in baseball was a secret suspension caused by his gambling problem, which was so severe that it led to his father getting murdered.
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I really appreciate the first part of the post re: sports. I have a number of close friends who don't care about sports at all, and, although I bear them no animosity, I can't help but feel like they've missed this entire part of life that, if they engaged with it, would make every other part of their life better. My very best friends not only played and enjoy sports, they each have an attitude bordering on obsession with one or more professional or college teams. It means something. It means ... everything?
On conspiracy theories, I think people get tripped up in defining them. As @FirmWeird post indicates, sometimes what people call a "conspiracy theory" is really just the truth that one or more parties have attempted to conceal. If we don't get more specific, than a personal conspiracy can be as commonplace as telling your significant other a white lie about their appearance to preserve domestic bliss.
Therefore, my model of what makes something a conspiracy has more to do with the epistemic rubric people apply to any causal series of events. To be more direct about it, a "conspiracy theory" is a method of processing evidence wherein any counter-evidence is treated as, inversely, additional evidence that further proves the initial point.
"The Earth is flat"
"Here's a picture from space. It's a globe."
"OBVIOUSLY THAT'S A FAKED PHOTO THEY PRE-PRODUCED AS A PSYOP, WAKE UP, SHEEPLE"
In dealing with this epistemic rubric, there's simply no evidence, no matter how compelling, you can ever produce to change the other person's opinion. Note how this is actually distinct from confirmation bias in which confirming evidence is amplified 10x, and counter-evidence (sorry for that goofy phrase) is diminished 10x.
All the theories about the Luka trade, therefore, are NOT conspiracy theories until someone says something like "Lakers doc did Luka's physical and says he's fine" and the original conspirators respond with "Well, duh, the Lakers would never tell you the truth if he was injured."
A lot of the more enduring "conspiracy theories" (JFK comes to mind most easily) are fun because you can judge the available evidence pretty evenly and still find a lot of holes. Not believing in the Warren Commission report is nowhere near "lol tin foil hat alert!" I'd call it a kind of popular narrative agnosticism.
More recently, this is exactly how I felt about the lab leak theory. I couldn't give you a full, evidence laden dossier on why I felt unsure about the wet market hypothesis, or why I gave some credibility to the lab leak theory. I just kind of felt that way. What's more, nobody could offer me any sort of counter-evidence totally falsifying the lab leak theory. Instead, it was just an endless, yet vague, appeal to authority. "Jeepers! No serious SCIENTIST believes the lab leak theory. Get over it, man! A pangolin fucked a bat and now we can't hug grandma. That's just how life is sometimes!"
At the same time, you had John Stewart (of all people!), putting the regime on notice in real time. Wild.
In terms of conspiracy theory filter up / trick down, I think the key variable is mostly how an individual views information as a commodity. Meaning, when I encounter a new piece of information on anything, what's my initial reaction to it before I even process it. Is it "well, here's some data, I ought to consider it vis-a-vis my existing model." Is it "Someone obviously put this here for me to find. Let met try to discern this unknown person's motivations." Is it "I will begin with the assumption that, whatever this new piece of data is, it's wrong until proven right (or vice versa).
A smarter person than I might have some sort of snappy label for this (metabias? omni-priors?). The point remains the same; people are going to have attitudes about information even before they have enough information to justify having an attitude.
I just went from "don't care sports at all" to "care about soccer a great deal" last summer, and it really was just like a switch flip in brain moment. Like having children (obviously not like having children at all expect in this one sense), just can't explain it fully to those who don't have it.
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I will note that the most talked about NBA conspiracy theory prior to this one was that there was a frozen envelope that guaranteed Patrick Ewing would go to New York.
From my POV that is several orders of magnitude less viable than ANY conspiracy theory regarding this trade. How can you be the GM of Dallas and not know you have the best asset in the league (minimum top 3) when you just made the freaking finals? Is he some sort of mafia boss sex slave trader? If so how does LA not know they are giving up assets for a super felon?
Luka Doncic being traded in this fashion should spur accusations of conspiracy, they are deserved.
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I apply the same structure to "conspiracy theory" evaluation as a prosecutor would to a criminal case: means, motive, and opportunity. The NBA is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, the value of which rests on delivering a compelling product to as wide an audience as possible. It's a cartel of privately-held organizations operating in lockstep under a commissioner whose job is to maximize the value of the league as a whole. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for a small handful of high-level NBA executives (whether they be corporate office or individual team owners) to work together in the interest of profit maximization at the expense of competitive fairness. Things like this trade, the Lakers-Kings '03 match fixing, Donaghy, etc., all point to what appears to be obvious collusion.
The flip side to this is the idea that if it became known that things were in whole or in part fixed, people would tune out.
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I proudly claim to be a conspiracy theorist on this site and have done so for years but I don't really see any "small conspiracies" like the kind you're suggesting. For the record, I started believing in conspiracy theories as a child in the leadup to the Iraq war - I thought that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and that those reports were lies to allow the rich Americans in charge of the MIC to steal the oil from another Middle Eastern country. I believed that the government was monitoring all domestic communications - and then Mark Klein reported on it, which was also considered a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden just released the details. I thought the lab-leak explanation for COVID was more likely despite being told it was a baseless conspiracy theory, and now it seems to be generally accepted knowledge that it was actually a lab leak. I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct. I'm on record stating on the old site that Joe Biden was mentally checked out and could only temporarily be made to perform for special events years before the news about his actual mental state broke.
It just seems nakedly obvious to me that conspiracy theories are a more accurate and truthful depiction of reality than mainstream media reporting and societal consensus. This doesn't really bleed out into my daily life in any noxious or odious way, either - the one time I thought that somebody was conspiring against me, I had another person they tried to conspire with directly tell me that they were doing so. If anything, I think having an accurate understanding of how people work and act, built up over experience interacting with them in the real world, directly leads to conspiracy theories because conspiracies are real and a natural outcome of human psychology. People start seeing conspiracies not because they're just having their brains get filled up with microplastics, but because we live in a world where conspiracies very obviously happen and have a lot of influence on the world.
I'd be interested to read them, would you mind sharing the links?
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