Rational Protagonists, Irrational Stories, Conspiracy Thinking

Monday Miscellany

There’s a kind of critical response that pops up a lot in science fiction and fantasy fandom. Basically someone will say that they didn’t really like a particular story because a major character’s actions don’t make rational sense. The character’s plans were contradictory or excessive, their responses to events were obviously going to backfire or fail, the actions they take don’t serve the character’s goals, or the character’s goals don’t fit the character’s motivations.

I think sometimes this is a valid critique. For example, when a long-established character in a major franchise does something completely at odds with their normal behavior and the writers do not explain why, or when a character who is normally cunning and far-sighted does something impulsive and stupid simply to get the plot rolling in the direction that the writers need it to go in. Say, if Professor Moriarity gets caught by police robbing a jewelry store personally without that being an elaborate deception, or if Captain Kirk concludes there’s nothing he can do about a Klingon vessel bombing a nearby planet and continues with a scientific survey of a nebula so that the writer can stage a court-martial for the sake of drama.

A lot of the time, on the other hand, this kind of objection seems to me to be coming from someone who wants fictional characters to act with a kind of consistent rationality, whether or not they’ve been established as prone to rational calculation or as aspiring to a sort of methodical reason. A fair amount of the time this is coming from fans who believe themselves to be rational, or who aspire to being that way, or who at least need characters that they like to be that way.

So a character who acts impulsively, who acts in a contradictory way, whose actions don’t fit their self-declared motivations, who is overwhelmed by momentary emotions, who make bad decisions that were almost inevitably going to hurt the character’s own goals, sometimes provoke this kind of fan into arguing that the cultural work in question is aesthetically bad. They will argue that this is unrealistic: why would anybody do that? Why wouldn’t the character realize that that action was a terrible idea?

This kind of fan has a problem that they aren’t fully aware of, which is that a story where everyone acts rationally is a story where all characters are boringly the same and where it is extremely difficult to explain why there is a story at all—why there is conflict, why there is change. It can be done—Asimov’s Foundation series, at least the first three books, is arguably a case where the individual actors are all acting in accord with their local self-interested rationality and where their conflicts are just the unfolding of a higher rationality that leads to a super-rational outcome in the end. (And truthfully, that makes the characters kind of boring—the seemingly clever people aren’t unusually clever at all, the idealistic people’s ideals don’t matter, and the antagonists are just doing what they are expected to do, except for the Mule.)

This deep way of reading culture is not limited to fans of speculative fiction. Major bodies of social scientistic thought and philosophy assume through some form of methodological individualism that people generally have rational goals and motivations, that they understand accurately what is best for them as individuals and try to undertake action accordingly, and that societies and institutions should largely are the sum total of such actions.

That leaves this substantial body of interpretation with a difficult problem when both individual and collective outcomes don’t seem aligned with rational evaluations of needs and wants. There are some classic ways out of this trap. Perhaps individual and collective actors do not have all the information necessary to align what they are doing with rational goals. Perhaps rational actors compete with each other in a fitness landscape that has intrinsic scarcity and thus not all actors can have their goals, which leads them to either actively foil the actions of others or to engage in deception that keeps necessary information from all actors. Perhaps it is that what seems irrational is actually rational in some deeper way and we have to adjust our evaluations. Perhaps (this possibility is often only reluctantly conceded) there is a role for chance and accident, that some rationalities are foiled through no fault of their own.

What some fans disdain, what some analysts dislike, is a conception of character—or of human subjectivity and agency—where individuals have a multiplicity of motives and goals, many contradictory or divergent, where individuals don’t know themselves well and therefore don’t actually know what they want or what will get them what they want, where individuals hate some of their own desires and regard those motivations and goals as ill-begotten intruders, where individual consciousness is mostly a post-facto fairytale and action is determined by some form of hidden or inaccessible cognition or instinct. Equally, they dislike versions of collective outcomes or narrative situations that are not summed up from individual motivation, where there are forces, structures, constraints that no one fully understands or that can’t be understood until action is undertaken, or where outcomes are contingent on the strange interactions and relations between actions, timing and circumstance. E.g., that the consequences of the exact same actions are different if they’re undertaken ten minutes apart, if they’re undertaken in one place rather than another, if they’re undertaken in the presence of one actor rather than another actor, and where none of that is really foreseeable, where rewinding the tape and doing it all again just as it was done before might produce a different outcome just because of a stray impulse or possibility.

In fiction, it’s easy to see why complete indeterminacy makes for bad storytelling. Characters become interchangeably non-rational in a way that is just as boring as every character doing what they rationally ought to. Characters need to have some kind of finite, representable interiority even if real people don’t. In life, we exist in a world of sufficient complexity and scale that even if every individual has a finite but contradictory or heterogenous set of motivations, interests, past experiences, the outcomes from huge numbers of people acting at once within a materially, institutionally, historically, socially complicated world are extremely hard to limit in practice. This is one of several reasons why prediction is something of a fool’s game: we are constantly caught up in contingencies that either no one anticipated or that were only anticipated as part of an encyclopedic listing of all possible contingencies, which hardly counts as prediction. (It’s how famous psychics have sometimes scored a seeming prophecy, by throwing everything at the wall and claiming credit for whatever sticks.)

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I offer this review as a prologue to another statement: conspiracy narratives are an interpretation of the world that seeks to restore this kind of rationality to both individual motivations and collective outcomes. It reorders what seems like a bad story where people do inexplicable things or mismatch their actions and their goals into a story that unfolds as it was meant to, where what people do, no matter how superficially odd, makes sense.

As such, a good deal of conspiracy thinking is quite appealing and in some cases, achieves insights into the world even when it is empirically wrong. I say “when” because for one there are conspiracies. Or more commonly, there are collaborations and agreements between powerful actors whose terms are kept rigorously secret from all other actors because if those agreements were revealed, they would be deemed illegal, unethical or would at least inflame considerable outrage and opposition.

Many of us also respond to conspiracy thought by pointing out how implausible its assertions are, often almost the polar opposite of Occam’s Razor. And yet a fair amount of change over time in history involves efflorescent, baroque complexity in the interactions of people, materiality, institutions and actions. If we agree that people act irrationally or inconsistently, or that institutions and social classes do not always pursue their self-interest, we are already agreeing that the simplest explanations are not always the best.

Moreover, most social theory has some form of “spooky action at a distance” in terms of explaining how people who are not involved in direct intentional coordination of their actions can nevertheless end up acting in similar ways at almost the same moment. Parents across the United States did not talk to one another about naming their daughters “Emma” two decades ago, nor in many cases did they consult with baby-naming guides, family members, friends or the wider culture. But they still did the same thing at the same time. Marxists don’t need evidence that capitalists actively align their individual or institutional plans to argue that capital’s actions in the world are coordinated and purposeful, economists have an “invisible hand”, evolutionary psychologists have “modules” that express into the world as consistent behavior from similarly ordered minds. So while it is theoretically and empirically silly to imagine that tens of thousands of doctors, nurses, scientists, bureaucrats, political leaders, and educated elites somehow actively coordinated a conspiratorial plan to pretend there was a coronavirus in order to carry out a scheme to test forms of controlling civil society or extending state power, there’s a way of articulating that argument which removes the need for specific agentive intentionality and the sort of supra-rational capacity it implies.

Conspiracy thinking doesn’t want to give that up, to shift towards some more normalized and debatable social analysis, for two reasons. The first is its moral content: it relies on a separation between them the conspirators and us the victims of the conspiracy that confers legitimacy on “us” and denies it absolutely to “them”—nothing about their actions is allowable, reasonable or fair because everything “they” say about what they are doing is a conscious deception concealing what they are really doing.

But conspiracy thinking also doesn’t want to give up its vision because it is about retelling the story so that everything makes sense again, to go back to where I started. If you tell the story of the coronavirus epidemic and various policies adopted to cope with it as a massive collision of many contending interests, worldviews, and inclinations in a way that includes the preference of some actors for empowering the state but also includes the cultural habitus of many people who didn’t believe that they should change anything about their lives in response to the epidemic, then not only are the contradictory outcomes of the epidemic a sort of accident that makes it hard to easily distribute responsibility or fault, but you have to concede that in some cases people who set out with one goal ended up pursuing actions that were at odds with that goal, that people who should have stuck with one kind of grounding rationality almost randomly switched to another or used a kind of mixed-up pluralism to decide what to do or how to explain it, that what happened is deeply complex and interpreting depends on your own perspectives, your own experiences, your own goals and mindset, but also on the tools and formalisms you adopt in any given act of interpretation. Conspiracy thought is an attempt to make the characters in the story know what they’re doing unless they’ve had the truth concealed from them, to realign all people with their properly consistent rationalities and to offer some people the benediction that their rationalities were misaligned only because of information asymmetry.

It is trying to explain the story of Professor Moriarity robbing the jewelry store and being arrested by Scotland Yard by writing a sequel that reveals that this was his plan all along and that what he was really doing was getting himself thrown in Wakefield Prison in order to arrange the escape of every inmate as a distraction for his plan to succeed in blowing up Parliament while coordinating the simultaneous theft of the crown jewels. It takes what most of us would say is simply a bad story that doesn’t understand the character of Moriarity and makes it a fantastic one, if somewhat implausible and in its way also a violation of Moriarity’s normal “in the shadows” modus operandi.

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This point in turn is another sort of prologue, which is an attempt to reflect on my own temptations to conspiracy thought. As I’ve said, sometimes those temptations are wholly legitimate because there are conspiracies in the world, and sometimes because there are forms of “aligned action” that can only be described by spelling out the hidden content of such alignment. But I’m also tempted sometimes by the nerdy impulse to simply make an event make sense that is otherwise a hopelessly messy, confusing moment full of miscalculations, misunderstandings, multiple motivations, and improvisations.

Say, for example, the career of Yevgeny Prigozhin, with its latest turn in his march to Moscow with his Wagner mercenaries and his sudden acquiescence to a suggestion that he fly alone to Belarus while his men return to service in the Ukraine war.

Since Prigozhin’s acknowledgement of his role as commander of Wagner, after years of denying it, and his suddenly very public role in commenting on the activities of his own forces and the Russian military generally, I’ve been unable to resist thinking, “This is all some kind of elaborate fake-out, some sort of infowar maneuver”—that he was trying to bait the Ukrainians or NATO or the Western press into thinking the Russian military was weak or divided, perhaps to tempt them into hasty actions that would draw them into a trap. Or that would make it easier to believe that Putin might do something unstable like use nuclear weapons and thus try to inhibit Western support. Like Prigozhin was the loose cannon Riggs to some more sober and reliable Russian Murtagh, trying to bad cop-good cop their targets into doing or saying what they wanted them to say.

On the “conspiracies are sometimes real” front, after all, this is (supposedly) the man who coordinated misinformation campaigns against American, British and other countries’ elections. And just look at his biography—he feels like a “false flag” come to life, like a fiction. Petty thief, convict, hot dog salesman, gambling oligarch, national head of catering, chief of disinformation, brutal mercenary leader. In a novel, you’d expect him to turn out to be some kind of elaborate deception, a puppet.

But I indulge my conspiracy brain right now especially because I resist trying to make sense of the last week in some other way. In a complex world where individuals and institutions are messy and contradictory, I suppose I could just say, “Prigozhin’s really actually been feuding with Shoigu, he’s really actually egotistical enough to think he’s a better military commander (or maybe he actually has been), he’s genuinely been thinking of being the top dog”. Or “he’s genuinely desperate to maintain the integrity and fighting readiness of his own mercenary group and he’s run out of convicts to use for suicide wave attacks, so he’s trying to gain control over overall command of Russian military strategy”. I could just say “So he and maybe some of his closest aides decided to seize Rostov as a bargaining chip and then things got out of hand and they somehow found themselves on the road to Moscow and threatening a general uprising.” But what do I make of the end of the story (for now): denounced as a traitor by Putin at one moment, then peacefully going off to Belarus the next with his troops going back? How does any of this make sense?

Conspiracy thought helps me: it’s all a plan! It was always supposed to go down this way, it’s an attempt to lure the Ukrainians into thinking Russia is weak and divided. Or it was some shadowy figure manipulating Prigozhin into going too far so he could be removed easily—it’s a Game of Thrones sort of thing! I feel the need to restore some sort of consistent thinking into the people and the groups and the institutions in order to make it all make sense.

And genuinely, really, indulging in this reordering of a story is a good intellectual habit. You test the possibilities, you recognize that conspiracies and purposeful misinformation are real (especially in war!), you don’t just accept the messy story as it superficially appears. You can’t just settle for, “All is as it seems” when all that seems is so strange and when it happened in a setting that is demonstrably full of disinformation, secrecy and misdirection to begin with.

But you also come to understand, as some fans do, that good stories and real life sometimes feature characters with uncertain and contradictory motivations, and that sometimes narratives unfold in ways that don’t make consistent sense. That accidents and miscalculations are frequent, and that sometimes nobody really knows what’s going on. That stories where everything makes sense and every character has a consistent motivation and acts consistently on it are mostly not very good stories. That the desire to align motivation and outcomes in this way is often about trying to make the world simpler, more tractable and to confer on oneself the unearned self-compliment of being the world’s most perceptive—and rational—man. Conspiracy thought always involves a kind of moral self-pleasuring, of the kind that really does lead to blindness when overindulged.

Sometimes, the painful truth is that nobody ever will know all of what happened or why, because nobody saw or lived through enough of all of what happened to be sure they have all the information necessary. And sometimes someone has all the information and still can’t really say why with any finality, only curate a catalogue of the maybes and somewhats. That might not be great storytelling, but that’s life.

Image credit: "Yevgeny Prigozhin ที่มา รัฐบาลรัสเซีย" by Prachatai is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.