Another error that conspiracy-theorists make is to “take the org chart literally”.
CTists attribute superhuman powers to the CIA, etc., because they suppose that decision-making in these organizations runs exactly as shown on the chart. Each box, they suppose, takes in direction from above and distributes it below just as infallibly as the lines connecting the boxes are drawn on the chart.
If you read org charts literally, it looks like leaders at the top have complete control over everything that their underlings do. So of course the leader can just order the underlings not to defect or leak or baulk at tasks that seem beyond the pale!
This overly literal reading of the org chart obscures the fact that all these people are self-interested agents, perhaps with only a nominal loyalty to the structure depicted on the chart. But many CTists miss this, because they read the org chart as if it were a flowchart documenting the dependencies among subroutines in a computer program.
Nice article all around!
Another error that conspiracy-theorists make is to “take the org chart literally”.
CTists attribute superhuman powers to the CIA, etc., because they suppose that decision-making in these organizations runs exactly as shown on the chart. Each box, they suppose, takes in direction from above and distributes it below just as infallibly as the lines connecting the boxes are drawn on the chart.
If you read org charts literally, it looks like leaders at the top have complete control over everything that their underlings do. So of course the leader can just order the underlings not to defect or leak or baulk at tasks that seem beyond the pale!
This overly literal reading of the org chart obscures the fact that all these people are self-interested agents, perhaps with only a nominal loyalty to the structure depicted on the chart. But many CTists miss this, because they read the org chart as if it were a flowchart documenting the dependencies among subroutines in a computer program.