It’s all too easy to get caught up in a conspiracy theory. You
only have to look at the number of, otherwise sensible, Celtic
supporters who will jump on any evidence of a wrong refereeing decision
as incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy. It is also easy to
concoct a conspiracy simply be selecting the appropriate evidence and
ignoring contrary evidence.
The recent video, showing a couple of Celtic players on-stage singing
an Irish political song while members of the audience chanted their
support for the IRA, has brought conspiracies in droves. Celtic
minded conspiracy theorists have
jumped on a fake
“second video” to conclude that the original video is a fake. I’m
sure that they would not have needed the fake video to come to that
conclusion. Rangers conspiracy theorists have pointed to the
discrepancy between the way that the press jumped all over Donald
Findlay’s singing of an Irish political song and their
seeming reluctance to cover this story; sitting on the story for several days after they were aware of it.
There was a time when it was difficult to conjure up a good
conspiracy. You mostly had to rely on you and your mates to come
up with evidence and it was difficult to disseminate your theory beyond
this group. They still popped up, growing up in instances like
Willie Woodburn’s
sine die
ban, where a sense of injustice was universal amongst a group. In
recent years the conspiracy business has really taken off. The
internet has made it easy to get all of the “evidence” you need to
“prove” any theory and has also made it trivial to disseminate the
theory.
This has led to two main conspiracy theories on the fan sites for the
old firm and these in turn have become an article of faith for many
fans. For Celtic fans, this is that there is a refereeing/SFA
conspiracy that favours Rangers. For Rangers fans, it is the
media favouring Celtic (although Celtic fans also like this one in the opposite direction).
Both of these are nonsense, of course, but it is easy to see the
evidence that supports your beliefs and simply not notice the evidence
that does not support your beliefs.
The argument made about referees is that since Rangers have more fans
(active or otherwise) than any other team in Scotland, it stands to
reason that more referees will support them than any other team in
Scotland. There are two problems with this theory. The
first is that, in my experience, the majority of non-old firm fans have
a deep dislike for Rangers so there will still be more football fans
that dislike Rangers than like them. The second problem is the
assumption that referees go onto the pitch supporting one side or
another. I think this is pretty laughable, both from a logical
point of view and based on the evidence. So-called Rangers
supporting referees are just as likely to give bad decisions against
Rangers as for them.
As for the media. The simple fact is that almost without exception, the
Scottish sporting press are a bunch of lazy, amateur hacks who will
take the easy story when ever possible. The editorial policy is
to come up with something that will sell. This normally means
something that will scandalise at least one half of the old-firm.
So, if you don’t like what they are printing, stop buying it.
Conspiracies are an easy alternative to examining reality. Stop subscribing to them and start seeing things as they are.