All this recent talk about ‘deep states’ and their nefarious designs globally has reminded me of some novels I have read over the years since the 1970s. The earliest of them, whose title I forget now, was about a group of businessmen, retired military officers, judges, civil servants, editors etc meeting every six months in a European hilltop villa to review the status of their hegemonic agendas. It was all very gripping stuff based on the globally popular preference for conspiracy theories.

Those who have read Arms and Man by George Bernard Shaw will recall that it was he who created the concept of the ‘military-industrial’ complex that an American president in the 1950s so effectively propagated. This was an early version of the ‘deep state’.

More recently, there was none other than the great John le Carre who, after the collapse of the USSR, turned his attention, and extraordinary writing skills, to the nexus between large corporations, intelligence agencies and political leaders. The latter two worked for the benefit of the first.

When I googled this genre of novels it turned out that it’s actually about 150 years old. Many famous novelists have had a go at it. The books have always been a success because, as I said, people love conspiracies and are quite willing to accept things at face value.

The key to success is plausibility. You have to combine fact and fiction in the right proportions and then tell the story convincingly. The beauty of it lies is that the facts are provable, and the fiction requires no evidence.

There is also the post hoc, ergo propter hoc aspect. This is a Latin phrase which means ‘after this, so because of this’. It’s a common failing that people have as they look for believable explanations for things that happen. Astrology exploits this tendency to the fullest.

Another important aspect of this sort of thing can be found, if you stretch the point a bit, in a formal proof in logic developed by a German mathematician called Kurt Gödel about 90 years ago. Gödel’s Theorem, as it is known, says that in every propositional system there will be one proposition that can neither be proved nor disproved. God is a perfect example of this.

Gödel and deep state

This is exactly true of the set of propositions that constitute the deep state theory. Its existence can neither be proved nor disproved. You take it (or don’t) on faith. Or as the saying in Hindi goes, “apni, apni shraddha”.

Yet another aspect is that all these ‘deep state’ theories satisfy a major requirement of how to reach logically valid conclusions. There are two ways of doing it, namely, by deduction or induction.

In deductive logic you start with general ideas and reach a specific conclusion. In inductive logic it’s the other way around. You start with a specific thing and reach very general conclusions.

If you think about it a little you will see how all ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories satisfy both methods. That in itself is a remarkable feat. It also explains their prevalence in the popular lore.

It’s a different matter that inductive logic was discredited way back in the 1940s. But unfortunately that happened only among logicians and the lay public is still wholly vulnerable to it and political parties make full use of this vulnerability. They take one or two data points and build a whole edifice of believable stories around it. And, as Gödel said, these follow from a single proposition that can neither be proved nor disproved.

Another pitfall is a logical fallacy called the ‘Fallacy of Composition’. They think that if something is true of a part of something, it must be true of the whole thing. So if one regime change was achieved by a country, then all regime changes must be by it acting via its ‘deep state’.

This includes regime changes in the ‘deep state’s’ own country. If you lose an election it’s because of the ‘deep state’. Evidence to the contrary can easily be countered or rejected because, hey, that’s what ‘deep state’ does, right?

Schrodinger’s Cat

In conclusion, all I can say is that all these deep state theories are the political equivalent of Einstein’s unified field theory. That is, a single causal explanation for everything that goes wrong.

Or, if you like quantum physics, Schrodinger’s Cat experiment where a cat in the box is both dead and alive at the same time till you actually open the box and see. Its moral is that simple errors of interpretation can result in absurd beliefs that don’t fully match reality.