The Conspiracy Theory

In an important sense, there are not conspiracy theories, plural; there is only one conspiracy theory, singular. I confess to borrowing from (and reversing) this witty joke:

Enough! Don’t listen to this guy. Everything’s conspiracies with him.

Not conspiracies. Conspiracy. Singular. Reaching back to Ancient Egypt, there’s been a single cabal of powerful individuals directing the course of human history. But the common man prefers to believe they don’t exist. Which aids their success.

Global warming? Military upheavals in the third world? Actors elected to public office? The spread of coffee bars? Germs outpacing antibiotics? And boy bands? Come on! Who would gain from all this?

Who indeed?

The particular terms of The Conspiracy Theory are endlessly mutable, but the basic story is the same whether it is QAnon or the New World Order or the Illuminati or whatever:

• a small homogeneous group, Them, secretly control the world to nefarious purpose
• simultaneously They are
• pervasive and hidden
• seductive and repulsive
• vulnerable enough to need to act through guile and capable enough to control almost everything
• They are sexually perverse, including personally abusing children out of cruelty and literal thirst for their blood
• wars and social breakdown come from Their deliberate efforts, simultaneously
• to profit materially
• to make people at large easier for Them to control
• to satisfy a perverse desire to destroy everything good (which may feed the inhuman source of Their power)
• most seemingly powerful leaders in politics, business, et cetera are puppets whom They manipulate through Their direct control of
  • banks
  • popular art & media
  • universities

This should sound familiar.

The Conspiracy Theory is a cognitohazard: a seductive, simplistic funhouse mirror version of how power works. By collapsing the frustratingly diffuse mix of people and institutions which enable systemic processes of power into a far less unruly package — an imagined small coördinated circle of villains of pure malice, Them — The Conspiracy Theory offers a paradoxically comforting nightmare. Someone is in control of All This. The world can be made right, simply, by eliminating Them. The quip “antisemitism is the socialism of fools” alludes to this: antisemitism says that our troubles come not the system of capitalism, but from The Jews.

One cannot avoid addressing antisemitism when thinking about The Conspiracy Theory, because the first perfected form of it was published as propaganda in a tsarist disinformation campaign at the dawn of the 20^th century: Протоколы собраний ученых сионских мудрецов — the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which cast The Jews as Them.

The Conspiracy Theory tends to feed fascism, in a way that illuminates how fascism works and what it really is. Fascism is not simply authoritarianism, but a way of thinking about politics and society which says We Must Use Violence To Destroy Those Who Have Corrupted The Natural Greatness Of The True People Of The Nation. Since Nazis put The Jews at the top of the list of Those Who Corrupt, drawing on the Protocols and its decendants, it is tempting to imagine that antisemitism is part of the definition of fascism.

But neither fascism nor The Conspiracy Theory are always or simply antisemitic.

One popular variant of The Conspiracy Theory says that They are shapeshifting space lizards.

Many contemporary fascists cast trans people as Them, a frightening and frighteningly effective innovation, since in amplifying fascism’s anxieties about masculinity, in being a small-yet-pervasive population, in and many other ways trans people fulfill the function of Them in fascism and The Conspiracy Theory even better than Jews do. This is not an entirely new development, nor does it entirely displace antisemitism: transphobia & antisemtism were deeply entangled in the Nazis’ eyes, of course, much as they are now.

Since the Protocols cast a long shadow, people who fall deep into any version of The Conspiracy Theory have a tendency to find their way into antisemitism, or at least into alliance with people who do cast The Jews as Them.

Since The Conspiracy Theory is a cognitohazard, its gets into everything, including a lot of things I love like The X-Files and Blade and They Live. That does not mean one has to walk away from them.

Learn the scent.

Build up intellectual defenses.