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.

The Conspiracy Theory has been integral to American politics for a long time. From The Paranoid Style In American Politics, written by Richard Hofstadter in 1964 feels as fresh as yesterday in too many ways:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons — later, Negroes and Jews — have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Learn the scent.

Build up intellectual defenses.