My interest in conspiracy theory has nothing to do with the extent to which I ‘believe’ in any given conspiracy theory. I don’t consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist although I’ve certainly felt the dark pull of paranoia and I don’t underestimate its power, its danger or its seductiveness.
I do, for what it’s worth, believe power to operate conspiratorially to a large extent, and in that sense am able to accept the illuminati, or the reptilians, as broad, crude but functional metaphors to describe the power elite. Power is in some sense a conspiracy against everyone outside of its circle.
So in that sense, and again we are talking really quite broadly, I believe conspiracy theory captures something about the reality of human society. Groups emerge and rise to dominance and will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain that dominance. What you see enacted in the internal dynamics of organised crime is what is hidden but no less brutal and uncompromising in the internal dynamics of any other hierarchy, be it political, corporate or what have you. There is a huge amount of art that explores this field. A lot of Stanley Kubrick is about this. A lot of The Wire was about this. And of course there’s a ton of scholarly work and investigative journalism you can sift through. The existence of conspiracies, current and historic, is uncontroversial. (as we all agree) I don’t believe there to be one overarching group which controls all things. There are, plainly, a number of groups which are hugely powerful, and some or all, of these groups converge around certain shared interests, and collaborate, in secret. Again, this is common knowledge and uncontroversial.
Societies are machines but much of the moving parts are hidden from view. We are told those parts don’t exist but you can’t understand how the machine functions just by looking at what is on display. You can’t follow cause through to effect. You have to extrapolate, and at some point, due to the amount of obfuscation, lies and misdirection in play, you have to make guesses. James Ellroy novels are about this hidden half of power and how it operates.
One of the things I find so fascinating about the conspiracy theory culture, is the way it sheds light on the way we fill in the blank spaces of the map. We project our fears and our fantasies onto those blank spaces. Our fears and fantasies are usually tawdry, lurid and irrational but they are ours and seeing them on display is useful, and, to my mind, extremely interesting. The internet is laying bare the collective unconscious and it is as fascinating as it is horrifying. Recoiling from it won’t make it disappear. Repressing it won’t make it go away. These are things which need to be worked through, if I can slip into therapy jargon briefly.
Nobody, not even the heads of secret services, are working with anything like a full data set. No one can see the full picture. Everybody is groping a different part of the elephant. The way data is assembled into a world view, and how near-identical data inputs can form into radically different world-pictures is, I want to keep using the word fascinating, because it is fascinating. In fact no one is as famously paranoid as the heads of secret services. Read up on them and you will see what I mean.
I consider it to be hubristic to assume that one has a better grasp on reality than anyone else. This is the basis of my railing against ‘common sense’ which is just an unwillingness to examine underlying and often unconscious assumptions.
The news comes down a very small number of pipelines. It is like oil or gas in that regard. And yet people construct such different narratives from that limited amount of ‘raw data.’ Why is that? I have no patience for the trite, smug, patronising dismissals of people on this forum. It can’t be explained away as easily as you’d like it to be. It’s a real force in our culture (in world culture in fact, not just in the west) and yes, as we have been reading a lot about recently, it has been ‘weaponised’ (to use a vogueish word)
It helps to understand its allure from the inside. It thrives on the ambiguity of the uncertain and the unknown. You can’t wish away this ambiguity. It exists. It is a crucial part of being human and it is amplified by propaganda, by secret services, by the media and so on and so forth. It is a corollary of being able to lie. Horses presumably can’t. Humans do, habitually. If you take all official pronouncements at face value you are a naïf. To feel the biting point of a conspiracy theory, where the alternative presentation of the ‘facts’ (as they are commonly understood) starts to seem as plausible as the official version is essential to grasping the appeal. The vertigo of that. Allowing the anomalies in any account to hold their full force. To be able to be poised in that ambiguity, without toppling, is a useful experience.
It is the basis of imagination. To turn the wheel of the kaleidoscope and have the particles cohere in a completely new pattern. If you cannot do this, and at will, then you are only partially human. I don’t claim that all, or even more than a handful, of conspiracy mongers are terribly imaginative. As I have said, a lot of it is a crude projection of tawdry fears and fantasies. But even in its most debased and tawdry forms there is something very interesting going on. It is very rarely, virtually never, that a conspiracy is made out of whole cloth. It is rather a collective mythos, a patchwork quilt. So you get to see this and trace this, really in real time. The participants build on a number of foundational myths or stories. Why do these take hold? Why does, for example, the ancient astronaut myth resonate? But it does, and the degree of convergence among all proponents of ancient astronaut myth is startling. There is very little divergence from Zecharia Sitchin and von Danniken. The idea is to contribute to a pre-existing universe. In that sense it is like writing for Marvel comics, for example. There has to be some degree of continuity. That collective myth-making and tacit collaboration tells us a lot about how society works. If you can be bothered thinking about these things you can learn from them. Being dismissive and condescending strikes me as the least useful and least interesting of all the possible responses to this stuff. I hope that goes some way to explaining my attitude towards this discussion and why I occasionally lapse into irritability and/or dismissiveness.