by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?
Lionel Mandrake: I… no, no. I don’t, Jack
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.
Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen… tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first… become… well, develop this theory?
General Jack D. Ripper: Well, I, uh… I… I… first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
If you can imagine the figure of Jack, well-built and imposing, with a deep American drawl; Mandrake, timid, placating in his conscientious British way, you’ll have the scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; you’ll also understand something of the conspiracy theorist’s manner. You don’t usually get the theory as well as what it is masking, psychologically speaking, in such quick succession, but this is satire: “erectile dysfunction could never happen on my watch!”. Things don’t end well for Jack, and it is, ironically, by his own instructions; it is in his “regaining” control of himself, making decisions, and wilfully taking things into his own hands, that gives him, to his mind at most, an honourable death.
We all like to laugh at the conspiracy theorist; a comfortable film covers our minds as we know our faculties need not be stressed, our attention not forced on some great problem of interpretation. It is a unique feeling, and a cynical pleasure to see the ridiculous cut of a figure speaking eloquently, waxing vehemently, on something that is plainly far from honest. A child’s misapprehension intermixed with that crafted cumbersome store of adult chicanery. The comic effect gains by the wearing of a suit; what can you say to a well-dressed, lucid man informing you that reptilians are deeply entrenched in the Royal Family?
It is a different story, however, when you hear a horde are storming the U.S. capitol building, or that many have been fatally shot for the cause of something that is horribly untrue. They were mentally unstable, neglected and bitter, and down comes the conspiracy theory as a stabilising force, as something worth fighting for, something to be redeemed by. Conspiracy theories are notoriously stable, precise, over-arching; they have everything down to the tee, a precise history, a perfect calculation of the movement of culture; finally, we know where the enemy sleeps. They are obsessed with exposing, for though they all know where the corruption lies, there is something murky and obscure about where exactly the corruption takes place, for it is everywhere present.
When Coca Cola introduced their new formula in the 80s, theories began to abound about how the company intentionally introduced an inferior formula to drive up demand for the original; Coca Cola president Donald Keough is on the record as saying: “The truth is, we’re not that dumb, and we’re not that smart”. Although relatively minor in scale, as far as conspiracy theories go, this comment speaks volumes. The coordination, the “they are all in bed together and they’ve got us by the toes”, the exactness of the conspiracy theory clashes forcefully with that common sense notion that appears to our mind whenever we reflect on history, or when we reflect upon ourselves and our actions. Life, in the social, in the political, as reflected through actions, decisions, does not have the teleology that a conspiracy theorist dreams up. Life is a constant revision, and prone to errors of judgment. This is, naturally, frustrating. It is obvious we all find this frustrating to varying degrees and constantly grate against it, hopefully finding novelty in between the acts. The conspiracy theorist does away with the whole dynamic, cuts to the core of things, sweeps away the floor as so many leaves covering the hieroglyph and there basks in its message which they are lucky enough to be able to interpret.
This is the attractive side of the conspiracy theory, its stability and its “hiddenness” that raises up the believer; this is what makes them so sententious, and enables such insensitiveness to the other stuff of life. All explaining narratives have a veneer of gold about them and attract the eye: the acolyte builds up their store of knowledge, possibly joins a conversation, and begins the swagger. Knowledge empowers the individual because it gives birth to a faculty of mind that is able to discern intelligently. The difference between the would-be conspiracy theorist and the curious is that the former wants to “shut-down” extraneous detail while the latter looks to lay roots. The mechanism is not so much to be wondered at given our propensity to think in this manner; we want to reduce things down, to expose and figure out, but you rarely hear a conspiracy theorist yell “eureka!”, instead you hear the angry muffled notes through a mega-phone, or the haughty tone of someone who has lost the ability to listen.
These elements are merely of the reflective; conspiracy theories abound because there are forces much greater than the individual, even groups of individuals, profiting in spite of them. There is corruption in politics, and shady figures attempting to pull strings; lives and innocence are lost to phoney wars; intellectual posturing and disinformation abounds – this is all not new. The British news outlet GBNews is certainly peddling a kind of conspiracy theory: Rishi Sunak came to power in an “anti-democratic coup” and is in league with the “Globalist Elite”; migration is replacing British culture etc., etc.; Q-Anon is another: a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic, child molesters (i.e. evil incarnate) are operating a global sex-trafficking ring (they also conspired against Trump). The “globalist elite” is a coin in common use amongst conspiracists these days – anti-vaxxers also trade on this stock. It comfortably takes both sides of the political spectrum. You sit back and wonder: all this in plain sight? Have conspiracy theories ever had such ease of motion, made such a noise in our news?
We can point to social media quite convincingly, at least as the most powerful transmitter, but what about the person being transmitted this information? Is there something about our times… or, when we take an overview and find out that forms of our conspiracy theories all seem to be born out of the twentieth century? The noteworthy instances before the twentieth century are religious in content, i.e. anti-freemasonism, anti-catholicism (the pope is the anti-christ), and one of the longest standing hatreds: antisemitism, which somehow found its way into “reptilian” conspiracy theories. It’s not surprising, then, that Q-Anon has been described as a cult, and cult seems a fitting word for the more militant, aggressive conspiracy theories; they are one-sided, reductive, sanctimonious, and, out of respect for life, very dull.
However, we don’t want to overblow the thing – on a rare occasion, I come across a couple of people equipped with a mega-phone, before life dives again into its obscurity. It is a sad day when deplorable actions are enacted in the name of such theories, and the news scoops out a greater proportion of its viability into our homes. It is true, we do not know what is festering in the minds of our neighbours, even our own, and it is perhaps on those who do not act that conspiracy theories take their largest toll. How maddening to have to continue our lives whilst these sinister groups gorge on our world, our livelihood; the attitude towards life turns black with bile, the feeling of impotence increases, and all those others, the “unenlightened”, are figures of scorn, walking blindly like sheep.
It is difficult to pass off any element of the conspiracy theories as benign, apart from the humour inherent in the more far-fetched scenarios: Those early 2000’s shows where the music is overblown dramaticism and shady figures talk about aliens onboard U.S.S. Philadelphia, a ship that was also invisible, are funny – it’s difficult to even categorise what you are seeing; or if a burly man walks in on a banker’s meeting, firing off pointed accusations, and shouting at them for some grand scheme, you can’t help but laugh A conspiracy theory ought, by a subtle inversion, to remind us of the fallibility of reason. It ought to remind us that the world and lived experience is multi-dimensional. It can also be entertaining as a novel is entertaining. In some ways, a conspiracy theory is a narrative gone awry, and sometimes we could not ask for a better satire on the ratiocination – if only it were kept within the bounds of satire, then the conspiracy theory may have a benign effect.
All this reminds us to say: “Look after the way you think, folks!”. But should we have to expend ourselves in such a way? You first have to get over the insouciance, duplicity, and perfidy, and that’s no easy task when you have to deal with the stress of life anyway – it is really the last thing we desire. And you are in danger of becoming too ironical, too much used to passing over things, other people, as spouting bullshit. Look after your attitude towards living as well, then; conspiracy theories are, clearly, making the moralist don his pleading mantle – do we desire that as well? Alternatively, if you want, you can look up the rhetorical techniques that conspiracy theorists often use, and they are nothing we all don’t recognize from our adolescent days of using any trick to be right.
The baffling thing is that in our times these tricks have been shown to be effective, have worked on such a large scale, and that is a real reason to feel despair. COVID brought out the side of humanity which sings for life from its confinement, but then the refrains of conspiracy theories tore through and convinced many minds about the shadowy “global elite”. It is true, that sentiment is now perhaps a remnant of what it was during that time, but the theme is consistent and is ready-made for times of crisis. Christopher Hitchens called the conspiracy theory the “exhaust fumes of democracy”, explaining that it was the price we had to pay for such a multiplicity of viewpoints on such a large amount of information that our society churns out day by day. But it is also the vulture, ever-circling, ready to profit off the dead – and it is with the dead that the conspiracy theorist truly wishes to live with: the world block-painted in spite of its innumerable shades.
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://carlkruse.org
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include: Oliver Sacks, Walters Way, and Houses of Great Minds.
An older Carl Kruse Blog is here.