The pervasive stereotype of the conspiracy theorist is that of a paranoid, hyper-vigilant figure synthesizing an epic quantity of signs and symbols to draw up idiosyncratic arraignments of shadowy forces directing world affairs from behind the scenes. This caricature of a hard-driven eccentric loner battling the unseen wielding only the weapon of information has been expressed in a variety of movies, television programs, and books. Paradigmatic examples include Mel Gibson's character in Richard Donner's film Conspiracy Theory, the JFK assassination researcher in Richard Linklater's groundbreaking indie classic Slacker, numerous characters in Pynchon and Delillo novels and – of course – the Fox Mulder character on the hit series The X - Files. It was The X - Files that first brought this figure into the mainstream, by capitalizing on the broad overlap between conspiracy theory and UFOlogy. Indeed the program's mottoes ("Trust no one" and "The truth is out there") also exemplify the epistemological double-bind of many paranoid conspiracy theorists – or "conspiranoiacs."
In spite of the tremendous energy exponents of the conventional wisdom put into denigrating conspiranoiac social, political, and historical analysis, such ideas resonate with a large enough portion of the general population to support a substantial cottage industry. Entrepreneurs working in this field include people such people as Art Bell, David Ickes, Alex Jones, Russ Kick, and many others, all typically very savvy in cross-promoting their work across the internet, radio, books, video, and lectures.
Conspiranoiac leitmotifs are tremendously varied and often contradictory. One good example is the varied attitudes towards a perennial bete noire, the Council on Foreign Relations. While some see it as the high cabal steering America into godless subordination under a world socialist government led by the United Nations, others see it as the high cabal steering America into transnational corporate imperialism. Comparably, conspiranoiacs also have a wide variety of attitudes towards their material. Some exercise the detached, self-reflexive irony of The X - Files' Fox Mulder. Some, particularly UFOlogists, push this irony far into high camp playfulness, to such an extent that a pilgrimage to Roswell, New Mexico or Area 51 in Nevada is more about whimsical affinity group bonding than true discovery. Some organize their lives around their beliefs and exhibit all of the tedious zealotry of a True Believer. Some exhibit the dispassionate rigor of social scientists.
Contemporary America has a schizophrenic attitude towards conspiranoia. On one hand, it has become the default popular view, one of commodified skepticism towards history and government. This sentiment has proliferated rapidly since the 1960s and Watergate. With the collapse of the reassuring dualities of the Cold War over the course of the 1990s, it has culminated in a pervasive apocalyptic teleology.
On the other hand, the disavowal of conspiranoia has also become an integral part of the conventional wisdom itself, a social technology of control that establishes the boundaries of "responsible discourse” by reflecting elite consensus on the fundamental nature of social reality, in accordance with the elite's own class interests. This makes for an incredibly effective means of establishing ruling class hegemony by controlling dissent, foreclosing alternatives, engineering support, and transmuting the interests of the ruling class into that of the nation as a whole.
One is apt to be labeled a conspiracy theorist for merely suggesting that there is a ruling class that seeks to maintain hegemony, to say nothing of the idea that the ruling class occasionally uses conspiratorial methods. Rather than conspiracy theory, most media and intellectual gatekeepers prefer to view elite behavior through the lens of "somnambulist theory," "coincidence theory," "incompetence theory," or "spontaneity theory." No amount of intellectual gymnastics will be spared to avoid arriving at the conclusion that the rich and powerful, like the rest of us, might possibly act in support of their perceived best interests. This is, of course, in spite of a voluminous sociological literature on the power elite and “elite deviance,” a danger that laws against conspiracy are presumably designed to protect us from.
True freedom of mind requires not only the negative absence of constraint but the positive presence of other alternatives. Even though the rich and powerful have repeatedly used conspiracy to get richer and more powerful, to mention this sociological fact immediately draws the most vicious criticism, including charges of superstition, cynicism, paranoia, hysteria, and primitivism.
Conspiranoia can and should be a tool of empirical explanation - it is possible to point fingers and name names. The powers that be, thousands of people enslaving six billion, act not in conspiracy but in tacit collusion, supporting an agenda of domination fostered by the similarity of their backgrounds, calibrated at key forums and through key organizations.
Ultimately, however, the appeal of conspiranoia is that of narrative itself: narrative’s ability to explain, predict, motivate, and entertain. Although conspiranoia offers the aficionado an integrated worldview, a weltanschauung, it is also provides more than this. When confronted with the potential evidence of conspiracy, one must ask, as in criminal trials: "Is there motive, means, and opportunity?" All too often there is, especially at the intersection of politics, law, high finance, intelligence, diplomacy, covert military operations, narcotrafficking, organized crime, and the media simulacrasphere – the place where so much of 20th century history has been made, and the juncture the Bush family has been sitting at for the last four generations.
Life writing can be an effective means of examining this nexus because "(l)ike biography, human conspiracy originates in a preconception of the person as historical agent." (Keener, John F. "Biography, Conspiracy, and the Oswald Enigma") Instead of the usual characterization of conspiracy theory as an individual psychopathology, conspiranoia can be better thought of as a populist fusion of life writing, historiography, and political science which provides explanatory narratives that void the epistemic warrant of the elite consensus on history, social reality, and the “conventional wisdom." This is a major development in the long tradition of popular resistance to state power and economic oligarchy, not of the right vs. left, but of the bottom vs. the top.
At its best, conspiranoia is a radical exercise of the skepticism and critical reason at the heart of the Enlightenment project. In this sense it represents a last-ditch effort by the supposed repositories of popular sovereignty – the people - to save liberal humanism and the Enlightenment from their demented doppelgangers – the program of perpetual war for perpetual peace and the enslavement of the autonomous bourgeois subject under regimes of panoptic control managed by technocrats serving the super rich, using all of the awesomely powerful tools made possible by the nation-state system established since the Treaty of Westphalia.
Conspiranoia narratives could be empirical explanations of social reality, since it can easily be argued that "(c)onspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means...and where there is no limit to power, there is no limit to conspiracy." (Carl Oglesby) The knee-jerk denigration of such attitudes by the mainstream, however, demonstrates that their disavowal has become a vital social technology of control in the late modern age. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, virtually all pre- and anti-capitalist systems have been colonized by "global monetocracy," a transnational corporate socialism that socializes the costs and privatizes the profits. This is kleptocracy by any other name, albeit a far more sophisticated version than that practiced by hacks like Marcos, Duvalier, Mobutu, and their ilk.
Although seemingly at its moment of universal triumph, this system may in fact be teetering on the brink of economic, political, and social collapse, which would surely usher in overt police state fascism in all of its core states. It is precisely the dramatically escalating accumulation of these fundamental contradictions with the global capitalist system that coincidence theorists try to deflect public attention away from with their vilification of conspiracy theories. This relentless disparagement continues even though, ala Occam's Razor, they often provide the simplest, most rational explanation. As Marx said in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past."
The power elite deliberately obscures the structural limitations on free will (that they themselves largely created) to mask the sad fact that, as human civilization has evolved from feudalism to democracy, we have traded kings and tsars for presidents and prime ministers but the money power behind the scenes has remained the same. Worse yet, it has allowed only the absolute minimum concessions to the establishment of a sane economic, political, and legal order needed to stave off social revolution.
This is not enough. The regime of capital accumulation survives by feeding off of the subject body while simultaneously stupefying the subject mind with the myth of individual agency and doing everything in the regime's power to ensure that this agency cannot be used in any meaningful way. In such an environment, denigrating conspiranoia becomes a means of cordoning off from the masses the facts that they are being lied to every day of their lives by authority figures and the consumerist hydrocarbon-based industrial civilization they live in is arguably psychopathic and terminal.
While the provisional government of politicians does the lying, they do so in the service of a permanent government above and behind political power, a secular oligarchy working in tacit collusion. In America they are the great commercial dynasties, 500 Fortune companies and their lobbyists, media simulacrasphere, civil and military services, and large research universities, law firms, and charitable foundations. They hire the politicians and establish the boundaries of the politicians' agenda.
They authorize the production of regular elections/pageants to protect the brand name of American democracy. They convince a large enough portion of the general population that the system still works, so that the machinery of oppression, theft, enslavement, and murder can continue to operate without friction.
Camps within this oligarchy make effective use of the Bilderberg Group, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Economic Forum at Davos, Bank of International Settlements, World Trade Organization, Council of Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bohemian Grove, Group of Eight, Trans-Atlantic Business Council, and other organizations to calibrate their rhetoric, achieve consensus, and even set policy superceding that of sovereign governments. This isn't done in smoky star chambers, however, but in the miasmic group think of those with similar backgrounds, class interests, and institutional positions, all pursuing the interests of the global capitalist system by pursuing misguided senses of their own self interest.
As the key nations of transnational corporate imperialism degenerate into police states, they slowly strip citizens of their rights, periodically manufacturing incidents and crises to use as excuses for increased governmental power. Meanwhile, the media toes the government line, lulling the people – or the “sheeple” – to sleep. Eventually, agencies such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and militarized local police will confiscate all weapons and imprison any citizens who dare oppose authoritarian rule.
Pittsburgh August 2005Although conspiranoiacs exist in great variety, many share a belief in the rough outline of this dystopian nightmare. If true, it is the truth which cannot be spoken. For that reason, the media gatekeepers will continue to dismiss anything that challenges the conventional wisdom as a "conspiracy theory" until some catalyst finally reveals enough of the horrible truth to enough people, facilitating a paradigm shift of world historical importance.
The ills of society can neither be ameliorated nor even adequately described by means of the law alone. Nevertheless, progressive efforts to ameliorate these ills cannot succeed without committed work in the legal field. However, such work will be necessarily defensive in posture until such time as substantial extraparliamentary pressure is brought to bear on the system by means of “either grassroots citizen participation in credible progressive projects or rebellious acts of desperation that threaten the social order.” (Cornell West) With adequate reach into a broad enough segment of the general population by leaking past the media oligarchy, armed with adequate credibility by weeding itself of the pervasive disinformation that so often taints it, conspiranoiac analysis has the potential to precipitate and consolidate a very significant portion of that extraparliamentary pressure.
As the dean of American conspiranoia, Robert Anton Wilson, put it "Like it or not, the people of the fringe are in an apocalyptical struggle: either the elite techniques of control will be perfected to the level where dissent can be abolished, or heretics will mutate to some level of consciousness where they can do holy and miraculous works to resurrect the old dream of freedom for all."
Although this may seem a millennial hope, it may also be a cogent empirical analysis of a decisive historical crossroads. In any event, until consciousness is liberated to such a degree as to enable the establishment of an abiding regime of peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability, as Rousseau said, "Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains."
