Straight to the point

The United States is the land of conspiracy theories, not least when it’s busy electing a president. Such theories are a secular version of the idea of a malevolent God, for which the world is a sinister place but at least makes sense. In fact, for conspiracy buffs it makes far too much sense, as every bit of reality is covertly connected to every other bit. Are the Vatican and my pancreas really the separate entities they seem, or are they not part of the same secret plot? Maybe it’s better to believe that we are ruled by a vindictive deity rather than by nothing at all. It’s comforting to know that everything that happens, including the bad stuff, is somehow meant, since the mind revolts against the random and accidental.

It’s hard to accept, for example, that those who perished in the Holocaust did so in vain. It seems discourteous to the dead to suggest that their death had no point. But part of the horror of the event is that there was indeed no point to it, not even from the Nazis’ own viewpoint. You don’t need to massacre six million people in order to create a bugbear or scapegoat. Some of those who were killed had skills which the Nazis could have used in the war effort, just as they could have used the men and machinery tied up in running the concentration camps. What purpose the whole project served was metaphysical rather than practical. Annihilating Jews was an attempt to abolish the frightful form of non-being they stood for, which threatened the very foundations of the Third Reich. Even that, however, was as counterproductive as murdering Polish metal workers, since the Nazis were entranced by a dream of purity, and nothing could be purer than nothing.

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In defence of stereotypes

By Terry Eagleton

Conspiracy theories are out to purge human life of chance and coincidence. They restore a sense of purpose to a civilisation which seems without design or direction. The claim that paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy are running the banking system may take some believing, but so does the claim that the large number of young black men killed or injured in police cells is purely coincidental. And there are, of course, plenty of real conspiracies. Not all of them are the product of collective paranoia. Some paranoiacs really are persecuted, just as some hypochondriacs genuinely are ill. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the misfortune to be both. The dictionary defines a conspiracy as a secret plan to do something harmful or unlawful, in which case such groups are about as common as kindergartens. Why are they so widespread? Partly because it’s consoling to detect human agency behind a world of anonymous forces, and partly because it’s pleasant to find fellowship with other conspiracy buffs in a world short on solidarity. It’s just that the latter aim might be better served by joining a Pilates class.

A lot of American conspiracy theories spring from the sheer vastness of the country. To impose some political coherence on this far-flung terrain is one reason why the word “America” is used in the States far more often than the word “Portugal” is used in Portugal. “Swedish” or “Hungarian” are purely descriptive terms, but “American” is a positive value-judgement as well as a national label. “A very fine American” means an outstanding example of a valuable species. One doesn’t imagine that the Albanians spend much time asking God to bless their country, as Americans do, or that Belgians see themselves as specially favoured by the Almighty. It’s true that a Peruvian army officer once exhorted his men to “always remember that you are Peruvians”, but this is mildly comic because nobody has much idea of what being a Peruvian means, probably not even the Peruvians. It would be like being urged to be an authentic inhabitant of Maida Vale. There are hordes of people in Ireland who see the nation as blessed and its soil as sacred, but they are known as Irish-American tourists. America, however, has to keep on talking about America in order to forge some unity out of its plurality. It has even adopted that phrase as its national slogan. In many ways, this drive for unity has been stunningly successful, as the tone in which a waitress in South Bend, Indiana says “Have a good day” is an exact replica of the tone you’ll hear in Roscoe, South Dakota. There are those, however, who fear that this cultural uniformity is not exactly what the Founding Fathers meant by freedom.

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The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

Because the nation is so immense, Americans are particularly sensitive about their space being “invaded”. They can occasionally be heard to murmur “excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the residents of Beijing. Large tracts of space help to breed individualism, and Americans are adept at keeping their spiritual as well as physical distance. Even some of the poorest dwellings in the country stand proudly in their own meagre patch of land, unlike the tightly stacked terraced houses of post-industrial Britain. All this is the opposite of the carnivalesque, a condition in which bodies are merged and mingled to the point at which it’s hard to know where one ends and another begins. The stereotypical American body, by contrast, is squeezed tightly into its own space, sealed against disease and conscious of its precise boundaries. It’s surprising it isn’t wrapped in cellophane. Carnivalesque bodies, being devotees of Dionysus, are often drunk, a state in which their boundaries become messy and inexact, but Donald Trump is a teetotaller. There’s a relation between the fact that he uses others’ bodies purely as instruments of his own power and desire and the fact that he is a germophobe. Mexicans can be repelled by walls and barbed wire, but germs are invaders of the body politic too tiny to be rounded up and deported. As wholly invisible immigrants they represent a Right-wing nightmare.

Conspiracy theories draw on the anxiety that things which should be distinct are actually commingled, and by no means for the good. This distinctness should be true of the nation itself, which is only diminished by being locked into trade agreements or international treatises. Yet we now live in a world in which, as the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle remarks, seeing everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. The modern philosopher whose vision reflects this most starkly is Hegel, which is why Freud once remarked that philosophy is the nearest thing there is to paranoia. There are no free-wheeling cogs in the machine of global capitalism. Nothing is allowed to exist purely for its own sake, which used to be the privilege of the work of art.

Some years ago, if you smoked on the street in the United States, it was possible to have the cigarette knocked out of your hand by a concerned citizen, if not in Manhattan then perhaps in Wichita Falls. This wasn’t only because smoking can kill you, or because the States is a profoundly puritan nation somewhat given to self-righteous moralising. It’s also because smoke represents a contaminating connection between one body and another, insidiously undermining their autonomy. The model of human contact becomes infection. Smoke eventually grows invisible, yet remains lethal and ubiquitous all the same. It is thus a perfect symbol of the menacing powers detected by conspiracy theorists, which determine our lives and confiscate our freedom but which, like the Almighty himself, are both everywhere and unlocatable. These forces are toxic, contagious, all-pervasive, without any identifiable source and well-nigh impossible to overcome. In all these ways, they resemble the theories which claim to expose them.

In this sense, conspiracy theories exemplify the forces they seek to hunt down. When a pandemic breaks out in this context, as it did in 2020, it isn’t the virus that the less enlightened sections of society regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipotent, but the state which tries to protect them against it. At a time when bodies actually need to be insulated from each other for their own good, they cast off their protective masks in the name of liberty and demand to be allowed to breathe together — another irony, since breathing together is the literal meaning of “conspiracy”.

The Nazis saw themselves as avant-gardists at the very cutting-edge of technological progress, but they were also deeply archaic. If they were modernisers spellbound by the future, they were also obsessed with myth, ritual, astrology and the occult. When reason is reduced to a bloodless, purely instrumental form of rationality, it leaves a space into which the irrational can flood. This paradox is now being repeated in Trump’s America. The last word in technological wizardry co-exists with a belief in demonic powers. At the very peak of modernity, we are turning back to the Middle Ages — to a world of diabolical forces and weird convergences where nothing is what it seems. There is less and less between the world of pure appearance of Hollywood on the one hand and the invisible machinations of the deep state on the other. Between the two, everyday reality is being squeezed to death. There is still suburban middle-class life, but scratch the surface and you will find monstrous predators and blood-lusting fiends. The place where humdrum reality and diabolical powers meet is known as paedophilia, or some other unspeakable crime. The United States is a Gothic movie in which horror lurks behind every icebox and beneath every kitchen table. The trouble is that the Saviour whose mission is to send this nightmare packing is the most lurid manifestation of it of all.

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