A Figure of Fun…
You know the type- thick glasses, disheveled appearance, rants incoherently about the “sheeple” he’s surrounded by as he adjusts his tinfoil hat and delves into something called “COINTELPRO.” The conspiracy theorist, a figure of some fun, has an interesting relationship to our society at large. We ridicule him in the abstract because he is so clearly wrong, yet we are intrigued by him because, in reality, he is so often right. The government funded death squads in Nicaragua? Businessmen attempted a fascist coup under the guise of a veteran’s organization in 1933? US operatives funnel hummus up people’s anuses in illegal torture-prisons? Yes to all three, but before the answers became public you’d be called a crackpot for suggesting any of them.
In our post 9/11 world the term “conspiracy theorist” has become a synonym for being out of step with the shadow war being fought at all times and in all places against the threat of terrorism. The CIA, FBI and military have required enormous privacy to carry out their goals, sometimes to the point of Kafkaesque absurdity. We live in the age of the redacted document, the shadowy foe, the known unknown. To deny the necessity of this secrecy is unpatriotic, even traitorous, for to assume an abuse of power goes on beyond the veil of power- heaven forbid!- is to render oneself a “conspiracy theorist.”
But, even though the term has re-entered public discourse recently, the history of the “conspiracy theorist” really parallels the history of modern America. After the assassination of John F Kennedy in 1963, a report named the Warren Commission was released that claimed that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a lone gunman who had acted alone. The Warren Commission was, and remains today, widely disbelieved. To counter public suspicion, the term “conspiracy theorist” was co-opted into the CIA’s propaganda campaign surrounding their issue, and has remained in their toolkit ever since.
It’s here we need to ask ourselves what the term “conspiracy” actually means, because in rendering the idea ridiculous much has been bound up with the concept that is not inherent to its nature. A conspiracy does not need to be composed of sociopaths or satanists working towards mystical ends. A “conspiracy” is merely a collection of individuals, acting in their collective interest at the expense of the public. They make decisions with far-reaching consequences in total privacy. For their conspiracy to be important, they must be connected to powerful social institutions like businesses, governments, or religious orders.
Certainly it seems probable that the assassination of JFK was in some part due to a conspiracy- though a conspiracy of whom exactly it is difficult to say. Ironically, the very nature of the CIA’s attempt to slander the term was itself conspiratorial. It was a decision reached by powerful government figures without the consent of the public, who went a step further in that these conspirators hoped that their involvement would never be known.
However, though “conspiracy theorist” began as a term of propaganda, it has also been deeply internalized by the American public. Why? Because the concept of the conspiracy theorist as ridiculous actually dovetails neatly into the larger American mythos. In a country where the “self-made man” is king, where our fates are supposedly determined solely by our own virtue, the conspiracy theorist’s claims that our lives are sculpted by forces outside of our perception and rooted in historical structures of power provides a dialectical opposite. The conspiracy theorist represent a doubt, a weakness, that actually our lives are not justly ordered, that they are in fact the result of historical and social forces which we have no agency over as individuals. The self-made man believes (to quote Jordan Belfort, the eponymous Wolf of Wall Street) “The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” Race, class, politics, society, history? Bullshit stories, the self-made man says, but they form the coordinates for their conspiracy theorist’s narratives.
With A Past Wreathed in Shadows…
The point at which the conspiracy theorist enters the public consciousness was also a transformative moment for the American Left- though decidedly not for the better. In the late 60s, following frustrations of Left political movements- frustrations which often arose through meddling by “internal security agencies” like the FBI and CIA- the idea of spiritual and sexual liberation became, for many, an ends in itself. The advent of the “new age-ers” who sought to transform themselves through mysticism and experimental psychology was birthed by people who believed that personal liberation would eventually lead to public liberation. If society could not be changed from the outside (via the counterculture), then individuals must change themselves, and society will eventually be forced to catch up. This led to the development of programs like the famous Erhard Seminars Training or EST in 1971.
Of course, it didn’t quite work that way. Mostly because once the explicit political shield of the counterculture was dropped, it became easy prey for marketers. Re-buffed initially by these self-determining individuals, eventually marketers learned to make their products appeal to these new consumer’s sense of identity. A car no longer merely made you an adult, a moneyed man- it also made you sexually desirable and free. This idea of self-definition, divested of political content, made these well-intentioned individuals more vulnerable to the very intellectual control they had been trying to escape.
As all empires inevitably take on the attributes of their victims, so too did the corporate empires which preyed upon these self-defining individuals become more like them. The “Randian” self-made man of the 50s- serious-minded, hyper-masculine, dutiful- gave way to the “guru,” the spiritually enlightened capitalist, the prophet of profit, the Richard Bransons and Steve Jobs of the world. Some of these businessmen were themselves new age-ers who had simply left the politics behind.
The politics did not disappear, however, even if they were ignored. It was, and remains, a strange situation- the people on the bottom have changed themselves, seemingly the people on the top have also… so what’s the problem? Why are we still fighting unjust wars, using exploitative labor practices, suffering from enormous divides of race and class if we’re all digging the same vibe? The spirit is willing, but the body politic remains weak. This is because power-relations could not be smoothed over by individual spiritual concern. Steve Jobs had probably read the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagvad Gita, but neither of these stopped Apple from employing child labor in China and India. Obama, in his first campaign, told us he had a deep love for classical middle-eastern poetry- did this stop him from scarring those same lands with fire spat from drones? Whatever truths the elites think they have uncovered through these frankly bourgeois meditations, it has not been enough to counter the irreducible kernel of power that permeates political and economic relationships.
The CIA knows this, for even as it redoubles its efforts to discredit dissidents as “conspiracy theorists”, they are becoming more like conspiracy theorists themselves. The content of the “War on Terror” fits the bill neatly- a war against shadowy, clandestine agents, a war of half-truths and secrets in which handfuls of (supposedly) powerful individuals threaten the very heart of civilization. This is the stuff conspiracy theories are made from; a paranoia towards ill-defined targets who nonetheless hold absolute power over us. Their existence can never truly be verified, and any of the public’s demands for transparency are dismissed as being rooted in an ignorance of the true evil the country faces.
More than merely acting like conspiracy theorists, however, our acronymed defense agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, DoD) have also become more conspiratorial themselves. Flying killer robots incinerating innocent people en masse? A worldwide network of torture prisons? Complete surveillance of the citizenry’s communications? These things sound like bad plots to dystopian sci-fi- and yet here we are. The fact of the matter is that though we may only have a murky view of the specifics, time and again the idea that just behind the curtain the machinations of power are far more brutal than we have been lead to believe has born out to be true. Not only do we suffer from multiple forms of systemic oppression, but the fact of oppression is itself systemic. A defense agency, given the funding and secrecy we endow ours with, will use these powers to the greatest effect possible, and it is in their best interest to turn those powers against threats both internal and external- meaning US citizens.
This is the fact that repels us most about conspiracy theorists- that the specifics of whether one individual conspiracy might or might not be true is unimportant. Perhaps the theorist is wrong about one or another particular instance. Despite this, it is the very perspective of the theorist, the idea that power will be abused and the masses kept in the dark, and that the institutions we glorify the most deserve our trust the least, that we are loathe to admit is valid. We should reverse the thesis that conspiracy theorists could redeem themselves by proving some number of conspiracies true; we should say, rather, that whether or not particular theories turn out to be true is irrelevant to the fact that, through the mechanisms of opacity and inequality, major US institutions (both public and private) have become systemically more conspiratorial.
And In The End He Vanished, Like a Ghost
This is the major incentive for the establishment to discredit conspiracy theorists- not because they wish to discredit any one conspiracy so much as they wish to discredit the outlook it represents. Businesses and governments do not want the people to be suspiciously looking upward. They want them looking forward, to their personal futures, so that they can be more easily controlled. The “John Galt”s of the world do not ask questions of their masters because such questions are irrelevant to the task of becoming a master themselves. The self-made man who moves up the ladder is a deceptively confident figure, because in reality he is quite servile. He serves his boss, he serves the economy, and though he questions the wisdom of government regulation, he toes the line when it comes to defending neo-liberal freedoms from the (brown) religious zealots he has been trained to fear.
In undertaking this role, the self-made man becomes (often quite unintentionally) a conspirator himself. If he is, say, a communications magnate, he likely sees the act of meeting to discuss a business deal in private as unobjectionable, as the meeting concerns his private property. Yet, if this magnate owns a major service like Comcast then the decisions he reaches in private will drastically effect the public. And if this person could further his goals by funding a politician sympathetic to them then… why not? Such a thing is within the limits of the law. In any case the idea that these decisions are his alone to make, no matter how many people they effect, is a testament to his individual strength, not a slight upon society.
This casual acceptance reveals a deeply troubling fact regarding conspiracies: they are usually mundane. As at the Nuremberg trials, where Hannah Arendt noted the “banality” of the evil she witnessed (the result of men- Nazis- “just following orders”) so with the conspiratorial capitalist is there rarely any idea that he has even done something wrong, less so still with the heads of defense agencies who believe wholeheartedly in their moral right. Though the capitalist is not following orders, he operates under negative permissions, doing what is expected of and allowed for him without political reflection. A conspiracy can be used to achieve monstrous, obviously immoral ends like the establishment of torture prisons or mass surveillance- but it can just as easily be used to broker lucrative trade deals or to discuss the process of privatizing a post-austerity economy. In fact, it usually is. Every time a deal like TTIP is brokered in secret without public oversight, every time a politician receives a major donation and its implications for his policy are discussed in private (which in civilized places is referred to as bribery), every time the CIA discusses exactly much of the newest batch of memos it will redact- every time the public is exploited by powerful individuals behind a veil of secrecy a conspiracy can be found. A mundane conspiracy, perhaps, a sort of “everyday conspiracy,” but these events fit the minimal definition.
This process of secrecy is essential for our system of political and economic relationships. The appalling legal distance between the political/economic elite (who can violate international law and defraud an entire country without punishment) and normal citizens (who can be shot for selling bootleg cigarettes) requires privacy- for some- to maintain itself. Private prisons could not exist in a world of public oversight, nor could the cruelly exploitative practices of major banks. Indeed, the majority of the systemic injustices the American people face are the results of decisions reached in secret by powerful institutional figures.
Considered singularly, the conspiracy makes one look paranoid, but considered as a system, this secrecy for the powerful constitutes a political grievance. If our government considers it necessary to spy on every mundane communication of average citizens, then why are they not observing the conversations between politicians and the businessmen who fund them? If the idea of a tube of toothpaste making its way onto an airplane is so egregious that we must submit normal passengers to the humiliation of the TSA, then how is it that the CIA can hide its spending and communiques when their possessions and actions have an exponentially larger bearing on our national security? And of course, before the crash of 2012 we could have surveyed all the memos sent by major financial institutions where they outlined their corruption as it happened, just as we universally survey our citizens. Yet we didn’t, and no one is surprised. The preference for the elite is so obvious as to be virtually ignored.
I do not want to prove that there was a shooter on the grassy knoll, nor that the Elders of Zion control the media or that communists are putting flouride in the water. What I want to say is that, by inflating conspiracies to supervillainous proportions, the idea of the “conspiracy theorist” has been used as a method to discredit a larger critique of power as secretive and exploitative. We are trained to be self-made men and women- masters of our own destiny who do not indulge in “bullshit stories” about the context of our existence. Instead we move forward towards the goals that are set for us, be it career success or spiritual enlightenment (or both), doing what is expected of us. If sometimes we should hear rumors that things are not as they seem, if injustice should peek into our reality to unsettle us, then take heart, for these are simply lies we tell when we fear our own greatness. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.