Conspiracy Theories

The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, at least in the West, goes something like this: There is an ubiquitous secret society in our midst, alien to our religion, which aims to seize control of the world, or at least the only part of it which counts, i.e. ours. They are everywhere; they are ruthless and powerful (often, supernaturally powerful); they are sexually corrupt (often, incestuous); they preform the very worst of crimes, perhaps as rituals (often, infanticide, cannibalism and religious desecration). This is the burden of Norman Cohn's superb Europe's Inner Demons, and I think Cohn is absolutely correct. The oldest versions of this story he could find were in Livy (where the Romans applied it to the Bacchantes). It was later applied by the pagans to the Christians, by the Christians to the Jews and all manner of heretics, then by Christians to (non-existent) witches; and at that point Cohn leaves off. Since then of course Jews and heretics have continued to be fashionable, but it has also been applied to Catholics, philosophes, Freemasons, Communists, homosexuals, radicals, aristocrats, etc., etc. It is still powerful and still with us. Read alt.conspiracy or alt.illuminati or alt.usenet.kooks --- to say nothing of the tons of apocalyptic and conspiratorial tracts issuing from the presses each year --- and this will become obvious. Look up the tactics the Church of Scientology uses to smear its opponents; listen to a televangelist for a while. --- Nor is it confined to the soft, dark underbelly of thought (confined there? whatever isn't there is confined!). Michael Crichton, for instance, uses it in his xenophobic novel Rising Sun; it is the substance of the "satanic ritual abuse" myth promulgated by respected psychotherapists, on the basis of conditions they create in their patients; Republican attacks on "counter-cultural McGoverniks," the "cultural elite," the "media elite," etc. are a (for the moment, mild) version. It is now as it has always been the mainstay of demagogues, and for some reason it seems Americans are particularly vulnerable to it.

One is tempted to say that conspiracies are the characteristic lunacy of the Right, as millennia are of the Left; but no doubt there are plenty of counter-examples.

Questions: Why are we fascinated by this kind of conspiracy? What do conspiracies from other cultures look like?

The last word on this subject deserves to go to Randall "xkcd" Munroe (click for the full-size version):

about

Phil Agre, The Return of Antimasonism in American Political Life
Michael Barkun, A Cultural of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America [Blurb and sample chapter]
Norman Cohn
- Europe's Inner Demons
- Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Corcoran, Bitter Harvest [Growth of conspiracy theory/ apocalyptic/ racist Christian movements in the American heartland. Conforms astonishingly well to Cohn's schema]
Umberto Eco
- Foucault's Pendulum [Fiction, with serious arguments]
- Travels in Hyperreality [Essays]
Barbara Ehrenreich, Kipper's Game [fiction]
Kieran Healy, Take Me to Your Leader
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics [Title essay online]
George Johnson, Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics
Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism [No that title is not overblown; LaRouche is not just an unusually well-read paranoid, he's actually quite disgusting when you take a good look. I did, after a LaRouchie tried to recruit me on the basis of one of my notebooks.]
Donna Kossy, Kooks [stranger than fiction; cf. the Kooks Museum]
Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator [Free full text. Reprinted in Lowenthal's collection False Prophets: Studies on Authoritarianism]
Ofshe and Watters, Making Monsters [See under Memory]
Political Research Associates [Monitoring the fringe since 1981]
Kenneth Rahn, The Academic JFK Assassination Web Site
H. R. Trevor-Roper, The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Robert Wilonsky, "The Truth Is Way Out There," Dallas Observer 6 July 2000 [Profile of serial conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs. Online via Kenneth Rahn]

examples

Art Bell [Demonstrating just how dumb conspiracy theories can be and still propagate mightily]
Jack Chick Publications
Focus on the Family, August 1995 is an interesting variant of the myth, where the Conspiracy is split into two allied parts, one of which (American "gender feminists") is sexually decadent and plotting to take over God's Own Country, the other (the Chinese Communists) cannibalistic. Yes, that's right, the Chicom are cannibals: of aborted fetuses, what else? It was in a magazine, so it must be true. This particular detail, fetus-eating, also features in some incarnations of the Satanic Ritual Abuse myth, and goes back, as readers of Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium may recall, to the prophecy known as Pseudo-Methodius in the seventh or eighth century AD. Its application to the Chinese is specially ironic, as there have been widely-believed rumors in China that European missionaries established orphanages to get children to eat. The author of this altogether unpleasant piece is James C. Dobson, Ph.D. a "licensed psychologist" (surprise, surprise!), "author of 13 best-selling books on marriage and the family, including The New Dare to Discipline, The Strong-Willed Child, Love Must Be Tough, Parenting Isn't for Cowards, Children at Risk and When God Doesn't Make Sense. [These are mainly notable for advocating corporal punishment as the most effective means of breaking the wills of children; see Wendy Kaminer, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional.].... Dr. Dobson was appointed by President Reagan to the National Advisory Commission for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. He also served on the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography and on the Attorney General's Advisory board on Missing and Exploited Children."
Addendum (1): The Chinese-eat-aborted-babies myth is spreading. Vide this page "One Man's Ministry", part of a series of pages about a gargantuan road-side Cross in (where else?) Texas. The author wrote for permission to link to one of my pages (presumably not this one!), which of course I granted, but he doesn't seem to have gotten around to it yet. [14 May 1996] [Those links are now dead and gone, alas: 18 February 2000]
Addendum (2): The original web-site with the on-line article is down, and it's not available from the official Focus on the Family web-site (understandably), which in fact seems mostly devoted to flogging Dr. Dobson's inspirational tapes. [4 November 1998]
Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer [or Kraemer or Institoris], Malleus Maleficarum ["The Hammer of Witches"; a 15th century witch-hunter's manual. The English translation by Montague Summers (reprinted by Dover Books) is particularly appalling, in as much as Father Summers believed, and argued at length, that Sprenger and Kramer were both correct and justified.]

Shalizi et alii, The Story So Far, but as a conspiracy theory it's a failure (we were far too nice)

James A. Aho, The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism
Gil Alexander-Moegerle, James Dobson's War on America
Vaughan Bell, C. Maiden, A. Munoz-Solomando and V. Reddy, "'Mind control experiences' on the internet: Implications for the psychiatric diagnosis of delusions", Psychopathology 39 (2006): 87--91 [pdf]
Epstein and Forste, Radical Right [the John Birch Society]
Extremism in America
David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History [Blurb, ch. 1]
Ted Goertzel, "Belief in Conspiracy Theories," Political Psychology (1994) [on-line version as MS Word file {speaking of conspiracies...}]
Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America
Brian L. Keeley
- "Of Conspiracy Theories", Journal of Philosophy 96: 109--126 [Described by the author as "[a]n attempt to do for conspiracy theories what Hume did to miracles." Preprints in HTML, PDF]
- "Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition! Further thoughts on conspiracy theories", Journal of Social Philosophy 34: 104--110 [PDF preprint]
Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America [Blurb]
Gustavus Myers, History of Bigotry in the United States
William G. Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague Spreading Conspiracies in the Western Alps, 1530--1640
Nathan, Satan's Silence
Daniel Pipes
- The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy
- Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From
Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Conspiracy in Ancient Athens [Blurb]
Victor, Satanic Panic

Notebooks

Conspiracy Theories