Understanding Conspiracism - Introduction
The three contextual filters that illuminate our inquiry.
Whether it's the spirit of Leviathan, a spirit of Jezebel, Abaddon, whether it's the spirit of Belial, we come against the strongmen, especially Jezebel, that which would operate in sorcery and witchcraft, that which would operate in hidden things, veiled things, that which would operate in deception.
—Televangelist Paula White-Cain, spiritual advisor to President Donald Trump
Note: With the resurrection of President Trump, it feels urgent to revive my series on understanding conspiracism, which I’ve held for a long time in intellectual storage, as it were, while making sojourns into research material. Conspiracism is one of the vital organs pulsing at the center of extremist movements. Trumpism is made of large shares of kayfabe and self-interest, but it leans heavily on conspiracy theories and the psychopathic libertarianism they foster, while lavishing power on true believers, like RFK, Jr., with which they might do the most harm. I hope to share with you everything I know about this destructive dynamic that will thrive during the next four years.
The instinct of most people is to disparage conspiracy theories. That’s appropriate, because they’re a form of counterknowledge. But along with their fissiparous effect on our shared reality, they are an accelerant of political entropy so peculiarly dangerous that it can be, under the right circumstances, a world-historical engine of catastrophe. Because of the absurdity of contemporary examples—think of Marjorie Taylor Greene babbling about Jewish space lasers—we are too often misled to regard the phenomenon as intellectually trivial. That’s wrong. Conspiracism—the mindset that reflexively resorts to conspiracy theories to explain the world—draws on influences that are traceable through thousands of years to antiquity. They span philosophy, mysticism, magic, mythology, and even religious cosmology.
Because the sources of this phenomenon are so diverse and complex, we need a framework for understanding it. We start with a definition.
A conspiracy theory is a belief that a circumstance or event is a deliberate, connected, and occulted product of the timeless struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, attributable to the malign influence of a secret elite that supernaturally coordinates to enslave and exploit humankind, fabricates false consciousness to hide its activities, and indulges in pleasures and rites of extreme misanthropy.
But what I propose is epistemically thick. Why does an event or circumstance need to be “deliberate, connected, and occulted?” What do I mean by “timeless” and “supernaturally?” Where does “extreme misanthropy” fit in? On top we will superimpose three “conceptual domains” that might vivify these terms. In my post introducing this series, I referred to them as Manichean, Epistemic, and Magical.
My definition identifies what might be thought of as the Platonic ideal of a conspiracy theory—the all-faceted, board-mountable specimen—but sharp focus creates a shallow depth of field, blurring the broad details. You are more likely to encounter incomplete artifacts of conspiracism, satellites of the ideal, floating quietly in the medium of the culture. When Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is not a conspiracy theorist, writes that Trump cracked open a “glowing amulet” to release the “eldritch energies” of “whiteness”, he launches into cultural orbit debris from the hot core of conspiracism: false consciousness. a fatalistic order, and a society made by magic.
Without the three conceptual domains, it will be difficult to perceive these artifacts as more than traces of a rarefied concept, when in fact they are important indicators of social stability. Canaries in the coal mine of analytical thinking, they are indices of the place on the spectrum from open inquiry to spellbound bigotry on which a given discourse sits. To what degree do artifacts of conspiracism reduce media literacy? When RFK, Jr. writes about “Big Pharma,” what backgrounds his critique? What is the epistemic health of our society measured by contemporary conversations, about issues like for-profit medical insurance, systemic racism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Another conceptual metaphor is that of a stage, where the phenomena of conspiracism have gathered in a tumultuous ensemble to enact their roles. Instead of color gels, the stage lights are fitted with contextual filters that highlight different areas of the action. Each filter illuminates an aspect of the performance, showcasing conspiracy theories and their artifacts, providing context without which their meanings and dependencies may be obscured. In fact, the phenomena of conspiracism direct themselves, and we use the contextual filters to follow the action of each group as it coordinates to answer an urgent question.
The conspiracy theorist may not be religious, but his worldview is rooted in religious cosmology. He may not realize it, but to him history and society are made by eternal struggle of the forces of Good and Evil. And while he may not say so, he assumes an order of battle: arrayed on one side are God, the angels, and the righteous on earth—the People of Light; opposing them are Satan, demons, and their human helpers—the People of Darkness. Starring in this cosmic passion play, in the center of it all, stands the conspiracy theorist.
The Manichean filter is named for an ancient religion, the most successful form of Gnostic dualism, which was the primary rival to Christianity before Islam and a heavy dialectic influence on it. We use it to understand Tucker Carlson, the ex-Fox News host who has powered his solo career with a fulsome embrace of conspiracy theories, when he claims that a “demon” visited him in bed at night and “physically mauled” him. This eremitic nightmare, copied from the early Christian tradition of monastic struggle against the Devil, gave Carlson a “direct experience” of evil. It gives us the self-image of the conspiracy theorist as the protagonist of a metaphysical combat myth.
The Manichean filter also illuminates the role of the conspiracy theorist in this drama. He focuses primarily on exposing the identity and activities of his antagonist. He answers by marking the targets of his bigotry with what historian Norman Cohn called stereotypes of the anti-human. This is the true purpose of the blood libel, the medieval canard that Jews kidnapped and murdered Gentile children to harvest their blood for religious rites: to identify the enemies of humankind and mark them for extermination. But the stigma has taken other forms—ritual murder, cannibalism, monstrous sexual practices—since antiquity, when it was a staple of xenophobia justifying even the persecution of Christians. It surfaces today in conspiracy theories, from Pizzagate to Frazzledrip to QAnon, and as artifacts of conspiracism, in debates about the Gaza war, trans rights, COVID vaccines, and immigration.
The native milieu of religious dualism is apocalyptic. The roots of conspiracism, therefore, are in eschatology anticipating a salvationist battle with a monstrous adversary. Yet the conspiracy theorist doesn’t believe in history. He doesn’t really believe in time. All that matters to him is the eternal combat myth, so temporal details give way to a sense of timelessness. It’s why conspiracy theorists exhibit anachronism, as when Antisemites refer to Jews who lived long before the 19th Century as “Zionist.” It’s also why people hold contradictory conspiracy beliefs. The paradox that the Jews are both rapacious capitalists and subversive Communists is credible to those for whom it accurately reflects the cosmic role of the People of Darkness.
History collapses to synchronic eternity. The cosmos is static, upset by perturbations of the struggle between Good and Evil. At its center continually seeking realignment, the conspiracy theorist asks, “Who are the Devil’s helpers on earth?”
Whereas the Manichean filter concerns the cosmology of conspiracism and the Devil’s earthly agents, the Epistemic filter shows us the process by which the conspiracy theorist acquires what he regards as knowledge.
His method of reasoning is a closed system with unique features, cast by the mold of horror at a universe indifferent and without meaning. The human animal is distinguished by its inelegant but powerful Frankenstein brain. An analogue computer of inferential intelligence sits on top of a relatively primitive limbic system, one of whose important jobs is using fear to keep us safe. In the mind of the conspiracy theorist, the urgency with which the limbic system seeks security is twinned above by hyperactive apophenia—the tendency to draw meaning from unrelated things.
The conspiracy theorist is the hero of a metaphysical combat myth and, in this role, he operates under constant Anxiety of the Three As: that which is Abstruse, Ambiguous, or Ambivalent poses a threat. To regain comfort, he refigures things with these qualities as deliberate, connected, and occulted. Michael Barkun expands this into three heuristics: “nothing is by accident”, “everything is connected,” and “nothing is as it seems.” Conspiracy theorists are often dismissed as irrational, but that’s not quite right. Their anxious teleology leads to hyper-reason—a compulsion to explain. What they lack is consistent inductive reasoning. In that critical faculty, cogency is selectively replaced by magical thinking.
Because of his devotion to the Manichean narrative, the conspiracy theorist makes absolute assumptions. In order to explain why most people don’t immediately share them, he argues that the evil cabal controls the information we receive in order to warp our perception and hide their enslavement of humankind. The conspiracist response to this false consciousness is captured in a teaching of the Five Percenters, a breakaway sect of the Nation of Islam: 85% of people in the world are ignorant and vulnerable; 10% are an evil elite who use their knowledge to exploit them; and 5% are poor, righteous teachers charged with waking up the world.
Conspiracy theorists are the vanguard who will lead us to enlightenment. Their mission recalls the Gnostic roots of the Manichean mindset. The Epistemic filter illuminates phenomena of conspiracism as they expose a crucial activity of the Devil’s earthly helpers: "How have they rigged the contest for knowledge?”
There was current among our people a vague belief which was always mentioned in mysterious tones. It attributed to the Jews some secret magic power which enabled them to suspend, or at least effectively intervene in, the normal processes of nature.
—Pierre van Paassen, Dutch journalist, describing his upbringing in Gorinchem, Netherlands during its early-1900s shipping boom. Quoted in Joshua Trachtenberg’s The Devil and the Jews. Emphasis mine.
The Magical filter illuminates the rest of the activities of the Devil’s helpers. Research suggests that belief in supernatural intervention in the physical world overlaps with conspiracism. This aligns with the inductive defect of conspiracy theories. The unrealism of many of them—the theory the Holocaust is a hoax, for example, rests on the belief that Jews might secretly orchestrate millions of people in such a vast and complex ruse—presupposes a magical agency.
Here conspiracism reveals a debt to the medieval Church. As Christianity conquered Europe, it assimilated swaths of pagan society. Some of the cultural material of which the Church was left to dispose were the various strains of magic that were an everyday part of life. If it wasn’t addressed, pagan magic would pose a serious threat to the spiritual health of new Christians and the doctrinal authority of the Church. The answer was to teach that magic was the work of demons and ultimately the Devil, himself.
Once magic was diabolized, the Devil’s helpers on earth were upgraded to sorcerous conspirators against humankind. Through the deicide charge, the Church had established the Jews as the opposite of a saving remnant—hateful, obstinate relicts clinging to Satan, conspiring with their master against Christendom. Transitively, they now received an enhanced stereotype made of three traits: extreme misanthropy, conspiratorial intent, and supernatural ability. In combination, these have an incendiary potential to incite mass violence, abundantly confirmed in the European persecution of women, as witches. The connection to the Holocaust is less immediate, but no less vital.
In the contemporary world, racism is stigmatized and open belief in magic is dismissed or ridiculed. Yet we are not so advanced as we like to think, and many have an abiding sense that certain aspects of life remain, at least partially, under the jurisdiction of otherworldly forces. These correspond to traditional domains of magical practice: food and drink, medicine and health, sex and reproduction, weather and natural disaster, money and treasure, spirits and energy. Specific practices thrive as well. The gross anatomy of astrology and fortunetelling are largely unchanged, and others persist in subtler form, such as numerology and steganomancy, the search for occulted meanings in legible and unencrypted text.
A French-Algerian tells a reporter that “magical shape-shifting Jews” staged the Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher attacks to make Muslims look bad. DC Councilman Trayon White cites the ability of the Rothschild family to control the weather. Marjorie Taylor Greene says something similar about wildfires, and echoes White’s comments to explain Hurricane Helene. Feminist Naomi Wolf worries that 5G radio waves are producing a “strange group consciousness.” Women’s March tweets an apology for sending a fundraising email containing the figure “$14.92,” because it invoked a year of “colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people” just before Thanksgiving. A university lecturer in Iran says, “The Jews are experts at sorcery and at creating relationships with demons,” while the Supreme Leader declares than jinns helped the United States create and spread the coronavirus. A Palestinian warns that Israel “recruited and trained cattle” to spy on his village; another bemoans “Zionist” deployment of pine trees and wild boars to “colonize nature.”
We use the Magical filter to understand phenomena of conspiracism that expose daily depredations of the People of Darkness. The conspiracy theorist watches closely, seeking to answer an existential concern: “By what means do the Devil’s earthly helpers seek to do me harm?”
With this introductory material in place, we can begin to drill down on our definition of conspiracy theory and see how its terms of art function in real life.
Next: The Search for the Devil’s Helpers on Earth.
Good introduction! I particularly like how you characterize conspiratorial thinking as ahistorical or synchronic. It is worth mentioning that the view that over time people, culture, economics, institutions, social structures etc. undergo a perpetual process of change and continuity (e.g. historicism - see Tyson Retz) is the weird epistemic position. It requires a very complex understanding of people and institutions, the interplay between the general and the particular, and lots of detailed knowledge of histories composed at various scales from micro to macro.
That said, you may have engaged in a bit of that yourself when you began to link contemporary conspiracism to the medieval Church. There is great continuity in the manichean narrative and in the ability of people to regard themselves as heroes in the struggle of good vs. evil. However, there is something particularly modern about these conspiracy theories as well. The vastness of knowledge, the inter-connectedness of populations across the world, the struggles of contemporary capitalism and the states that support it are all just really hard to digest and understand. The modern conspiracy theory, beginning with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, departs from earlier ones in that it attempts to contend with a vastly more complex reality in which people one will never meet face-to-face appear to have power over one's own life. The Enlightenment and the culture of capitalism have promoted the idea that we are responsible for making sense of the world, of realizing who we are as individuals, and of acting with agency to control our fate. All of those ideas would have been really strange to people before the 18th century. They help to explain the appeal of conspiracy theories in our context.
Keep it up!
Thank you! These are excellent comments, especially your note about the comparative strangeness of diachronic history. That makes a lot of sense in support of where I’m trying to go.
I wasn’t trying to go too far with bringing in the medieval Church. My goal was to identify the source of the supernatural dimension of the Devil’s earthly helpers.