On this year’s anniversary of September 11th, I stood in an art space in Hoxton and watched a live rerun of the moment the World Trade Centre collapsed into rubble. “Weird,”, “worrying” and “creepy” are how friends and colleagues have rightly described this event. But the most extreme reaction has been reserved for one of the artists who aspired to take part in Verdurin’s “Conspiracy season”, devoted to exploring the aesthetics of the extremely paranoid mind. Contacting the curator, an enquirer wanted to know what safeguards would be in place to temper the potential spread of any “extremely dangerous ideas”.
That a deliberately transgressive event should court the precise anxiety it intends to send up is an amusing curio, and one part of a broader moral panic that has emerged around conspiracy theories. Much of this ultimately derives from a reaction to populism across the West since the 2010s. Fears around the spread of online misinformation, waning trust in institutions, and the fraying authority of media have offered up a paranoia eager to battle the conspiratorial demon within.
As the old preoccupation with the Kennedy assassination and the Moon Landings have been upended, the very idea of conspiracy theories has become highly politicized. For each populist concern, from immigration to the adoption of net-zero policies, there is an associated conspiratorial horror. The concepts underpinning this panic have been driven by a series of popular books and a sub-genre of journalism, which purports to explain through a mixture of reportage and cod psychology how bored and wayward citizens in Western democracies have fallen under the spell of conspiratorial ideas while casually scrolling on their phones.
For each populist concern, from immigration to the adoption of net-zero policies, there is an associated conspiratorial horror.
The “New Conspiracism,” argue Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, the authors of A Lot of People Are Saying, is a roving discontent concerned with disruption, a bored populism distinguished from the thinking of the old school conspiracist who sat at his desk coming up with creative ways to read the report of the 9/11 Commission. The mere viral repetition of claims online is enough to entail real-world damage—an understanding linked to a specific brand of transatlantic liberal thinking that sees social media and its discontents as having the power to upend democracy while driving mistrust and hate.
Critical reviews of Muirhead and Rosenblum’s book have argued that it is itself an extreme form of unfounded paranoia. Alongside this, there is a growing body of academic research that disputes strictly deterministic causational thinking regarding people’s beliefs and their behaviour online. Nevertheless numerous titles since the pandemic have courted the Western liberal mind with this panic: Qanon, The Hidden Pandemic, Among the Trolls and Foolproof: Why Misinformation Affects our Mind have framed a conspiratorial mindset in danger of being fuelled by mistruths and misinformation that spreads like a virus. These are modern day morality tales for the dark side of the information age, with social media possessing the power to bring about everything from family breakups to violent insurrection and madness. Alongside this is an exceptionalism: the digital information age is marked by an unprecedented period of misplaced paranoia brought about largely by misinformation on social media—an idea that even a brief glance at history renders laughable.
Yet this alarmism has also become widely institutionalized. At the end of the last parliament, UK politicians were given a glossy brochure detailing different conspiratorial beliefs, from “old school” Elders of Zion antisemitism to new 5G conspiracism, with adventurous graphics suggesting they are in fact all linked. To take a recent example from academia, a survey of people’s attitudes towards immigration in the US was extrapolated into the finding that up to a third believed in the “The Great Replacement” theory, an idea spread from the dark corners of the internet that had allegedly come to infiltrate conservative immigration attitudes (whether respondents were politely informed they believed in such a conspiracy was not made clear).
At the end of the last parliament, UK politicians were given a glossy brochure detailing different conspiratorial beliefs, from “old school” Elders of Zion antisemitism to new 5G conspiracism, with adventurous graphics suggesting they were in fact all linked.
This renewed interest in conspiracy theories, particularly post-pandemic, has forced me down the rabbit hole, to understand our historic response to these ideas and how they have evolved over time. The cultural turn has been dizzying. In the 2000s, the likes of Louis Theroux and Jon Ronson courted television audiences by presenting conspiracy theorists as semi-comic figures of ridicule. Now they are presented as the ever-growing enemy within. Surveys appear every year, reporting ever increasing numbers guilty of toying with dangerous conspiratorial ideas.
But what exactly does it mean to “believe” in this carefully taxonomized landscape of the new political paranoia? Are these, as is often argued, merely allegorical stories told by the displaced, rooted in legitimate concerns? Are they told and heard in an ironic spirit, as an expression of apathy and despair in a world mired in cynicism? Are the conspiracists genuinely mad? If people do believe a “secretive elite” is ruling the world, are they talking about inter-space lizards or Keir Starmer?
The idea that there are broad categories of nefarious and dangerous beliefs into which people can fall is itself a novel belief. Karl Popper first introduced the idea in 1952 in The Conspiracy Theory of Society, rooting it in a religious impulse that had tried to create a secular metaphysics around good and evil. Timothy Melley has suggested that the most influential framing originated, in the discord following the Kennedy assassination, with Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter identified a particular strand of right-wing populism resurgent in American thinking, that lent itself to a fervent moralism unable to reconcile itself with the hypocrisy and folly of American power in the 20th century. The American frontier had closed, and the archetypal impulses concerning liberty and God had been left to fester nightly in front of the television news. The conspiratorial mind was essentially a superstitious impulse to which the rigmarole of American politics and its markets ultimately had no answer.
Hofstadter’s framing of the conspiratorial mind is perhaps the most determinative for the present panic, presenting conspiracism as an aberration of the modern mind that must be shut out. But in The United States of Paranoia, Jesse Walker tries to turn Hofstadter’s polemic on its head. If conspiracy theories are in essence varying, and often unsuccessful, attempts at theorizing extreme political paranoia, then elites must be just as susceptible as the masses below. What Walker calls “Elite Hysteria” not only competes with paranoia from below, but drives it, too.
If conspiracy theories are in essence unsuccessful attempts at theorizing extreme political paranoia, then elites must be just as susceptible as the masses below. What Walker calls “Elite Hysteria” not only competes with paranoia from below, but drives it, too.
The Cold War was fought and indeed won on the highly paranoid belief that not just the rest of the world, but America’s’s own citizens could become agents of communism. Actual conspiracies involved government agencies toppling regimes and spying on American citizens, in some instances even deliberately introducing conspiratorial symbols and ideas into society to stoke the embers of paranoia and justify further government surveillance.
The ensuing suspicion of the American government and its misuse of power was just one feature of a broader environment out of which a growing interest in conspiracy theories emerged. In 1957, public intellectuals warned of “large scale efforts” by everyone from “political operatives” to “public relations men”, to subtly influence the daily experiences, behaviour and choices of the American citizen. Indeed, interrogating this aspect of the American century became a respected fixture of American letters. Thomas Pynchon famously championed the paranoid style, while the fiction of Don DeLillo (who said the Kennedy assassination made him want to be a writer) is devoted to exploring the ripples of paranoia that have emanated from the power structures of the American century.
In Timothy Malley’s Empire of Conspiracy, “agency panic” is posited as one means of formulating a theory with regards to this paranoid response to American modernity. Here conspiracy theories are presented as the fallout of what happens when the liberal individual and her illusion of free choice are forced to reconcile themselves with expanding and invasive government bureaucracies, stultifying consumerism, cynical media environments, suburbanized living and diminishing political utopias in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than being seen as enduring pathologies to be tamed in the spirit of Hofstadter, conspiracy theories are mere repositories of anxiety, that are sometimes even vindicated to various degrees by real world events.
The mappers of today’s conspiracies have little time for this sort of reading. Politicized moralism and tabloid style panic around the spread of conspiracies on social media have abrogated any hermeneutical study of such theories in relation to the changes of our time. Those who see conspiracy theories as allegorical, or as wayward expressions of anxiety, are arraigned as apologists for potential violence and extremism. This response has aligned itself with the fight against populism, with its call for censorship of misinformation, resting upon the belief that the everyday citizen is not capable of navigating an information environment in which the authority of government narratives has collapsed.
The response has aligned itself with the fight against populism, with its call for censorship of misinformation, resting upon the belief that the everyday citizen is not capable of navigating an information environment in which the authority of government narratives has collapsed.
Yet, paradoxically, this alarmism has only bred greater mistrust. During the pandemic, attempts to censor and disarm the “lab leak theory” backfired, while more recently it has emerged that it is likely that Ukrainian forces were behind the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. Both ideas were initially labelled as conspiracy theories potentially being spread by nefarious powers seeking to undermine the West. Such an approach has emboldened conspiracists on both the left and right, who have come to recognise the moral power of conspiratorial framing. Those on the liberal center, who have themselves engaged in degrees of conspiracy regarding the causes and resurgence of populism, have further proliferated this collapse in trust.
Indeed, one of the great ironies of elite driven-alarmism is that it has reminded everyone of the emotive, mobilizing effects of paranoia that have endured throughout history. One way to read the political environment of the early 21st century is that the aesthetics of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking have once again triumphed, serving to reanimate dead ideologies and a belief in the transformative power of politics. Opponents can be easily discredited by pointing to spurious ideological, financial or personal motives.
The aesthetics of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking have once again triumphed, serving to reanimate dead ideologies and a belief in the transformative power of politics.
The upcoming US election is essentially being pitted as a battle between two competing conspiracies that, in true Pynchon style, concern themselves with the hidden motives of the ever complex web of American power. One side fears the replacement of government bureaucracies with Trump allies in order to bring about a (soft, or not so soft) dictatorship. The other fears a deep state, running from the FBI to humanitarian NGOs, that is presiding over everything from a border crisis to the undermining of American capitalism.
It’s no surprise then that such paranoia has also been posited as a means to reawaken 20th century ideologies on the left. In the aftermath of the pandemic, an anonymously authored text called the Conspiracist Manifesto appeared in France, suggesting that the only means to reinvigorate any critique of capitalism is to engage with the heightened emotion of conspiracy and to “recover truths from the shadows”. Arguably, this technique is already being embraced by the mainstream left. Promoting his memoir, the former CitiBank trader Gary Stevenson has suggested that post-2008 there was a widespread consensus amongst international finance to bet against the recovery of the Western global economy. “The plan”, one interview suggested, “is to make you permanently poorer”.
Far from being a phenomenon excluded to an extreme fringe, the resurgence of extreme paranoia and conspiratorial thinking is an inevitability of our historical moment. The facile isolation of conspiracism as a mere byproduct of social media and its corrupting influence is part of a cynically politicized and historically ignorant narrative. As per historical norms, the return of political paranoia in its various forms is driven just as much by the folly of those in power as by the dispossessed below. For those living in a West marked by failed politics, cynicism and the collapse of the authority of media and institutions, the resurgence of the aesthetics of conspiracy should come as no surprise. The conspiracy society in its many guises is here to stay.
