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The Conspiratorial Style in Pretty Much Everything
So I'm in one of those weird in-between-stages where I just went Through It brain-wise and am now starting to wake back up and trying to assemble all the obsessive lines of thought that I acquired during that time into something coherent. I'm still stewing over John Brown/remembering America the correct way/Captain Ahab megalomaniac archetype stuff and I'm reading again finally soooo ... anticipating extensive Thoughts in the next few weeks hopefully. This should really be a "what I've been reading" entry honestly but I've been following the aforementioned pattern for the last few weeks --> morosely rotate from one room to the other and grab whatever's near, read 10 pages, get distracted, wander off, repeat-- so I haven't actually finished anything in a while. So instead, here's whatever this is (fair warning--there is a Point here, but I don't think I get there. true braindump content below).
I've been obsessed with calling things a "style" ever since I became a Richard Hofstadter reader, not just because it sounds silly, but because it's also apt--so many of our societal thought patterns are well-trodden modes, no matter how resistant we tend to be to calling out this repetition. Of all of R.H's proposed styles, though, the conspiratorial style is the most widely applicable because it's how we resolve the dissonance with so many OTHER modes of American political thought ... the paranoid, the anti-intellectual, etc. etc. Conspiracy exists to unify the disparate and explain the unexplainable; it's belief-aligned, predicated on an essential conviction of religion, which is that even an order that appears evil is better than no order at all.
I think it's this inclination for SOMEONE to be at the wheel, even someone awful, that leads so many disparate areas and groups of people into pseudo-conspiracy. On TikTok, where I unfortunately have spent some time rubbernecking recently, this impulse is EVERYWHERE in the intuition-first rumormongering that springs up in the wake of literally any tragedy or mildly suspicious event. How can the conspiratorial urge be more distilled than an anti-factual inkling that there's "more here than meets the eye" ... the most basic grasping for facts to organize the disturbing and unexplained. I really do believe we are living in an era of unprecedented secular millenarianism, where the future is incredibly dark and unsure, that is leading to return to a kind of individualistic spiritualism, rooted less in any particular religion than in the sense that something has gone amiss. The baby satanic panics that spring up every few months in response to an artist's actions, the prevalence of vague 3d-->5d "shift" rhetoric even in very popular, mainstream wellness circles, general fear and rumormongering all based off the fact that something feels *wrong* about a given situation. Of course we feel unsettled in our existence when we see things terrible things happen randomly. This is also super prevalent in true crime on all platforms--the "born evil" fallacy, the conception of elaborate multi-player schemes to explain the simple cruelty of one individual, the pre-crime clue hunt, as if we were all telegraphing our future unwittingly into the present at this very moment ... the books we read, the music we listen to, the ways we spend our time ...
One of the most interesting forms of unconscious conspiracy-theorizing to me is the leftist/antifa "qanon is a Russian/CIA op" phenomenon. I think to believe this you have to have not investigated very far into the vast American history of homegrown pseudo-qanon cults and conspiracies alike (I AM, anyone? the Millerites? the right-wing infiltration into the spiritual/UFO conspiracy arena in the '80s?), and perhaps that's why these peddlers don't realize their own ensnarement. It's just an incredibly classic attempt to allocate blame to the Biggest and Evilest entity possible, to ascribe higher organizational capabilities than an event actually needs or than evidence supports. Thinking about conspiracy makes ME feel helpless so I get it--how are we supposed to fight our own history, decades and decades of priming for blind belief in the necessity of a pure good and evil struggle, American Israel mythology older than the founding documents. It's ironic that we can't even restrain ourselves from straightjacketing the most highly visible illogical nonsense in our lifetimes into some overarching plot controlled by others. Truly nothing is more frightening than the random infallibility of other people.
Sometimes when I think about this stuff I worry that my own Achilles heel in all this is a kind of elitist superiority complex. I've never been a believer of any sort; I don't have the facility for it, in Weber's words I'm "religiously unmusical." But even if that particular template of thought has never come naturally to me, that's not to say that it's obverse did either. What would be more hypocritical of me would be to ascribe the American conspiratorial style solely to the overarching institutions--churches, the public school system, mass and social media, whatever-- or to assume that I'm in some way immune because of my background, when the antidote to this "style" is to remember that we are all capable of illogicism, of emotional responses and not being as honest with ourselves as we should be. We're born with inclinations, not outcomes, and awareness of these sorts of rhetorical and logical traps is a tool, not necessarily a condemnation. It's comforting to imagine that someone else is control, or that we are called to participate in a struggle of good and evil, but it's more empowering to realize that we still retain individual agency, and that we can exercise independence of thought and the ability to change our own personalities and perspectives by ourselves, not just under the crushing buffetings of enormous forces beyond our reach.
I think in some ways, this all relates back to ideas of the mysticism of language/the law and government, and the inclination to prioritize personal perspective and experience over canonical/established frameworks and ideas ... measuring ideas against intuition/trust rather than any kind of practical framework ... etc. It has to be incredibly isolating to view the world constantly as your own personal cage match against outsized evil. What this form of anti-intellectualism misses, too, is that other people, far smarter and better read than ourselves, are also thinking about the same things, and have come to conclusions that may help, rather than mislead us in the structuring of our own worlds. Again, the tools of human power often are just that--tools--that can be used and misused by individuals, including ourselves, to far greater effect on our own lives, than they could ever be used by the supposed captains of conspiracy.
I've been obsessed with calling things a "style" ever since I became a Richard Hofstadter reader, not just because it sounds silly, but because it's also apt--so many of our societal thought patterns are well-trodden modes, no matter how resistant we tend to be to calling out this repetition. Of all of R.H's proposed styles, though, the conspiratorial style is the most widely applicable because it's how we resolve the dissonance with so many OTHER modes of American political thought ... the paranoid, the anti-intellectual, etc. etc. Conspiracy exists to unify the disparate and explain the unexplainable; it's belief-aligned, predicated on an essential conviction of religion, which is that even an order that appears evil is better than no order at all.
I think it's this inclination for SOMEONE to be at the wheel, even someone awful, that leads so many disparate areas and groups of people into pseudo-conspiracy. On TikTok, where I unfortunately have spent some time rubbernecking recently, this impulse is EVERYWHERE in the intuition-first rumormongering that springs up in the wake of literally any tragedy or mildly suspicious event. How can the conspiratorial urge be more distilled than an anti-factual inkling that there's "more here than meets the eye" ... the most basic grasping for facts to organize the disturbing and unexplained. I really do believe we are living in an era of unprecedented secular millenarianism, where the future is incredibly dark and unsure, that is leading to return to a kind of individualistic spiritualism, rooted less in any particular religion than in the sense that something has gone amiss. The baby satanic panics that spring up every few months in response to an artist's actions, the prevalence of vague 3d-->5d "shift" rhetoric even in very popular, mainstream wellness circles, general fear and rumormongering all based off the fact that something feels *wrong* about a given situation. Of course we feel unsettled in our existence when we see things terrible things happen randomly. This is also super prevalent in true crime on all platforms--the "born evil" fallacy, the conception of elaborate multi-player schemes to explain the simple cruelty of one individual, the pre-crime clue hunt, as if we were all telegraphing our future unwittingly into the present at this very moment ... the books we read, the music we listen to, the ways we spend our time ...
One of the most interesting forms of unconscious conspiracy-theorizing to me is the leftist/antifa "qanon is a Russian/CIA op" phenomenon. I think to believe this you have to have not investigated very far into the vast American history of homegrown pseudo-qanon cults and conspiracies alike (I AM, anyone? the Millerites? the right-wing infiltration into the spiritual/UFO conspiracy arena in the '80s?), and perhaps that's why these peddlers don't realize their own ensnarement. It's just an incredibly classic attempt to allocate blame to the Biggest and Evilest entity possible, to ascribe higher organizational capabilities than an event actually needs or than evidence supports. Thinking about conspiracy makes ME feel helpless so I get it--how are we supposed to fight our own history, decades and decades of priming for blind belief in the necessity of a pure good and evil struggle, American Israel mythology older than the founding documents. It's ironic that we can't even restrain ourselves from straightjacketing the most highly visible illogical nonsense in our lifetimes into some overarching plot controlled by others. Truly nothing is more frightening than the random infallibility of other people.
Sometimes when I think about this stuff I worry that my own Achilles heel in all this is a kind of elitist superiority complex. I've never been a believer of any sort; I don't have the facility for it, in Weber's words I'm "religiously unmusical." But even if that particular template of thought has never come naturally to me, that's not to say that it's obverse did either. What would be more hypocritical of me would be to ascribe the American conspiratorial style solely to the overarching institutions--churches, the public school system, mass and social media, whatever-- or to assume that I'm in some way immune because of my background, when the antidote to this "style" is to remember that we are all capable of illogicism, of emotional responses and not being as honest with ourselves as we should be. We're born with inclinations, not outcomes, and awareness of these sorts of rhetorical and logical traps is a tool, not necessarily a condemnation. It's comforting to imagine that someone else is control, or that we are called to participate in a struggle of good and evil, but it's more empowering to realize that we still retain individual agency, and that we can exercise independence of thought and the ability to change our own personalities and perspectives by ourselves, not just under the crushing buffetings of enormous forces beyond our reach.
I think in some ways, this all relates back to ideas of the mysticism of language/the law and government, and the inclination to prioritize personal perspective and experience over canonical/established frameworks and ideas ... measuring ideas against intuition/trust rather than any kind of practical framework ... etc. It has to be incredibly isolating to view the world constantly as your own personal cage match against outsized evil. What this form of anti-intellectualism misses, too, is that other people, far smarter and better read than ourselves, are also thinking about the same things, and have come to conclusions that may help, rather than mislead us in the structuring of our own worlds. Again, the tools of human power often are just that--tools--that can be used and misused by individuals, including ourselves, to far greater effect on our own lives, than they could ever be used by the supposed captains of conspiracy.