The professor said that the assignment should be completed by the end of the week.
The professor stated that the assignment must be finished by the end of the week. It’s become cliche to say that we’re in a unique moment of a specially rampant conspiracy theories, but this is misleading because conspiracy theories are as old as America itself. Just ask George Washington who enthusiastically believed in the Illuminati. As scholar Joseph E yusinski writes, conspiracy played a crucial role in the ideology of American Revolution. Rebellious colonists believed that a cabal in London conspired against colonists Liberties that the British wanted to impose a kind of slavery on their white settlers. Yusinski and Scholar Joseph M parent even go so far as to call the Declaration, which argued that King George II was trying to establish absolute tyranny over the colonies, the original American conspiracy theory.
Eras of political divisiveness are party time for conspiracy theories. In the 10th years leading up to the Civil War, a popular book alleged that southern spies poisoned the lump sugar at a Washington hotel hoping to kill president-elect James Buchanan. Post-war, a major newspaper alleged that Democrats had engineered a malaria outbreak in DC to undermine Republican leadership and prevent President Andrew Johnson from being impeached. As author Jesse Walker writes, it was a paranoid time in America; it is always a paranoid time.
There’s always a logic at the heart of every conspiracy theory. Take the Salem Witch Trials, usually attributed to gossipy teenage girls just stirring things up, but there was actually a lot more going on. Social historians Paul Boyer and Steven nisenbaum explained that the accusations that ran rampant and got many people killed also closely correlated with long-standing local disputes over land, Church politics, and the tension between The Agrarian Salem Village and the more Mercantile Salem town. That is to say, people’s willingness to invest in the conspiracy reflected their real social anxieties about things like religious power and the rural proto-urban divide.
World War One signaled an intense expansion of federal government power. Yusinski writes during the War, the government drafted soldiers, took over key sectors of the economy, and monitored and imprisoned critics of the war. Over a thousand people were sent to prison for disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language. Uncle Sam’s brand new power birthed a new New Era of conspiracy theory fomented on anxiety not that out groups were trying to infiltrate your government, but that your government was trying to infiltrate your freedom. ered everywhere you look
It’s all right here in these secret documents, but you’ll never get them. As historian Daniel Pipes argues, conspiracy theorists seem to have startling faith in the capabilities of their enemies. Also, if Daniel Pipes wasn’t a historian, what do you think his job should be based on his name? I think there are two clear options: let me know what they are in the comments.
Philosopher Carl Popper argues that conspiracists even imbue their chosen boogeyman with god-like powers, essentially ascribing them Divine agency. The mainstreaming of various 9/11 conspiracy theories suggests that it’s easier for some to believe that the government was organized and powerful enough to engineer the attacks than it was to incompetent to stop them. Maybe that’s because if the US was truly so incompetent, it raises the possibility that such an attack could happen again, which is too frightening to prospect for many to deal with.
Shortly after 9/11, George W. Bush cautioned Americans, “Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the Attacks of September the 11th.” Apparently unable to follow his own advice, he quickly blamed the attack on Saddam Hussein, using this and faulty evidence of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext to start a lengthy, expensive, and destructive war.
As Olmsted puts it, “in the case of 9/11, the Bush Administration officials’ response to the terror attacks followed the model established in World War One and perpetuated and refined through the Cold War. They promoted conspiracy theories, they plotted conspiracies, they expanded executive power, repressed descent, and lied and covered up the truth of what they had done—all of these actions worsened rather than alade the American public’s distrust of its government.”
In a post-9/11 world, conspiracy continued to congeal, proliferating over the internet and constituting not only kooky beliefs, but many people’s entire world views. That may be why we feel like we live in a more conspiratorial world than ever.
There’s a big difference between being suspicious of, say, Catholics versus believing that all the lovers of Power are conspiring in tandem to articulate a New World Order. Conspiracy thinking might not necessarily be more rampant today, but it may be more comprehensive.
So what should we make of conspiracy theorists in 2023? As journalist Sarah Kenzier puts it, “a conspiracy theory, when rooted in a sincere desire to find and expose the truth, is a refusal to move on from betrayal.” Conspiracy theories are expressions of grief and memory. In this way, conspiracy theorists are almost like the small child bursting into tears during a tense family dinner—they know that something’s wrong, they just can’t articulate exactly what that thing is.
Here, we can’t help but think of a classic fable by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It concerns a jealous husband convinced that his wife is cheating on him, who obsessively searches for clues that he’s right and thus views the most innocuous things as evidence for his case. Lacan argues that even if the man’s wife is in fact cheating on him, the man is nevertheless behaving pathologically.
Applied metaphorically, then, even if conspiracy theorists are right about the government, the thought process behind interpreting every single sign as proof for one’s case could nonetheless be seen as pathological. This means that even if your overarching paranoia is in fact correct—whether it’s that your wife is cheating on you or that your government concealed the truth about how your handsome president died—the pathological desire to hunt for evidence and interpret that evidence to fit your thesis can not only make you seem a little crazy, it can make you do legitimately crazy things, like, I don’t know, bring a gun to a pizza parlor to find the kids in the basement—even though the pizza parlor doesn’t have a basement in the first place.
What’s more, once you start centering your world view around shadowy conspirators, you’re liable to see their fingers everywhere you look.