Real Life and Conspiracism on a Sunday Morning

One of the many reassuring things about the world is the reality of human credulity. The most hard-minded of people (often in their own eyes), practitioners of realpolitik and of atheism, will often decry as 'conspiracy theory' perfectly sensible associations of facts without actually engaging with the patterns which others see. It's because they themselves are in the grip of a self-serving certainty.

Often, they do this for good reasons. Human beings don't proceed cognitively by some assembly of logic. We tend to use metaphor, simile, and learned short-cuts or heuristics. We follow others, by identifying with or internalising the things that they see. Sometimes, like Mayans refusing to see the Conquistadors' ships, we refuse to see things because we cannot process them. We hold to our delusions, because some of them are useful in processing the world or in advancing us economically.

Those who arrange themselves against conspiracy theories, or religions, for that matter, often blind themselves to other truths. Some are utilitarian, some profound. I remember hearing Stephen Pinker lecture on the mind as not a tabula rasa, but an engine with embodied ideas, and thinking of how he'd rejected Hobbes or Augustine only to get to an anaemic version of their perspective.

A little more humility and a little wider reading and he could have made his time on earth more interesting, and no less insightful. Yet he'd become something intellectually that he would have decried genetically; a pure strain unable to draw upon dormant or apparently useless genes that could have been activated and that would have provided the chance of an adaptive mutation should the pressure of facts upon the mind change.

Sometimes, people reject conspiracists because they are, frankly, either nuts or just silly. The same confabulated memes and archetypes keep popping up again and again. Syllogisms, and in particular the liar's paradox, bothered Alan Turing immensely, for instance.

A syllogism confuses one sub-category with a greater one. So when a table has four legs and a dog has four legs, unless you know that the greater category is four legged things, you are logically defeated. For Turing, the idea 'Turing thinks computers could thing; Turing is a despised homosexual; therefore computers can't think' was the liar's paradox, the worry which held him back. He worried that everyone, rather than idiots, would think like that, inferential logic would lead people to believe that all people like Turing were living a lie all the time and therefore all liars.

Plenty of conspiracists, too, repeat the deliberately engineered or self-serving conspiracy stories that cover up the shame or crime of the powerful. When the assault on Constantinople began in July 1203, for instance--when the Fourth Crusade turned on Christians--the Crusaders had a fairly good idea of what they thought was inside. Money, mostly, but also other things.

They thought that the true cross, and nails, and the head of John the Baptist, and the shroud of Jesus, and various other accoutrements, were in either the Chapel of Our Lady of the lighthouse or the Treasury of the Bucoleon and the Hagia Sophia. Constantinople was not protected by the Golden Gates for nothing, to use a construction which has in its own time encouraged 'ripperologists'.

So, it's not surprising that very soon afterward rumours swept Europe that things had been found 'in the Holy Land' and various deniable stories emerged about Solomon's Temple and so forth. If I had broken church laws as a Christian Crusader, killed and stolen in a clearly bad way, and looted, I might make something up, just as, oh, I don't know, if I'd imported a bunch of Nazi Rocketeers to New Mexico or Texas, I'd make something up about aliens.

Religious debates undergird so much of what we see, and yet we'd never recognise them as such. One of the central differences between orthodox and western Christianity, for instance, is whether or not Christ was God or subordinate at some stage or all stages to God. Gnosticism is in some ways the suppressed survivor of the Catholic determination to make Jesus God at all times, mystically, along with the Holy Spirit; in the East, subordinationism survived.

So when Bulgakov writes of animal parts taking over human spirit, or westerners make films like the X-Files about Russians transplanting bodies and keeping souls, isn't there some trace in our reaction of this debate, even if we don't know it?

The rumours and stories that whispered and flew from Constaninople's looting had a life of their own, and re-emerged as the 'substance' of best-selling books and engines of antireligion in the twentieth century. From spacemen to the grail, the last century iterated and reiterated combinations of myths at a frightening pace. These myths were very much influenced by the wider market tastes of western readers and ultimately swallowed up by the internet; but what a bunch of tales were told!

As a youth, I was fascinated by the rubbish Eric Von Daniken used to come out with. I could see immediately that it was an odd blend of implicit racism, potboiler prose, and unlearned contempt for the capacity of other cultures to be ingenious, and creative. It was also highly limited. It had the kick of cheap rum, though.

However, like Pat Buchanan reinventing American fascism and flirting with a sort of Joe Kennnedy-style badness mixed with apocalypticism, it was entertained by 'The Man at the bar', as were all sorts of barely rational approaches to politics. The tragedy of the past forty years is that the confused gobby drunk at the bar, and the woman who wants to impress or appease him, has become the basis of the Republican majority in the United States, and, pint changed for pinot, his spineless equivalents in the European cafe and the rip-off pub chain.

A few decades ago, the managerial and professional classes divorced from the masses and then assaulted their communities, kicking away collective ties, industrial jobs, canonical education curricula, broadly similar patterns of income and family life, and religion. Conspiracism, lowest-common denominator views of human nature, and the resentment of the masses who were increasingly locked out of politics or defined as bigoted or in need of social therapy, bubbled through the fracture.

Conspiracism has always been useful for antisemites and those who set themselves in easy opposition to globalism, or cosmopolitanism; recently, nationalists, media groups, the left and the right, discovered its utility too. Perhaps we are suffering from a lack of education and spiritual content, and are forced to impose mad patterns on the things around us.

The Arab world, run by heartless elites where ordinary people, frankly, get stuffed nineteen times out of ten, is a good example of what happens when such processes take hold. perhaps the coming recession will clear the blockages away, and expose how hollow we have become in its associated wars. I doubt it, and I don't wish for it. Why anticipate pain when we all we need to improve is our connection with love and reason?

Conspiracy theories and apocalypticism are enticing, and seductive. It's true, too, that the world has ended many times; Rome and China and the Caliph and Byzantium all fell, and we will too. Who wouldn't, like the maker of the video at the bottom of this post, want a grip on when that might happen? Revelation, like the poetry at the extremes of Yeat's career is enticing.

Engaging reason, however, suggests that predicted apocalypse happens far less than people have wanted to think, and that it is almost never inevitable. Weren't we all meant to be in the John Titor war right now? It is truly shocking how an obvious hoax attracted so many believers, and how it continues so to do. Shocking and fascinating.

Yet real conspiracies happen. Take a look at this link, ostensibly about L'affaire Observatoire, when Francois Mitterand staged an assasination attempt upon himself before going on a long march through the French state with the aid of some hired thugs and an utterly false socialist reputation. Or at these threads on the RFK story, which has always had more legs than the 'Oswald didn't do it' tale of Dallas (I think he did). The other day, I also noticed all the shady rich people and Likudniks supporting the premature release of Yigal Amir, who was convicted of killing the great, great Yitzhak Rabin, and how they were all connected to Benyamin Netnayahu.

Now, there's a real story. Impossibly, incredibly, someone bred a Jewish Nixon, except Benny has absolutely none of Nixon's attractive features, which were very, very few and mostly to do with a phase of the Scots-Irish drinking evening. I mean, how come is this, and who is responsible for that?

The picture at the top of this blog is Kapitalisme 1915, by Albert Hahn. You can see more of that sort of thing at this great site