Spooky
twisty turny thing
Registered: Jul 2000
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Posts: 7236
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The Nature of Conspiracy Culture
Rumour has it that you no longer have to be paranoid to believe that there exists a conspiracy to spread conspiracy theories about everything. The number of acronyms, code name, and trebled names that have infiltrated the American mind, and thusly the Western World since the 1960's is massive.
The list includes JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe, Cointelpro, Lee Harvey Oswasld, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Mark David Chapman, John Hinkley Jr, LSD, MIA, CIA, FBI, NSA, Octopus, Gemstone, Roswell, Area 51, Jonestown, Chappaquiddick, Waco, Oklahoma, Watergate, Iraqgate, Iran-Contra, Savings and Loan, Whitewater, Lockerbie, TWA Flight 800, OJ, ebola, AIDS, crack coccaine, military industrial complex, black helicopters, grey aliens, grassy knoll, magic bullet, lone nut - and many more.
It seems that since the Kennedy assasination conspiracy culture has moved from the fringes to the centre of American/Western cultural life, in America particularly it has moved from an obssession with a fixed enemy to a generalised suspiscion about conspiring forces. Where conspiracy theorists once saw the US threatened by an external minority such as the Communist Party, now the assumption in more that the American way of life is itself a threat to those marginalised by it, and that the conspiracy now exists within the corridors of power. This logic of conspiracy has helped to shape the outlook of not just the right-wing militia, but of the new Left, feminists, black radicals, AIDS activists and academics. As the cultural theorist Peter Knight argued the situation in the US is one in which the nation is 'increasingly being fragmented into minorities, each of which feels itself beseiged' thus 'paranoia becomes the default political style'.
The most striking contrast is between the conspiracy culture of today and the classic American conspiracy theory, of say the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the early 1950's. Back then, the conspiracists saw a deliberate plot by communists with clear subversive aims. Even when the the communists were culturally represented as aliens, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the conspiracy theory concerned willful human action in the pursuit of predetermined goals. By contrast, all the sides in the current debate about conspircacy culture contain rest on the loss of belief in the history-making potential of humanity.
However, conspiracy thinking can be seen as a creative response to bewildering change. Again Peter Knight argued that conspiracy is often 'an everyday epistemological quick-fix to often intractably complex problems'. Unfortunately this only demonstrates the problem: because whatever form they take, conspiracy theories are not theories of society at all. They do not offer anything in the way of understanding society, far less resolving the complex problems society faces. In the end they can only reconcile people to the hopelessness of the human condition. So conspiracy thinking in essence, is an intellectual endorsement of ignorance, fear and powerlessness.
Many years ago Karl Marx attacked the philosphers for merely interpreting the world, and then argued that the point 'was to change it'. Now it seems the philosphers are interpretting the X-Files as the world. So is the point now to change channels?
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I thought I was the walrus.
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