Not
too long ago, I read Jesse Walker’s The United States of
Paranoia, which covers
conspiracy culture in US political history, ranging from colonial
fears of Indian insurrection to 9/11 truthers. Where Walker’s book
excelled compared to others I’ve read on the subject is his
decision to focus on paranoia as opposed to conspiracism, thereby
avoiding the pedantic delimiting of the grey area between the two.
His thesis, in simple terms, is that a) paranoid thinking has played
a non-neglible role in American history since
its beginnings and b) that despite claims by other researchers of the
subject (especially Hofstadter),
this paranoia is not only prevalent on the fringes. Walker makes a
point of refuting claims that it is only during extreme cases that
paranoia becomes rampant across the political and social spectrum
(e.g. the Satanism scares in the 1980s). While he accomplishes this,
he does so at the expense of a useful taxonomy of
paranoia/conspiracism. Walker defines five types of paranoia that
can be mixed and matched, namely the Enemy Within,
the Enemy Outside,
the Enemy Below, the Enemy Above, and the Benevolent Conspiracy.
Walker’s desire to prove
that paranoia is not only on the fringes limits the depth of what is
otherwise a fantastic overview of the subject. In the aim of
furthering his thesis, Walker created a taxonomy in which the only
valid distinction is
who is the
subject of paranoia,
but where the degree of paranoia is irrelevant. So within Walker’s
taxonomy, a man who has been investigating the banking industry for
decades and considers it completely untrustworthy, an economic
populist who distrusts centralized banking as part of a broader
political view, and a man who believes that all the banks in the
world are owned by the Rothschilds to further a Zionist new world
order, would all fall into the same category of paranoia.
Walker’s categories are insufficient.
But
speaking of conspiracy, rather than paranoia in general, how should a
taxonomy be devised? The main goal is to identify useful
distinctions. I don’t think there’s a significant distinction
between someone who believes the CIA killed Kennedy because he was
getting in their way and someone who thinks the FBI killed Kennedy
because he was getting in their way, although the belief that he was
killed because he was going to publicize the existence of reptilian
overlords would be
significantly
different. I have a tentative taxonomy
of conspiracy theories that consists of two factors: scope and
perpetrators.
Scope
can be broken down into only two categories: limited and open-ended.
Every real-world conspiracy theory (from the Tuskegee experiments to
Iran-Contra) has fallen into the former category. A limited
conspiracy is the use of conspiracy for ultimately non-conspiratorial
ends. The moon-landing being faked for the propaganda purposes would
fall under this category, because “winning the cold war” isn’t
conspiratorial. This is not to say that the ends achieved by a
limited conspiracy must be legitimate. Some flat-earthers believe
that the reason governments keep the earth’s shape a secret is so
they can use the space programs as shell companies to shuffle money
around off the books. While hiding funds may be conspiratorial in a
legal sense, it isn’t anymore conspiratorial than the claim that
“the government doesn’t always want us to know what it does with
all its money.” If, however, a flat-earther believes
that the governments of the world were hiding the shape of the planet
so they could funnel money to create a single world government to
enslave us all, then this would be an open-ended conspiracy. People
who believe that the contrails from planes are actually chemicals
designed to affect the public, tend to fall into the open-ended
category, as the purpose of the chemtrails is generally part of a
larger, more sinister ploy. Notably, most open-ended conspiracies
tend to focus on a new world order, often some form of single world
government. Whether this is run by the Illuminati, the Jews, the
Jesuits, the Reptilians, Satan, etc. depends largely on when and
where the conspiracy arises.
The
second taxonomy, perpetrators,
can be split into three
categories, which I call:
Mostly Harmless, Partisan,
and Cabal. While I’ve
named this “perpetrators,”
this is more than just a simple cui bono?
As indicated by the first category
of perpetrator, the supposed
victims of the conspiracy are taken into account. In the first
category, even according to the conspiracists, there is little actual
harm done. At most, it’s the truth that is harmed, and the
deception is itself the greatest evil involved. Who benefits is, I
believe, of secondary importance in these examples. Those who
believe that the moon landing
was faked or that evidence of
Bigfoot is being systematically hidden would fall into this category.
No one is being seriously harmed by the perpetuation of these
conspiracies. Children
aren’t being pimped out of a pizza parlor, skyscrapers aren’t
being blown up, aliens aren’t taking over the earth.
“Partisan”
would refer to cases where there is one large group that benefits at
the expense of another. While only a small number of people need be
aware of the actual conspiracy, it benefits the entire group. Some
of those who believe that the Sandy Hook shooting was a ploy to enact
gun control laws would fall into this group. Within this conspiracy,
only a small number of people would actually be complicit, but all
who advocated for gun control in its wake would benefit. Likewise
people who thought that the Bush administration was responsible for
9/11 to aid the popularity of Bush and his party, or that FDR allowed
Pearl Harbor to happen to stymie isolationists. It should be noted
that many Partisan conspiracies focus on the same events as “Cabal”
conspiracies. The main difference between the two is that in the
latter, it is only the conspirators who benefit, not everyone on
their side. (e.g. people who believe that Sandy Hook was meant to
lead to the confiscation of guns and the enslavement of all
Americans, regardless of their position on gun control, would fall
into the “Cabal” group).
I
think the best example of a Cabal conspiracy is the anti-vaxxers. In
their view, the medical industry is intentionally giving kids autism.
Most people who are pro-vaccine are not part of the conspiracy, but
as opposed to liberals who
participate in “the war on Christmas,” those who unwittingly aid
the conspirators are themselves harmed. The Cabal can also be
clandestine. As opposed to something as visible and publicly debated
as anti-vaxxers, this could be a Rothschild secretly tightening
control on the banking systems, waiting for the right time to strike.
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