You can spend a fortune asking focus groups and online polls what they think, and you may even get an honest answer from time to time, but by far the simplest way to find out what people are actually thinking is by looking at their nightmares. I’ve thought about why conspiracy theorists are so hated, and it isn’t because their dangerous ideas are totally false. I live a few blocks from the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and there you will find plenty of homeless people who believe things that are patently false.
We let them wander the streets, free to accost people with their false ideas at will. Nobody is trying to ban the social accounts of homeless people. Nobody is bothering to follow them.
The difference is that their beliefs are personal. They don’t scale. There’s not enough resonance to their truths to get a rise out of anyone. What does get a rise out of us are the theories that, like a hard-hitting joke, have just enough truth to them to make us react. For many, the reaction is violence or disavowal.
Both then confirm the suspicions of the true believers. As a kid, you blame yourself for the rage you trigger in your parents. As an adult, you recognize that disproportionate force as someone trying to hide something. This causes the theorists to band together harder and push harder, which causes the establishment to impose harsher penalties, and so on. Eventually, you end up seizing bank accounts of a truck protest, banning presidential candidates from Twitter, or worse.
And while you go back to watching celebrities air their dirty laundry in court or nobodies have love triangles on Netflix, it might be worthwhile to read the primary sources and ponder what the internet’s underbelly is telling us about who we are.
I get why this is difficult to do. Conspiracy theories, like religious stories, can cause a lot of trouble when they are taken literally. But so long as we understand them to be metaphorical, there should be no problem with taking in a good myth. So here are a few, and what they might mean:
The Third Reich is Alive and Well
In fact, many of our popular entertainments do little more than transposing popular urban legends and conspiracies onto popular franchises. What is Hydra but the theory that the Nazis went underground to form our shadow government? You can see why such a fear might seem credible. There are Bavarian towns in Argentina settled by escaped Nazis, our space program wouldn’t be possible without Operation Paperclip, a government project to employ Nazi rocket scientists. Many American captains of industry, from Henry Ford to Coca-Cola, either supported Hitler outright or created new products for Germany during WWII. And then there are the more fantastical claims. Bush Sr. was secretly a Nazi, the secret clubs he was a part of are secretly Nazi-sympathetic. Our government actually is, like Hydra, a compromised institution in the grips of the SS.
What does all this mean? Beyond this being a good place to start examining how the surface-level facts could lead one to blatant falsehoods, it may be helpful to consider the ways in which these claims might be “metaphorically true if not factually accurate”. For one thing, America went into the Second World War as an isolationist. They chose to step back from the League of Nations after the first and really wanted the world to govern itself.
After the Second World War, the America that emerged saw itself as the first defense against Communism and the Soviets. This became the justification for a lot of pretty heinous acts, from coups to assassinations to Vietnam. Add to that the rigid societal structure of the Eisenhower 50s. For the average middle-class citizen, they were in an age of tense peace. For the disenfranchised and downtrodden, this was fascism. As time has gone on, the global system which America backs through its military, its currency, and its media become increasingly fascistic in the eyes of those who long for a more just, equitable, “free” way of living. This isn’t to say that a more global, more utopian system exists, I’m in no position to comment, but it does seem as if the old Platonian tenet that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” holds true in all sorts of ways.
Here’s an unsettling insight: For decades, we’ve painted Nazis in our media as the ultimate evil automaton. The two types of people it has been Hollywood-sanctioned to shoot on sight are those so possessed by ideology as to be rendered mindless, and those so diseased as to be braindead, i.e. Nazis and zombies. What does it say about large swathes of our population that they earnestly believe their society to be in the possession of ultimate evil?
The Mandela Effect
There are many explanations for why huge segments of the population might misremember how The Berenstain Bears was spelled or when Nelson Mandela died. But the most popular ones all seem to center around a distrust of technology. When the internet shows you that your gut was wrong, who are you going to believe? Did the entire world conspire to mislead you? Do “they” have the power to alter the public record so thoroughly that all traces of your reality have been subtly removed? Or has the large Hadron Collider actually put us all in an alternate reality where many of the facts which were once obvious are now obviously false?
Whatever the explanation, the fear that parts of our reality can be so drastically altered, like some 2.0 version of a despot removing political enemies from old photos and history books, persists today.
More “True Conspiracies” next week!
Maybe some time you’ll look at why we seem to need villains and enemies in the first place. Yes, the actual Nazis were our enemies in WWII, but we seem to later imagine enemies in less stark times.