Are We Stupid Yet?

The Rise of Pantomime Politics

One of the fundamental principles underpinning modern liberal democracies is the idea that politics is a rational activity, in which voters make choices based on arguments, explanations, and a basic understanding of reality to which we all subscribe to, regardless of our individual affiliations.

This principle applies to all voters, regardless of their IQ or their educational background. Democracies don’t say that only the most intelligent or the most well-educated can take political decisions, because such societies would be elitist and undemocratic, and even more susceptible to the misuse of privilege than they already are.

But most democracies assume - at least as an ideal to work towards - that there are certain fundamental things that all voters can agree on, and that even when they disagree, there is enough of an epistemological connection between them to be able to accept political defeat, and delegate to governments the right to take decisions on their behalf.

Without such assumptions democracy would be untenable, and government itself would become impossible. Of course the idea of democracy as a ‘reality-based community’, as one of George W. Bush’s team once contemptuously described it, is not rock-solid or immune to manipulation. But even if it falls short, it should remain as an ideal that we should all be working towards.

Needless to say, this is not an ideal that can be applied to our new era of rightwing populism. Some readers may be old enough to remember the Illuminatus! trilogy from the early seventies, with its fusion of pop culture, satire, science fiction, Pynchonesque paranoia, and long-form conspiracy theory, all washed down with lashings of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Immanentizing the Eschaton

The novels revolved around an evil conspiracy by a rock band called the American Medical Association (!) to ‘immanentize the eschaton’ by way of a mass human sacrifice that would produce enough ‘life-energy to confer eternal life on a group of initiates, including Adolf Hitler.

It was nonsense, but fun, which is more than can be said about the seemingly endless torrent of conspiracy theories pouring through 21st century politics, and which shows no sign of abating. We are now living in a golden age of conspiracy in which every kind of evil that can be imagined, will be imagined and also believed.

Take for example, last week’s protests in Oxford to condemn a traffic-calming experiment by Oxford City Council, which protesters believed to be a precursor to the ‘15-minute city’ concept devised by the Paris-based urbanist Carlos Moreno.

The basic concept of the 15-minute city is pretty simple. Moreno believes that cities would be healthier and more congenial and convivial places if their inhabitants could access basic services from shopping, cafes, exercise, and health within fifteen minutes of where they live.

Anyone who has ground their way along an endless rush-hour traffic queue or pushed a children’s buggy through an exhaust-filled road ought to be able to sympathise with this idea. Don’t we want our neighbourhoods to be more friendly to pedestrians and people in general? After the isolation of the pandemic, don’t we want to feel part of our neighbourhoods again? Wouldn’t it be a good idea not just for us, but for the environment, to have greener cities that we could walk or cycle around?

Of course there are legitimate reservations that you can have about how a 15-minute city might be rolled out, but these are not the criticisms that were being made in Oxford, whose basic precepts were as follows:

These are the principles that a plethora of far-right groups, YouTubers, newly-unfettered Twitterati, libertarians and ‘real conservatives’ have seized upon as their latest cause celebre that they want to save us from, or simply keep their constituencies whipped up in a constant state of outrage and horrified paranoia. The authors of the Illuminatus! trilogy once mocked people who weaved elaborate conspiracies from the weakest and most disparate components.

But these people are serious, at least they think they are. They see monsters everywhere, and monstrous conspiracies in everything. Covid? A ‘scamdemic’, cooked up somewhere in Wuhan or a biolab by the ‘global elite’ to bring about -what else? - total world domination.

Ditto, lockdowns and masks, which not only don’t ‘work’, but also constitute another indication of our descent into serfdom. Vaccines? How can they work against a virus that never existed?

Not only do they not work, but they are also intended by Big Pharma/Bill Gates/George Soros/the global cabal - you can choose your own nightmare here - to control you through 5G antennae or implants, while also killing your children and definitely killing more people than the pandemic ever did, which killed no one, since it never happened.

Like children at a pantomime, the Conspiracy Grifters scream ‘it’s behind you!’ and if you don’t believe them they call you sheeple or a blue-pilled communist, because there is no way out for you, buddy if you can’t see what Q or John Mappin or Neil Oliver or Laurence Fox or Alex Jones and so many liars, frauds and downright charlatans are telling you.

And what they are telling you is genuinely alarming. Because nowadays, it isn’t enough that governments should sometimes be corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, or even criminal. Not for these conspiracy theorists the banality of evil; what they seek is the evil in the banal. So everything governments - or at least liberal and left-of-centre governments - do must be utterly evil, or the product of monstrous conspiracies that used politicians as their pawns.

It’s all a game of psychotic peek-a-boo, in which city councils test-drive 15-minute cities in order to prepare you for dystopia, and international organisations hint at their evil plans with names like Agenda 30 or Global Compact on Refugees, without ever telling you what they really intend to do.

Spoiler alert: They want to control and enslave you. Maybe they want to replace you with immigrants. They definitely want to destroy your way of life, and if you laugh at this you haven’t heard the bad news; that your politicians are paedophiles, and not just your average billionaire paedophile like Jeffrey Epstein, but Democrats and media celebrity paedophiles, who hold cannibalistic sex orgies and eat the faces of children.

This is next-level evil, which makes ‘immanentizing the eschaton’ look tame, even if it takes some of its narrative components from a similar combination of pop culture, celebrity, and politics.

There are endless variations and points of overlap between these grand conspiracies, which might constitute a minor sociological and subcultural phenomenon, were it not for the fact that so many people are inclined to believe them. And many of these believers are also willing to apply their basic ‘puppet-master’ thesis to anything that happens, or at least anything that happens that they don’t like or which they feel oppresses or merely inconveniences them, like a pandemic say, or a war in Ukraine.

What explains this credulity and this willingness to embrace the most barking drivel? Don’t we live in advanced modern democracies where the benefits of mass education are available to everybody?

The most straightforward explanation is that there are a lot of charlatans out there, most of whom are on the right or even further out, who have a political and even financial interest in peddling even the most deranged fantasies, in the hope that they or their movements might benefit from them.

Without falling into conspiracy theories ourselves, we can certainly point out that the more insane conspiracies currently in circulation mainly emanate from the populist right. Asking ‘who funds you?’ or pointing the money that particular individuals make can explain their motives, but it doesn’t explain why so many people believe them.

Take this 2019 conversation, between the CNN presenter Anderson Cooper and a former member of the QAnon cult named Jitarth Jadeja.

This conversation was part of a documentary about the influence of QAnon in the Trump era, and Anderson had a personal interest in it because he had been identified by Q as a member of the ‘Pizzagate’ paedophile conspiracy that included Hilary Clinton, as he shows in this extract:

Cooper: Did you at the time believe that high-level Democrats and celebrities were worshipping Satan, drinking the blood of children?

Jadeja: Anderson, I thought you did that. And I would like to apologise for that right now. So, I apologise for thinking that you ate babies. But yeah, 100 per cent.

Cooper: You actually believed that I was drinking the blood of children?

Jadeja: Yes I did.

Cooper: Was it something about me that made you think that?

Jadeja: Because Q specifically mentioned you. And he mentioned you very early on. He mentioned you by name, and from there he often talked like for example about your family. And yeah, I’m going to be honest, it’s like people still talk about that today. There were posts about that just four days ago. Some people thought you were a robot.

Cooper: You really believed this?

Jadeja: I didn’t just believe that. I at one stage believed that QAnon was part of military intelligence, which is what he says, and on top of that that the people behind him were actually a group of fifth-dimensional, intradimensional, extraterrestrial bipedal bird aliens called blue avians. I was so far down in this conspiracy black hole that I was essentially picking and choosing whatever narrative that I wanted to believe in.

What struck me at the time about that conversation, apart from the nonsensical ideas that Jadeja had absorbed, apparently uncritically, from the Q phenomenon, was his willingness to choose ‘whatever narrative’ he wanted to believe in, no matter how ludicrously implausible. Why would you want to believe such things?

Jadeja did not seem particularly stupid, but in politics you don’t have to be stupid to embrace a stupid idea.

Believing that Trump - an alleged rapist and accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein - is a hero-messiah secretly fighting to save children from paedophiles is a stupid idea, yet many educated, supposedly intelligent people believed it and still do, and calling them stupid doesn’t necessarily explain why.

Some of them are in the upper echelons of the Republican Party. One of the most powerful figures in the GOP is Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon conspiracist who all but advocated civil war in an interview this week. Thousands of Trump supporters with similar ideas launched their own mini-civil war during the January 6th insurrection.

Many of these people loathed Antony Fauci, who they described as an agent of the ‘deep state’ , and that is another stupid idea. If you can believe that, you won’t have any trouble believing that 15 minute cities are a communist plot intended to plunge us into a surveillance dystopia, or that the Great Reset is a (secret) plot by the World Economic Forum to create a world government.

You might like to see this as a fringe social media phenomenon, in which some people have become trapped and entangled in their Twitter and Facebook bubbles. Perhaps you take comfort in the idea that if only these people had more information they would change their ideas.

But the fringe is no longer as far away from us as we thought it was. New technologies may have facilitated the spread of pantomime politics, and there are steps that could be taken to reduce the spread of toxic disinformation. But the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg do not in themselves explain the willingness of so many people to believe the most arrant nonsense about their governments and international institutions.

To some extent the age of conspiracy is an age of chaos and confusion, in which, as Marx once wrote, everything solid is melting into the air. Like the ancient Gnostic sects who believed that the material world in front of them was a satanic deception, the 21st century conspiracy theorists offer a branch to hold onto as the mountain gives way, and they also offer exciting explanations for the chaos of a world in which nothing has turned out quite like it was supposed to.

These intellectual snake oil salesmen offer you an endless stream of logical fallacies. They invite you to look ‘behind the veil’ to join the dots and take the magic pill. You too can ‘leave the Matrix’ by doing ‘your own research’ and seeking ‘the truth’, even if, like the hapless idiot who drove 400 miles to Washington with a carful of guns to save children from paedophiles in a pizza restaurant, you only find children and their parents eating pizza.

Because as in the X Files, the truth is always out there, even if it can’t always be found. In a world battered by constant crises and political problems that seem too complex to solve, the belief that all-powerful and utterly evil conspirators are secretly manipulating people and events like chess pieces provides a kind of order, however menacing.

But whatever bleak satisfactions these narrative choices may bring to individuals, when they break out of the basement into the political sphere, they become dangerous. They open schisms across society that cannot be repaired through the usual mechanisms of democratic consensus. They impede our ability to respond to a public health emergency, or the climate emergency, or the fallout from a vicious war.

They make it difficult even to make our cities nicer places to live in and bring some hope of a more positive future after two dismal years of the pandemic, by interpreting that aspiration as yet another plot by the evil ones.

There was an old sixties joke that said just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not trying to get you.

Nowadays the reverse is true. Too many people are paranoid even though no one is trying to get them, and in their willingness to believe otherwise they are making it difficult to find solutions to the genuine challenges that all of us face in a century filled with very real dangers, not the least of which is the threat to democracy that comes from them.