Conspiracies of Dunces

Why The World is Not a Horror Film

Cinemagoers of a certain age may remember the moment in the movie Poltergeist, when little Carole Anne announces ‘they’re here!’ as her family tv set begins to flicker. Her tone is frightened but also expectant, even a little excited; whoever’s interfering with the tv set is a familiar visitor, to her at least, even if the adults in the house don’t know it.

The 21st century often has a similarly haunted feel, except that it’s mostly adults - or people pretending to be adults - who are looking out for the ghosts and monsters. I’ve often thought the Enlightenment wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, but at least it was a good idea. And nowadays we seem very far from its essential premises, and increasingly closer to Goya’s sleep of reason, as the wildest and most delirious ideas peck at our heads on a daily basis.

Earlier this month, for example, Elon Musk - Mister ‘interplanetary species’ himself - responded to Twitter footage of migrants arriving at Lampedusa that referred to a ‘George Soros led invasion’ of Europe, with the observation:

The Soros organization appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization.

As they say on Twitter, let that sink in. Here is one of the richest, if not the richest man in the world, attacking another rich man by referencing the white nationalist conspiracy theory of the ‘Great Replacement.’ For those that aren’t familiar with it, the Great Replacement was originally disseminated by the French author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement, who argued that ‘replaceist’ liberal elites are conspiring to replace ethnic French and white European people with non-white migrants - particularly Muslim migrants.

Variations on this them have been around for a while, in Jean Raspail’s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints; or Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, in the writings of Oriana Fallaci, Melanie Phillips or Douglas Murray. Nazi demonstrators chanted ‘You will not replace us’ at the deadly 2017 Charlottesville that killed Heather Heyer. The New Zealand Christchurch mosque killer Brenton Tarrant posted a manifesto called ‘The Great Replacement’ to ‘explain’ the massacre he was about to carry out.

This is the toxic sewer that Musk was paddling in, because in the far-right imagination - and apparently in Musk’s imagination too - George Soros is using his money to bring migrants to Europe, in order to destroy ‘western civilization’ ie. white people. Why Soros? Well, partly because Soros is rich, and his Open Society Foundation, in its own words, supports groups that work towards the ‘safety and well-being of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.’

That’s bad enough, and there is also the fact that Soros is Jewish. By painting a Jewish billionaire as the ‘cosmopolitan’ mastermind plotting the downfall of western civilization, the right is entering very well-worn Nazi territory. And this is what Musk was doing. Like Carole Anne in Poltergeist, he was turning to the adults in the room - because he is most definitely not the adult in the room - to announce ‘They’re here!’

And he’s done it before, back in May, when he made the following observation:

No wonder Nazis have been flooding back into Twitter. Here is the platform’s CEO essentially echoing and amplifying their messaging, comparing George Soros to a comic book villain who ‘hates humanity’. This is disgraceful enough in itself, but let’s leave aside the antisemitism for a moment, and the fact that nothing that Musk and his Nazi/white nationalist fellow travellers say about Soros bears any resemblance to who Soros is and what he actually does with his money.

Let’s just focus on the paranoia, idiocy and intellectual shallowness required to believe that thousands of men and women are being deliberately brought into Europe and America by liberal ‘elites’ that hate white people; aided by a vast secret network of international ‘elite’ institutions like the Open Society, is working with the World Economic Forum, the Davos Forum, and the United Nations and probably - according to Suella Braverman - with ‘activist charities.’

The very least that can be said about this proposition is that it is epistemologically weak. To believe it, you have to accept a) that a secret or not-so-secret group of all-powerful people are evil enough to want to do this in the first place b)that they are powerful and clever enough to pull whatever strings are required to get away with it and c) that 21st century migration is entirely the result of their actions.

The Hidden Hand

And it isn’t only migration that requires this kind of suspension of disbelief. Leaving aside its racist components, the Soros/Replacement theory is a variant on the grand conspiracy narrative, which suggests that negative political and social events happen because hidden but all-powerful organizations and individuals are working together to make them happen.

Such secret ‘agendas’ have become obsessive themes in 21st century conspiratorial politics: from the ‘9/11 was an inside job’ theories that brought the likes of Alex Jones to the surface of the pond, to the ‘scamdemic’, QAnon, and ‘climate scams, lockdowns, masks, multiculturalism and so much else.

Week after tedious week, Neil Oliver warns his audiences on GB News that ‘they’ are trying to scare us and control us by forcing us to wear masks, accept vaccines, or submit to lockdowns.

In fact the scariest thing about Oliver’s bug-eyed monologues is the shallow fanaticism of Oliver himself, as he delivers his starey-scary monologues in the belief that he is some kind of daring truth-teller/highlander warrior, slaying the evil ones with a plastic claymore, when the truth is that he is a well-paid alt-right tv presenter who faces no risk whatsoever beyond the very remote possibility that Ofcom might one day wake up from its slumber.

But there are so many people like him, from Andrew Tate and Russell Brand to Tucker Carlson and Victor Orban - all doughty warriors on the hero’s path. All of them, like Carole Anne, see the shadows moving behind the static, but unlike her, they know the ghosts in our smartphones and tv sets are not our friends.

However dishonest and manipulative their intentions may be - and there’s no doubt they are mostly deeply dishonest - they have many credulous followers who will lap up whatever conspiracy they throw at them, the grander and more outlandish the better. Once upon a time, political manipulation was a collective activity, which depended on the madness of crowds.

Now millions of solitary and atomised individuals stare at screens at what the MSM isn’t telling them, following whatever rabbit holes the algorithms and the tech bros take them to, until they find ourselves in a world of demons and witches with a distinctly sixteenth century or even medieval flavour; a world that they are invited to believe as nothing more than a manufactured illusion and a puppet-show.

And behind the scenes the truth-tellers and the truth-seekers know who the puppets are: the MSM. The Deep State. Soros. Bill Gates. China. Liberals. Big Pharma. The Project for a New American Century. The Matrix. Jeffrey Epstein. Anthony Fauci. The WEF.

Once you start to see reality like this, and understand power like this, you can apply the same plotlines to anything. Why did 9/11 happen? Because the Project for the American Century wanted to shock America through a ‘new Pearl Harbour’ into a new era of dictatorship and endless war? Why has Trump been indicted 91 times? Because the paedophile deep state network is afraid of him. Why did the Pandemic happen? Because Bill Gates or China or Big Pharma or just ‘they’, as Neil Oliver puts it, want to ‘control us’ and take away our rights, and because - Oliver once again - ‘evil grows first of all in the darkness’.

The same can be said of stupidity. Why has Russell Brand been accused of rape? Because he was getting too close to the truth. Why did Putin invade Ukraine? Because the military-industrial complex wanted him to. Why do migrants come to Europe? Well you know why now. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because the global elite wanted to control the pavement on the other side.

This is scary stuff, enough to keep you huddled under the bedsheets while Steve Bannon reads you a bedtime story. But it’s also comforting, in a way, to think that history is a grand conspiracy and reality is not what ‘they’ say it is. Rather than try and make what sense of the world we can, in the little time we have, we gawk at our smartphones in the way the Gnostics looked at the skies, searching for signs of the demiurge and the archons, to the point when it is possible to know, as the crackpot former CNN correspondent Lara Logan recently insisted she knew, that Satan himself was sending migrants across the Mexican border.

These dark forces may be malignant and all-powerful, but evil can be comforting if you know it’s there and believe that truth and goodness are on your side, as Logan obviously does. At least these ‘theories’ explain why bad things happen, even if they don’t explain why such conspiracies rely on people like Matt Hancock to achieve their aims.

I mention the little fellow, because of the furore that his leaked 2020 emails caused in conspiratorial circles, when he promised to use the Kent variant to scare the public into compliance with the government’s covid restrictions. In one of these exchanges Hancock’ asked ‘When do we deploy the new variant?’

This expression was taken to mean - I can’t say by people who should know better because they clearly don’t - that Hancock was literally ‘deploying’ the variant. A true gotcha! moment, in which the puppet-masters behind the scamdemic reveal their strings, even if one of them turns out to be a needy attention-seeking little grifter.

The grand conspiracies of the 21st century often draw from a similarly mediocre casting pool, none of which makes any difference to the intensity with which some people cling to them. In a world that is increasingly suspicious of conventional ‘experts’, an endless succession of Youtube prophets and truthtellers and talkshow hosts is available to guide us towards enlightenment and become ‘awakening wonders’, while also tapping their viewers for subscriptions.

Leaving aside the techie elements of our age of conspiracy, there are precedents for this. Paranoia, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out, has been a hallmark of the far-right for a long time, and there is nothing entirely new under the sun. Governments also have their own grand conspiracy theories: the subversive freemason conspiracies imagined by reactionary governments in the aftermath of the French revolution; the non-existent ‘anarchist international’ of the late nineteenth century; international communism; the 1970s ‘terror networks’ conjured up by Clare Sterling and various other spooks and spook-related ‘terrorism experts’; the wildly-exaggerated depictions of al-Qaeda as an Islamic version of Spectre.

All these conspiracies were offered as explanations for complex and disparate political phenomena with many different causes. But most of the conspiracy theories that are coursing through the 21st century are anti-government, or at least stem from a deep distrust of government and a cynicism about what governments can do or claim to be doing.

Such distrust isn’t unwarranted. No one can say we live in a world full of good people at the top just trying their best. Conspiracies do happen. Governments do lie, and make terrible blunders. Corporations and politicians make plans in secret, and have agendas, even if their plans don’t always turn out the way they want or expect. The Bush administration may not have carried out 9/11, but it did take advantage of it, and manipulated intelligence to ensure that the public accepted the necessity of war, and the same could be said of our own government.

But neither government was prepared for what happened afterwards, and strategically, they lost. So much for the new Pearl Harbour. No one has ever paid any price for this. No one has been held accountable. And this is the point: that governments fail and conspiracies fail, and these failures have become part of the history that we are still living through, in a century overflowing with disturbing and often downright sinister events.

These events don’t need puppet-masters. 9/11 was bad enough, without assuming that it was a ‘false flag’ attack. The Iraq war was bad enough. The financial crisis was bad enough. The tragedy of 21st century migration is bad enough. We don’t need to believe that all these events and episodes were orchestrated. We don’t need to believe that Big Pharma created the pandemic to know that pharmaceutical companies made money out of it, or that the Tory governments siphoned off vast sums of public money for PPE to companies and individuals who never provided it.

We should be able to criticize the mistakes and missed opportunities made by NATO and Europe in dealing with Russia, without assuming that NATO wanted Putin to invade Ukraine or that Putin had no choice but to invade. It’s perfectly possible to see how governments and powerful individuals use the media at certain times to influence and shape public opinion, without thinking that the ‘MSM’ acts like a single monolithic gatekeeper, and that truth can only be found in a Russell Brand video.

Corruption and conspiracies are all around us. Cover-ups take place. But conspiratorial elites don’t explain why our haunted century is the way it is. They don’t explain why pandemics happen. Because history is the sum of many different forces and processes, and no group of people can control it or entirely predict it. And sometimes governments do their best and sometimes they don’t, but we need to believe in the possibility of the former, otherwise, why bother with governments at all?

And the mad, bad and frightening conspiracies propagated by the likes of Oliver, Jones, Tate, Bannon and so many other false prophets are not leading us to enlightenment, knowledge or a great awakening.

They are paving the way for a new kind of dystopia, in which good government becomes impossible to achieve, in which public health measures are seen as a sign of imminent dictatorship, in which re-election of a criminal gangster becomes possible, and taking action against climate change or pollution becomes impossible, and any notion of the common good is regarded as another expression of a secret agenda of the evil ones.

And the longer this goes on, the more difficult it will to find solutions to the real problems that we face, or make the world any better than it is, and our societies better than they are.