There’s being foolishly naïve, and then there’s being cautiously trusting of others, and then there’s being skeptical but intelligent about it, and then there’s being cynical, followed by being bitter and holding a grudge against the world. The next step is being paranoid. Everyone is out to get you, even if any objective observer knows the almost all people almost all the time aren’t thinking about you at all – they’re wrapped up in themselves. Face it, you were always an afterthought. Get over yourself. Of course some do get over themselves and see conspiracies everywhere – which generalizes paranoia, or at least redistributes it over a group or class. Perhaps no one is out to get you, personally, but there is a War on Christmas or perhaps on Christianity itself – or a war on evangelical folks, or Catholics, or Baptists, or maybe just Missouri-Synod Baptists, or maybe Lutherans – but there is a conspiracy. Secular humanists are out to destroy all religion. It’s a plot. No one else can see it, but you can, and maybe Obama is in on it – unless he’s secretly a Muslim, a clever plant in a plot hatched long ago in Kenya, to turn America Muslim and have us live under Sharia Law, which means he’s not out to destroy all religion. Islam is a religion after all – but still there are those devastatingly logical and irritatingly articulate atheists out there, like that Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, doing their damage. This could be a clever plot. All the polls show more and more Americans don’t give a damn about religion, even if the number is still small – twenty percent of us have “no religious preference” but only three percent say they’re actually atheists. The problem is that those numbers are rising. It must be a plot.
It could also be paranoia. The nation is overwhelmingly Christian, and of all the advanced nations we are far and away the most religious, believing in angels and miracles and Jesus returning soon – and anyone else who matters is Jewish, which is almost as good in most people’s eyes. No one is outnumbered and oppressed here. These folks run the country, although now and then you come across things like this:
“The Bible Belt is collapsing,” says Russell Moore. Oddly, the incoming president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission doesn’t seem upset. In a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Moore explains that he thinks the Bible Belt’s decline may be “bad for America, but it’s good for the church.”
Why? Because “we are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority.”
Wait. Did he say minority? Even Obama talks about Jesus – but then this doesn’t seem to be about Jesus. Moore is talking about what his folks think, or know, or believe Jesus wants Americans to do in the here and now:
A youthful 41, Mr. Moore is among the leaders of a new generation who think that evangelicals need to recognize that their values no longer define mainstream American culture the way they did fifty or even twenty years ago.
On gay marriage, abortion, even on basic religious affiliation, the culture has moved away. So evangelicals need a new way of thinking – a new strategy, if you will – to attract and keep believers, as well as to influence American politics.
He sees the church as a political institution. It exists to influence American politics, perhaps for the Glory of God, but the aim is political nonetheless. Jihadist Islam has the same goal of course, but that aside, the idea that Christians are a beleaguered tiny minority in America is absurd on the face of it. American politics, managed exclusively by those who talk of God quite a lot – no one who doesn’t could ever get elected to office – is a long dispute about morality. The disputes are theological – the morality of universal healthcare, or our social safety net, such as it is, or the innate morality of every-man-for-himself totally unregulated free-market capitalism, where the good people succeed and everyone else loses everything and dies, if you believe that’s moral. These aren’t secular arguments.
Nope, there’s no conspiracy here, no subtle secret plot to destroy religion. There’s also no conspiracy to destroy America, and capitalism itself, cooked up by all the scientists in the world deciding to rig the data and claim that the earth is warming dangerously, and we’re doing it to ourselves. There was no secret meeting. Working independently, they just saw the data, which at first they said was interesting, and then decided was alarming. They looked at each other’s data, to confirm that they hadn’t made silly errors, and were even more alarmed. This has nothing to do with capitalism. None of them has anything to say about that. They simply noticed that we’re cooking ourselves into massive chaos and collapse. It was just a heads-up. Policymakers will have to do something about this, or not. Scientists have suggestions, but scientists don’t make policy. They observe and cross-check their observations, verifying what’s going on, and report that. Someone else will have to do something about it. They’ll go back to their labs and keep looking at the world. Charging them with a conspiracy is paranoia.
Last year, Todd Leopard put it well:
Ever have the feeling you’re being lied to by the news media, the authorities, the corporate world? That somebody – or something – is out to get you?
You’re not alone.
Welcome to 21st-century America.
But it’s nothing new:
A fearful strain of mistrust flows through the blood of the republic, whether it was 18th-century religious leaders worried about the Illuminati, politicians suspicious of immigrants or McCarthyites convinced of Communist infiltration.
Hollywood has dined out on these feelings for years: “The Manchurian Candidate,” “The Parallax View,” “Wag the Dog,” the TV series “The X-Files,” even the James Coburn comedy “The President’s Analyst” – all are based on the idea that some kind of secret, malevolent operation is going on behind the curtain.
It’s as American as apple pie – filled with razor blades.
Sure, like the stories about those razor blade-tainted apples, there are sometimes bits of truth within. More often, however, the truth is overwhelmed by panic and hyperbole.
This was written in an election year, so we get this:
Facts, apparently, don’t matter anymore. Both campaigns have earned “pants-on-fire” ratings from the fact-checking site Politifact; both sides have blithely ignored them and moved forward. After the Romney campaign was called out for some falsehoods, pollster Neil Newhouse responded, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
Worse are the actual laws on the books based on some kind of perceived threat. Oklahoma banned courts from considering Islam’s Sharia law. (Oklahoma’s law has been temporarily blocked.) The Texas state Republican Party even created a platform opposing “critical thinking” in state schools, though a spokesperson was quick to point out that the platform regards “critical thinking” as another name for “outcome-based education” (which the platform criticizes as having “the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority”).
Paranoia isn’t on the fringe anymore…
Leopard points to Richard Hofstadter who died in 1970 and was a man for the fifties and sixties, so he shouldn’t matter – but he does. In his day he was quite the public intellectual, back it the day when we had those, that brief time in American cultural life when big thinkers were big deals. Einstein was at Princeton and not the punch line for jokes that he is today, people bought encyclopedias, and the University of Chicago’s Great Books program was thriving, and people on quiz show were supposed to know things, even if it turned out that they didn’t. That was a scandal – and that’s hard to imagine these days.
It was different back then, when being well-educated and insightful, and full of ideas, or at least able to discuss the ideas of others intelligently, or least know there were ideas floating around out there somewhere and they mattered, made you cool. Now it makes you a fool. You’re inauthentic, you see. You’ve lost touch with the real America – or you don’t see the obvious conspiracy right in front of your face.
Hofstadter saw it coming. In the forties he was writing about “Social Darwinism in American Thought” and as an historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, he started to hit his stride. There was Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). The former won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the cultural history. And then it was forgotten. The collection of essays on paranoia in politics is now quoted most every day, and Glenn Beck was born the very same year that those essays on paranoid politics were published. It’s odd how things work out that way.
It seems we caught a disease:
Paranoid personality disorder (PPD) is a mental disorder characterized by paranoia and a pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others. Individuals with this personality disorder may be hypersensitive, easily feel slighted, and habitually relate to the world by vigilant scanning of the environment for clues or suggestions that may validate their fears or biases. Paranoid individuals are eager observers. They think they are in danger and look for signs and threats of that danger, potentially not appreciating other evidence.
They tend to be guarded and suspicious and have quite constricted emotional lives. Their reduced capacity for meaningful emotional involvement and the general pattern of isolated withdrawal often lend a quality of schizoid isolation to their life experience. People with this particular disorder may or may not have a tendency to bear grudges, suspiciousness, tendency to interpret others’ actions as hostile, persistent tendency to self-reference, or a tenacious sense of personal right.
In short, they’re average Americans, and perhaps it’s time someone updated Hofstadter. This may be our natural state, at least that’s what Jesse Walker, Reason magazine’s editor, argues in his new book The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy – taking Hofstadter a bit further this time.
A review by Hector Tobar just popped up in the Los Angeles Time and it covers the basics:
Americans have always feared secret cabals.
In three successive decades in the mid-20th century, a “Brown Scare” swept through this country, followed by a “Red Scare,” and finally a “Lavender Scare” …
Americans heard so many stories that described Nazis, communists and homosexuals nefariously and secretly trying to take over our government, our minds and our bodies, they began to see them everywhere. In an earlier era, they feared murderous slaves and libidinous Native American kidnappers. And more recently: UFOs and satanic nursery schools.
“This is a book about America’s demons,” Walker writes. “Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it …”
Our anxieties and experiences is the real problem here:
Not only do Americans believe conspiracy theories, they also believe their fellow citizens are more susceptible to conspiracies and manipulation by “elites” than they really are, Walker writes. Take, for example, the myth surrounding Orson Welles’ 1938 radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” In the years after Welles’ broadcast, a few writers spread the idea that it had induced a mass panic.
“The truth was more mundane but also more interesting,” Walker points out. In fact, only a few people truly believed aliens had invaded the East Coast. A famous Life magazine cover photo of a farmer with a pitchfork ready to fight the aliens was staged. Walker argues that the story of the purported “panic” fed the notion that Americans could easily be manipulated, that they were a many-headed “robot” easily controlled by skillful artists using the mass media.
There’s also this:
Americans fear mobs: They are the dark force lurking inside “Enemy Below” conspiracy theories, one of several categories of “primal myths” Walker explores. Over time, blacks, immigrant laborers and Jewish radicals have all been the protagonists in imagined “Enemy Below” conspiracy theories. A mythical group of black intellectuals called “The Organization” was said to be behind the 1965 Watts riots, Walker writes.
All of this is to say the first guy got things wrong:
Hofstadter contended that it was social outsiders or “marginal” movements that most often embraced this kind of conspiratorial thinking. Walker quickly demolishes that argument. It wasn’t true in the 18th century, when Federalist leaders and their Jeffersonian rivals both spread conspiracy theories, he says. And it certainly isn’t true in the modern age, when the mainstream media and political leaders in both parties have spread paranoid narratives.
The book argues convincingly that the mainstream media, following the lead of groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, exaggerated the threat of right-wing militias after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 – even though neither bomber Timothy McVeigh nor his accomplice, Terry Nichols, was ever a member of a militia. Of course, with the radical right also embracing conspiracy theories of its own – “Enemy Above” myths about “the One-World Government” and the like – it became easier to portray them as dangerous, fascist wackos plotting a coup d’état.
All those images of militia men began to seep into America’s collective subconscious. Something similar happened after the 9/11 attacks, when Americans were “semiotically aroused,” Walker writes, quoting a phrase coined by historian Richard Landes.
To be “semiotically aroused” is to fall under the influence of signs and symbols. A few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the constant broadcast of images of Islamic extremists caused such a spell to overcome several otherwise rational people in Tyler, Texas, according to Walker. An object made with wires and duct tape was found in a mailbox. Believing it was a weapon of mass destruction, the authorities called in the bomb squad. An entire neighborhood was evacuated. The object turned out to be an 8-year-old boy’s homemade flashlight, built for his science class.
“The most prevalent form of paranoia after 9/11 was the mindset that allowed officials to mistake a harmless school project for a jihad,” writes Walker.
We have met the enemy and it is us. It always was:
Yes, Al Qaeda staged the 9/11 attacks. But in a “paranoid” retelling after the attacks, the Al Qaeda movement became a centralized organization controlled by one man, a fact contradicted by most intelligence reports. In the American imagination, Al Qaeda became something akin to “the global networks of mayhem found in James Bond movies,” Walker writes.
Instead, years later, when American forces actually reached Osama bin Laden’s last hideout, they found not a “Goldfinger” or a “Dr. No” but instead a pathetic and lonely man who colored his beard. He didn’t even have cable TV or a cellphone.
It was all paranoia and Salon’s Laura Miller cites other parts of Walker’s book:
“It was a paranoid time,” writes Jesse Walker after recounting an elaborate, half-forgotten conspiracy theory from the 19th century. (It involved “the Slave Power,” which some 19th-century Americans believed had been responsible for poisoning several officials who had in fact died of natural causes.) “In America,” he adds, “it is always a paranoid time.”
Hofstadter got it wrong. This has nothing to do with anti-intellectualisms. No one is immune:
“Educated elites have conspiracy theories, too” and the nation’s long history of “moral panics” illustrates the ways that “influential social institutions” – from the government to churches and political parties to the press – engage in paranoid thinking, sometimes with lethal results. “When I say virtually everyone is capable of paranoid thinking,” Walker writes, “I really do mean everyone, including you, me and the founding fathers … It is even possible to be paranoid about paranoids.”
Walker is serious, as we’ve been quite mad all along, seduced by tiny bits of truth:
Many of these beliefs, he notes, have some basis in fact: While it’s highly unlikely that “night doctors” prowled cities looking for African-Americans to kidnap, kill and dissect (a widespread rumor in early 20th-century black communities), it is certainly a documented truth that the white medical establishment, being a white-dominated establishment, had a cavalier attitude toward its black patients and sometimes used them inhumanly, as in the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of 1932 to 1972. White people really have conspired against blacks and lied about it, which is one reason why conspiracy theories about everything from AIDS to fast food have flourished in African-American communities. …
Perhaps the rich and powerful are not giant space lizards in disguise (as noted kook David Icke -not covered in this book – claims), but they do seem to treat the rest of us with a coldblooded detachment that’s rather reptilian, so the theory has its resonance. For this and other reasons, Walker states, “I’m not out to espouse or debunk any particular conspiracy theories,” but rather to tease out what they reveal about our collective psyche.
That’s not pretty:
This is a tricky brief because, as Walker himself admits, some conspiracy theories – such as the activities of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program to investigate “anti-American” groups in the 1960s and ’70s – are documented, while some of the undocumented ones are more credible than others. “It would be absurd,” he writes, “to deny that conspiracies can be real … The world is filled with plots both petty and grand, though never as enormous as the ancient cabals described in the most baroque conspiracy literature.”
None of this is pretty, but much of it is fun:
This book is part Greatest Hits – you find discussions of JFK, Watergate, the Freemasons, birthers and the Satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s – and a few lesser-known oddities, like a subculture that believes “certain digital time displays, particularly 11:11, might be messages from another planet.” For the connoisseur, an entire chapter on John Todd – a lecturer on the evangelical circuit during the late 1970s who revealed the “secrets” of the vast witchcraft-practicing conspiracy from which he’d defected – offers a delicious farrago of crackpotiana. According to Todd, the Illuminati (aka the Council of Foreign Relations, aka the Rothschild family) had everything from Standard Oil to the John Birch Society to the ACLU dancing from its puppet strings. Ayn Rand, a mistress of Philippe Rothschild, wrote, at his order, a novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” which was mostly read by “Communists.” The Denny’s logo is really the symbol for the “eightfold path of what a witch must master to be a powerful witch” and Elton John “has never written a song that was not written in witch language.”
That’s good to know, perhaps, but that misses the point:
As Walker sees it, our brains are predisposed to see patterns in random data and to apply stories to explain them, which is why conspiracy theory can be so contagious. Although conspiracies do exist, we need to be vigilant against our propensity to find them whether they are there or not. The most sensible outlook would appear to be that of Robert Anton Wilson, who concluded that “powerful people” could well be “engaged in criminal plots” but who found it unlikely that “the conspirators were capable of carrying out those plots competently.” Or, I would add, of covering them up effectively. It’s the ineptness of human beings in executing elaborate schemes and then shutting up about it afterward that makes me skeptical of almost all conspiracy theories. Besides, if the U.S. government was masterful enough to engineer the 9/11 attacks, why couldn’t it also plant some WMD in Iraq?
Conspiracy theory is an argument about how the world really is, but it’s always useful to weigh the possibility of bumbling incompetence against the possibility of careful organized conspiracy, hidden in total silence by all concerned. Which is more likely? Let your experience with everyone you’ve ever met in your life inform your choice there. There are also people who do random stuff for no good reason, or no reason at all, just because it seemed like a good idea at the time. There is whim. That’s pretty common, as is ego, and the dare. It may always be a paranoid time in America, but it doesn’t have to be.
On the other hand there’s Google. It’s all true you know. That may be the real problem now.