5 hours Ago By Mark O'Connell
I’m not all that well up on the conspiracy lore around the rapper/producer Sean “P Diddy” Combs’s arrest for multiple counts of sexual assault. The gist of it, though, seems to be that he was, in fact, an intelligence asset, whose depraved Epstein-style parties were used to gather dirt on powerful and prominent people, and that vice-president Harris was somehow deeply embroiled in the whole sordid business. The insinuation in the above-mentioned reply to Selzer, to the extent that it can be parsed, seems to be that she was paid off by Combs – from jail, mind you – to release a fake poll, on the eve of the presidential election, showing Harris’s support in Iowa to have outstripped Trump’s.
Let’s not get bogged down here in how plausible any of this is; plausibility has, in any case, rarely if ever been the point of conspiracy theories. What I am interested in here, rather, is how little thought and imaginative energy seems to have gone into this conspiracy theory, and how indicative it is of this more general decline of the form. Whether you believed them or not, conspiracy theories used to mean something.
They had the authority not of facticity or of logical coherence, but of folklore. It didn’t matter whether they were true or not; what mattered was that they captured, in their dreamlike fashion, something real about the structure of reality itself. At their best – the moon landing was a hoax; Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone; the Illuminati are brainwashing the population through mass media – they touch upon a primal mistrust that lurks within us all, a sense of some secret design to the chaos.
The conspiracy theory is the poor, illegitimate sibling of those nobler narrative forms – mythology, the heroic epic, the novel – that seek to make sense of the world, in all its vastness and incoherence. [ Six common conspiracy theories and why it’s pointless to argue with them Opens in new window ] I have always felt that there is, in this sense, a paradox at the heart of conspiratorial thinking: that in conjuring lurid (and frequently anti-Semitic) fantasies of shadowy cabals controlling the world in their own interest, the more imaginative conspiracy theorists tend to overlook the one very large and prosaic way in which societies are, in fact, run by, and for, a tiny number of people. Forget about shape-shifting lizards, I want to tell conspiracy enthusiasts.
Forget about the New World Order and the bloodlines of the Illuminati. Have you looked into capitalism? Have you looked into people who are simply very, very wealthy? There are, of course, conspiracy theories that are not just symbolically true, but literally true. The CIA really did conduct covert mind control experiments, using hypnosis and psychedelic drugs, with its cold-war-era MK-Ultra programme.
In our own country, Britain’s state security forces really did collude with loyalist terrorist organisations during the Troubles. And, while we’re at, if a person wants to convince me that Oswald did not, in fact, act alone, I’m always at least willing to hear them out. All of which is to say that there has always been a demotic richness in the form, a dirty and disreputable depth.
But I think the internet might have killed the conspiracy theory, or at least drastically weakened it, as the internet eventually weakens and kills all things. We’re seeing conspiracy theories now that are very obviously not ready for prime time. People are out there just concocting them on the fly, grabbing whatever vaguely relevant cultural references come to hand.
And so we’re seeing half-baked stuff about a 68-year-old owner of a polling firm in Des Moines, Iowa being paid off by an alleged celebrity sex-offender to cook the books for a Democratic presidential candidate. Not only is it not coherent, it’s not even interesting. It is entirely devoid of any kind of real narrative seduction.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that conspiracy theories have, for some time now, been struggling to compete with the palpable insanity of actual politics. In 1961, Philip Roth published an essay called Writing American Fiction, which contained the following lines: “The American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.
The actual is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” The same is now probably true of conspiracy theorists, as they become increasingly priced out of the market by reality itself. [ Conspiracy theories: ‘It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are.
Everyone is susceptible’ Opens in new window ] Take, for instance, Robert F Kennedy jnr, whom Trump has nominated to serve as health secretary in his upcoming administration. Kennedy, as the nephew of JFK – in whose assassination he firmly believes the CIA to have been instrumental – has political paranoia woven into his very DNA. Among the other beliefs he has expressed are that wifi causes cancer, that chemicals in the water supply turn children transgender, and that Covid-19 was concocted in a lab in such a way as to impact Jews and Chinese people at a much lower level.
Trump himself, of course, has advanced numerous conspiracy theories over the years; his entire political career, in fact, began with his jumping on the bandwagon of “birtherism”, the claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible to be president. The ironic fact of these conspiracy theorists in positions of conspicuous power may, in the end, be what finally kills off the conspiracy theory as a form. The exhausted conspiracy theorist may, like Roth’s novelist, be forced to throw up his hands in defeat, having been decisively outmanoeuvred by the actual news.
.
