On Conspiracy Theory

Do you remember post-9/11 conspiracy hysteria? It still potters on in the backwoods of the internet. Nevertheless, the fashion for the belief that complex conspiracies rule our lives has somewhat diminished since the credit crunch.

The first half of this decade already seems like a high point in one of those periodic waves of political paranoia that rise and subside, moving from fringe to mainstream and back again. America has been particularly prone to these events but Europe has never been immune.

Nurtured by growing interest in the esoteric and the irrational, becoming mainstream with the massive popularity of the X-Files and appearing to become real with the psychological assault of America on 9/11, the movement now seems to be subsiding again.

Most of our ruling class now seems to be too obviously incompetent at some very basic tasks such as getting the economy to work or ensuring barely adequate national security. If we are guided by some inner circle of Bilderbergers or reptiles from Sirius, they do not seem to be particularly good at their job!

On the other hand, we must be equally cautious about too easy acceptance of the prevailing idea of the Left and of the Academy that there are no conspiracies, only movements and social forces. This is a position promoted by the State Department and, for that reason alone, should occasion caution.

The truth lies somewhere in between - as always. There are great economic, cultural and social forces which drive the lives of individuals, but there are also tight cliques at the apex of every system of power (much like the courts of eighteenth century Europe that became terrified of the Illuminati).

There are certainly conspiracies to corner natural resources and truth of just the type which that most sensible of men, Adam Smith, identified as likely whenever men (or women) huddle into a corner and calculate their interests against those of the larger mass of humanity.

The tendency of academics, especially centre-left academics understandably worried that populist obsession with conspiracy will create an anomic, defeated, suspicious, inactive and irrational mass on which the elite can feed like political vampires, is to be so dismissive of conspiracy as to miss the point.

Conspiracy theory is generally false theory to try and explain a truth. Most people's destinies are guided by small groups of unaccountable persons who are highly clubbable and who bludgeon each other into group-think about what is right and wrong for the rest of us, often using dodgy science and theory.

In this context, a typical conspiracy looks more like the bumbling High Command of New Labour or the dodgy world of security and NGO collaboration in international affairs than anything so extreme as the Illuminati.

The populist masses have grasped at a truth in this but the academy in general still does its best to deflect them from enquiring further by trying to prove that there are no conspiracies at all and that they are all 'irrational' and stupid for even raising the possibility.

Meanwhile, the loss of faith in simplistic conspiracy in recent years has many causes:

• there has been some successful re-assertion of simple common sense while the public has developed a much more mature appreciation of conspiracy theory as an entertainment phenomenon;
• the internet has matured as a source of information - social networking permits debate and the questioning of assumptions whereas the web until recently had been little more than an efficient mass transmitter of received ideas;
• some nonsense is being delivered to our minds by people with an increasingly obvious commercial motive - the recent surge of books and films on the Mayan Calendar in the US does not represent a religious movement, it represents a business model;
• 'real' conspiracies are much more basic, less competent and less well organised than the fantasists would like us to believe - they just have more cash or power than we do;
• the election of Obama and the credit crunch have shifted the balance of opinion somewhat back to movements and blind forces as the motors of history.

But this does not mean that there are no conspiracies. In fact, there are many conspiracies - but 'not quite as we know them, Jim'. These conspiracies are much more mundane than the myth and represent any process of systematic manipulation and lying by the few against the many i.e. normal politics.

I hope that we do not lose our interest in the phenomenon of conspiracy both as an instrument of the powerless, who can use it as a form of coded cultural resistance that the market then cynically serves, and as the actual fact of conspiracy against the public interest.

This latter is implicit in the way that our already self-appointed and barely accountable elites (Washington, Brussels and London) are riddled with networks of like-minded individuals whose primary interest is to use their access to office and information to enrich themselves now or in the future.

It must be a major project for the future to get researchers and the academy to stop fretting about restoring 'pure reason' to politics (as if politics was anything other than the expression of some very basic drives) and start getting anxious about the practical and moral competencies of our ruling castes.

Until this is done, the public will always want their conspiracy theory. Their need for it will remain a standing challenge to those who purport to represent their interests. The suppression of conspiracy theory is of far less importance than making it redundant through reform.

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