A Culture of Conspiracy. Michael Barkun
If Conspiracy Theory implied that militia claims about black helicopters were grounded in reality, conspiratorial preoccupations were presented in a far more detailed and literal fashion in The X-Files motion picture. The film, which grossed $150 million worldwide, joined T-shirts and a veritable library of books and magazines as part of the industry generated by the original television series. While the film contains the expected quota of references to black helicopters and alien abduction, its most striking characteristic is its demonization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Since the 1970s, FEMA has been a target of conspiracy theorists. The film’s principal conspiracy theorist, the ill-fated Dr. Kurzweil, predicts that when the conspirators are ready to strike, the president will declare a “state of emergency. . . . All federal agencies will come under the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—FEMA—the secret government.” This belief, which has circulated widely on the radical right for decades unbeknown to the general population, suddenly was presented to an audience of millions.27
The appearance of conspiracism in major motion pictures signals a major change in the relation between stigmatized and mainstream knowledge claims. The coteries within which stigmatized knowledge was refined and nurtured were traditionally insular and marginalized—the worlds of occultism, alternative science and medicine, sectarian religion, and radical politics among them. These domains were marginalized in part because they were so closely associated with stigmatized knowledge. At the same time, the reverse was also true—some knowledge claims were stigmatized because they were identified with marginal subcultures. Now, however, the boundary between the stigmatized and the mainstream has clearly become more permeable. Themes that once might have been found only in outsider literature or on the more outré Web sites have become the stuff of network television and multimillion-dollar motion pictures.
It may be, as Jodi Dean suggests, that such easy cross-boundary movement has erased any distinction between “consensus reality” (the version promulgated by powerful mainstream institutions) and deviant, alternative realities, including those in which conspiracies figure prominently. On the other hand, as Dean herself concedes, stigmas have not been wholly erased, giving to those who traffic in the forbidden the thrill of the taboo. Thus, for example, “the very stigma makes UFOs and alien abduction seductive, transgressive.” The as-yet-unanswerable question is whether the partial absorption of these ideas by popular culture will increase or decrease their potency and appeal.28
Surely the appearance of conspiracy themes in popular culture at least partially destigmatizes those ideas, by associating them with admired stars and propagating them through the most important forms of mass entertainment. They are sometimes identified with stigmatized sources, as is the case with the strange cabdriver at the center of Conspiracy Theory, who clearly reads publications and pursues issues omost people are unaware of, making them part of his reclusive lifestyle. But at other times, as in The X-Files, the claims may appear strange, but their sources are never identified, other than through tipsters in the film such as Kurzweil. And even Kurzweil is literate, well-spoken, and far better dressed than his fugitive life would lead one to expect.
Popular culture can also reduce the potency of conspiratorial themes by depriving them of some of their allure. Once hidden, they are now revealed. Once intended only for the knowing few, they are now placed before the ignorant many. Once mysterious, they can now appear banal, the building blocks of not particularly distinguished popular entertainments. Those who frequent the domain of stigmatized knowledge do so in part because it confers feelings of chosenness: only we few know the truth. That sense of constituting an elite provides partial compensation for what might otherwise be insupportable feelings of powerlessness—the sense of being a minority in a world of scoffers. The popularity of conspiracy films does not inevitably translate into a feeling of empowerment for conspiracy theorists. To the extent that their common currency is placed in everybody’s hands, it is devalued. It is also potentially trivialized, for there is no assurance that those watching a conspiracy film really believe it. It is, after all, only a story. So the popularization of conspiracism is tinged with ambivalence for conspiracists, combining a sense that they were right all along with a fear that the newly enlightened will not take the ideas seriously enough to act on them.
We can gain some sense of this ambivalence from a practice mentioned earlier: that of treating some films and novels as encoded messages created by the conspirators. That claim has apparently not yet been made about either Conspiracy Theory or The X-Files, but it has been made about numerous science-fiction films. The belief in hidden messages has two advantages. First, it locates a level of meaning in popular culture that the mass audience is unaware of but that the knowing few can read. Second, it maintains a consistent view of the world as controlled by powerful, hidden forces, since if the forces are as powerful as the conspiracists assert, then they would surely be able to control the content of movies and books.
As I have indicated, believers in stigmatized knowledge assume that any widely held belief must necessarily be false—the result of indoctrination, suppression of the truth, or some other insidious mind-control technique. As ideas from stigmatized knowledge migrate into popular culture, conspiracy theorists must burrow ever deeper to discover the truths hidden by appearances. One of the chief exemplars of this technique is Milton William Cooper, who became widely known for his 1991 “exposé,” Behold a Pale Horse, of the alien control of the American government. By 1995, however, Cooper had decided that UFOs were a creation of an all-too-earthly conspiracy and that the revelations of ufologists were “intentional disinformation projects designed to promote the alien threat scenario while allowing for complete deniability on the part of government.”29
Thus the larger audience that popular culture has given to the culture of conspiracy must be balanced against the loss of special knowledge that conspiracy believers suffer—the threat that conspiracy knowledge, once the ultimate secret, will become merely another artifact of mass entertainment. It is far too early to know which set of forces will turn out to be the more powerful. One possibility is that the normal politics of compromise, openness, and incrementalism will give way to an orthodoxy of conspiracist politics dominated by belief in secrecy, dissimulation, and covert control. Another possibility is that conspiracism will become a diverting convention, with no greater claim to realism than, say, the antics of James Bond.
A more radical approach lies in Dean’s suggestion that, at least where political matters are concerned, there is no longer a consensus reality about the causes of events and the reliability of evidence. In such a situation of uncertainty, she argues, “conspiracy theory, far from a label dismissively attached to the lunatic fringe, may well be an appropriate vehicle for political contestation.” She is at pains to make clear that “the sort of conspiracy theory I’m advocating here has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.” That is no doubt the case; however, the desire to distinguish “good” conspiracy theories from “bad” ultimately founders.30
First, although Dean is clearly correct in suggesting that the domain of consensus reality has shrunk and that formerly stigmatized beliefs have joined the mainstream, the wish to possess secret knowledge unavailable to or shunned by the majority keeps regenerating. Even as parts of stigmatized knowledge get swallowed up by popular culture, novel forms of esotericism and the forbidden arise in their place.
Second, the relation between conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism is far more problematic than Dean indicates. There can certainly be conspiracy theories that are not anti-Semitic; some are described in chapters 3 and 4. But contemporary conspiracy theories manifest a dynamics of expansion—the movement from event conspiracies to systemic conspiracies to superconspiracies. As this progression occurs, two characteristics appear. First, the more a conspiracy theory seeks to explain, the larger its domain of evil; the conspiracy includes more and more malevolent agents. Second, the more inclusive the conspiracy theory, the less susceptible it is to disproof, for skeptics and their evidence are increasingly identified with the powers of evil.
The result of these processes is that the villains who populate conspiracy theories tend to multiply rapidly. Conspiracists find it difficult to keep out new putative evildoers. Ufologists—the very subculture