For the conspiratorial mind, nothing is random (Getty)
Here’s a conspiracy theory of my own invention. Why did Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald? Readers under the age of 80 may need to know that Jack Ruby was a Dallas bar owner and small-time crook who shot dead Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy. Nobody has ever thought that Ruby did this out of patriotic indignation. Somebody wanted to silence Oswald for good, and Ruby was the instrument they chose to do so.
But who? There’s evidence that Ruby was a low-level sidekick of the Mafia, so maybe it was the Mafia who shot Kennedy. But why kill Oswald as well? It’s here that my devilishly ingenious theory comes in. There’s no real evidence that the Mob killed the President, but they might have been incensed that someone else had. Not because they had any love for their leader, but because they had intended to assassinate him themselves. After all, they threatened the lives of both Kennedy brothers several times. Before they could get round to it, however, a private entrepreneur called Oswald stepped in and did it instead. By having Oswald bumped off by a known associate of theirs, the Mafia made it look as though Oswald, had he lived, could have revealed their guilt. My theory, then, is that the Mob bumped Oswald off because they didn’t kill Kennedy. They just wanted people to think they had.
Is this true? Probably not. When it comes to the death of JFK, the hardest question is who didn’t do it. There’s a comically long list of possible candidates: Oswald, the CIA, the FBI, the Dallas police, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s driver or his bodyguard, Right-wing Cubans, the Teamsters Union, perhaps (who knows?) a 21-year-old Harrison Ford. Members of QAnon probably believe they were all in it together. As with equality and diversity programmes, genuine conspiracies must leave nobody out.
One shouldn’t be too cynical about conspiracies. After all, as new UnHerd polling has shown, more people in Britain are conspiratorially-minded than aren’t. But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism.
Besides, the more individuals are in the know, the more fragile a conspiracy becomes. One reason why the US moon-landing wasn’t a put-up job is that it would have involved too many people, any one of whom could have blown the gaff. And if the truth (as conspirators see it) had got out, the United States would have suffered the most calamitous loss of credibility in its history. Its reputation would have been trashed beyond repair. Fear of being discovered is a primary reason why some events can’t be faked, just as one reason why most politicians try not to lie is not because they are more angelic beings than the rest of us, but because the consequences of being found out mean that it just isn’t worth it.
If great masses of people maintain a certain belief over long periods of time, one can be fairly sure that there is something in it. This doesn’t mean that the belief in question is true, but it’s unlikely to be complete nonsense either. Myths tend to have a core of truth. For many centuries, everybody thought that the Sun moved around the Earth, which isn’t true; but it was a rational belief all the same, because the evidence seemed to support it. Much the same goes for paranoia. It isn’t true that creatures from Saturn have placed a secret device in your skull to beam your every thought to a control centre in the Glastonbury Tor, but it’s true that a mighty amount of surveillance goes on, much of it secret. Or to put the point more pithily, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the bastards aren’t out to get you. No civilisation in history has ever spied on itself so relentlessly.
Those who genuinely go off the deep end are those who imagine that we live our lives in private. The idea that what we do is covertly directed by a cabal of obscenely wealthy paedophiles is a delusion — but if you drop the “covertly” and “paedophiles”, it us not far from the truth. We are indeed governed by an elite, but there’s nothing particularly secretive about it. You can see them strolling around Davos or read about them in the newspapers. The phrase “Masters of the Universe” isn’t just a piece of flashy science fiction. There is a sovereign superpower whose presence can be felt in every nook and cranny of the globe, but its name is capital, not the Knights Templar. Like all power, what it needs to sustain itself is knowledge. Knowledge is no longer just what is conveyed in seminars, but priceless stuff which people are prepared to kill for.
Conspiracy theorists are convinced that everything hangs together, which is indeed a symptom of paranoia. For the paranoid, nothing happens by chance. Even a gust of wind is secretly intended. The fact that the Prime Minister has five letters in both his first name and surname must surely be trying to tell us something. Freud thought that the nearest thing to paranoia was philosophy, because philosophers (he was thinking of the Hegelian type) also see connections between apparently unrelated items. There must be some way in which my left foot and the Vatican are secretly interrelated.
Once again, this isn’t complete nonsense. Even the most trivial of our actions send ripple effects through the thick mesh of social existence, breeding unexpected consequences in unpredictable places. None of our acts is purely our own. Reading this essay may cause you to tear great clumps of hair from your head, thus making you look too frightful to attend the dinner this evening at which you would have been offered the Governorship of the Bank of England. And don’t just blame me: blame the editors, sub-editors, technical assistants and so on. We all had a hand in tearing your hair out. It was a conspiracy, but not a conscious one.
These ripple effects are random. None of them needed to happen, or to happen in exactly the way they did. And this is where they differ from conspiracies. For the conspiratorial mind, nothing whatsoever is random, any more than it is for the paranoid. This is an alarming thought in one sense but a consoling one in another. A world of chance and contingency is a bewildering one, upending our schemes and thwarting our purposes. Far better to imagine that there’s a plot to it all, in both senses of the word, than accept the fact that a lot of things just happen, without any particular rhyme or reason, and that this is part of the price we pay for freedom. This was presumably what Harold Macmillan had in mind when he remarked to a reporter that the hardest thing about trying to run the country was “events, dear boy, events”.
Ironically, however, American conspiracy theorists are lovers of freedom. “Liberty or death!” ranks among their slogans, and by refusing to wear masks during the Covid pandemic some of them ended up with both. Among other things, conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom — from living in the precarious, unpredictable world of late modernity. They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history. Those who spin these yarns are for the most part on the wrong side of that history — those washed up by so-called modernisation, men and women who need someone to blame for their lousy living conditions but who point an accusing finger at fantasises of their own creation.
Conspiracy theories are also reactions to a diffuse, fractured, conflictive society in which there are just too many competing narratives around, so that falling back on a grand narrative which makes sense of everything is profoundly appealing. For a blessed moment, the whole lot falls neatly into place, as an opaque, impossibly complex world becomes luminously simple, purposeful and transparent. Because these myths spring from insecurity, which in turn breeds hatred, the grand narrative in question is almost always a sinister one. Anyone with an eye to how the world is going will have no quarrel with that, even if they don’t believe that Nancy Pelosi is a North Korean spy. They will have no quarrel either with the central assumption of the QAnonites and their ilk — that behind the surfaces of social life there lurks some exceedingly nasty realities, and that the official story is rarely the whole truth of the matter. What you see is most definitely not what you get. The good news is that no conspiracy can be entirely successful, since if it were we wouldn’t know about it.
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SubscribeThe “War on drugs” began in the eighties. That’s 44 years to have developed effective programs and show results. Despite all the talk and programs things have got worse. From what I can see certain drugs come very cheaply. Those drugs obviously appeal to the poor. Fentanyl obviously isn’t a dance drug, it’s the drug of misery. What’s behind all that misery? Harm reduction is a bit of a joke when these people are already seriously harmed. By what? What is it about these societies that destroy people first and then watch them fall into drug dependency and then offer ideological band-aids?
Offer users non-voluntary assisted dying.
Easier, if no better morally, to just stand back when they self-administer that cure.
Do you mean they’re all guilty for their own misery and don’t deserve any concern?
Well, is it really involuntary?
Harmed by what? What is it about our societies? I don’t know for certain. But, I’ve come to believe that the person who comes closest to answering those questions is Ian McGilchrist.
The war on drugs became official in 1971 under Nixon, it was a war on Nixon ‘s enemies, marijuana smoking white hippies who opposed the Vietnam War, and blacks living in ghettos and using mostly heroin. It accelerated under Reagan and led to mass incarceration of mostly blacks for simple possession and became a source of cheap labor in prisons. The war cost over a trillion dollars, and amounted to nothing in terms of dealing with the drug problems, except alot of people profited from that war. Let’s face it , it was a race war. Like all drug bans, opium laws were aimed at Chinese immigrants, the 1st marijuana laws were aimed at Mexicans and migrants. Even prohibition was racial, aimed mostly at Irish and Italian catholics.
Your claims seem sensible in the main, Canuck, if overgeneralized. You do seem to make Nixon stand in for the whole 1971 establishment: military, church, school, police, distraught parents, etc.—and fair enough to a point. But you’re using race as a proxy for both ethnicity and class, which makes “race” into a catch-all umbrella term that isn’t very useful.
Also note that penalties for marijuana possession in particular were vastly reduced in most states and in Canada between about 1968-1971. Drug use or alleged sale was indeed used as a pretext during the height of mass imprisonment. They locked up “undesirables”—both non-whites and poor, uneducated white (especially when you had two or more “demographic strikes”)—for a range of crimes that included gun possession, theft, and petty parole violations. Drugs or drinking were of course at least somewhat involved in many other crimes like theft and assault, as a rule—and they can’t lock you up very long just for using the drug of alcohol.
I think the author of this article is correct to stress drug availability and non-enforcement as major drivers of overdose death and severity addiction, but wrong to deny the singular severity of fentanyl.
A comprehensive social approach that involves de-criminalization, along with outreach, treatment, and measured supply is one thing. In the States, most harm-reductionist approaches (with which I’m in sympathy, especially in principle) have used a hands-off approach that is supposedly compassionate but usually leads to more public disorder as well as more misery and death among addicts themselves.
I’ve read Gabor Mate on Vancouver’s de-criminalized Eastside; truly horrific, epidemic misery there. What approach(es) do you favor or suggest?
Thank you for your considered points, which however seems to me to depart rather a lot from those rather extreme ones of Dave Canuck above!. I just can’t see however how it could be possible for any state to reduce and control the often terrible effects of drugs, without strong intervention involving at least the possibility of a degree of coercion of the users. But modern liberal and progressive opinions simply isn’t willing to countenance this. Much as I want to live in a free society, it is just obvious that the drug problem in the US is very much worse than in China, or even Japan.
Oh my goodness – an actual sincere woke analysis on UnHerd! No, it is ludicrous to suggest it was a “race war”! (I imagine that Nixon, like Trump might be pleased that some black people have rather conservative views and might consider voting for them!). Was it a good thing for blacks that so many used heroin?! So, is the implication here that because we can always find some difference between the rates of use of harmful drugs between different ethnic groups, that essentially the state should have a completely laissez faire attitude towards the widespread use of addictive and extremely destructive drugs in society?
The scenes of people totally raddled and destroyed by crystal meth in the centres of cities like San Francisco are appalling. It isn’t nice for everyone else, is economically damaging, but most importantly is a disaster for the drug addicts themselves. No doubt liberals and progressives feel like thet have adopted a humanitarian policy – they have not!
A thoughtful comment.
There is “no war on drugs”! As the article makes clear! Americans are still pretty well off on average, drugs are cheap and widely available, and people like the effects of them! You are exceedingly unlikely to be punished for using. Then a significant fraction get physically or psychologically addicted – as indeed do rats. What is difficult to understand about this?
It seems that some people broadly on the post liberal right now echo exactly the same points as progressives on drugs – that people use them mainly because they are somehow are traumatized or suffering from all sorts of social ills. But many of these social ills, such as poverty and poor housing and physical violence are much worse in other countries where drug uses much lower – drugs being expensive and the penalties very severe!
I should probably write an article about this instead of a comment but drug use has so many factors. Impunity and acceptability is one part. I think parental neglect is the common factor in about 70% of cases.
What is it about these societies that destroy people first and then watch them fall into drug dependency and then offer ideological band-aids?
Korea and Japan both have some social problems but the vast majority of their citizens haven’t fallen into drug dependency.
There is far more social cohesion and pressure to conform there than anywhere in Western Europe or the Anglosphere.
As Sherlock Holmes taught us: The only way to survive modernity is drugs and music.
perhaps we could one day ambitiously espouse: “drugs or music’… I’ve never done a hard drug in my life, but as a musician I mostly get my high when I need it. But I do imagine drugs as more efficient for the musically lame person.
Actually one question I want to have an answer to is did Classical geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Bach and the like take drugs like 70s rock and rollers, intentionally or not? (e.g. they likely ate or drank things that made them drunk all the time, like beer, but perhaps they were harder drug users too?!), Does anyone have a solid answer to this, or read anything of the like?
Perhaps Christianity thrived on drug use back in the day… I certainly see it helped the new agers in their mission so why not general Christianity or religion.
The word I would emphasize is “modernity.” A modern person is one who aspires to comfortable self-preservation and fears death. He can have such a life, however, only if there are men like SH, for whom such light stuff is insufferable. SH must have danger. And modern men must have their SHs. It was not this way in pre-modern times. The noble have no place in modernity and thus take refuge in drugs and music. It is an escape for them.
That is mostly complete rubbish! People from all backgrounds can be offered drugs, which are cheap, and, hey, they like the effects and some start to habitually use!. The bad effects are not as obvious, at first. There isn’t anything “noble” about drug use – and I am not being “judgemental” here.
Please, be judgmental.
This sounds like a pretty flippant and silly point. It is sometimes possible to use drugs in moderation, but all too often it isn’t. Being addicted to crystal meth (I have some experience).or presumably fentenyl and others doesn’t seem to me to do anything except make whatever defects “modernity” might have very much worse. Losing your job and home, for starters. And by the way, what about the other people in your life who are close to you?
SH had no squeamishness about using narcotics to excess. The more the better actually. As for your suggestion that modernity is no worse than other times in history, all I can say is that I so hope you are right.
America is the greatest democracy in the world
Uh, no. America is a republic. A pure democracy would not have an Electoral College. A pure democracy would provide the states with very few and quite limited powers.
The issue with drugs is twofold: first, the refusal to accept that bans do not work. Prohibition should have made that a concrete lesson, and if not that, then the decades of the failed ‘war on drugs’ should have confirmed what was already known. Second, the refusal to understand that life never offers solutions, just tradeoffs. Whether legal or not, there will be spill-over effects from drug use. Perhaps the nation’s mistake is to treat drug use as a criminal problem rather than a public health issue, but given the quality of person in public service, the outcome would likely be just as bad either way.
Has anybody claimed it’s a pure democracy? Great Britain, though a parliamentary commonwealth with a symbolic monarch, is still a democracy by the normal definition.
Your remarks on drug policy seem sensible to me. Until you pivot from trade offs to a damn-it-all conclusion where the different trade-offs are “likely” to be equally bad. What is the point of understanding when it is joined to a refusal of hope or unwillingness to help anyone beyond ourselves?
Drug use in the US today, IS largely treated as a public health problem, albeit very unsuccessfully and often without any robust evidence, as the excellent article made clear
Very incisive
I recommend reading the actual article “Harm Reduction Calls to Action from Young People who Use Drugs on the Streets of Vancouver and Lisbon”. The ten points listed at the end might be called The Drug User’s Bill of Rights. Basically we’re to give them food, shelter and their drugs of choice and then not interfere in their activities in any way.
No.
Those people have destroyed Vancouver and it’s obvious. Yet they still have some useful idiots esp lawyers who support them. Majority of the population doesn’t.
I used to do drugs in my youth, but since I started going to mass every Sunday I no longer have that hole in me, where I’m searching for that point of peaceful oblivion – just over the horizon.
The urge to turn everything from drug abuse and depression to racism and gender into medical conditions is a materialist fallacy. We as a species made some metaphysical assumptions with the likes of Ockham and Bacon 700 years ago which have slowly disintegrated reality such that our default perspective cannot even perceive meaning, beauty, purpose etc in their transcendent sense – leaving everything as pure surface onto which we impose a banal meaning..
The only solution to our problems are spiritual, no government policies can fix them, but how long will we go on thinking “if only government X really did Y properly, everything would be great now.
You gave up drugs for the Catholic Church? That sounds like a poor bargain to me! I mean, give up drugs if you must, but the Catholic Church?
Catholic Church is more good than bad for the most part.
Singapore. For dealers.
Next question?