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The United States is the land of conspiracy theories, not least when it’s busy electing a president. Such theories are a secular version of the idea of a malevolent God, for which the world is a sinister place but at least makes sense. In fact, for conspiracy buffs it makes far too much sense, as every bit of reality is covertly connected to every other bit. Are the Vatican and my pancreas really the separate entities they seem, or are they not part of the same secret plot? Maybe it’s better to believe that we are ruled by a vindictive deity rather than by nothing at all. It’s comforting to know that everything that happens, including the bad stuff, is somehow meant, since the mind revolts against the random and accidental.
It’s hard to accept, for example, that those who perished in the Holocaust did so in vain. It seems discourteous to the dead to suggest that their death had no point. But part of the horror of the event is that there was indeed no point to it, not even from the Nazis’ own viewpoint. You don’t need to massacre six million people in order to create a bugbear or scapegoat. Some of those who were killed had skills which the Nazis could have used in the war effort, just as they could have used the men and machinery tied up in running the concentration camps. What purpose the whole project served was metaphysical rather than practical. Annihilating Jews was an attempt to abolish the frightful form of non-being they stood for, which threatened the very foundations of the Third Reich. Even that, however, was as counterproductive as murdering Polish metal workers, since the Nazis were entranced by a dream of purity, and nothing could be purer than nothing.
Conspiracy theories are out to purge human life of chance and coincidence. They restore a sense of purpose to a civilisation which seems without design or direction. The claim that paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy are running the banking system may take some believing, but so does the claim that the large number of young black men killed or injured in police cells is purely coincidental. And there are, of course, plenty of real conspiracies. Not all of them are the product of collective paranoia. Some paranoiacs really are persecuted, just as some hypochondriacs genuinely are ill. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had the misfortune to be both. The dictionary defines a conspiracy as a secret plan to do something harmful or unlawful, in which case such groups are about as common as kindergartens. Why are they so widespread? Partly because it’s consoling to detect human agency behind a world of anonymous forces, and partly because it’s pleasant to find fellowship with other conspiracy buffs in a world short on solidarity. It’s just that the latter aim might be better served by joining a Pilates class.
A lot of American conspiracy theories spring from the sheer vastness of the country. To impose some political coherence on this far-flung terrain is one reason why the word “America” is used in the States far more often than the word “Portugal” is used in Portugal. “Swedish” or “Hungarian” are purely descriptive terms, but “American” is a positive value-judgement as well as a national label. “A very fine American” means an outstanding example of a valuable species. One doesn’t imagine that the Albanians spend much time asking God to bless their country, as Americans do, or that Belgians see themselves as specially favoured by the Almighty. It’s true that a Peruvian army officer once exhorted his men to “always remember that you are Peruvians”, but this is mildly comic because nobody has much idea of what being a Peruvian means, probably not even the Peruvians. It would be like being urged to be an authentic inhabitant of Maida Vale. There are hordes of people in Ireland who see the nation as blessed and its soil as sacred, but they are known as Irish-American tourists. America, however, has to keep on talking about America in order to forge some unity out of its plurality. It has even adopted that phrase as its national slogan. In many ways, this drive for unity has been stunningly successful, as the tone in which a waitress in South Bend, Indiana says “Have a good day” is an exact replica of the tone you’ll hear in Roscoe, South Dakota. There are those, however, who fear that this cultural uniformity is not exactly what the Founding Fathers meant by freedom.
Because the nation is so immense, Americans are particularly sensitive about their space being “invaded”. They can occasionally be heard to murmur “excuse me” if they come within six feet of you, which is not true of the residents of Beijing. Large tracts of space help to breed individualism, and Americans are adept at keeping their spiritual as well as physical distance. Even some of the poorest dwellings in the country stand proudly in their own meagre patch of land, unlike the tightly stacked terraced houses of post-industrial Britain. All this is the opposite of the carnivalesque, a condition in which bodies are merged and mingled to the point at which it’s hard to know where one ends and another begins. The stereotypical American body, by contrast, is squeezed tightly into its own space, sealed against disease and conscious of its precise boundaries. It’s surprising it isn’t wrapped in cellophane. Carnivalesque bodies, being devotees of Dionysus, are often drunk, a state in which their boundaries become messy and inexact, but Donald Trump is a teetotaller. There’s a relation between the fact that he uses others’ bodies purely as instruments of his own power and desire and the fact that he is a germophobe. Mexicans can be repelled by walls and barbed wire, but germs are invaders of the body politic too tiny to be rounded up and deported. As wholly invisible immigrants they represent a Right-wing nightmare.
Conspiracy theories draw on the anxiety that things which should be distinct are actually commingled, and by no means for the good. This distinctness should be true of the nation itself, which is only diminished by being locked into trade agreements or international treatises. Yet we now live in a world in which, as the narrator of Orhan Pamuk’s The White Castle remarks, seeing everything as connected with everything else is the addiction of our time. The modern philosopher whose vision reflects this most starkly is Hegel, which is why Freud once remarked that philosophy is the nearest thing there is to paranoia. There are no free-wheeling cogs in the machine of global capitalism. Nothing is allowed to exist purely for its own sake, which used to be the privilege of the work of art.
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Subscribeit isn’t the virus that the less enlightened sections of society regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipotent, but the state which tries to protect them against it.
Sometimes there actually is a conspiracy. Just because some theories are outlandish doesn’t mean there is no conspiracy and government covid actions were a conspiracy. The demonising of conspiracy, it’s craziness, is a way of shutting down the people and we’ve seen it in action.
You may not believe in conspiracies, but conspiracies believe in you.
“These forces are toxic, contagious, all-pervasive, without any identifiable source and well-nigh impossible to overcome.”
The identifiable source is billionaires who intend to own and control all the resources on the planet and are now very close to achieving their goals. The plans are well laid out and documented, and they can be found on the UN, WHO, and WEF websites. They are not hidden or concealed. If people only spent a few hours reading these websites and the documents on them, they would find clear explanations of everything happening around them. They will also note that they have never been offered a vote on any of this.
In the 1960s American students enthusiastically embraced Tolkien. But not for his Catholicism. Whether Tolkien’s literary creation was experienced by these young people as a frisson of what it was to be United States American haunted by their Anglo colonial roots, if anyone needed a consoling fantasy enshrined in their heart, the Shire wouldn’t be a bad one at all.
The Shire isn’t a militaristic power. It has no empire and doesn’t seek one. It is overlooked by the rest of the world and therefore cannot have a migration crisis of tens of thousands of refugees from war-torn Rohan. It has no pretentions to be a ‘Global Shire’. And last but not least, the Shire has no ‘special relationship’ with the witch realm of Angmar.
However, there are some differences between the Shire folk and the English. The Shire people are not seafarers. They have had no industrial revolution. Even if the Shire had a coastline, without having an industrial revolution as well, they could never have the English seaside holiday. That would be a considerable loss.
One enviable feature of the Shire is its history. No event in it is such that it can disturb the mind and lead to history becoming pathological. There are no statues of long-forgotten notables from the 17th century of the Third Age of the Sun that need dumping in the Bandywine River. There are no peoples of Far Harad demanding recompense for the ill-use of their ancestors and no Mayor of Hobbiton who would be docile and enervated enough to find ‘creative’ ways of indulging them if there were.
There are no Shire historians looking at the past and trying to mine a grievance from the fact that a long-forgotten king of men granted to their ancestors as a place of settlement an unwanted province devasted by war rather than one better furnished.
Whether England should be like it or not, the Shire is the subject of the benignant interest and guardianship of one of the eternal entities who form the overarching supernatural structure to what is – despite the creation of all in the thought of the One using the Flame Imperishable – an otherwise godless universe.
As elsewhere in the world, and unlike England, the Shire has no places of worship. Though close to the soil, the Shire folk are not even animist, as are the Elves. So untroubled are they by religion, nothing reaches the Shire people of any of the greatest spirits; not even of Manwë who is the breath of all people.
But congratulations to Mr Eagleton for describing a non-conspiratorial world as if it were a conspiracy. Does wearing the world like a hair shirt calm the soul?
Visit the Rockefeller Centre in New York during the week before Christmas and you couldn’t find people more ‘stacked together’ than those around the Christmas tree.
Conspiracy and Narcissists go together. I’m so unique and insightful only I and few like me can see and explain this etc etc. It’s makes me special. Groan.
Many things are complex and not straightforward. They warrant an inquisitive mind that can absorb nuance and intricacy. Conspiracies can thus also appeal to the lazy.
And then of course there are the manipulators. They drip-feed the narcissists and the lazy.
Don’t forget that conspiracies can also be fun. Imagine that you live a life talking to your friends on the phone: everyone knows that politics are boring, boring … but conspiracies can be exciting. How many conversations start with, “They say that….”?
In a sense though, conspiracy theorists are usually right. What they miss is that the conspirators are not usually acting consciously but out of class interest. The mantra ‘government should be left to the experts (ie: people like me)’ so beloved of the Blairites is a good example. Another is the fondness for open borders of the asset owning class which is so enriched by them and which they explain with appeals to phoney altruism.
I always enjoy reading lengthy articles about the US written by people who’ve barely spent any time there. They are invariably informed more by the peculiar snobbery of the provincial British intellectual than by any genuine knowledge or understanding.
Case in point:
“There is still suburban middle-class life, but scratch the surface and you will find monstrous predators and blood-lusting fiends.”
Scratch the surface of these leftists you’ll find a swivelled eyed conspiracy theorist who literally thinks white people who live in nice houses are brain eating nazis. It’s an eternal fever dream. The lizard nazi of suburbia is everywhere and omnipotent.
Aimlessly and pointlessly abusive.
Yes and however cursed the US at least they do not have to suffer Mr Eagleton
Thanks for reading the article so I didn’t have to
“Conspiracy Theory” = Smear thrown at ‘outsiders’ to undermine public scrutiny.
No need to read further than the opening words, really.
The article talks of the human unwillingness to accept the randomness of life; of humans’ belief in external, especially divine, influence on events; of the presence of malign forces; of fear of contamination from the other.
All interesting topics, worthy of thoughtful analysis and understanding.
And you will find those hopes and fears in all cultures, all over the world, forever.
But it’s the United States, see. The United States. The United States. They’re demons, I tells ya.
It’s not that they’re demons. They’re assorted. It’s not even that American institutions are fundamentally demonic, if you leave aside the presumption of settler colonialism. The demonic qualities of American regimes and it’s presence in the world are a happenstance of internal and external interplay. A lot of evil has been installed there by British ruling orders.
I think I got up to the bit about young black men being injured in police cells before I gave up. A tough old read if you are intolerant to utter tosh.
Exactly the same here. Terry, read Roland Fryer and get up to speed.
What a long winded, smug way of stating US citizens who don’t agree with you are some lunatic fringe, Mr, Eagleton maybe you cannot hear the difference between an upper Midwest accent and an Upper Plains accent doesn’t mean it’s not there. And more striking try the Appalachian accent vs the NYC accent.
I would imagine that people in government think in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Only we understand the truth but we have to explain it to them, the plebs. So, in a way, a conspiracy is necessary to sell an idea, as well as to refute the same idea. Almost nothing that you read can be separated from a conspiracy. An author on UnHerd is conspiring with the UnHerd management to make an article which appeals to the members.
The wackier conspiracies are started by people who want to draw attention to themselves, who want to be interesting.
Or in the “know”.
There’s a paradox at play here, if you create an ideology then you will find like minded people to pursue it but who can you trust. At some point, knowledge of said ideology will leak out. Will those who believe in the ideology, admit their part in it or dismiss it or perhaps more likely engage in machiavellian behaviours: sophistry, obfuscation etc. That is when the conspiracy theories come in to play followed by an endless cycle of denial, social media only amplifies this sense of paranoia.
Terry Eagleton, truly one of the most over-educated, under-brained individuals I’ve had the misfortune to read.
Terry has never written an article in which he doesn’t contradict himself, but the fact that he managed to contradict himself in the same paragraph is a new low.
You could argue that Americans are modern day Cathars, believers in two Gods. Wikipedia:
Unfortunately the traditional Gnostic certainty that the Republics spoke for the rich and the Democrats spoke for the working man has shrivelled as the Parties now turn into their inverse. No wonder American politics seems to be a conspiracy theory…
It makes sense though. The 1% need votes to oppress the silent majority.
So they buy the votes and pluck those they can.
Professor Eagleton’s complaint seems to be that people in America think that unreal things are real. But then he started stating all sorts of unreal, imaginary, metaphorical, unprovable things as if they were simple facts, himself.
Very like his compatriot Fintan O’Toole … people won’t behave in ways I consider nice, so I will create an inverted pyramid of piffle to explain why.
By the end I’d lost him completely. One for Pseuds’ Corner.
There’s some very vague logic in here, and of course Mr. Eagleton finds the time to draw an analogy or two between what the Third Reich were doing and what Trump is currently attempting – well done! – but the conspiracy theory idea is a flimsy one.
As I often tell people, at least before they change the subject and remember pressing engagements elsewhere, the reason lots of people believe in conspiracy theories is that they cannot take the actions of politicians on face value. When political parties put policies in place which look to the average person like a really bad idea, and from which everyone can predict a lousy outcome, and which inevitably DO have a lousy outcome, people refuse to believe they don’t have some kind of hidden agenda – otherwise why would they do things so obviously counterproductive? Surely not for the good of the people, like they’re supposed to be. What are they hiding? What are their REAL intentions? Seems pretty obvious to me.
Some good insights here, but quite a bit of nonsense, too. America is not Puritan. Progressivism is. It is the last, most desiccated form of Puritan religion, shorn of Jesus but with all the moral hauteur and intolerance intact. People like that will slap the cig out of your mouth. Or elect Kamala Harris.
That’s good, really good, apart from the point where you try to touch down at the end.
Huh? WTF was this about?
This bit is particularly irritating, though:
In this sense, conspiracy theories exemplify the forces they seek to hunt down. When a pandemic breaks out in this context, as it did in 2020, it isn’t the virus that the less enlightened sections of society regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipotent, but the state which tries to protect them against it. At a time when bodies actually need to be insulated from each other for their own good, they cast off their protective masks in the name of liberty and demand to be allowed to breathe together — another irony, since breathing together is the literal meaning of “conspiracy”.
As “A very fine American” I’m tempted to say FU and leave it at that. But, protect us? The state created the crisis and there were people (conspiracy theorists, Mr Eagleton?) who, as early as May of 2020, were discussing furin cleavage sites, a Wuhan lab and the complicity of certain government officials in playing hide the weenie with government funding. I know because I found there conversations interesting.
What the heck – FU, Terry.
The thing is Terry your philosophy points are spot on but your against-conspiracy theory is a little, well, conspiratorial.
You missed the part where Kamala Harris was plonked on the podium after an aging buffoon puppet was ‘elected’ into office.
How’s that for a conspiracy?
His final paragrpah must be a homage to Kamala Harris for being a word salad as meaningless as hers.
Please God no more Eagleton. How does he get published here? He is the and English Zizek in every sense. Moderately intelligent windbag whose mind is marinated in a toxic stew of Marxist historiography and lit crit word salad. Also Like Zisek a nostalgic boomer conservative masquerading as a trenchant social critic. never a fact or a number just one pretentious ridiculous sweeping statement after another. unreadable and embarrassing.
If Americans have learned anything over the past several years, it’s that so-called conspiracy theories have this way of becoming verifiable facts in relatively short order.
There has been such a sharp decline in the quality of UnHerd since the management change that I am withdrawing my support. I’ll look in a few months from now to to see if I detect improvement, but I’m not optimistic. Cheery-bye-bye!
You should most definitely stay for the cheap entertainment!
Powerful insight here denied to Americans themselves who are wandering lost in their troubled landscape.
So why engage TE, apart from the pure pleasure of reading him, irrespective? Maybe to puff up a notion that Unheard is lire than merely alt right? Or dialectical thinking that it’s good to wind up the usual addicts from time to time. By offering something unheard normally in their bailiwicks. And confident their amour propre can only be burnished thereby.
Terry Eagleton is a fine fellow, but a bit stack to his nerative..! If you don’t take your nerative out in the open to breath some fresh air that nerative stands no longer. I understand the tendency to support one’s ideas. I think though that the best way to empower these ideas is to bring them into contrast with the finest of the opposition. Sadly, the leftists more and more in our time, quit the effort of intelligent dialogue and only have mad to throw towards the “enemy”..!
By the way.. can someone explain to me what was the “non-being”, that Jews were allegedly standing for..?
“..Annihilating Jews was an attempt to abolish the frightful form of non-being they stood for, which threatened the very foundations of the Third Reich..”
It is all too easy for authors to fall for their own internal conspiracy theories and their facility with words that flow with artful flourish. Reading “paedophilic Jewish reptiles from a distant galaxy” I almost floated off the ground. There’s a whole bestseller and blockbuster movie in that phrase.
Still, America is a very strange country, both in its unique origin, unity with diversity and, as the author states, its combination of aggressive high-technology with political and religious myth. The latter is most peculiar, as it is hard to imagine Christian conservatives letting a mendicant preacher who believes in not sowing, reaping or giving thought to the morrow past their front door.
Today, the morrow is bright from sea to shining sea. But the next four years may be the last chance for the politics of denial: of climate change, education, true facts, plodding everyday administration, Machiavellian foreign forces, and of long slow changes driving shifts of power, competitive advantage, deprivation and migration.
Brilliant as always from Terry Eagleton.
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?
Progressive journalists, Tech billionaires, Hollywood, and their fellow Democrat allies have approximately one month to concoct a fakery “vast right-wing conspiracy” to rewrite history – like they did at the end of 2015 when Trump won (“Trump Russia Collusion everybody!”) – or they’ll lose the progressive initiative to bog down the will of the American people that will be set in motion by the President Elect and Republicans.
By definition, Trump’s popular vote win, Trump’s landslide electoral college win (with 312 electoral votes), the Republican win of the Senate, and the Republican win of the House means that Trump and his vision for America now represent the center.
Also, by definition, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hold the more extremist vision for America as judged by the voters. They and their vision(s) were rejected by the people.
And yet many progressive credentialed-class journalists are still pushing gaslighting articles in which they encourage Trump to ‘move to the center.’ By which they mean Trump should move to the Left fringe that they, themselves, still occupy without being cognizant of the reality that they speak on behalf of no one but the fringe (progressives once called those that they perceived were on the fringe, “extremists”).
Trump IS the center, by absolute definition, after such one-sided national and local elections.
Eagleton writing his own comfort blanket. The only thing lurking under kitchen tables was women and minorities refusing to be patronised. They cared about immigration and the economy as much as anyone. The Democrat assumption that they owned these people and need not address their very real concerns was blown apart.
“There are those, however, who fear that this cultural uniformity is not exactly what the Founding Fathers meant by freedom.”
Only people like the author who jealously nurse a fantasy that the most diverse country not just on earth but in history is somehow flawed at its core for the sin of ignoring how the rest of the world tells us we must behave. Have a good day, Terry.
“Some years ago, if you smoked on the street in the United States, it was possible to have the cigarette knocked out of your hand by a concerned citizen, if not in Manhattan then perhaps in Wichita Falls. This wasn’t only because smoking can kill you, or because the States is a profoundly puritan nation somewhat given to self-righteous moralising.”
Former smoker here. This never happened. Someone please notify the self-righteous puritan moralizing at us at the top of his lungs.
“When a pandemic breaks out in this context, as it did in 2020, it isn’t the virus that the less enlightened sections of society regard as deadly, invisible, infectious and omnipotent, but the state which tries to protect them against it.”
It was a serious disease in some very small populations, but many more people died WITH it than FROM it. We the “less enlightened” knew this at the time, and that “the state” and complicitly censoring social network “moderators” were actively suppressing such impermissible opinions. Sorry, there really was a conspiracy. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-worsened-america-rage-virus-for-which-theres-no-vaccine-lockdown-vaccine-mandates-ron-desantis-stanford-masking-2670cd39?st=6yY88a&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
How come the last election was stolen but this one was not. Really difficult to figure out how the deep state works. Or why. Moves in mysterious ways.