Several months ago, I replied to a comment on a blog that I used to frequent, but no longer do because reading that blog raises my blood pressure dangerously high. The comment was in reaction to a local zoning ordinance in the community where the blog is based and the commenter dragged in the irrelevant issue of United Nations Agenda 21. I won’t go into Agenda 21 – anyone who is interested can go to the United Nations website and read all about it. Suffice it to say that I don’t subscribe to the New World Order/One World Government conspiracy theory that Agenda 21 is designed to enslave everyone to the dictates of those shadowy people who are espousing one world government. The response that I published on the blog haunted me for weeks afterwards – I kept asking myself why people like the person who commented believe what they do. In the interim, I found the humorous video that was the subject of the last post. After thinking the matter over for a time, I would like to retract my claim that it was “humorous” – I think it is more likely that the producer thought it was dead-on right.

This whole incident triggered an intense re-examination, on my part, of my thoughts about conspiracy theories. I’ve never been fond of them – they always blame a current event on international bankers, Jews, the Illuminati, the Skull and Bones Society, the New World Order, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bohemian Grove, and aliens, among other perpetrators. But I’ve also never really investigated why people believe these crazy ideas. The comment on the blog (and my response) was the tipping point.

So. My initiation into this inquiry took the form of reading Mark Fenster’s book, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. That book is a bit dense at times (it is a university press book) but it is a fascinating introduction to how conspiracy theory mongers think. What particularly fascinated me was his assertion that conspiracy thinking is not, by any means, limited to the right-wing. It is all over the political spectrum and it is something that we all need to educate ourselves about so that we don’t fall into the trap of using conspiracy theories to “solve” the problems of the world. I’ve not read it yet, but I have Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America, by Timothy Melley, on order. I was much intrigued by his idea that people who engage in conspiracy thinking almost always have two personality traits that stand out. First, that individual subscribes fervently to the idea of individual rights. He will very likely worship at the altar of Ayn Rand, be a strong proponent of Second Amendment gun rights, or be a follower of Austrian economics. Second, that person doesn’t believe that he has much, if any, control over his life. Events that happen to him are the result of others plotting to take away his rights. The combination of these two personality traits, according to Melley, is agency panic, which he describes as an “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy” to others. He further states that “for one who refuses to relinquish the assumptions of liberal individualism, such newly revealed forms of regulation frequently seem so unacceptable or unbelievable that they can only be met with anxiety, melodrama, or panic.” When I read this, lots and lots of things started falling into place. I’ve always known that Americans worship individualism and that any idea that even faintly smells of collectivism is angrily swatted down. According to Geert Hofstede, the United States has the highest ranking in individualism in the world. I’m not surprised. If you combine this ranking and the ideas of Melley, I think it is safe to say that he has just shed an enormous amount of light on the political debate that has paralyzed this country for the last 40 years. He has for me, anyway.

I’m continuing to delve into this topic and this morning, I came across a very interesting article in the March, 2011 issue of the magazine, The New Internationalist. Entitled, Challenging the Politics of Paranoia, it delves into the dangers that conspiracy thinking poses to those who believe in social justice. Here is a single paragraph from the article:

“Believing that a sinister, ultra-powerful cabal is to blame for it all opens up the possibility that ‘human nature’ is in fact an innately benevolent thing, capable of flourishing into utopia overnight – if only, if only we could prove that the establishment was involved in a malignant conspiracy of such intense moral repugnance that everyone would find it utterly repulsive. Then the status quo would fall overnight, leading to real, profound and rapid social change. Hence the popularity of the ‘waking up the brainwashed masses’ theme within conspiracy thinking: ‘sheeple’ is the patronizing term that’s most often used. What a glittering apple, dangling just beyond our reach!”

I, and many others on the Left, am guilty of using the neologism ‘sheeple’.

While reading the comments in response to the article, I noted a very valuable list of sources for further study of this phenomenon, compiled by Ralph Dumain. While I don’t have the time (or the money!) to read every source in his list, I think a selected reading would be valuable for everyone on the Left who is puzzled, upset, or outright enraged by the prevalency of conspiracy thinking.

Chip Berlet, who has published an enormous amount of really good work on right wing populism and conspiracy thinking on his site, Political Research Associates, was interviewed by David Barsamian in September, 2004. The interview appeared in Z Magazine and is worth reading. The last question, and Chip’s response, should spur you to read the entire interview:

What is the average citizen to do, facing this blizzard of charges and countercharges and theories and countertheories? How do you make sense of it?

I don’t think you should try to make sense of it because I think it’s like Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum where the protagonist decides to try and chase all of these loose ends, and in the chase he discovers more loose ends. He leaves his job and he begins this quest of showing the gigantic conspiracy. By the end of the book it’s clear that what Eco is saying is there is an infinite number of loose ends, there is an infinite number of questions for which there will never be an answer. You have a choice: you can take part in real life and deal with real issues that affect you in a real way or you can go on that endless quest for finding those loose ends and tying them together. And the choice is yours.

One final thought that builds on Chip Berlet’s last sentence. If you choose to “take part in real life and deal with real issues that affect you in a real way”, you really should visit G. William Domhoff’s website and, if sufficiently impressed, buy some of his books and read them. Power Structure Research is not easy and it doesn’t seem to have many followers, but I think it answers a lot of questions that other means of knowledge production can’t touch.

Chip Berlet has more to say about power structure research in another article, which also appeared in Z Magazine, this time in the November, 2007 issue. In it, he states that what came to be known as power structure research originated with C. Wright Mills’ book, The Power Elite, which was published in 1956. Another book to read!