More Conspiratoons: A Look Back

by Geoff Olson | Nov 24, 2024

Where was I again? Oh yes, I don’t recall what I said in response to the arts editor who objected to my Schrodinger terrorist toon, but it must have sounded okay because it ran unaltered in my paper.

As my fellow Substack writer Monika Ullmann and I laboured to explain here and here, “conspiracy theorist’ is the ultimate slur in academic and media circles. Commit Thoughtcrime and you’ll soon find yourself radioactive to friends, family, your employer…maybe even your family doctor if you don’t keep your big yap shut.

I recently came across a passage from leftist philosopher Slavoj Žižek that offers a good brief for the defense. This is particularly noteworthy since he’s not generally considered a crank, and is held in high regard globally by educated lefties.

It is also fashionable for today’s Leftists to reject conspiracy theories as fake, simplified solutions. We all know the cliché that conspiracy theories are the poor man’s ideology: when individuals lack the elementary cognitive mapping capabilities and resources that would enable them to locate their place within a social totality, they invent conspiracy theories that provide an ersatz mapping, explaining all the complexities of social life as the result of a hidden conspiracy. However, years ago, Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen that cannot be explained merely by referring to some anonymous “logic of the capital.” For example, we now know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” by certain financial circles. A quick ideological-critical dismissal of conspiracy theories is thus not enough: in today’s global capitalism, we are often dealing with effective “conspiracies.” Back in the early 1950s, the destruction of the Los Angeles public transport network was not an expression of some “objective logic of capital,” but the result of an explicit “conspiracy” between car companies, road construction companies, and public agencies. The same is true for many “tendencies” in today’s urban developments. The justified critical dismissal of the “paranoid” ideological dimension of conspiracy theories (they presuppose a mysterious all-powerful Master, etc.) should alert us to actual “conspiracies” that are happening all the time. Today, the ultimate ideology would be the self-complacent, critico-ideological dismissal of conspiracies as mere fantasies. The true task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions.

Comedian George Carlin once remarked that you don’t need an organized conspiracy to explain the status quo, you just need a circle of people near the top who know what’s in their best interests. Once the hierarchy is established, self preservation does the rest. Actual conspiracies, when they occur, can be regarded as ‘emergent properties’ within bureaucratic organizations, both private and public. Incentivization structures keep those in the ranks from doing anything other than their assigned jobs, even if some tasks appears questionable or even indefensible.

It helps that ‘compartmentalization’ – the perennial ‘need to know’ restrictions – occur within both organizations and brainpans.

Conspiracy is hardly an unusual or aberrant state of affairs: it’s simply politics by other means. Global monopoly capitalism in its present form wouldn’t exist without a billionaire superclass of investors and their proxies, supported by a military-banking cartel and the letter agencies. Whether it’s in neoliberal or neoconservative flavours (and we’re really just talking Coke vs. Pepsi here), the surveillance state’s managerial class are hardly above ponzi schemes, racketeering, covert actions, proxy wars, and all manner of trickery when the bottom line or a bureaucracy is at risk. Particularly when the surveillance state makes things completely transparent from the top down, but mostly opaque from the bottom up.

CJ Hopkins calls it ‘Globalcap (global capitalism). It’s also been referred to as ‘milbank’ (military-banks). A great recent article by Toby Rogers here elaborates on the medium that makes conspiracies possible. Yet whatever term you use, this is the medium in which all we fishies now swim, most of us oblivious to any dangerous undersea currents. Conveniently so, since the vast bulk of the First World population benefits in some way — directly or indirectly — from its perpetuation, from the widow whose blue collar husband’s pension fund was invested in Lockheed or Raytheon, to the hedge fund manager in diamond cufflinks performing voodoo for Blackstreet or Vanguard.

Of course, this mass buy-in is nothing new. It was even the stuff of mass entertainment, as indicated by the close of this classic conspiratorial thriller from 1974: