Conspiracy theories becoming self-evident truths

Tirdad Derakhshani

is an Inquirer staff writer

Everyone knows that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by an unholy alliance of the Feds, Cosa Nostra, and anti-Castro Cubans; that Princess Diana's car crash was staged by British intelligence; that the invasion of Iraq was never about WMDs. Even if you don't believe these theories, I'd wager you still hold to others like them.

Ours is the age of the conspiracy.

Over the last four decades, more and more Americans have begun to accept conspiracy theories as if they were self-evident truths.

Believers seem unconcerned about the growing chasm between their explanations of such tragedies as Hurricane Katrina (some say the Bush administration purposefully flooded New Orleans' poor, predominantly black neighborhoods) and the official story.

For their part, the news media write off conspiracy theorists out of professional prejudice or class bias, even when their claims may merit investigation. Not all conspiracy theories are fictions.

In an April 2001 Gallup Poll, 81 percent of Americans said President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. The numbers have steadily increased since 1963, when 52 percent said Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone.

And, in an alarming commentary on our lack of trust in government, a 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll found that 36 percent of Americans believe federal officials assisted in the Sept. 11 attacks or did nothing to stop them.

This irrational, contagious fever is supported by an avalanche of often controversial, if dead-serious, books, TV shows, and films, including Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Kiefer Sutherland's terrorist TV thriller, 24, Matt Damon's box-office killers, the Bourne trilogy - not to mention comic strips Doonesbury and Boondocks.

By comparison, a decade ago, the elaborate tales told in The X-Files and Millennium were taken with a grain of salt, if not dismissed.

There's a religious impulse behind the need to ascribe Diana's accident to a cabal of evildoers. Like the Christian notion of Providence, it helps us feel that there must have been some reason or purpose behind such a tragic accident. Some find it unbearable to see the universe as ruled by a play of contingent forces. For some, what we call an accident is merely a veil that hides mysterious motives.

The metaphysical need for meaning becomes dangerous when it hides the impersonal social, political, and economic processes that help define our lives. Raised on stories that locate the center of reality in the individual, we anthropomorphize these processes instead of investigating them.

Consider how we talk about the stock market as if it were a person (of almost divine power). The business pages ascribe it volition, motives - even feelings.

Conspiracy theories, which proliferate during periods of traumatic economic and social shifts, are a real form of protest by citizens angry over a system that makes them feel small, impotent.

Ironically, they end up reinforcing that powerlessness. Like the Greeks who preached amor fati in the face of the crushing power of Fate, conspiracy theories teach political quietism and social apathy. They shift the citizen's responsibility onto an imagined devil and make us self-identify as victims in need of salvation by a mythical hero.

Politicians and would-be demagogues capitalize on the frustration of people alienated from the mainstream by offering them scapegoats. Thus Sen. Joseph McCarthy's crusade against a Communist plot to infiltrate the highest echelons of government, a plot he called "a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man."

Conspiracy devotees often talk in apocalyptic terms: They win assent not by appealing to logic but by whipping us into hysteria.

Partisan politics is now waged in conspiracy speech, as Barack Obama learned when some Republicans made a big to-do about his middle name, Hussein. They implied that like Saddam Hussein, Obama must be a bad 'un. (Sarah Palin even suggested the Democrat hung out with terrorists.)

For artists, conspiracy tales can still be a potent form of social critique, as was the case during the golden age of paranoid films - the '70s. Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) was a prescient allegory about the dangers of the surveillance society. Three Days of the Condor (1976), Winter Kills (1979), The Parallax View (1974) The Candidate (1972), and All the President's Men (1976) attacked systemic corruption and abuse of power.

These films often had bleak endings. Instead of offering comfort or closure, they inspired viewers not to hide from their anger. Since then, there has been a massive domestication of the conspiracy theory in the media and pop culture. (A conspiracy? More likely the result of economic and political shifts.)

With a few exceptions, today's conspiracy thrillers do not criticize the system itself. Films such as The Shooter (2007), The Bourne trilogy (2002, 2004, 2007), Wag the Dog (1998) and The Matrix (1999) ascribe corruption to evil persons who have infiltrated the system - which itself stays fundamentally good. The evildoers are invariably defeated, mano a mano, by a hero who perpetuates the myth of radical individualism.

These films offer catharsis and closure - the bad guys are killed or put away. We feel sated, not impelled to take political action to reform perceived corruption.

Most of all, they keep us in a realm of grand fictions that offer only imaginary solutions to real and often intractable problems.