By Richard Seymour
At the origin of modern political conspiracism lies a myth of subversive power, first fabricated in response to the French revolution. In 1797, two books appeared simultaneously. These were Abbé Barruel’s five-volume Mémoire pour servietterr à l’histoire du jacobinisme, and John Robison’s Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies. Both attributed the revolution to a centuries-old conspiracy of secret societies (from the Order of Templars to the Freemasons), responsible for an assault on religion and political authority.
This theory of totalitarianism avanta la laettere is the template from which modern conspiracy narratives – from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the ‘New World Order’ – are cut.
Conspiracy theory today, says Fredric Jameson, is an attempt to represent the ‘social totality’ at the level of fantasy in a way that evades ‘liberal and anti-political censorship’.
It is in the work of distortion, the mechanisms of metonymy and metaphor, that unconscious desire secretes itself. That is happening in this dreamwork, say when the idea of big tech tracking us becomes a fantasy of penetration; the effect is to transform a network of often rivalrous powers, both capitalist and state, whose inability to master the systems they benefit from has been exposed in multiple crises, into a single omnipotent and omniscient command centre. What is at stake here is the conspiracist’s contradictory desire for totalitarianism, as a solution to the crisis of authority.
It is unsurprising that in practice these myths exert a rightward pull, just as Roland Barthes finds that myths in general accumulate on the right.
At the outset of the anti-lockdown protests in Germany, when tens of thousands gathered in Berlin in August 2020, most Querdenken supporters had little interest in the far right. They had previously either abstained or voted for parties like the Greens or Die Linke. But now, they were seeking a new political expression: 92 per cent said they wouldn’t vote for any ‘mainstream’ party. They were highly educated on average and strongly middle class, with the self-employed particularly over-represented. They were sceptical of government intrusion, of vaccines, of the media and of scientists. To an extent, as William Callison and Quinn Slobodian put it, they were working together ‘to be left alone’.
The panicked sense of lost sovereignty resonated with the prevailing sociophobia of the far right, entailed in the assertion that any communal abridgment of individual freedoms is despotic: ‘social distancing is communism’ and ‘masks are muzzles’. Nor is this entirely novel: the fear of the individual being destroyed by the masses united fascists from Pierre Drieu de La Rochelle to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange. Rochelle aimed to ‘kill off statism by making use of the state’. For Rivera, ‘We are anti-Marxists because we are terrified … of being an inferior animal in an ant-nest'.
The over-representation of the middle class in such movements [Querdenken, AfD, etc.] is telling, since the most potent myth on the right is of a ‘virtuous middle’ squeezed between a treacherous elite and a vile underclass.
The unacceptable, violent and dysfunctional parts of society are split away and projected onto an intrusive outsider who must be done away with.
In a strange dialectic, the conspiracists often end up supporting a version of the authoritarianism they claim to oppose. The disaster dreams of the afflicted can be seen in this way as a kind of imaginative foreplanning, a psychic preparation for bloodletting.
According to Baudrillard, the ‘reality principle’, by which it was possible to differentiate between ‘real’ and ‘fake’, was under assault. Already, as he was writing in the early 1980s, humanity was drowning in a sea of commodity-images, from Hollywood to Disneyland, which didn’t so much represent an underlying reality as algorithmically model a new hyperreality.
Baudrillard could not have foreseen the rise of the social industry platforms like Facebook and TikTok, through which billions of people now conduct their social lives, and on which social life is mediated by a flow of digital images which are collectively produced by users. The simulacrum has taken over in an unprecedented way.
The strategy of governments and legacy media aiming to assert the reality principle consists of effortful ‘fact-checking’ and the promotion of ‘media literacy’. This campaign, being waged on the terrain of the simulacrum, is generally about as efficacious as a chocolate teapot. Congruent with that approach, however, some recent studies suggest that the reason people believe disinformation on the internet is because they are simply too trusting: they are the dupes, ready to be misled by the duplicitous. According to the findings, older generations lacking media literacy are less likely to check their sources. They assume that any authoritative-sounding claim must be accurate. By implication, generational improvements in literacy will make life harder for the purveyors of falsehood.
Knowledge is a matter of faith. Most of our knowledge depends on trust in others, and trust must be at least partially blind.
What applies to the scientists certainly describes the rest of us, who must accept on trust a wide range of claims about war, the natural environment, science, world history or economy. We may have excellent objective reasons for trusting our sources, but trust is also anchored in a form of collective fantasy life. Social trust depends on a fantasy of shared values and history, a public space which Lacanian psychoanalysts call the ‘big Other’, and which can be the measure of our lives and the sanction of our decisions. This, the very idea that we have anything in common at all outside our cultural tribes, is what has been breaking down in recent years.
If knowledge is a ‘social state’, then the degradation of knowledge is a consequence of that social corrosion. In the empirical sciences, trust has been eroded by the proliferation of fraudulent scholarship, papers ghostwritten by corporations and the collusion of a supposedly independent academia in the marketing strategies of companies they partner with. In media, trust has been eroded by the obvious political biases of owners, the influence of advertisers, the fusion of news with infotainment, the rise of ‘churnalism’ and the social industry platforms that thrive on turning attention surges generated by addictive disinfotainment into advertising revenue.
Historical fascism reposed its trust in myth. Disaster nationalism, coming of age in the era of the internet, trusts in the simulacrum.
But disaster nationalism today is distinguished by its effort to turn a pastiche of familiar myths into hyperreality. It begins by leveraging a radical distrust of reality arising from the way in which social relations are increasingly mediated by digital images.
Far-right conspiracism has lately discovered a latent possibility in the simulacrum: participatory disinfotainment. Rather than rebel against an artificially produced reality, it offers the chance, through a live-action role-playing scenario, of participating in its production.
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, Verso, October 2024
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