I came of age with some of the mid-to-late 20th century literature that took conspiracies as truss work for calculated paranoia, from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Philip K. Dick’s identity shuffling, and on to the obscurely psychedelic Illuminati books by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. They were undoubtedly influenced by the dirty tricks and mind control fantasies and realities of the Cold War, from thallium and LSD poisoning plots against Fidel Castro to the Manchurian Candidate and John Birchers; from Dr. Strangelove to ratfucking in the Nixon-era Republican Party.
The fiction paralleled and mimicked those realities but it was also infused with a kind of magical realism where the ideas permeated through the characters in a nexus of paranoia and fantasy. The reader was admitted to eccentric ways of structuring the history of the world and the motives of unseen forces acting through organizations, governments, and powerful people.
While endlessly fun, the fictional forms were also an inoculation: no mundane conspiracy could possibly capture that pulse of inside knowledge of a mystic firmament of lies and outlandish goals canopied above our earth-chained heads.
But here I am again, though much less amused and more fearful.
I think I read ten different reporting and opinion pieces today on the topic of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the shock-curiosity of the day who amplified QAnon, Jewish space lasers, political assassination fantasies, and likely a range of yet-to-be-discovered subjects of scorn and ridicule. Most analysts agree that such fantastical and angry ideas are methods for manipulating gullible people. They are tools for the acquisition of power over others.
The whole project feels like an alternative reality so late in America’s evolution, like we’ve transitioned to a Counter-Earth or Bizarro Htrae or Nabakov’s AntiTerra. Yet it is real enough that has broken out into the mainstream and become the core of political analysis.
There is another parallel world concept, Putnam’s Twin Earth, that is also of interest to my Dr. Roquentia. In this Twin Earth we see meaning is externalized from our heads. On Earth, water is H20, but it is quite another thing on Twin Earth, yet all of the conversations about it, all the reasoning about its properties and qualities, are equivalent to H20. The secret of this twater is unknown to the Earthlings or their twins in Putnam’s thought experiment because their sciences have not unraveled what makes them what they are. But they are definitely different things.
And it will take time to integrate the new concepts of molecules and elements even when they are discovered. The metaphor of smaller and smaller—more atomized—constituents of reality can be brought to bear, but only through specific experiments can the elements be freed from their bound state and thus prove their existence. Then this insane idea of water being composed of things that are themselves not decomposable can push and pull surrounding concepts into their proper orbits to create a new understanding of water, twater, and all other things.
Not understanding, then gating the new concepts in, then feeling a tension of displacement at the dissonance they create with the old idea that water or twater were a pure substance composed only of itself, is a familiar feeling during learning. It can be disorienting. It can be beautiful. And, as it turns out, it is also related to conspiratorial thinking.
In this model, that goes back to the 1950s, cognitive dissonance is a key psychological component to cult indoctrination. Leon Festinger was the originator of the idea that dissonance between reality and cognitive states might lead to psychological agitation. It is natural for people to try to reduce that agitation by changing their attitudes and the inventory of cognitive elements that are involved in their thought processes. They reorganize to reach a balance of understanding where facts and hypotheticals are weighed and refined until the dissonance is reduced.
But for cultists and conspiracy mongers, dissonance is alleviated by further, more radical agreement with more outrageous ideas and personalities. Facts are suspicious and the natural alignment of machiavellian personality traits makes them more susceptible, in turn, to fearing conspiracies are at work behind the scenes. Modern anti-cult theorists (and former cult members) see the breaking down of normal ways of understanding and establishing new cognitive agreements as a key to understanding how outlandish ideas can take overwhelming hold of some people.
There is no dissipation into fictional models. The fiction is instead that the conspiracy does not exist.