Conspiracy theories arise when people either can’t adequately explain events or don’t trust the explanations. We live in a world where a large number of bona fide sources of information are easily accessible via the Internet, and in a variety of languages — sources can be thoroughly cross-referenced for legitimacy. Today, distrust for rational explanations and the popularity of conspiracy theories are sure signs of a society in distress.
Not long before the outbreak of COVID-19, New York’s Metropolitan Museum at Cloisters put up an exhibition of treasures from the French city of Colmar. In retrospect, the show seems extraordinarily prophetic and relevant for our particular time in history.
Discovered in the walls of a building in Alsace, this trove of jewelry pieces was hidden in the mid-14th century, during the plague that devastated Europe. Based on several pieces it contained, historians identify it as belonging to a Jewish family.
The production of wine and its export all over the continent was one of the reasons why Medieval Alsace had a large and vibrant Jewish community. Commerce and openness to the world were also the reasons why the disease was particularly devastating in that region.
As Black Death progressed across Europe, conspiracy theories began circulating, focusing on the Jews who were allegedly immune to it and were poisoning the wells. Jews were murdered in a series of massacres across the continent, and the survivors expelled. That was probably the fate of the family in Colmar, which is why they never retrieved their jewelry.
There is nothing particularly new there. Jews and other outsiders were often blamed for disease, droughts, and other bad things. Now, however, science has been able to provide an explanation for most natural phenomena that do not involve uncovering some hidden evil plot or blaming a particular group of people.
In the second half of the 20th century, rich developed societies with educated populations and a free press seemed to have left conspiracy theories behind. Even in the case of extremely strange and ominous events, such as the assassination of President John Kennedy in which many loose ends remained, alternative explanations were the province of the lunatic fringe, not the mainstream. Despite being inadequately explained, the JFK assassination attracted only a subculture of kooks trying to come up with a more plausible scenario, while most Americans accepted the findings of the official Warren Commission.
Rationally minded Americans and Northern Europeans used to be rather condescending toward countries where conspiracy theories flourished. The Middle East was a particularly fertile ground for them, but so too was Italy with its traditional mistrust for the central government and rich history of back-stabbings and poisonings.
However, in the US, too, conspiracy theories used to pop up among groups that distrusted the government. In the 1970s, such theories were the province of the left, with its belief in the evil and pervasive military-industrial complex. America’s conservative “silent majority”, however, tended to give their federal government the benefit of the doubt, trusting in its self-proclaimed mission as a force for good both at home and abroad.
Ronald Reagan’s presidency ushered in an era of distrust for the government on the right. In his inaugural address in 1981, he famously declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem, the government is the problem.”
Government industrial policies, assistance programs and, most importantly, power to tax, were maligned by the new right-wing libertarian political thought. Even though it took several decades to solidify, there has always been a straight line from the view that government is not the solution to seeking alternative solutions — typically concealed from the public eye with evil intent.
Just as maligning the government has moved from the fringes to the government itself, so conspiracy theories have now moved from the fringes to the mainstream, including Congress and the White House. Mainstream journalism takes a while to be developed and corroborated, its stories tend to be pedestrian and boring. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, can pop up overnight, go viral on social media and have the advantage of changing on a whim, without making their adherents believe in them any less. As they say, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots.
Thus the coronavirus was first a Democrat hoax, then a biological weapon developed in a secret Chinese lab from which it inadvertently escaped, then a Red Chinese plot to weaken the US economy and finally a ploy to defeat Donald Trump.
There is such a plethora of conspiracies to uncover. BLM protests are staged by Antifa funded by George Soros who flies them from hotspot to hotspot. Vaccines are an evil invention by Bill Gates. The presidential election was rigged by a cabal that included the Deep State, Venezuela, Hunter Biden and conventional Republicans.
And that doesn’t include the QAnon conspiracy theory and its surfeit of falsehoods, from Kennedy’s son faking his own death to stand shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump to Pizzagate and to the newest twist, a pitched WWII-style tank battle between Trump and the invading Chinese army currently taking place in Maine. QAnon is only a few steps away from becoming mainstream in the Republican Party.
Unlike the truth, which exists in a single version, you can believe all conspiracy theories at once, no matter if they are mutually exclusive, and shift from one to the next at a moment’s notice.
To one extent or another, similar crazy ideas — especially ones about the virus, its effects, the government remediation efforts and newly developed vaccines — have spread far and wide around the world. Notably, they have become popular in Russia, suggesting once again that the two imperial Cold War rivals remain linked by some invisible cord.
And for good measure. The U.S. leads the world in COVID-19 cases and deaths while Russian coronavirus statistics are garbage. In Moscow and St.Petersburg alone you hear of an enormous number of people falling ill and just looking at nationally known figures who have died of the disease recently suggests that the true numbers of pandemic victims are vastly larger.
Yet, while their citizens are falling ill and dying, both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump are obsessed with other things. Putin is bent on revenge after his FSB clowns botched the poisoning of opposition leader Alexey Navalny and then made the world’s laughingstock. Trump has not stopped tweeting about a stolen victory without providing a shred of evidence.
Those rational Americans used to laugh at conspiracy theories which their less rational, angrier countrymen and women embraced. They are laughing no more. Their first reaction was shock and now fear. The popularity of conspiracy theories is an alarming sign. It shows that, to use Vladimir Lenin’s famous words, that “the bottoms don’t want and the tops cannot live in the old way” — which is how Lenin defined a revolutionary situation.
