When I had the lovely opportunity to participate in Patrick Farnsworth’s Last Born in the Wilderness podcast, he asked a question about conspiracy thinking. I answered from the perspective I had at the time, but in that conversation my perspective began to change.
New insights often come through me through speaking and writing, things I had not considered until they were named, as though they lay in wait for their moment to slip through my very active analytical mind and startle me. As we spoke, I said something about the idea of a world in total control was an illusion, but then I also, as an afterthought, noted that a world of total randomness was its own illusion.
In my early days of training as a therapist, I gravitated toward an Existentialist tradition of therapy. In brief, very brief, my understanding of an Existentialist perspective is that anxiety is a response to apprehending the fundamental meaninglessness and chaos of the world. We clothe ourselves in stories of meaning, purpose, and control for comfort, but freedom requires the shedding of this control, that we may discover the meaning is generated within. Anxiety, as Kierkegaard said, is “the dizziness of freedom.”
Doing therapy from this perspective, standing with my clients as we face the chasm of meaninglessness together, is both more harsh than I care to be these days, and paradoxically an expression of an archetypal Western meaning of heroism. We become the brave ones who face the storm to strengthen our inner fires and bring light to the world.
For a time, I needed that truth. Like many twentysomethings I was paralyzed by the dread of making a “bad” choice while experiencing every obstacle as a sign that I was on the wrong path. As though there was a god watching who knew the right way but refused to come out and tell me what it was. Letting go of that story of external authority freed me to take ownership over my life.
So when I talked to Patrick, I was coming from a mindset that the tendency to develop conspiracy theory — to see the world as ruled by hidden masters webbed together through occult alliance — was its own comforting story of order, though horrifying in its own way. Someone is in control, even if they are malevolent. As I spoke, however, I sensed my thinking was incomplete and preparing to shift.
For what we may call conspiracies—secret political operations that people in power lie about or cover-up—do happen. There are times that people in power do exert control and influence over the world through secret operations, as almost anyone in a Latin American or Middle Eastern or African country whose democratically elected leader was overthrown in a coup instigated or funded by the United States could tell you. People in power do lie and bring harm to the people for whom they are supposed to care, such as the Black men of the Tuskeegee Experiment, who were told they’d receive care for syphilis but were left untreated, so the disease’s full progression could be studied, even when a cure became available.
It is also true that, in this world, our plans and efforts to control are frequently thwarted by circumstance, luck, fortune, the turning of history. One could keep drawing the perspective out, like a fractal, and see how those unfortunate incidents themselves emerge from the conditions of the moment—while not unleashed intentionally, they may arise inevitably, as our human influence on the climate feeds back into increasing the likelihood and intensity of natural disaster.
Recognizing causality is not necessarily the same as being in control—like the alcoholic who is anticipating cirrhosis of the liver. They may know this will be the end of the path, but not when the damage will be severe enough to harm them, or past the point of recovery. They may intellectually know that drinking is harming them, but that knowing does not stop the parts of them that drink.
It is also true that many strains of conspiracy theory emerge from and feed into anti-Semitism. Though this is not the focus of this essay, it cannot be overstated how often you scratch a conspiracy theory’s surface and find at its center anti-Semitic tropes that have re-emerged over centuries as new glosses on old stories attempting to pin all contemporary ills on Jewish people.
The world is neither utter randomness and meaninglessness; nor is it completely ruled by totalitarian control. That is where our distress arises: the inescapable and uncontrollable coexistence of chaos and order.
The Tension of Unpredictability and Maps of Knowing
Once I spoke with a BDSM coach—stay with me here—about how one induces “catharsis” in a flogging scene. A top can purposefully guide their bottom toward an emotional outburst and release. It’s not the pain itself. If the top is flogging with a regular, metered rhythm, the bottom can relax and move into trance space.
What guides catharsis is the execution of randomness and unpredictability. Striking the bottom at sporadic and changing intervals, switching intensities and even tools in such a way that the bottom cannot intuit a pattern and anticipate what’s coming.
Our hearts beat in regular rhythm, our days and nights pass in predictable patterns. We can relax into these rhythms, which is adaptable in its way. Why waste energy stressing about problems that aren’t happening? The shelves are stocked with food, we have clean water, we have a daily routine of going to work and coming home. Any change would throw us into the stress of the unpredictable, and risks the emotional response that comes from feeling powerless and out of control.
This insight was used to great effect in my home state’s pandemic response, where the Governor frequently telegraphed the changes that would happen a few days before they were enacted. Rather than us waking up to the news that restaurants were closed, we had time to mentally adjust to the change. To not have too much disruption at once.
Contrast this with the chaos of a hypothetical leader who makes decisions as though on impulse, announcing them on social media before even informing important stakeholders that a decision is in the works. Whether the mark of an intentional mastermind or an impulsive fool, the effect is the same—it creates tension and confusion, knocks others off balance.
We tense up when we don’t know what’s coming and don’t know how to prepare for what’s coming. Instinctively, when dissonance arises, we want to bring it back into rhythm. We seek entrainment, the process by which discordant systems bring each other into alignment.
Should we have workable rhythms, we build upon them a theory of the world that explains how life works. But then we encounter disruption. A horrible, chaotic event whose trauma scars that sense of rhythm and regularity. Illness or personal catastrophe. A pandemic erupts. Someone goes into a school and murders children. It becomes harder to get a job, to pay rent, to go about one’s daily life.
These events may be, in a personal sense, without meaning. It may look like complete discord that exposes a vulnerability in our theory of the world. Now we have to make sense of things to re-find a sense of rhythm. Upending and re-examining all of our beliefs about the world takes a great deal of energy. Far more efficient is to find a way to mentally explain, justify, or shift the event back into our existing theory.
When one has a suspicion of corporate greed, political corruption, and a sense that those with power and money do not have the interests of the people at heart, those seeds could grow a variety of ideologies. Every advancement of medicine might look like a threat of encroachment and control. Or, the medicine itself might look good, but the profiteering corporation that limits access is evil. Or, we could see the disease as increasing dependency on the government, and even see the government having created it. Or, we could see the disease as a natural phenomenon but the government and private corporations colluding on maximizing profit and minimizing support to the people.
The distress around the figure of the conspiracy theorist is, I think, twofold. The first is the unsettling experience of seeing that a person can inhabit a reality completely contrary to our own, while otherwise not being much different than we are. For the difference between the conspiracy theorist and the knowledgable historian is less obvious than is comfortable.
Once, in casual conversation, I was stunned to learn a coworker believed the moon landing was staged. What unsettled me the most was her ease and how coherent her reasoning was. There was nothing to argue. It exposed the seams of my own believing. I’d never been to the moon. I don’t know anyone who has been to the moon. She and I had all the same evidence but came to different conclusions. In an objective sense, one of us must be right and the other wrong, but how could either of us prove it?
To be in a world with so much information available demands that we develop sophisticated maps to organize and filter information. I literally cannot take the time needed to validate every truth claim about reality that undergirds my living. Some things I accept because it’s grounded in a context of knowledge that is workable to me, such as assuming my science teachers didn’t lie to me. Meeting a person who fundamentally rejects that context throws me into a state of tension.
How do I know what I know? What ruptures of knowing do I smooth over to make my life workable? How do my maps of knowledge obscure the ways my behavior is guided by instinct, conditioning, marketing, propaganda, or other forces? What if, as Patacelsus says, my ego story of why I make the decisions I make and believe what I believe are merely public relations campaigns to justify decisions that arose from deeper, instinctive domains of being?
When I imagine a workable model of reality, one that can hold both chaos and order as realities that coexist, I think about listening to rap music while driving. There have been moments when, no matter how many times I’d listened to a song, I would have a moment of panic when I heard a police siren, suddenly sure I was about to pulled over for some offense I couldn’t understand in the moment.
Then I’d look around and not see anyone behind me, and realize the siren was a sample in the song itself. “Why the hell would they do that?” I, a middle class white guy, often wondered. Now I see that what I experienced was a glimpse into the experience of the Black artist. A rhythm, and then the disruptive threat of the police.
Rap, Hip Hop, and Industrial music do the aesthetic work of weaving together the discord and the beauty, the rhythm and the record scratch, of urban and industrial worlds .
A Snake Devouring Itself
What has struck me profoundly this year is how much this pandemic has amplified a profound ambivalence about modernity. For example—as social distancing and work from home mandates have made us more dependent upon technology, such that having a strong 5G network would be very helpful, there is a movement of suspicion and rejection of 5G. We can see parallel movements around vaccination and masking.
It is almost like a social-psychic immune system instinctively recognizing and mobilizing against the intrusion of a foreign presence in the body. But is that intrusion a life-stealing parasite, threatening to destroy the whole system; or is it a life-saving replacement organ? One’s answer to this question necessarily determines how one feels about that immune system response.
Our diagnosis of the illness encircles our imagination and limits what we would see as cure. Which brings us to the second troubling facet of the figure of the conspiracy theorist: if we inhabit such different foundational premises of the world, if our diagnoses and cures are fundamentally opposed, how can we find solution?
Beneath our politicized conflicts are underlying, dare I say archetypal, tensions — anger at being dominated by another person’s will versus fear of being hurt by another person’s selfishness; excitement for the possibilities created by technology versus deep concern about technological disruptions to our natural organisms and ecosystems; the need for collective solidarity versus the risk of being exploited.
These archetypes become embedded and expressed through the particular, through intellectual justifications and exercises that can continue indefinitely and never resolve the underlying tensions, which are embodied, emotional, and relational. In a sense, agreeing about the moon landing only matters if it affects our ability to trust each other and work together to find solutions to the problems before us.
We need a container strong enough to separate out and hold the tension of these polarized forces, bring them into confrontation as equals that they may witness each other. From this confrontation comes the synthesis that moves forward. Not “finding a middle ground,” which tends to be an intellectual compromise that seeks to bypass the conflict. But rather for the edges to truly see each other, find what is valid about the other polarity’s concerns, both understanding and being understood, and in that process for the solution to emerge.
Jungian therapy taught us to see the underlying archetypes from which these conflicts emerge, and turn toward the soul as the sacred container in which the tension of these opposites can give rise to the synthesizing force.
When it comes to our larger culture, the sacred containers could be those institutions of meaning and law that we share in common—the school, the research institute, the government, the court of law, the church—but in the current climate, those containers are neither shared nor well-sealed. With every chaotic shock that disrupts our rhythm, with every increasing catastrophe, we experience more emotional catharsis without containment.
These forces are greater than us, but as we are their hands and ears and feet and tongues upon the earth, they must act through us, through our own particularity. That gives us a power if we are able to slow ourselves down to see it. That gives us the opportunity to breathe and see how these serpents fight in our being, a moment of choosing, of finding the seams in our thinking and leaning into the discord rather than smoothing it over.
Not to accept each other’s intellectual reality, necessarily, but to find where our polarities agree—perhaps, as an example, that none of us want to feel controlled, and also none of us want to be put thoughtlessly at risk by another person’s stupidity. And if we find a space where those premises align, there is a foundation on which we can build.