Conspiracy, Nominalism and Fascism

Listening to a mass (with Latin text!) by Machaut I have to marvel at the strangeness of the 16th Century inquisition going back in time and changing the words of a composer (who had long been forgotten anyway) into Latin from whatever the original language was. This reminds us, of course, of the basic weakness of conspiratorial thinking which is, that while picking random flaws in the ‘official’ story, it cannot tell a coherent story of its own. If someone claims all mediaeval and ancient Latin is fake I would like to know the who, what, when, where, why and how of so extraordinary a feat. Here is where the conspiracy theorist always fails to deliver for whatever problems there are with the received story are dwarfed by the incoherence and arbitrariness of the ‘alternative’ one. Worse, if the official sources can be so comprehensively misleading and systematically deceptive what grounds are there for thinking the ‘alternative’ sources are any different? But, of course, this is the real point of the exercise. The aim of the conspiracy theorist is to dissolve social and epistemic trust. Her aim is to show the empirical world to be ephemeral and illusory and that is why conspiracy thinking mutates into multiple forms all of them wildly contradictory and all of them at bottom arbitrary. She seeks a world of random, uncorrelated atoms of information that can be rearranged into any order we please because it is without intelligible principle. Personally, I believe that the real emotion the conspiracy theorist has toward the Jews, the Catholic Church, the Masons or whoever is envy. Look at what these virtually omnipotent people can do! I want that power for myself! 

Because, to be frank, it is only power and unmediated will that holds the world of the conspiracy thinker together. It is the WILL of the Catholic Church or the Illuminati or the Jews that invents and sustains the matrix like simulation we call history and culture. I wish, in eating that enemy ritually, by ‘destroying’ it as we now like to say, to absorb its power as my own. More exactly though, I wish to assimilate its power to something I call my own and that of course is the Fascist leader with whom I vicariously identify. Pseudo- historians of the Erich Von Daniken/ Dan Brown type laid the groundwork for this disaster years ago as did ‘New Atheists’ like Daniel Dennett who assured us that the entire ‘memetic’ realm of culture and history is mechanically self-reproducing nonsense to be dissolved into ‘evolutionary psychology’ and its (evidence free) ‘just so’ stories about the ‘African savannah’.[1] After all, if an entire realm of culture, religion and its attendant philosophies and aesthetic styles, turns out to be mere gibberish ginned up by priests and kings impersonally replicating a mind virus why stop there? Why not extend this insight into evolutionary determinism and the ruthless replication of the selfish meme to everything else as well? Why isn’t it self-replicating, blind, mechanical algorithms all the way down? And in such a random, fact and reality free universe, what is there but blind power embodied in an omnipotent daddy like Orban or Trump? Nominalism leads to a philosophy of pure will which leads to adoration of the great leader who embodies that will and brings order to pure chaos. Hobbes laid this out with impeccable clarity centuries ago as did Blake in his myth of Urizen. 

This is much as to say that it is social trust and social bonds that sustain the objectivity of the empirical world. Without faith in each other all objectivity dissolves.  We produce and sustain the empirical world (as opposed to the world of raw unmediated sensation) through many intersecting webs of social trust and authority and absent those webs of trust the empirical world itself crumbles along with our own perceptions of it.[2] In such a world I might well discount the evidence of my own senses (what are the senses after all but principles of error!) in favor of the leader or the party. This is the basic function of secret police in totalitarian regimes: to destroy any belief anyone might have in anyone else for without such belief we can scarcely produce or sustain self-belief. We fall prey to the thought that we too must be crazy! The world of capitalist consumption has the same effect: all is planned obsolescence. The word consumption itself indicates this. Styles and products fly by turning the even the world of natural objects into ephemera and abstract ciphers of the monetary value to be realized from them. Social relations are also dissolved into naked transactions of power. None of these forms of totalizing, at the end of the day, are consistent with there being a ‘real world’ of ‘solid objects’ in which people believe. Nor are they consistent at the end of the day with authority. Under the neo-liberal paradigm (which is just the ultimate expression of the capitalist paradigm) we are consumers of everything, knowledge and expertise included. The neo-liberal order is about freedom as embodied in the (purely abstract) notion of consumer choice: in this totalization the barest, most abstract form of freedom swallows all others. Freedom becomes the freedom to die of plague while freezing in the dark if that’s what the ‘logic of the market’ demands. Under the reign of consumer choice we choose our own truths as we choose our own toothpaste, soap or beer. We are curators of our own reality and that is why, for certain celebrants of the ‘post-truth’ condition, TRUE freedom can only be realized when the physical world and its constraints have been banished; when we have uploaded our personalities into a digital format! 

 

 

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[1] History is bunk said a famous American and it is indeed in America where conspiratorial thinking about history finds its most congenial environment. This is because it dissolves history into pure seeming and simple unmediated will. With Americans, history can sink no deeper than the surface of the mind. The American knows, abstractly, that there was a world before 1776 but he does not feel this in his heart or in his gut. It is all the realm of maya as the Hindus say; an indistinct, oppressive delusion. This is why he is thrilled to discover that the Roman Empire was fake and that there was no thought or science in the middle ages or the Islamic world. This is why he is thrilled to be told that historical religions and philosophies are all conspiratorial gibberish he need not bother his head about. All of the above just confirms what he feels directly in his gut: that the world outside his immediate present is all trumpery. Dissolving the past in this way frees him to be immediately in the present which is not the product of a long spiritual and intellectual mediation but a sheer given; unintelligible, arbitrary but for that reason infinitely malleable. This stance is all the more tempting if he is given to moralizing for if ethical truths are simply directly and immediately felt (rather than historically mediated) he can judge all time and space from the superior standpoint of his simple, unsullied heart. He can now, if he is inclined, roam through the ages determining who was a republican and who was a democrat, who was progressive and who was a conservative and doling out judgment accordingly. In this way he can radically cancel the despised category of history by turning ALL OF IT into the simple present. 

[2] This is why, for instance, merely seeing things like ghosts, witches or aliens does not establish such objects as real. The empirical world is not what we see but what we as a social body construct out of what we see. Depending on how these webs of social confirmation are constructed slender inferred evidence (like a fossil footprint) can outweigh direct un-inferred evidence (as it does with Bigfoot say). Inferring by the right people under the right circumstances beats any and all seeing. A blip on a radio telescope means more than all the U.F.O sightings ever. An empirical claim that alien bodies exist on earth would have to be demonstrated to the public. The medium of this demonstration would be institutions: the empirical claim would be filtered through the institution of journalism and its code of ethics and best practices. It could also be filtered through a museum for the Smithsonian, say, is assumed to have some credibility in the exhibits it mounts. The same seems true with 'letting scientists test the bodies to see if they are aliens' because someone has to pick the scientists involved based on their credentials which we assume are not fake. All of which is to say that aliens like other objects become real when they become a socially certified, socially constructed empirical fact. The world is raw data PLUS the chain of authorities that turn raw data into real things. As the internet dissolves these chains of authority the empirical world dissolves with them and suddenly we are debating the existence of Latin or whether the pyramids are optical illusions.