Who Needs Conspiracies? The Comfort of Paranoid Delusions.
Paul Hamburg, Harvard Medical School
At the threshold of a new millennium dominated by rationalism, the world nonetheless resonates with daily inventions of plot and intrigue, of implausible paranoid explanation, each one stranger than the last. No single psychological or social theory can fully explain the remarkable seductiveness of conspiracy theory to contemp-orary communities. However, a number of specific psycho-social uses help make paranoia a compelling discursive temptation. Here are a few of the most significant:
The apparent randomness of highly significant events -- whether murder, earthquake, or pestilence -- creates diffuse and pervasive anxiety. An unknown, unnamed, and unlocatable enemy is especially terrifying. Amidst this chaos, naming a sinister, powerful, imagined enemy crystallizes danger into a more predictable form. Rendered visible and nameable, the enemy is already on the way to being contained. An enemy with intention and will is less terrible, because passion makes it humanly vulnerable, unlike an intentionless, purely statistical catastrophe. Negative regard would seem easier to bear than the emptiness of a random wound. Paranoia soothes loneliness. Perhaps this is its most haunting hidden appeal.
A forgotten, friendless old woman imagines that her upstairs neighbors plot her demise, mimicking her every step as she walks from bedside to refrigerator down below. She is tormented by her imagination, but never entirely alone. What would she face if she gave up the delusion that keeps her such unwelcome company?
In a time of waning faith, community, and ideological certainty, people face the complexities of war, epidemics, economic insecurity, and rapid social change alone. Meaninglessness looms large. Creating a myth of conspiratorial design creates order out of chaos, predictability out of randomness, and potential action out of passive despair. People desperately want the world to make sense, even if making sense requires the wholesale distortion of reality. Of course the paradox of paranoia is that the meaning it creates actually disempowers individuals and generates absurdity rather than coherence. Declaring African AIDS a conspiracy ultimately increases victimization by virtue of absurd responses against imaginary human enemies instead of appropriate precautions against real viral ones.
In the face of intricate and ambiguous realities, people become too anxious to hold onto complexity. Conspiratorial solutions not only offer meaning in the face of the potentially absurd, but they typically offer singular, unambiguous meanings. Fiction, of course, can afford to be far simpler than real life.
Examples include simplistic government-plot explanations for the debacle at Waco, Texas; Scientologists’ demonization of psychiatric treatment for mental illness; recent claims that Attention Deficit Disorder has been invented by drug manufacturers in order to justify the poisoning of children with psychostimulant medication; and recurrent assertions that natural “cures” for cancer are suppressed by a medical industry hell-bent on profit. In each instance, complicated situations without clear solutions become instantly simplified by means of conspiratorial invention.
Inventing conspiratorial explanations frees individuals from their own ambivalence, personal responsibility, and the need for self-reflection. Evil has been relocated elsewhere -- it is no longer lurking within us. The imagined enemy serves as an unburdening repository of guilt, shame, self-doubt and ambivalence. Projection -- this wholesale throwing forth of unbearable wishes, images, and other miscellaneous contents of the self -- is a primitive psychic sanitation system. Of course, what has been eliminated by projection inevitably returns, making this process repetitive, incomplete, and habitual.
"Godless Communism" and its fantastic domestic conspiracies against the integrity of American culture provides an example of how useful the demonization of one’s enemy can be to fostering a sense of national purity. Whatever the actual threat of Soviet hegemony and subversion, the myth of an invincible, evil enemy served to further passionate, nationalist agendas for Ronald Reagan and Western ideologues. The demise of the Soviet Union and its allies has left a vacuum of available demons only partially replaced by hatred of Saddam Hussein or fear of pan-Arab terrorism.
Conspiracy theories are ready-made tools to promote political cohesion. If “The brigands are coming!”, then we upstanding citizens should unite, forget our petty differences and squabbles, and mobilize against a common danger. Conspiracy theory can be an instrument to coalesce rebellion or reaction to rebellion. By delineating a dangerous “them,” it fashions a collective identity. Of course, fear, hate, and aggression primarily fuel such an identity.
Religious nationalism in many parts of the world epitomizes this strategy. Pakistanis are encouraged to forget immense grievances against their own government’s ineptitude and instead mobilize to hate Indians. Indians are encouraged to hate Pakistanis in similar fashion. The recent disintegration of Balkan states that has fueled such terrible outbreaks of nationalist paranoia illustrates that ever-smaller national identities may engender paradoxical fragmentation even as they fervently unite their adherents.
Even as imagined conspiracies unite putative victims, they can also be a means for the powerful to divide their subjects. Are the factory workers becoming restless? Are the citizens agitating against the state? Conspiracy theories exploit differences of religion, gender, race, and affiliation in order to diffuse potential resistance to power. By dividing natural allies from each other, they stabilize oppressive power.
Managers have long employed such divisive measures against their workers, encouraging suspicions along lines of race, gender, and nationality to obscure common interests that would threaten worker-management relations. Conservative politicians (Nixon Republicans and their legatees) have long known how to divide black workers from white, in a cynical but highly effective effort to substitute fear for solidarity.
Conspiracy theory typically defines its mythical enemy in terms of filth, sexual danger, or social deviancy. As such, it offers a convenient depository for unacceptable elements of the self -- I am not dirty, promiscuous, or rapacious; it is the other who embodies these abject qualities. By hating him, I can avoid hating myself.
Anti-Semitism throughout the ages has embodied this quality of demonizing the unknown Other. The Nazi image of the hated Jew assembled every disavowed quality uncomfortable to the anti-Semite: greed, ugliness, filth, clannishness, and stealth.
In summary, conspiracy theory realigns personal and social qualities in ways that reduce anxiety, promote social and psychological cohesion, suppress opposition, and displace inner discontent. Like paranoid states in general, conspiratorial thinking affords temporary solace at the incalculable price of profound disruptions in reality testing, ethical values, and humanity.
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