Does one reduce the pervasion of conspiracy theories to the need to understand and control a seemingly meaningless and random world? Yes and no. Or maybe. Of course reductionism is anathema to the scholar, but it is tempting to the citizen baffled by the absurdities that pass for explanations and the number of people who seem confident of President Obama’s foreign, Muslim birth. Where do “they” come from, these people… how did they get that way? And so we concoct our own conspiracy theory about the conspiracy theorists—they are crypto-racists, birther-xenophobes, libertarian technophobes. Ostensibly in search of rational explanations, believers may fix on the most illogical, most improbable available. It calls to mind Hume’s view of the perversity of most religious believers who ignore the rational beauty of nature and choose instead to construct religions that depend upon fear, superstition, and capriciousness, “Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams.” But through these dreams the rationalized world is re-enchanted. A conspiracy provides a key to a mystery that, even as it unlocks, obfuscates. Contradictions both acquaint us with the stable, familiar episteme in which we are comfortable, and reminds us of how tedious it would be if we existed in absolute purity. Indeed, contradictions are in the eyes of the beholder. My landlord was not riddled with anxiety about being a conservative and a dabbler in occult sciences—I was. I was the one who had to explore my own confusion and interrogate my own surprise. The instinct to seek a key to unlock the mystery is a reflection of an inability, closer to home, to account for his hybridity, eccentricity, and imaginative playfulness. The more we dismiss such lifeways as kooky, the more we impoverish our ability to actually make such accountings of the unexpected. Check your inbox.
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