On Conspiracies

At a job a number of years ago, my coworkers used to tease me about my "conspiracy-minded personality." Many a day would go by when I would receive Slack messages of GIFs portraying tinfoil-hatted, crazy-eyed looneys that were supposed to be me. I am a marketer and it is my job to use the internet to connect people with the things they want. Luckily, the internet, connected devices and other technologies makes this very easy to do by collecting information on all of us. When I point this out, I have been called a paranoid crank.

I have made my peace with technology. I use it to do the things I want to do and I recognize that I give up some privacy along the way. I take certain precautions to protect myself but not nearly as many as I could. I am happily on the grid because I'm not willing to give up the things that it costs to be off of it. "Orwellian" has been a buzzword lately as put-upon pundits pontificate that we are on our way to 1984 but people in the know understand that we are in as much danger of becoming like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where people are controlled by willingly accepting pleasing but shallow entertainments and distractions. If one is looking for genuinely Orwellian situations, look no further (and, honestly, more people should be looking) at Ethiopia, which is engulfed in a civil war, where its leader Abiy Ahmed is starving the people of the insurgent Tigray region, by blocking UN supplies through the red tape of his Ministry of Peace. Orwellian to its core. You may recognize the name of Abiy Ahmed as he only won the Nobel Prize for Peace two years ago.

I am justified in worrying about the technological encroachment on our privacy but that hardly makes me a conspiracy theorist. When I was a kid I was fascinated by the people who believed in the glut of "evidence" that Paul McCartney died in 1966 in an auto accident and was replaced in the Beatles by an imposter. At the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever," John cries out "cranberry sauce" but it sounds a bit like he's saying "I buried Paul," clear proof that John was telling us the truth. Further, on the White Album's "Glass Onion," John declares that "the walrus was Paul," referencing the earlier song "I am the Walrus." When one learns that the walrus is the symbol of death in some Eskimo tribes, how could anyone doubt that Paul met his demise? On the inside cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, why is Paul the only Beatle not facing the camera? Because he had been dead for nearly a year when the photo was taken, that's why. On the Abbey Road cover, the clearest evidence of all, we have a funeral procession with John leading the boys dressed in the white of a minister, Ringo in the black suit of an undertaker, a barefoot "Paul," clearly the corpse, and a bedenimed George as the gravedigger bringing up the rear. Not convinced? The license plate of the Volkswagen Beetle on the album cover reads LMW 28IF. Do I need to spell it out for you? McCartney would have been 28 when the album was released if he hadn't died and LMW obviously stands for "Linda McCartney weeps" or "Linda McCartney, widow," whatever you'd like.

I always found all this to be a fun game, little clues that obviously don't lead anywhere but are an interesting coincidence. More interesting still is that the first publication to acknowledge the conspiracy was the school newspaper at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, which published an article titled "Is Beatle Paul McCartney Dead" in 1969. Rumors of Paul's death, while exaggerated (his replacement is very industrious, having released an album just last year), are not even the first Beatle-death conspiracy. The cover of Help! depicts the boys gesturing in semaphore. One would think that they are spelling out "help" but they're not. The letters spell out "NUJV." For some, this was proof that John had died was was replaced with a "New Unknown John Vocalist."

Nearly 6% of Americans do not believe we've been to the moon. That's nearly 20 million people. There are companies that sell insurance against alien attack, including policies that protect against extra-terrestrial impregnation, policies that are available for men and women. 30,000 of them have been sold. We like to think of conspiracies as boob bait for bubba but plenty of intellectuals fall prey to them. Mark Twain didn't believe Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. Neither did Henry James or Sigmund Freud. Shakespearean actors like Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi still don't. While we're on the subject, George Orwell's French teacher in school was Aldous Huxley, perhaps they conspired to corner the market on dystopian fiction.

Like all conspiracy theories, they reject the obvious for the fantastic. They don't explain how the surviving Beatles found someone who looked and sounded exactly like Paul McCartney, a person so humble that he was ok not getting credit for having written "Hey Jude." They don't explain why the Russians, our rivals in going to the moon, would never question that we went there when we didn't. They don't explain how the Earl of Essex, the most common Shakespeare stand-in, having died in 1604, was able to compose another dozen plays or so, including The Tempest, which references historical events that happened after the Earl's death.

These conspiracies are fairly harmless amusements. If Kyrie Irving believes the earth is flat, fine. We'll keep spinning regardless (though it should be noted that conspiracy-minded anti-semites once tried to kill Ringo because they believed he was Jewish). The issue is more dire when the conspiracy is more dangerous like, say, that a cabal of powerful people are running an underground Satan-worshiping pedophile, baby-eating ring. I have not lost any friends to the QAnon fever conspiracy but I worry that eventually I will, that at some point I'll open a social media app and see someone I like, know and maybe even respect spout nonsense about what Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton do in the dark. The internet is a wonderful democratizing force but it also allows unhinged cranks, the types that would be socially isolated a generation ago, to find each other and feed each other's obsessions. "You are entitled to your opinion," said Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "But you are not entitled to your own facts." Not anymore.

QAnon may be the most terrifying of the bunch but it is hardly the only damaging belief out there. A prevalence of people who think China engineered the coronavirus (or that there is no such thing) makes it difficult to effectively combat it as a community. Civic discourse is severely damaged with a third of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen despite no evidence of, or even court cases alleging, fraud. We've seen at the Capitol what happens when people who feel like they have been wronged or that they are fighting a force so evil they must take matters into their own hands. Conspiracy believers are often broken people, waiting for a glorious moment when they will prove to be the big shot, the guy in control, the hero. They are disappointed in their own lives and escape into another one where they are protectors in their own minds, saving a country, protecting kids. Not too long ago, people like Travis Bickle were outliers, now they are mainstream. How does that happen? So here is my conspiracy theory: a generation of reality television and 24-hour news has made us immature addicts of drama, faux-importance and mock-heroism.

It doesn't matter that no evidence exists of a globalist pedophile ring, it doesn't matter that the promised QAnon "storm" keeps getting pushed back, that doesn't appear to be a deterrent to people in thrall to the theory. In fact, every day the whole thing isn't exposed makes them more bought in towards fighting the enemy only they can see. Now does it surprise me that many of the insurrectionists at the Capitol own businesses, mansions and boats. Many of them were living the American Dream—economic autonomy, comfortable mobility, access to the finest things—but felt they were entitled to more. The goofy goober who famously waved as he sauntered out with the Speaker of the House's lectern is a stay-at-home father of five whose physician wife posted his $25,000 bail. Tell me how he is the forgotten man, robbed of his job at the coal mine and confused by a multi-cultural world he doesn't recognize. How can I come to any other conclusion that we have stopped being a serious nation when an insurrection is equally about "stopping the steal" and marketing your realtor business?

These are people who, despite having everything, feel they've been denied the things they deserve that you have to earn—status, respect, the admiration owed a patriotic hero. Cable news, with its never-ending need for content that attracts eye-balls is given to speculation, presumptions and, more than anything, fear. It is designed to keep its audience stirred up about something, usually their fellow citizens. The worst of reality television lionizes selfishness, petty confrontation and drama for attention at all costs. Given those twin promises, it's understandable that a comfortable life may seem empty, devoid of drama, and boring. That vacuum is begging for something exciting to fill it, as cults of all kinds from Scientology to Heaven's Gate have been doing for years. The split with actuality and can be severe and dismaying. Charlie Manson's Family, whose murderous philosophy was based in part on the misinterpretation of Beatles music, couldn't understand why the Fab Four didn't bail Charlie out after his arrest (Manson, for his part, blamed the Beatles during his trial saying "It's not my conspiracy. It's not my music. I hear what it relates. It says "Rise!" It says "Kill!" Why blame it on me? I didn't write the music." Strange interpretation to the band of All You Need Is Love). Similarly, a number of people are finding that they are left by themselves when Q or whoever else made the promises, isn't going to come through.

The real work of governing, undertaken by serious people, is the slow boring of hard boards, as Max Weber said, far too uneventful for our all-eyes-on-me populace. When each side has been demonizing the other for so long, it's no wonder a certain disturbed sector considers any compromise as a deal with the devil. That none of this has any basis in the real world is beside the point. William F. Buckley Jr. once called conservatism the politics of reality. I can't imagine what he would make of this moment. I'm not sure what to make of it myself.