406. The creative (IV)
Here is an established and revealed conspiracy: the American and British governments worked together with contacts in the media and the intelligence services to confect evidence that showed Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction; the deception was carried through successfully and a war was waged on that pretext—hundreds of thousands of people died and many resources were squandered. Yet the people who are generally called conspiracy theorists are not so interested in this event; why?
Conspiracy theories come from the right, the populist right to be exact. The conspiracy theory is an attempt to use the scientific method and common sense to work out how politics functions, although in an abbreviated and self-serving way; as such it leans on common sense analogies to a person’s own environment—i.e. the school, the office; places where cliques form and make arrangements in secret. The left avoids conspiracy theories because the left is not scientific or common sensical in its thought.
Marxism is not a conspiracy theory; it derives from Hegelian philosophy: Marxism tries to take an abstract account of how the world should be (Hegel thought his philosophy could explain everything) and then applies this narrative top-down to reality—then delusions occur. The left does not start iteratively from common sense and try to work out what is going on; rather, it has a religiously held axiom—such as the idea that race does not exist—and the world is then understood in relation to its failure to conform to this axiom.
The conspiracy theorist ends up with a picture that is somewhat less like a closed narrative; he has loose ends, extraordinary events, and mysteries—just like life itself and real investigations into reality. He is not quite cold enough, though; he retains enough socially-directed thought that he wants to narrativise and preach: hence he presents, especially if he is a populist outside the academy, his own homespun narrative—it will never be as complete and slick as real priestcraft, as with Marxism, mainly because it is too real to be credible. Man struggles with reality; and so Marxism, although wrong, seems more respectable than Alex Jones and his fears over inter-dimensional elites; and this is because Marxism presents a pleasing narrative that conforms to our expectations as to how rational and true thought operates, although Jones is generally more correct than any Marxist professor—than the licensed and high-status preacher.
As low-rent preachers, conspiracy theorists are still susceptible to priestly narcissism; hence their fascination with conspiracies around 9/11 and a relative disinterest in Iraq. The 9/11 conspiracy theories were largely attempts at narcissistic repair: the Arabs could never do this to us—it had to be Bush or the Israelis; we did it to ourselves—we are too perfect to be owned this way. Perhaps an element within the vast security state was involved in some way, just not in the narrativised way found in conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists constrain their schizoid tendencies; yet reality is schizoid. Since the Iraq War punished what for rightists is the out-group—Arabs and Muslims—conspiracy theorists had little interest in it, even though it was started via a conspiracy (mankind at work: if the out-group is punished we are pleased, if the in-group is punished we are upset—the pretext and particulars do not matter).
The conspiracy theorist also maintains the false hope that when there is a revelation the masses will rise in anger and topple the system; in reality, as the Iraq War shows, you can show the public the factory where the babies are turned into face cream and they will say, “I always thought it was something like that. What can you, eh?” Hence conspiracy theorists become stuck on pseudo-revelations; we know all about the Iraq conspiracy, but the *hidden truth* about 9/11 can never be revealed by definition—and this preserves the illusion that when it comes out everything will change; so the last thing a conspiracy theorist wants is the full truth.