Conspiracy Theory

Who denounces — for example, a politician or a ruler that he is plotting such a thing— is accused of conspiracy theory and, immediately, the suspicion falls on the accuser. William Butler Yeats, the great poet, said that the most powerful and most infamous capacity of journalism is to repeat over and over a name associated with something ridiculous or evil. Just do this a thousand times without proof and, above all, without arguing — the idea is not to put under discussion, but giving it as if it were common domain — ; something that has not even been discussed and that nobody knows, in fact, is given as if it were already proven and common domain — and one of the favorite terms for that is “conspiracy theory”.

For example, if you try to show people that there is a process of seizing power through culture, occupation of spaces, etc. People say this is a conspiracy theory. And another guy appears saying that there are extraterrestrials that are taking over planet Earth. People have the same reaction to the two things and confuse these two levels. It is one thing when you are demonstrating something reasonably with facts, and another thing when you are making up conspiracies. There is a difference in the narrative structure itself. You do not need to know the content of all the information to see if you are hearing something reasonable or absurd, but this distinction eludes people.

It is one thing for you to say that there is a political plot and an organization behind which is running events and making this and that happen. It’s another thing to say that there is such a process underway, but not through organized political action, but through cultural influence, cultural impregnation, like the process of raising rabbits from Vilém Münzenberg, where you send three people to do one thing and you know that the next day three thousand will be doing it. You have no control over those three thousand. In general, the imagination of individuals is very limited, they are not able to perceive the difference that exists between a direct conspiracy that implies the perfect line of command at all levels, and action by cultural impregnation. They understand this Gramscian business, for example, as if it were a conspiracy, and conclude that we are doing conspiracy theory. The person does not understand what it is about because he is only able to conceive political action in a conspiratorial way, not by cultural impregnation. So when they hear about the Gramscian process, they think it’s a conspiracy, and since they don’t believe in conspiracies, they deny that it exists.

The very narrative structure of a serious complaint is different from a conspiracy theory in the ordinary sense. Even because conspiracy theory, in the ordinary sense, is monstrously coherent in all its points, because as everything was imagined, the subject has mastery of all data. We, as we are dealing with reality, only have a part of the data, so we cannot offer a complete description. As our description is incomplete, we are obliged to work with conjectures, and knowing what is the level of reality that exists and the level of conjecture with which we are completing the data. But the individual who really believes in conspiracy theory, in the popular sense of the thing, believes that he has all the points. His version is monstrously coherent, and mine cannot be, there is no such level of coherence in the history.

Interestingly, the kind of requirement that is made when you present these things is that of total consistency. You are required to present a reality, incomplete as any reality, and the subject does not believe it because it does not have the total coherence of a work of fiction.

Precisely the reason he would not believe it becomes the reason for credibility

This is because in the mass society everyone can have an opinion, and monstrously disabled people have an opinion. Most opinion leaders today are people who are totally disabled.

For example, you explain that such a thing is happening like this, and the subject says “but how do you explain this, how do you explain that and that other?”. There is no explanation, that is, we know parts of reality, and for these parts you assume certain links of cause and effect, which in many cases are absolutely necessary, without which that could not happen, but that you did not see materially. The level of demand for evidence that people have is that of full proof with all the details, which only exists in fiction. I believe that this is one of the elements, it is a different narrative structure.

Invention is necessarily much more coherent than reality. Reality has density, it has three dimensions, it has a tension aspect that fiction does not have. Fiction is very explainable.

You realize how difficult it is for most people to discern the difference between a version of political plots whose belief is justified by the information obtained and versions of the sub-culture such as those things about UFOs and other forms of disinformation in which there is an obtuse cognitive stance. It turns out that it is possible to realize that even without knowing a priori under the veracity of each version, there are properties in the narrative structure itself and even in the conditions that characterize the source of this information that make it possible to distinguish one version from the other.