% Conspiracy Culture Are conspiracy theories wrong per se? Do we need to fight them? Here's a proposal for a more cautious position that avoids to frame conspiracy culture as simply an issue of belief or disbelief. Instead, we need to differentiate (a) conspiracy mythologies, (b) conspiracy theories based on at least partial evidence, and (c) proven conspiracies. We also need to acknowledge the blurry areas between them. Otherwise, there's the danger of aligning with uncritical agendas and establishment politics, simply out of opposition against the conspiracy mythologies that characterize, among others, anti-semitism and Corona deniers. It seems as if culture and society around the globe are currently witnessing an explosion of conspiracy narratives. Typically, this is being linked to the rise of the populist extreme right: of among others, Wilders, Baudet and Corona deniers in the Netherlands, Trumpism, Alt-Right and QAnon in America, Duterte in the Philippines, to some degree also Modi in India and Putinism in Russia, and many more. The typical extreme-right conspiracy narratives evolve around: - immigration and globalization; such as in the conspiracy narrative of "The Great Replacement" (that goes back to the French extreme right writer Renaud Camus); - the Corona pandemic and environmental politics against climate change; such as in the more recent conspiracy narrative of "The Great Reset" (that takes up a phrase coined by the World Economic Forum). These narratives are condensed in memes like the following: The first is a fake EU billboard, the second shows George Soros, a main target of contemporary extreme-right and antisemitic conspiracy narratives - also in the Netherlands, where extreme-right "journalist" Wierd Duk claimed in De Telegraaf that the Anti-Zwarte Piet movement was co-financed by Soros. [slide popper] In such a situation, it is tempting to simply side with a rationalist ideology that discredits any talk of conspiracies as invalid and socially and politically dangerous. The term "conspiracy theory" itself was coined in 1945 by a scientific rationalist and political liberal, the philosopher Karl Popper, with the intention to discredit conspiracy discourse as such. His book "The Open Society and Its Enemies" blames all political utopias from Plato to Marx as enemies of the open society, and for a development that ended with fascism and Stalinism. As a philosophical founder of neoliberalism (and early member of its main think tank, the Mont Pèlerin Society), Popper conceived of the "Open Society" as being organized around principles of skepticism and competition. In his definition of "conspiracy theories", Popper does not differentiate between evidence-based theories and made-up conspiracy mythologies, but equates and discredits both on the grounds of his liberal political philosophy. [slide Mont Pèlerin https://smhttp-ssl-53905.nexcesscdn.net/catalogue_images/auction//large/10126-2_1.jpg] # QAnon [slide diagram x3] The following diagram comes out of the conspiracy culture of QAnon: QAnon originated in the American extreme-right "Alt-Right" and its conspiracy "Pizzagate" mythology, according to which top-ranking Democratic Party politicians were part of a satanist conspiracy that sexually abused children in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC). "Pizzagate" ended with a man entering the Washington D.C. pizza parlor with a shotgun, wanting to free the supposed sex slave children from the basement. He found out that the building of the pizzeria didn't even have a basement. This debunked the conspiracy fantasy only temporarily. One year later, in October 2017, an anonymous poster on 4chan, identifying as Q, relaunched the mythology by claiming to be a secret agent working for the U.S. government, and having insight into classified information on satanic pedophile liberal elites in the "Deep State", and into Donald Trump secretly fighting them behind the scenes of his presidency, with an imminent end battle of a "Storm" and a "Great Awakening". Next to Pizzagate, this story was riffing, copy-pasting or sampling three other narratives: First, the widespread American evangelical belief in a "rapture" and endgame fight of Jesus Christ against Evil before Judgment Day. The term "Great Awakening" had already been used in U.S. evangelical Protestantism of the early 18th century, and has its immediate parallel in the fundamentalism Calvinism of the Dutch bible belt. It's therefore not coincidental that many Dutch followers of Corona denialism and anti-immigrant conspiracy mythologies come from this region and milieu, as it became apparent when a Corona test center was put on fire in Urk and in the violent anti-refugee protests in Harskamp in 2021. [slide LB, Q] Secondly, QAnon was almost certainly plagiarizing the novel "Q" by the Italian leftist-countercultural activist, artist and writer collective Luther Blissett. The novel appeared in 1999 and plays in the German reformation and peasant wars. It tells the story of anonymous messages by an alleged government agent called "Q" who calls upon the revolutionary peasants to go into an end battle against the aristocracy. In the course of the novel, these letters turn out to be disinformation that lure the revolutionaries into a trap and tragic defeat. The plagiarizing of Luther Blissett's "Q" for QAnon's conspiracy mythology - i.e. the riffing of a piece of left-wing critical political fiction for a right-wing conspiracy mythology - is historically not new. In a similar way, the founding document of modern antisemitism, the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", consisted of copy-pasted passages from a 19th century satirical political novel written by a member of the Paris commune. It's therefore not surprising that the QAnon narrative heavily draws on old anti-semitic myths, such as the one of a secret world elite that drinks the blood of children. This conspiracy myth has existed since the Middle Ages. [slide: woodcut from 1475, the caricature is from the Nazi paper "Der Stürmer" from 1934] The storming of the Capitol in January 2021 demonstrated how conspiracy mythologies can quickly switch from pieces of fiction to violent action. # Conspiracies These examples show that we need to distinguish conspiracy theories from conspiracy mythologies. Conspiracy theories are speculative, but can be backed up by evidence and probability. As such, they can be a meaningful part of political critique, and often have been proven correct in hindsight. Conspiracy mythologies, on the other hand, are pure belief systems that construct an alternative reality. That said, there is no binary distinction but many gray areas in between the two, as the following four examples should demonstrate: 1. NSA Internet surveillance Before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the surveillance of the Internet through the NSA and other Western intelligence agencies, this had been a common and wide-spread conspiracy theory in hacker culture, media activism - and even in popular culture, such as in this Hollywood movie that four years before Snowden: “Echelon” was the name under which the telecommunications surveillance program of the NSA was known since the 1970s. Before Snowden, activists who pointed out the high likelihood of total internet surveillance through the NSA, were often dismissed as paranoids and conspiracy mythologists. Through Snowden, it turned out that the reality of NSA/Five Eyes Internet surveillance program was actually worse than in most pre-2013 conspiracy theories. This is a striking example for the fact that conspiracy theories should not be categorically dismissed and declared invalid on the sole grounds of being conspiracy theories (as Karl Popper and his followers do). 2. Abstract Expressionist painting The conspiracy theory is: 1950s contemporary art, particularly the abstract expressionist painting of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others was supported and financed by the CIA. This is true. Globally traveling exhibitions of American abstract expressionist painting were financed by the CIA in collaboration with private sponsors. The vehicle for this were the CIA front organizations Congress of Cultural Freedom and American Committee for Cultural Freedom. These organization also published intellectual journals in a whole variety of countries and languages. Abstract expressionism’s main evangelist, the art critic Clement Greenberg, was an official member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom as was the painter Jackson Pollock. Abstract painting was used as an ideological weapon in the Cold War against Soviet communism and its doctrine of socialist realist arts, to promote the liberalism of the West. There have been scholarly articles on the CIA’s respective activities since the 1970s, but the first comprehensive research effort into the CIA financing of abstract expressionism was Frances Stonor Saunders’ 1999 book The Cultural Cold War. It should be noted that some of the former CIA front organizations were continued by the George Soros Foundation in Eastern Europe after 1990. This brings us to the contemporary conspiracy theories and myths about Soros that are being cultivated and spread by the extreme right, very often mixed with antisemitism. Soros, who was a student of Karl Popper, called his non-profit organization Open Society Foundation after Popper's book "The Open Society and Its Enemies". This is a perfect example for the grey zone between fact and fiction in conspiracy narratives. Back to proven facts: anyone who would have claimed in the 1950s and 1960s that abstract expressionism was co-financed by the CIA, or in the 1990s and 2000s that the Internet was under total NSA surveillance, would likely have been declared a conspiracy nut. Both are, however, true and factual conspiracies. In other conspiracy narratives, fact and mythology are harder to differentiate: 1. Neoliberalism “Neoliberalism” can be characterized as both a factual conspiracy and a left-wing conspiracy narrative. Originally, neoliberalism was a term coined in the late 1930s by European liberal politicians and strategists after the economic crash of 1929 had brought classical liberalism into an existential crisis. Unlike today’s common understanding of the term, neoliberalism was the concept of free market capitalism with state checks and balances, including social security systems, as opposed to laissez-faire capitalism. Neoliberalism, in this original meaning, also was the economic system of most continental Western European postwar countries including Germany and the Netherlands. One could argue that there was or is a factual neoliberal conspiracy, since the main thinkers, politicians and proponents of economic, political and philosophical neoliberalism were, and still are, organized in the aforementioned Mont Pèlerin Society. This society got its name from its first meeting on Mont Pèlerin in the Swiss Alps in 1947. Next to Popper, it included the original coiners of "neoliberalism" including the German liberal politician Alexander von Rüstow and the main thinkers of what is nowadays identified with deregulated, globalized capitalism: the economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Mises and Milton Friedman. The problem, however, is that Hayek and Friedman initially didn’t call themselves neoliberals while the original neoliberals - such as Rüstow and representatives of the German economic school of ordoliberalism - eventually left the Mont Pèlerin Society because they disagreed with the Hayek school. Rüstow, the inventor of the term "neoliberalism" even didn't like the conspirative nature of the Society, and was accused by the laissez-faire capitalists around Hayek and Mises of being a "social democrat" in disguise. Today’s left-wing notion of “neoliberalism” as deregulated laissez-faire capitalism factually identifies Hayek’s, Mises' and Friedman's school with neoliberalism. Likely - and this is my own conspiracy theory - this historical misunderstanding comes from a misreading of Michel Foucault’s late lectures on neoliberalism. In his lectures, Foucault had correctly, being the historian he was, referred to West German neoliberalism of the post-war period and its ordoliberal concept of “social market economy”. Outside Europe, his analysis was related to the radical capitalist reforms fostered by Hayek’s school first in Chile under the Pinochet regime, then in British Thatcherism and U.S. Reagonomics of the 1980s. Perhaps, this misreading is also due to the fact that “liberal” in America is generally being (mis)identified with “left-wing politics”, so “neoliberal” was chosen to clarify the difference. Eventually, this (mis)understanding of neoliberalism was re-imported by political activists in Europe during the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s and early 2000s. # Cultural Marxism “Cultural Marxism” as it is being used today goes back to an US American extreme right, antisemitic conspiracy narrative, whose popular contemporary versions are perpetuated by among others Jordan Peterson and Thierry Baudet. This narrative typically blames “Cultural Marxism” for corrupting cultural norms and asvlues, traceing its origins to the Frankfurt School while identifying it with contemporary left-wing academic cultural theory, including feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism and critical race theory. Often, such as in the case of Peterson, it lumps it together with postmodernism, such as in his term “postmodern neomarxism”. The sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit antisemitism of the original “Cultural Marxism” narrative is related to the founders of the Frankfurt school having been of Jewish origin and having gone into U.S. American exile during the Third Reich. Blaming the Frankfurt School for “Cultural Marxism” seems to be a particularly American misreading, grounded on the fact that the Frankfurt School called its sociological research “critical theory”. In continental Europe, “critical theory” is understood as referring only to the Frankfurt School, while in Anglo-Saxon countries, “critical theory” has become an umbrella term for poststructuralism, cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies - many or most of which do not refer to the Frankfurt School at all, or only to very minor degrees. But even more hilariously, the contemporary right-wing rejection of postmodernism and poststructuralism has actually been shared by the Frankfurt School. Its late representative Jürgen Habermas accused the French poststructuralist philosophers Foucault and Derrida of being “neoconservatives” in the 1980s. One could go even farther and rightfully claim that the contemporary political right and the Frankfurt School have more common ground than both would acknowledge, since they share such ideas and tropes as cultural pessimism, rejection of mass and popular culture, critique of alienation and destruction of values in contemporary capitalism. Adorno even appreciated the right-wing thinker Oswald Spengler, sharing his cultural pessimism and occidentalism. Adorno’s rejection of black American music, and the language in which he did that, could perfectly resonate with today’s white suprematists. However, there is a kernel of truth in the conspiracy narrative of Cultural Marxism for several reasons: - the Frankfurt School’s Marxist sociology focused on culture rather than economy, so it might be called a culturalist school of Marxism; - aside from the Frankfurt School, there actually has been “Cultural Marxism” as a proper school or movement. It just existed elsewhere than where today’s right-wing conspiracy mythologists located it: in British post-war Marxist cultural studies, of (among others) Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall, and their 1980s follow-up in a school that called itself Cultural Materialism (“materialism” in the sense of Marxist dialectical materialism). But likely, this (literal) school of Cultural Marxism is too little known outside the academic humanities to serve as a scapegoat and grand conspiracy narrative. - lastly, one could argue that the Italian Marxism of Antonio Gramsci and his successors was a “cultural” Marxism since it abandoned the revolution paradigm in favor of obtaining discursive hegemony in society. Gramsci, however, is another unfit scapegoat for today’s extreme right, since the so-called “Nouvelle Droite” of Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, its equivalents in the European New Right, and its American equivalent, the “Alt-Right” (of Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor and others), actually adopted Gramsci’s hegemony strategy for themselves and could therefore be said to be cultural fascists who use neo-Marxist - respectively: “cultural Marxist” - tactics. # The perils of conspiracy and anti-conspiracy cultures If there are blurry lines between made-up conspiracies mythologies, plausible conspiracy theories, and actual political conspiracies, there are conversely also blurry lines in many areas of culture. For example, there were subcultures of using fascist symbols as aesthetic transgression in 1970s and 1980s punk, post-punk/new wave and Industrial music culture. In some cases, and with some artists and followers, these was not merely symbolic, but turned into actual fascist practices. They often anticipated and later became part of the contemporary "Alt-Right". In many alternative culture circles, new age followers and hippie environmentalists have sided with neofascists and the extreme right in the anti-vaxxer and Corona denier movements. These has historical precedents in the late 19th/early 20th century "life reform" movement which advocated vegetarianism, organic food, naturism, liberated sexuality, alternative lifestyles and esotericism, but was also affiliated with fascism, particularly in Germany. Conversely, one could ask to which degree any esoteric belief system can be called a conspiracy narrative. What is the is between an esoteric belief system and a canonical religion? To which degree does religion (or the belief in gods or spirits) qualifies as a conspiracy - in the literal sense of a coming together of like-minded spirits - and its scriptures as conspiracy mythologies. If you one is in the camp of radical atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and Christopher Hitchens, the answer would probably be a yes. The same might be true if one is in Popper's camp of critical rationalists. These examples demonstrate how anti-conspirationism can potentially turn into cultural suprematism and chauvinism. # What makes up conspiracy culture? When talking about "conspiracy culture", we are almost always talking about intersections of (a) politics, finance, and other power structures, (b) pop culture, subcultural, visual culture, arts, literature and storytelling and (c) belief systems, speculation and esotericism. Conspiracy culture could thus called an aesthetic political theology. I'm using the concept of "political theology" coined by the fascist legal theoretician Carl Schmitt on purpose here. In the same time as Schmitt's, the Jewish-Marxist essayist and thinker Walter Benjamin had characterized fascism as tending "towards an aestheticization of politics". This means that any conspiracy narrative, even when it is founded on plausible evidence and serves a valid critique, is always in danger of ending up with false friends, and in the neighborhood of fascists. The ground assumption of conspiracy culture is the existence of esoteric (hidden) power structures in a hidden narrative that contradicts the official narrative of exoteric (visible) power structures. However, the boundaries between the esoteric and the exoteric, and between fact and speculation, can be blurry. To return to the example of NSA's global Internet surveillance, it only existed as speculation prior to Snowden, with a mix of probability, mythology and (still sparse) evidence, and solidified into a fact-based narrative through the leaked evidence. Conversely, some factual conspiracies have been revealed which might be wilder than even the wildest conspiracy fantasy. In the Netherlands, a good example is the MLPN (Marxistisch-Leninistische Partij Nederland), a fake Maoist party run by the secret service BVD from 1968 to the early 1990s to spy on China. [slide diagram] Going back to the initial diagram created in the QAnon subculture, we learn from it that QAnon has grown, - or perhaps even was designed - to become a meta-conspiracy narrative that potentially contains all other conspiracy narratives. Possibly, it is the feature of all conspiracy mythologies that they strive to become universal, in other words: world explanation models. QAnon now seems to be undergoing a process of emancipating itself from Trumpism and its original narrative, becoming a more generic conspiracy mythology of child-raping satanic world-ruling elites. While these mythologies obviously need to be debunked and resisted, I propose take them seriously at the same time. With the Italian Wu-Ming Collective (which succeeded the Luther Blissett collective that wrote the novel "Q") and the Swiss media researcher Felix Stalder, I shared the opinion that even the most absurd conspiracy narratives contain kernels of truth. For QAnon, as Felix Stalder pointed out, the narrative of liberal elites drinking the blood of children is literal nonsense, and openly anti-semitic, it still has a kernel of truth if one reads it figuratively: namely, that a wealthy elite destroys the future of children in times of ever-more extreme social divides; especially in a country like the USA, where higher education has become unaffordable for common people. Neoliberal politicians like Hillary Clinton - who, among others, served on the board of Walmart - are an active part of a vampirical system that accumulates wealth on the cost of future generations. # Conclusion In retrospect, the contemporary Alt-Right, QAnon and Corona denier movements simply continue a long history of conspiracy mythologies and cultures. My proposal was to characterize conspiracy culture as an aesthetic political theology. In terms of aesthetic theory, conspiracy mythologies operate in the mode of sublime - i.e. that what is overwhelming, overpowering, terrifying, infinite and shapeless (such as in horror and natural disaster movies, gothic novels or romanticist landscape paintings). The sublime is also evoked in language such "The Storm" of QAnon (which became the really storming of the Capitol), and in the near-infinity of names and connections on the QAnon conspiracy diagram. In the 1980s, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard characterized sublime experience as what "leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits". This seems exactly what is happening in conspiracy subcultures. The narrative of being caught in these sublime nets and powers is the real issue of conspiracy mythologies - because they seem to leave no way out except with violent force. The answer, however, cannot be to fundamentally discredit conspiracy narratives, as critical rationalist would do, because this shuts out critique and alternative imagination.