by Jesse Walker
Many people do understand that they’re the artists in the situation. Some even transform their experiences of pareidolia into artworks that others can enjoy. The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí called this the critical-paranoiac method. At a lecture in Connecticut in 1934, he illustrated the idea with a slide: a postcard photo of tribesmen in front of a hut. He then showed the same image on its side, and pareidolia did its work: With some priming from the painter, the audience could see an image of a human head.
Salvador Dalí, unknown, c. 1931
More examples followed, including a vulture that Freud had perceived in Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne.7 “These more or less accidental ideas Mr. Dali is concentrating upon in his own work,” The Hartford Courant reported the next day, “but instead of allowing them to be accidental, he is trying to cultivate them.”8
In a conspiracy context, the ironic approach entails a similar sort of cultivation. A group of scholars learned this in 2010, when they played a game they called The Paranoid Style. The historian Rob MacDougall, who organized the exercise, reported afterward that he started it with “a little briefing on pareidolia and apophenia.” Then, after asking each player to pick a well-known historical figure, he
told them we were looking for evidence of the secret conspiracy of vampires that has pulled the strings behind the world for hundreds of years. So we went through what we knew about each of our historical figures and found “evidence” of each one’s role for or against the Great Vampire Conspiracy. . . . If anything, they were too willing to indulge me: we very quickly spun out a goofy little chronicle of the vampire-vs-electricizer war behind the world, but we probably didn’t work at it long enough to get to the real kick of autohistoric apophenia, when the evidence starts to line up all too well with the fantasy you have just concocted, and you skate right up to the edge of believing. It’s a powerful and uncanny feeling, and if it serves as good inoculation against pseudohistorical thinking, it also colors your relationship with “real” history ever after.9
Tim Powers, whose novels often attribute historical events to supernatural conspiracies, encounters something similar when he researches his books. You reach a point, he has said, where you need to start “resisting paranoia” because “your research genuinely does seem to support whatever goofy theory you’ve come up with.”10 As Paul Krassner put it after his Manson satire seemed to come to life around him, “Had I accidentally stumbled into a real conspiracy when I thought I was merely making one up?”11
Human beings have a knack not just for finding patterns in chaos but for constructing stories to make sense of events, especially events that scare us. I can hardly condemn that habit. I just devoted an entire book, after all, to the patterns I think I’ve glimpsed in American history.12 But when building a narrative you can fall into a trap, one where a combination of confirmation bias and serendipity blinds you to the ways your enticing story might fail to describe the world.
A conspiracy story is especially enticing because it imagines an intelligence behind the pattern. It doesn’t just see a shape in the smoke; it sees a face in the smoke. It draws on one of the most basic human characteristics, something the science writer Michael Shermer calls agenticity—a “tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.”13 Sometimes the story a conspiracy theorist tells is correct. At other times he mistakes a chicken joint for a sterilization scheme, an unusual sect for a body-snatching cult, a Mooninite for a terror plot.
The conspiracy theorist will always be with us, because he will always be us. We will never stop finding patterns. We will never stop spinning stories. We will always be capable of jumping to conclusions, particularly when we’re dealing with other nations, factions, subcultures, or layers of the social hierarchy. And conspiracies, unlike many of the monsters that haunt our folklore, actually exist, so we won’t always be wrong to fear them. As long as our species survives, so will paranoia.
Yet we can limit the damage that paranoia does. We can try to empathize with people who seem alien. We can be aware of the cultural myths that shape our fears. And we can be open to evidence that might undermine the patterns we think we see in the world. We should be skeptical, yes, of people who might be conspiring against us. But we should also be skeptical—deeply, deeply skeptical—of our fearful, fallible selves.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It took a vast conspiracy to write this book. As I worked on it and on the earlier articles that fed into it, many people were generous with their thoughts and their time. I’d like to thank everyone who answered my questions, whether that involved replying to a couple of e-mails or sitting down for a multihour conversation: Rasul Al-Ikhlas, Craig Baldwin, Bob Banner, Joel Best, Sophy Burnham, Gary Chartier, Amy Cooter, Robert Eringer, Rita Fellers, Leslie Fish, Bob Fletcher, Erich Goode, Anthony Hilder, Afrika Islam, Steve Jackson, Philip Jenkins, Jay Kinney, Paul Krassner, Michael Moor (not Moore!), Christina Pearson, Dino Pedrone, Arie Perliger, Sharon Presley, E. L. Quarantelli, Brian Redman, Lewis Shiner, R. U. Sirius, Ivan Stang, Jeannette Sutton, Mike Vanderboegh, Malcolm Wiley, and Peter Lamborn Wilson.
Many other people passed along leads, helped dig up documents, offered useful advice, or otherwise lent a hand. Thank you to Bryan Alexander, Ceredwyn Alexander, Antero Alli, Sandy Asirvatham, Radley Balko, Greg Beato, Chris Bray, Tim Cavanaugh, Robert Churchill, Dan Clore, Dave Cushing, Soren Dayton, Eric Dixon, Jared Farmer, Thomas Fleming, Charles Paul Freund, the late Mary Frohman, David J. Halperin, Henry Hardy, Gene Healy, Mollie Hemingway, Robert Higgs, Mike Holmes, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Tom Jackson, Ben James, Lene Johansen, Bill Kauffman, Steve Kaye, Bruce Kodish, Psyche Lamplighter, Martin Levinson, Jim Lippard, Monica Lopossay, Rob MacDougall, Dave Mandl, Paul Mavrides, Daniel McCarthy, Don Meinshausen, Victor Morton, Michael C. Moynihan, Mark Murrell, Debbie Nathan, Ted Pappas, Jeffrey Pasley, Rick Perlstein, Mark Phillips, Virginia Postrel, Will Potter, Des Preston, Stacia Proefrock, Eric Rabkin, Dave Rahbari, Karen Rockney, Gabriel Rossman, Thaddeus Russell, Joel Schlosberg, George H. Smith, Randy Smith, Sam Smith, Thomas Ruys Smith, Seth Soffer, Clare Spark, Lester Spence, Lucy Steigerwald, Clark Stooksbury, Luis Vasquez, Timothy Virkkala, Dave Weigel, Cosmo Wenman, Shawn Wilbur, the late Robert Anton Wilson, and Oberon Zell. Thanks in particular to everyone who gave me feedback on all or part of the manuscript: George Baca, Amy Cooter, Brian Doherty, Jeet Heer, Jay Kinney, Rona Kobell, Ed Krayewski, Charles Pearson, and Amy Sturgis.
It would have been a lot harder to write this book without the assistance of the Baltimore County Public Library’s interlibrary loan department: Jennifer Baugher, Deb Brothers, Helen Hughes, Timberly Johnson, and Joan Lattanzi. I also spent valuable time at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library, where Julie Herreda, Kate Hutchens, and the rest of the staff were extremely helpful. So were the employees of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And a warm thank-you to Mars De Ritis and Jim Dwyer for their hospitality while I was in Michigan doing archival research at Labadie.
Matt Welch, my editor at Reason, didn’t just let me work out some of my thoughts in his publication’s pages; he let me take time off work to write the book, and he let me draw on the magazine’s resources in countless ways. My thanks to him and to everyone else at Reason who assisted in one way or another, including Mike Alissi, Ronald Bailey, Barbara Burch, Brian Doherty, Jim Epstein, Matthew Feeney, Nick Gillespie, Ed Krayewski, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Chris Mitchell, Ray Ng, David Nott, Mike Riggs, Damon Root, Scott Shackford, Peter Suderman, Jacob Sullum, Mary Toledo, J. D. Tuccille, and, not least, the interns who transcribed several of my interviews: Julie Ershadi, Melanie Kruvelis, John K. Ross, Nick Sibilla, and Calvin Thompson.
My agent, David Kuhn, and his staff were instrumental not just in getting a publisher interested in my book proposal but in shaping the proposal itself. Billy Kingsland in particular was full of good ideas, and the book is much better for his and David’s work. My editor at HarperCollins, Barry Harb
augh, has been an inexhaustible source both of enthusiasm for the project and of suggestions that have improved it. Thanks also to Lynn Anderson for her copyediting, to Nancy Wolff for creating the index, to Michael Correy for designing the book’s interior, and to Jarrod Taylor for designing the cover.
Finally, I’d like to thank my family for all their patience and love: my parents, David and Marjorie Walker; my brother, Andrew Walker; my wife, Rona Kobell; and our children, Maya and Lila Walker. I owe more to them than to anyone else. Except, of course, the Order of the Illumin— Ah, but I am not supposed to speak of that.
NOTES
Chapter 1: The Paranoid Style Is American Politics
1. William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (Knopf, 1928), 572.
2. “Case of Richard Lawrence,” Niles’ Register, February 14, 1835.
3. Quoted in Edwin A. Miles, “Andrew Jackson and Senator George Poindexter,” The Journal of Southern History 24, no. 1 (February 1958).
4. See Richard C. Rohrs, “Partisan Politics and the Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson,” Journal of the Early Republic 1, no. 2 (Summer 1981).
5. John Smith Dye, The Adder’s Den; or the Secrets of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America (privately published, 1864), 29.
6. Ibid., 94.
7. On the medical mistreatment of William Henry Harrison, see Will Englund, “Remember the Flu of ’41,” The National Journal, October 10, 2009.
8. Naturally, Dye’s revised book blamed Lincoln’s murder on the same culprits. Dye’s son, Sergeant Joseph M. Dye, wound up testifying as a witness in the trial that followed the Lincoln assassination, claiming to have seen Booth and his confederates conferring outside Ford’s Theatre.
9. “New Books,” The New York Times, October 8, 1864; “Poisoning Presidents,” Chicago Tribune, June 28, 1866.
10. Favorable reviews from the Philadelphia Daily Telegraph, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the Philadelphia Daily Press, the Harrisburg Daily Telegraph, the Trenton Daily State Gazette, The New York Daily Tribune, the Easton Express, and The New York Evening Express are reprinted in John Smith Dye, Life and Public Services of Gen. U.S. Grant: The Nation’s Choice for President in 1868, 10th ed. (Samuel Loag, 1868), 93–96.
11. David Wylie, letter to Abraham Lincoln, January 25, 1861, in The Lincoln Mailbag: America Writes to the President, 1861–1865, ed. Harold Holzer (Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 4.
12. A Maine Country Girl, letter to Abraham Lincoln, 1860, memory.loc.gov/mss/mal/maltext/rtf_orig/mal012f.rtf.
13. See George Duffield, The Nation’s Wail (Advertiser and Tribune Print, 1865), 10–11; William Goodwin, A Discourse on the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, April 14, 1865 (David B. Moseley, 1865), 9. Beecher’s article is quoted in John Smith Dye, History of the Plots and Crimes of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America (privately published, 1866), 305.
14. Quoted in David O. Stewart, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy (Simon & Schuster, 2009), 101.
15. “By the Bullet and the Bowl,” New-York Tribune, May 16, 1868.
16. Russel B. Nye, “The Slave Power Conspiracy: 1830–1860,” Science & Society 10, no. 3 (Summer 1946).
17. Abraham Lincoln, “Draft of a Speech” (1858), in Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fahrenbacher (Library of America, 1989), 488.
18. There is, for example, this elaborate metaphor for the policies that allowed slavery to extend westward:
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in—in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.
Abraham Lincoln, “ ‘House Divided’ Speech” (1858), ibid., 431.
19. Henry Wilson, The Death of Slavery Is the Life of the Nation: Speech of Hon. Henry Wilson (of Massachusetts,) in the Senate, March 28, 1864. On the Proposed Amendment to the Constitution Prohibiting Slavery Within the United States (H. Polkinhorn, 1864), 8.
20. The article originated as a lecture delivered at Oxford in November 1963, just a few days before the assassination of John F. Kennedy; it was then published in the November 1964 Harper’s. A revised version appeared in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 1965). Unless otherwise noted, my quotes are drawn from the 1965 version of the essay.
21. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 5, 7.
22. That is, the Harper’s version.
23. Thomas Hargrove, “Third of Americans Suspect 9-11 Government Conspiracy,” Scripps Howard News Service, August 1, 2006.
24. “John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Leaves a Legacy of Suspicion,” ABC News press release, November 16, 2003.
25. Frank Newport, “What If Government Really Listened to the People?” Gallup Poll, October 15, 1997. As this book went to press, Public Policy Polling released a survey asking Americans about a wide variety of conspiracy theories. The results showed a smaller but still substantial portion of the public—51 percent—believing that a conspiracy larger than Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the Kennedy assassination, with 24 percent unsure. Just 11 percent believed that the U.S. government knowingly allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen, with 11 percent unsure. These changes from the earlier polls could be a product of a greater distance from the events being discussed. (The anger that led people to blame 9/11 on Washington, for instance, may have cooled somewhat since George W. Bush left office.) It is also possible that the different numbers reflect different methodologies. People may, for example, be less inclined to embrace JFK and 9/11 theories when they are proposed alongside such obvious kook-bait questions as “Do you believe Paul McCartney actually died in a car crash in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike so that the Beatles could continue, or not?” and “Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power to manipulate our societies, or not?” For the full results, see Public Policy Polling, “Democrats and Republicans Differ on Conspiracy Theory Beliefs,” April 2, 2013, publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/PPP_Release_National_ConspiracyTheories_040213.pdf.
26. Monica Crowley, Nixon in Winter: His Final Revelations About Diplomacy, Watergate, and Life Out of the Arena (Random House, 1998), 309.
27. Webb Hubbell, Friends in High Places: Our Journey from Little Rock to Washington, D.C. (William Morrow, 1997), 282. Hubbell insisted that Clinton “was dead serious.”
28. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd ed. (Psychology Press, 2002), 1.
29. Erich Goode, e-mail to the author, November 9, 2001.
30. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 47.
31. Clifford Griffith Roe, The Girl Who Disappeared (World’s Purity Federation, 1914), 200.
32. For a comparison between the Bureau’s role in stoking fears of vice rings during the white-slavery panic and its role in stoking fears of Communist conspiracies after the First World War, see Regin Schmidt, Red Scare: FBI and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 83–86.
33. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 9.
&
nbsp; 34. Quoted in Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought (Harvard University Press, 1962), 129.
35. “What Does It Mean?” Winfield Daily Courier, October 4, 1888.
36. “Clinched!” Winfield Daily Courier, October 18, 1888.
37. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 32–33. Hofstadter here is elaborating on an argument in an earlier essay: David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, September 1960.
38. Walter Reuther, Victor Reuther, and Joseph Rauh, “The Radical Right in America Today,” December 19, 1961.
39. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang, 2001), 157.
40. Ibid., 149.
41. David Frum, “What Is Going On at Fox News?” March 16, 2009, web.archive.org/web/20100317185437/http://www.frumforum.com/ what-is-going-on-at-fox-news.
42. David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigms Press, 2004), 25–26.
43. Ibid., 27.
44. Sam Smith, “America’s Extremist Center,” The Progressive Review, July 1995.
45. As I was writing my manuscript, another book that treats conspiracy theories as a modern mythology appeared. I enjoyed it, though its approach was ultimately rather different from mine. See Robert Guffney, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (TrineDay, 2012).
46. The term comes from the Czech Communist Jan Kozak, who used it to describe how his party came to power. For an influential example of the idea being used in a Birchite context, see Gary Allen with Larry Abraham, None Dare Call It Conspiracy (Concord Press, 1972), 113–27.
47. “Brief lesson for paranoiacs: setting your open-ended conspiracy metaphors loose upon the world, they become (like anything) eligible for manifold repurposing. Free your mind and an ass may follow.” Jonathan Lethem, They Live (Soft Skull Press, 2010), 43.