by Umberto Eco
This, in conclusion, is the true secret: the reaching out at all costs toward an inviolable and unattainable secret is slobbering desire. It is not enough to know that some Al-Qaeda suicide bombers destroyed the twin towers. We will never be satisfied by what is before all our eyes, because we are the children of a blundering scoundrel of a Demiurge.
[La Milanesiana, 2013]
11. Conspiracy
When they asked me to give a talk on manias and obsessions, my thought was that one of the great obsessions of our time is undoubtedly with conspiracy. A quick look at the internet will show you just how many (mostly phony) conspiracies allegedly exist. The obsession with conspiracies, however, does not concern our day alone but also the past.
That some conspiracies do exist and have existed in history seems clear to me, from the plan to assassinate Julius Caesar to the Gunpowder Plot and from the infernal machinations of Georges Cadoudal down to modern financial plots to take over this or that corporation. But the tendency of real conspiracies is that they quickly come to light, whether they succeed, as in the case of Julius Caesar, or fail, as in Orsini’s plot to kill Napoleon III, or the so-called “golpe dei forestali”—an attempted 1969–1970 coup d’état organized by Junio Valerio Borghese—or Licio Gelli’s other machinations. The real plots, therefore, are not as mysterious and neither are they relevant on this occasion.
What is relevant is the phenomenon of the conspiracy theory, and especially those fabulous tales of cosmic plots with which the internet abounds. These remain mysterious and unfathomable because they share the characteristics of the secrets discussed by the early sociologist Georg Simmel; he observed that a secret is more powerful and seductive the emptier it is. An empty secret looms menacingly and can be neither unveiled nor disputed, and this is precisely what allows it to become an instrument of power.
This brings us to the principal conspiracy circulating on the internet: the one focused on September 11, 2001. Theories about the attacks are legion. There are the most extreme ones (found on Arab fundamentalist or neo-Nazi sites), according to which the conspiracy was organized by the Jews—the “proof” being that all the Jews who worked in the two skyscrapers were warned not to go to work that day. That news, reported by the Lebanese television station al-Manar, was clearly false; in reality, at least two hundred Israeli citizens died in the conflagration, together with many hundreds of American Jews.
Then there are the anti-Bush theories, according to which the attack was staged to provide a pretext for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Other theories attribute the event to various more or less rogue American secret service agendas. And there is also a theory that, while the conspiracy was originally an Arab fundamentalist one, the American government discovered the plot in advance yet allowed things to happen so that there would be cause to invade Afghanistan and Iraq (not unlike the theory that Roosevelt was informed of the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor but did nothing to save his fleet because he wanted a reason to declare war on Japan). In all these cases, supporters of the theories believe that the official reconstruction of the facts is false, fraudulent, and puerile.
Anyone wanting to have an idea about these various conspiracy theories can read the book Zero. Perché la versione ufficiale sull’11 / 9 è un falso (Zero: Why the Official Version of 9 / 11 is a Fake), edited by Giuletto Chiesa and Roberto Vignoli. You may not believe this, but the names of some highly respected colleagues appear in this book, whom I will not identify here out of respect.
Those who want to hear the other side of the story should also thank Piemme Editions, because with admirable equanimity (and demonstrating how to capture two distinct sectors of the market), they have published a book against conspiracy theories, too: 11 / 9. La cospirazione impossibile (9 / 11: The Impossible Conspiracy) by Massimo Polidoro, featuring views of equally respectable colleagues. I will not go into the details of the arguments advanced on either side, all of which can seem persuasive, and will rather appeal only to what I would call the “proof of silence.” A model of the proof of silence is its use, for example, against those who speculate that the Americans’ televised moon landing was a fake. Let’s say the American spacecraft did not arrive on the moon. In that case, there was a party in a position to check the matter out which even had an interest in exposing any fraud: the Soviet Union. So the fact that the Soviets stayed silent is the proof that the Americans really did land on the Moon. And that’s that.
As regards plots and secrets, experience (historical experience, too) tells us two things. First, if there is a secret, even if it is known to only one person, this person, maybe in bed with a lover, will reveal it sooner or later. (Only naive Masons and the adepts of some fake Templar rite believe in secrets that remain inviolate.) Second, if there is a secret, there will always be a sum of money adequate to persuade its holder to reveal it. (It took only a few hundred thousand pounds, in the form of a book advance, to persuade an officer of the British Army to spill what he got up to in bed with Princess Diana. And if he had instead done it with the princess’s mother-in-law, it would have been sufficient to double that sum, and a gentleman of that kind would have told the story anyway). Now, to organize a fake attack on the twin towers (to mine them, to warn the air force not to intervene, to conceal any embarrassing evidence, and so on) would have required the collaboration of hundreds of people at least, if not thousands. Especially given that the people used for such enterprises are not usually gentlemen, it is impossible to believe that at least one of these would not have talked. In short, there is no Deep Throat in this story.
The conspiracy syndrome is as old as time and the man who gave us a superb outline of the thinking behind it was Karl Popper. As long ago as the early 1940s, Popper shared his thoughts in The Open Society and its Enemies:
The “conspiracy theory of society” is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about. This view of the aims of the social sciences arises, of course, from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society—especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike—is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups. This theory is … a typical result of the secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups—sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from—such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.
I do not wish to imply that conspiracies never happen. On the contrary, they are typical social phenomena. They become important, for example, whenever people who believe in the conspiracy theory get into power. And people who believe that they know how to make heaven on earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory, and to get involved in a counter-conspiracy against nonexisting conspirators.
In 1969, Popper revisited the subject in Conjectures and Refutations:
This theory, which is more primitive than most forms of theism, is akin to Homer’s theory of society. Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus. The conspiracy theory of society is just a version of this theism, of a belief in gods whose whims and wills rule everything. It comes from abandoning God and then asking: “Who is in his place?” His place is then filled by various powerful men and groups—sinister pressure groups, who are to be blamed for having planned the great depression and all the evils from which we suffer.… Only when conspiracy theoreticians come into power does it become something like a theory which accounts for things which actually happen (a case of what I have called the “Oedipus Effect”). For example, when
Hitler came into power, believing in the conspiracy myth of the Learned Elders of Zion, he tried to outdo their conspiracy with his own counterconspiracy.
The psychology of conspiracy springs from the fact that the most obvious explanations for many disturbing events do not satisfy us, and often they do not satisfy us because it hurts us to accept them. Consider the theories that cropped up after the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro: How is it possible, people wondered, that a few thirty-year-olds could plan and carry out such a perfect scheme? There had to be some shrewder grande vecchio (grand old man) behind the operation. Never mind that, at that time, other thirty-year-olds were running companies, piloting jumbo jets, and inventing new electronic devices. It was easier to ask how thirty-year-olds were able to kidnap Moro in Via Fani than to face the reality that those thirty-year-olds were the offspring of the kind of people who dream up grand old man stories.
After Popper, the conspiracy syndrome was studied by many other authors, and I shall mention only Daniel Pipes’s book, Conspiracy (subtitled How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From). It opens with a quotation from Metternich who is said to have asked, on learning of the death of the Russian ambassador: “What could have been his purpose?”
Humanity has always been fascinated by imaginary plots. Popper cited Homer, but in a more recent century we find Abbé Barruel, who attributed the French Revolution to a plot hatched by members of the ancient Knights Templar. Adding to his theory that they had survived and infiltrated Masonic sects was a mysterious letter he received from a Captain Simonini, who also brought the Jews into the picture, thereby preparing the way for the future Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Recently I found on the internet a site that attributes every abomination of the last two centuries to the Jesuits. This site hosts a long text: Le monde malade des jésuites, by Joël Labruyère. As the title suggests, it is a wide-ranging review of world events, and not just recent ones either, ascribable to the universal conspiracy of the Jesuits.
The Jesuits of the nineteenth century, from Abbé Barruel to the founders of the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica and the novelist Father Bresciani, were among the main propagators of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theory, and it was only right that they be repaid in the same coin by liberals, Mazzinians, Freemasons, and anticlerical movements. The theory of the Jesuitical plot was popularized to some degree by pamphlets and books—from Lettres provinciales by Blaise Pascal and Il gesuita moderno by Vincenzo Gioberti to the writings of Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet—but much more so by Eugène Sue’s serialized novels The Wandering Jew and The Mysteries of the People.
Nothing new here, then: Labruyère’s website stokes the Jesuit obsession to fever pitch. I shall give only a quick overview, because Labruyère’s conspiratorial fantasy is of Homeric dimensions: The aim of the Jesuits has always been to set up a world government, controlling both the Pope and the various European monarchies. Through the notorious Illuminati of Bavaria (a group the Jesuits themselves had created before later denouncing them as communists) they tried to bring down the monarchies that had outlawed the Company of Jesus. It was the Jesuits who sank the Titanic because that incident made it possible to found the Federal Reserve Bank, through the mediation of the Knights of Malta whom they controlled. And it is no accident that among those who died on the Titanic were the three richest Jews in the world, John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor Straus, who had opposed the foundation of that bank. Working with the Federal Reserve, the Jesuits then financed the two world wars, which clearly yielded only advantages to the Vatican. As for the assassination of Kennedy, if we bear in mind that the CIA came into being as a Jesuit program inspired by the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, and that the Jesuits controlled it through the Soviet KGB, it emerges that Kennedy was killed by the same people who sent the Titanic to the bottom.
Naturally, all neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic groups are of Jesuit origin; the Jesuits were behind Nixon and Clinton; the Jesuits were responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing; and the Jesuits were behind Cardinal Spellman, who fomented the Vietnam War which brought 220 million dollars into the Jesuit Federal Bank. This is not to forget, of course, Opus Dei, which the Jesuits controlled through the Knights of Malta.
And this brings us straight to the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, a novel whose raw material is the conspiracy syndrome and one that has prompted legions of credulous readers to visit places in France and England (where, obviously, the things described are not to be found). Brown cheerfully dots his narrative with countless errors. He writes, for example, that the Priory of Sion was founded in Jerusalem by “a French king called Godfrey of Bouillon,” but it is known that Godfrey never accepted the title of king. He writes that Pope Clement V, in a bid to eliminate the Templars, “had sent sealed secret orders to be opened simultaneously by his soldiers throughout Europe on Friday, October 13, 1307,” when it is a matter of historical fact that the messages to the bailiffs and seneschals of the kingdom of France were sent not by the Pope but by Philip the Fair (and it is hardly clear how the Pope could have had “soldiers throughout Europe”). He confuses the manuscripts found at Qumran in 1947 (which speak neither of the “true story of the Grail” nor “of the ministry of Christ”) with the manuscripts of Nag Hammadi, which contain some Gnostic gospels. And as for his claims about the church of Saint Sulpice in Paris, that a gnomon in it is “a vestige of the pagan temple that once stood in that exact spot” and that a Rose Line would appear corresponding to the Paris meridian, and that this line runs on to the cellars of the Louvre, below the so-called inverted pyramid, where the Holy Grail has found its final resting place—pure fiction. To this day, numerous mystery hunters make a pilgrimage to Saint Sulpice to see the Rose Line, and consequently the church authorities have felt obliged to put up a notice:
The meridian constituted by the brass strip set in the floor of the church is part of a scientific instrument made in the eighteenth century. This was done with the full agreement of the ecclesiastical authorities by the astronomers of the recently established Paris Observatory. Contrary to fanciful allegations in a recent best-selling novel, this is not a vestige of a pagan temple. No such temple ever existed in this place. It was never called a “Rose-Line.” It does not coincide with the meridian traced through the middle of the Paris Observatory which serves as a reference for maps where longitudes are measured in degrees East or West of Paris.… Please also note that the letters “P” and “S” in the small round windows at both ends of the transept refer to Peter and Sulpice, the patron saints of the church, and not an imaginary “Priory of Sion.”
Why are such canards successful? Because they promise knowledge denied to others. Frédéric Lordon, writing in Le monde Diplomatique, suggests that the conspiracy syndrome is the reaction of people who would like to know what is going on but have noticed that they are often denied access to the whole story. Lordon cites Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (written back in the sixteenth century) where it is said: “It is not surprising that the common people have neither truth nor justice, since affairs of state are taken care of without their knowledge.” But there is a certain difference between state secrets, reticence, and conspiracy. In his 1964 book The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter says that the taste for conspiracy should be interpreted by applying a psychiatric framework to social thinking. It is a matter of two forms of paranoia. In a psychiatric case of paranoia, the individual thinks the world is plotting against him, whereas the mark of social paranoia is the belief that sinister powers are targeting one’s group, nation, or religion. The social paranoiac, I would say, is more dangerous than the psychiatric one because he perceives that his persecution is shared by many, perhaps millions of other people and has the impression that he is acting against the conspiracy in a selfless way. This explains a great deal that happens in the world today, as well as much that has happened in the past.
; Pasolini once wrote that conspiracies make us think crazy thoughts because they free us from the burden of having to face the truth. The fact that the world is full of conspirators could be a matter of indifference: if someone believes that the Americans did not go to the moon, that’s his problem. In a 2013 article, “The Social Consequences of Conspiracism,” Daniel Jolley and Karen Douglas conclude that “exposure to information supporting conspiracy theories reduced participants’ intentions to engage in politics, relative to participants who were given information refuting conspiracy theories.” In fact, if you are convinced that the history of the world is directed by secret societies—be they the Illuminati or the Bilderberg group—that are about to establish a new world order, what do you do? You give up, and you fret and fume. So every conspiracy theory directs the public imagination toward nonexistent dangers and away from genuine threats. As Chomsky once suggested, imagining what was almost a conspiracy of conspiracy theories, those who get the greatest advantage from fantasies about a supposed plot are the very institutions that the conspiracy theory aims to strike. This amounts to saying that, in thinking that Bush ordered the destruction of the Twin Towers to justify intervention in Iraq, people flit between a variety of delusions and stop analyzing the real reasons that prompted Bush to intervene in Iraq, and the influence that the Neocons had on him and his politics.