Hysterical Conspiracism. What begins in a tradition of healthy skepticism culminates in a universal su ion of anything presented as established wisdom. As Francis Wheen puts it in his recent book,
Strange Days Indeed: The 1970s: The Golden Age of Paranoia, “You start by reading your horoscope in the newspaper; then you dabble in chakra balancing or feng shui, saying that it is important to keep an open mind; after a while your mind is so open that your brains fall out, and you read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion without noticing anything amiss.”
No graduate of the Anglo-American university system in the past 60 years has lacked for an introduction to this pervasive theorizing of dark and hidden forces, which gallops across the political spectrum from right-wing fantasies about Freemasons to left-wing hysteria over the Warren Report.
The Jewish question, as Wheen rightly apprehended, seems to exercise over-active imaginations more than anything else. In the wake of the killing of Hamas militant Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the BBC Radio 4's PM program allowed one Gordon Thomas, author of
Gideon's Spies, a book about the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, to state the following: “They have a whole backup system called 'asylum.' These are people, local residents, Jewish people, who help the Mossad. It is estimated to be in the world about half a million—some people say a million; I tend to say it's about half a million—all of them Mossad people.” Avoid all open windows at your next bar mitzvah.
The strategic advantages of the hysterical conspiracist are as follows:
1. He never risks appearing ovine or “naďve” because he is perpetually attuned to
What Is Really Happening. What others might describe as pigheaded resistance to facts, he maintains as his unsullied record of un-falsifiable claims. As Johnson remarked to Boswell over dinner at the Mitre, “It is always easy to be on the negative side… If a man were now to deny that there is salt upon the table, you could not reduce him to absurdity.” Trying to convince someone who insists that a plane did not fly into the Pentagon on September 11 is no easier.
2. Where he does advance an “alternative” explanation of events, the hysterical conspiracist usually maintains a small distance from absolute certainty—just in case. Hedge phrases or coy locutions such as “I’m not saying necessarily…” and “Isn’t it interesting that…” exist to exonerate the conspiracist after the fact, preparing him for intellectual victory either way. Witness the qualifiers in this sample sentence from Tariq Ali’s
The Clash of Fundamentalisms: “[T]here exists no exact, incontrovertible evidence about who ordered the hits on New York and Washington or when the plan was first mooted.”
3. The hysterical conspiracist forces his opponents to fritter away their time and resources in debunking his non-theories as “not even wrong.”
Popular Mechanics might have devoted a cover story to flying cars or Fermilab cyclotrons in March 2005. Instead it
had to teach Rosie O’Donnell how steel girders melt in skyscrapers.
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