The conspiratorial mindset
By 
My post this morning generated lots of interesting comments, that inspired some further thoughts:
(1) Real-life conspiracies exist, of course — and indeed some of them have at least an oblique resemblance to the paranoid world of obsessive conspiracy theorists (Jeffery Epstein’s get-togethers for various members of what can be called with some accuracy a global elite provide an obvious example).
What I find particularly striking about the conspiratorial mindset is that, since at any time the political and social world features a number of actual conspiracies, and various often not-coincidental connections between various wielders of social and political power, there are almost an infinite number of plausible conspiracy theories out there, as long as you start from the premise that the conspiracy in question actually exists.
Here’s a classic example: There were without question a bunch of suspicious and potentially sinister connections between Lee Harvey Oswald and various individuals, groups, and governments who quite plausibly might have wanted JFK to be assassinated. And of course the fact that Oswald himself was assassinated while in police custody by another shadowy and, in hindsight, sinister figure — Jack Ruby wasn’t in the Mob but he was a “connected guy” in the parlance of the trade — just made all those other connections seem more salient in the context of the cottage industry of theories that placed Oswald either at the center of various baroque conspiracies, or even characterized him as a mostly or wholly innocent patsy or dupe of such conspiracies.
Indeed, if you start from the premise that Kennedy was assassinated via such a conspiracy, the evidence for this proposition can look pretty compelling.
The problem is that the premise is just completely absurd, because of two very simple and straightforward facts:
(1) Oswald’s presence in the Texas Book Depository was a complete coincidence. He had gotten a job there six weeks earlier, because his next door neighbor in Irving — a suburb halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth — worked there, and told him that a job was available.
(2) The Secret Service decided on the presidential motorcade route that took Kennedy directly under Oswald’s office window five days before the assassination. Oswald could not possibly have learned about this fact until either Tuesday, November 19th, when the route was printed in the Dallas papers, or more likely the next day, since he normally read day-old papers in the Depository’s lunch room, being too cheap and poor to buy his own copies.
These two coincidences, which can only be characterized as something other than coincidences by immediately rocketing off into the ether of obviously nutty the Deep State is Everywhere speculation, by themselves should sink every Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory. But they don’t, because people who believe such theories start from the assumption that the theory is true, and work backwards from there. They do this for all kinds of reasons, but perhaps the most important is that they don’t want to believe that a charismatic young president of the United States was murdered by a violent weirdo for almost completely random and stupid reasons, rather than because They wanted him dead.
Almost all the big conspiracy theories are more or less like this. I mean obviously you can find almost unlimited circumstantial evidence for the claim that 9/11 was an inside job, if you simply start from the axiom that it was. And, like the JFK assassination conspiracies, 9/11 as an inside job makes far more sense, in loosely speaking rational terms, than what actually happened, since what actually happened featured a mind-bending amount of random social vulnerability, that a handful of suicidal zealots decided to exploit.
A couple of other thoughts: A huge part of what’s happened to over the course of the last couple of generations is that there’s been ever-more pressure to transform everything possible into a form of entertainment, and most especially news in general, political news in particular, and the coverage of political news even more particularly. One big problem with that is that fake news is generally going to be far more entertaining than real news, if — crucially — the fake news can be presented as real. Thus the entire right wing media apparatus in the USA and elsewhere has essentially adopted the aesthetics of professional wrestling, in which the fake is presented as real, because scripted reality is usually much more satisfying to its consumers than simple reality.
A final point: I’m generally pretty libertarian in regard to questions of how mind-altering substances ought to be regulated, but one of the many disastrous consequences of all the lies that fueled the war on drugs is that there’s a strong tendency in progressive circles to minimize or sometimes even flat-out deny the real damage that drugs, including of course alcohol, do. So for example you get comments about how cannabis is a completely innocuous substance — a claim which in its own way is nearly as ridiculous as the government’s absurd exaggerations of the risks it poses to users.
To be clear I believe cannabis is on the whole a lot less dangerous than alcohol, and I drink one and occasionally two drinks pretty much every day, but it would never occur to me to deny that alcohol is a dangerous drug, whose use requires careful government regulation.
That said, I think the post-1950s drug culture played a mostly minor but still in some ways significant role in creating the social conditions that allowed life in early 21st century America to become increasingly untethered from what could loosely be called reality.
. . . forgot to add that another interesting and complex aspect of this untethering is the extent to which a lot of contemporary right-wing craziness is in some way — but not wholly by any means — a kind of LARPing, in which people play at performative fascism, while claiming in their own defense that of course they’re not really serious. The irony here is that fascism has always been highly performative, ironical, and aestheticized. Hence a movie like Starship Troopers can be consumed by viewers very easily as either a clever satire and sendup of fascist politics and aesthetics, or as a straightforward celebration of them. Fight Club is similar in this regard.