The Elaborate Plots of Conspiracy Nuts

Harvey in "The Manchurian Candidate"

Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate”

I remember the first time I encountered a conspiracy whacko. In the early 1970s, when I was a student at Carleton College, I walked over to St. Olaf College to hear the African American comedian Dick Gregory. At times Gregory was very funny and at times he was totally nuts. He even had some theory about how the CIA had downed a plane carrying segregationist senator Hale Boggs because… well, I never understood his explanation. But I remember Gregory found it very significant that the plane was never found!

Today many of the conspiracies come from the right, including the ones about Obama faking his birth certificate, the White House using the IRS to audit Tea Party groups, the White House covering up the truth about Benghazi, etc. etc.

Jonathan Gottschall’s fascinating book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human has an interesting insight into conspiracy theories: they represent a desire to find meaning in a chaotic universe. Inverting a line appearing in a Wallace Stevens poem (“Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon”), Gottschall describes this desire as “a cursed rage for order.”

Gottschall’s description reminds me of what theorist Peter Brooks has to say about literary plots. I’m also thinking about how an author like Thomas Pynchon plots his novels.

Describing conspiracy theories as “feverishly creative” and “lovingly plotted,” Gottschall calls them “fictional stories that some people believe.” They work as follows:

Conspiracy theorists connect real data points and imagined data points into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality. Conspiracy theories exert a powerful hold on the human imagination…not despite structural parallels with fiction, but in large part because of them. They fascinate us because they are ripping good yarns, showcasing classic problem structure and sharply defined good guys and villains. They offer vivid, lurid plots that translate with telling ease into wildly popular entertainment. Consider novels such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, films such as JFK and The Manchurian Candidate, and television shows such as 24 and The X Files.

And further on:

Conspiracy theories are not, then, the province of a googly-eyed lunatic fringe. Conspiratorial thinking is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant, or the crazy. It is a reflex of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience. Conspiracy theories offer ultimate answers to a great mystery of the human condition: why are things so bad in the world? They provide nothing less than a solution to the problem of evil. In the imaginative world of the conspiracy theorist, there is no accidental badness. To the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens. History is not just one damned thing after another, and only dopes and sheeple believe in coincidences. For this reason, conspiracy theories—no matter how many devils they invoke—are always consoling in their simplicity. Bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possible even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story.

I promised a discussion of plot so here it is. In his book Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Brooks notes four definitions of plot, all of which can be applied to novels: (1) a small piece of ground or lot; (2) a ground plan, as for a building; (3) a series of events comprising a story; and (4) a secret plan or scheme to accomplish a hostile or illegal purpose. He finds all four connected in interesting ways:

There may be a subterranean logic connecting these heterogeneous meanings. Common to the original sense of the word is the idea of boundedness, demarcation, the drawing of lines to mark off and order.

It’s clear how boundedness covers the first three definitions, but Brooks is particularly interested in how the fourth definition, arising from the French word complot, has also attached itself to narrative plots: a story can function as a devious plot.

This is how a novel like The Crying of Lot 49 works. A rare postage stamp and graffiti images scrawled on mailboxes leads protagonist Oedipa Maas to conclude that there is a vast conspiracy to defy the U. S. Government’s mail monopoly. A subterranean group, the Tristero, has established a secret alternative mail service. (I write about it more here.) The novel’s plot consists of Oedipa tracking down every lead she can find and concludes with her attending a stamp auction that may provide her with conclusive proof of Tristero’s existence.

Coincidence does not exist in Pynchon’s literary plots because everything that happens is the result of a plot. This is not like the 19th century, where fictional coincidences were a sign of a beneficent force overseeing our lives. (Think of the coincidences that guide Jane Eyre to the Rivers household and then back to Rochester or that ensure the happy endings of Dickens novels.) In earlier times, fiction didn’t have coincidences because a divine force was believed to determine everything. (It’s not a coincidence that Athena shows up just when Odysseus needs her.) What Pynchon signals and what the conspiracy theories reflect is human beings thrown back on their own resources and using their own connection-making capacities as a coping mechanism. When faced with disparate events, they can no longer plausibly attribute meaning to God or the devil so they substitute an all-powerful, all-seeing federal government.

To be sure, Dick Gregory, Glenn Beck, and all the so-called “truthers” are not creating great literature as they devise their plots. Their wild theorizing seems more like a kind of performance art.

Unfortunately, it’s performance art that is wreaking havoc with our politics. Oh cursed rage for order indeed.

Added note: 

Added Note: One of the best literary descriptions of conspiracy paranoia occurs in the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Final Problem.” It begins with Sherlock convinced that he is being followed:

 The only light in the room came from the lamp upon the table at which I had been reading. Holmes edged his way round the wall and flinging the shutters together, he bolted them securely.

     “You are afraid of something?” I asked.

     “Well, I am.”

     “Of what?”

     “Of air-guns.”

     “My dear Holmes, what do you mean?”

We then learn about Moriarty:

For years past I have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again in cases of the most varying sorts — forgery cases, robberies, murders — I have felt the presence of this force, and I have deduced its action in many of those undiscovered crimes in which I have not been personally consulted. For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and followed it, until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings, to ex-Professor Moriarty of mathematical celebrity.

He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed — the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defense. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught — never so much as suspected. This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.

Of course, this being fiction, Moriarty really is behind every crime everywhere. But Doyle gives us a good glimpse into how the paranoid mind works. Nor should we be surprised to find it coming from him since his detective’s entire m.o. consists of finding meaningful connections between apparently unrelated facts.

For instance, can you identify the following story? An unexplained death in a bolted and shuttered room involves an old mansion, a pair of marriage proposals, building repairs, an air vent that doesn’t lead outside, the smell of cigar smoke, a dummy bell pull, a bed clamped to the floor, a cheetah and baboon roaming the grounds, nearby gypsies (although they are just a red herring), a saucer of milk, a small leash, a whistle in the night, and a will with special provisions.

Oh yes, and the final utterance of a dying woman: “The speckled band!”

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