Sarx

BoingBoing shares an essay that was ditched by Salon, Jay Kenney’s The Conspiracy Boom. It’s well worth a read.

How did we arrive at this juncture where theories are facts and facts are theories? Where nothing is assumed to be what it appears to be, where paranoia afflicts the body politic like an involuntary twitch?

In one sense, America’s love affair with suspicion is nothing new. As far back as 1798, the Federalists accused Thomas Jefferson of being a tool of the Illuminati. Barely 25 years later, America’s first political “third party,” the Anti-Masonic Party, was fueled by heated accusations that Freemasons were corrupting the country.

Indeed, a preoccupation with conspiracies is such a long-standing American tradition that historian Richard Hofstadter famously labeled the phenomenon “the Paranoid Style in American Politics,” back in 1964.

[snip]

It might be attractive to blame this conspiracy boom on the late and semi-lamented X-Files, which undoubtedly did its part to propagate certain conspiratorial memes to a wider audience. But the X-Files was just a canny homage to a worldview that was already surging in popularity.

To what then might we attribute this upsurge in debunkery? At the risk of peddling a conspiracy theory of my own, I think the sources are several, though interrelated

What he fails to cite (I think) is the overarching paradigm of our current postmodern culture: nothing is true. Never mind if I believe that or not or if it is an oxymoronic position: since that is part of the cultural mindset just now, coupled with a lively American distrust of power, it makes sense that we would build conspiracies and “alternative realities” every chance we get.