George Monbiot, in a recent article for The Guardian, talked to “conspiracy fantasists” Jason Liosatos and concludes “he is insufficiently rigorous in choosing what to believe”.
I think Monbiot inadvertently shines a light on the organising principle of all conspiracy theories. They’re all governed by, and function within the paradigm of, that thing we call faith. It’s there in that willingness some people have to surrender to a higher power, to accept the kind of certainty offered by religions, all of them.
Religions have a logic, a way of understanding existence, that brings meaning to those willing to submit. In return for surrendering that thing they call a soul, acolytes are given a framework to make sense of the chaos. I have no doubt there is safety in joining likeminded souls inside the truth, a truth others on the outside couldn’t possibly understand. But this dynamic, the binary that favours inside and out, us and them, quickly takes on the euphoria of enlightenment. From there the polarisation of zealots and heretics falls conveniently into place. The East hates the West. Progressives are outraged by reactionaries. The liberal left rages against the fascists right. Each and every thesis defining their perfect antithesis. But, whichever side of the coin lands, they all share the same organising principles, a logic able to manufacture coherent but very different conclusions.
This epistemological shift away from observable truth and towards faith is the way of the world now. Monbiot sees it as the necessary precursor chemical in the manufacture of the designer drug neoliberalism. I wonder if it could be something different? The concurrent rise of religious fundamentalism and conspiracy fantasies, what I like to call secular fundamentalism, is too similar to be coincidental. I wonder if this new emphasis on faith-based-logic is actually the precursor chemical for what Yanis Varoufakis calls Technofeudalism.
Just as the feudal lords of medieval world harnessed religion to assure allegiance, man-rent, from their tenants and subjects. Are we now seeing the same faith-based-logic being used by the platform kings of cloud capital to harness the power of information. These platforms algorithmically organise what we see, who we talk to, what we care about, where we go, frame how we think? We have surrendered control, willingly taken the knee, pledged allegiance, without even realising. Are we becoming, or have we are already become, acolytes favouring doctrine, rather than individuals deploying critical thinking. Do we now embrace certainty and fear scepticism, submitting without question to faith in the algorithms? Is that why conspiracy theories are so attractive?
Just a thought.