environment, which he called the cultic milieu. This cultural underground encompasses Webb’s concept of rejected knowledge, but is broader in two ways. First, it includes “all deviant belief systems,” not merely those that find their way into occultism, though the occult remains a major component of the cultic milieu. But that milieu also includes such areas as alternative medicine and healing, not normally considered part of the occult domain. Second, the cultic milieu includes not simply beliefs and ideas but also their related practices, “the collectivities, institutions, individuals and media of communication associated with these beliefs.” There is, in other words, a world of persons, organizations, social interactions, and channels of communication that makes the cultic milieu a genuine subculture rather than a mere intellectual or religious phenomenon.13
The cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities, and because no single institution within the milieu has the authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds in it “unifying tendencies.” One such tendency is its opposition to “dominant cultural orthodoxies.” This is a point I shall return to many times, for it is also a major characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. The very oppositional situation of the cultic milieu makes it wary of all claims to authoritative judgment. Its suspiciousness makes it intrinsically receptive to all forms of revisionism, whether in history, religion, science, or politics.14
If disdain for orthodoxy is one trait of the cultic milieu, another is its fluidity. Ideas migrate easily from one part of the milieu to another, their movement facilitated by both a general receptivity to the unorthodox and a communication system of publications, meetings, and (more recently) interlinked Web sites. According to Campbell, “the literature of particular groups and movements frequently devotes space to topics outside its own orbit, includes reviews of one another’s literature and advertises one another’s meetings. As a direct consequence of this individuals who ‘enter’ the milieu at any one point frequently travel rapidly through a variety of movements and beliefs and by so doing constitute yet another unifying force within the milieu.” As we shall see in succeeding chapters, such currents can connect antigovernment, fundamentalist, and UFO subcultures, permitting both individuals and ideas to move among them with astonishing rapidity.15
Campbell’s essay is among the most acute and perceptive descriptions of the dynamics of contemporary religious experimentation. Its major limitation lies in its concentration on religious movements to the exclusion of other kinds of groups. Indeed, the very logic of the concept of the cultic milieu suggests that under certain circumstances, a person’s religion becomes indistinguishable from political ideology and the occult. Thus, without discarding Campbell’s valuable insights, we need to extend the cultic milieu to encompass a broader range of phenomena. This can be done through the concept I call stigmatized-knowledge claims.
Stigmatized Knowledge Claims
By stigmatized knowledge I mean claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error—universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like. Although this definition encompasses rejected knowledge in both Webb’s and Campbell’s senses, it also includes a broader range of outsider ideas. The domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims may be divided into five varieties:
Forgotten knowledge: knowledge once allegedly known but lost through faulty memory, cataclysm, or some other interrupting factor (e.g., beliefs about ancient wisdom once possessed by inhabitants of Atlantis).
Superseded knowledge: claims that once were authoritatively recognized as knowledge but lost that status because they came to be regarded as false or less valid than other claims (e.g., astrology and alchemy).
Ignored knowledge: knowledge claims that persist in low-prestige social groups but are not taken seriously by others (e.g., folk medicine).
Rejected knowledge: knowledge claims that are explicitly rejected as false from the outset (e.g., UFO abductions).
Suppressed knowledge: claims that are allegedly known to be valid by authoritative institutions but are suppressed because the institutions fear the consequences of public knowledge or have some evil or selfish motive for hiding the truth (e.g., the alien origins of UFOs and suppressed cancer cures).16
Two characteristics of the stigmatized-knowledge domain require particular attention: the special place accorded to suppressed knowledge and the empirical nature of the claims. The suppressed knowledge category tends to absorb the others, because believers assume that when their own ideas about knowledge conflict with some orthodoxy, the forces of orthodoxy will necessarily try to perpetuate error out of self-interest or some other evil motive. The consequence is to attribute all forms of knowledge stigmatization to the machinations of a conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories therefore function both as a part of suppressed knowledge and as a basis for stigmatization. At one level, conspiracy theories are an example of suppressed knowledge, because those who believe in conspiracy theories are convinced that only they know the true manner in which power is held and decisions made. The conspiracy is believed to have used its power to keep the rest of the populace in ignorance. At another level, conspiracy theories explain why all forms of stigmatized-knowledge claims have been marginalized—allegedly the conspiracy has utilized its power to keep the truth from being known. So the distinction between hidden knowledge on the one hand, which is “true,” and orthodoxy on the other, which is “false,” acts to push believers in stigmatized-knowledge claims toward beliefs about plots to suppress the truth, and hence in the direction of conspiracism.
Stigmatized knowledge appears compelling to believers, not only because it possesses the cachet of the suppressed and forbidden, but because of its allegedly empirical basis. Some stigmatized knowledge appears to rest on nonempirical or antiempirical foundations—for example, knowledge claimed to derive from spiritual entities channeled through human intermediaries. To a striking extent, however, stigmatized knowledge rests on asserted empirical foundations: those who make the claims explicitly or by implication challenge others to test their facts against evidence. For example, people who traffic in conspiracy theories do not claim for their beliefs the status of revelation, nor do they ask that their beliefs be taken on faith. Yet the version of empiricism that operates in the domain of stigmatized knowledge has its own peculiar characteristics.
In the first place, stigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth—for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth? Hence stigmatization, instead of making a truth claim appear problematic, is seen to give it credibility, by implying that some malign forces conspired to prevent its becoming known. A presumption of validity therefore attaches to stigmatized claims, which greatly facilitates the flow of such claims through the cultic milieu. As Campbell observed, beliefs in the cultic milieu tend to move and combine freely, so that individuals in the milieu quickly become exposed to previously unfamiliar ideas, which they often appear predisposed to accept. It seems to matter little whether the belief in question concerns the Kennedy assassination, Atlantis, Bigfoot, or UFOs. The belief must be true because it is stigmatized.
At the same time that stigmatization is employed as a virtual guarantee of truth, the literature of stigmatized knowledge enthusiastically mimics mainstream scholarship. It does so by appropriating the apparatus of scholarship in the form of elaborate citations and bibliographies. The most common manifestation of pedantry is a fondness for reciprocal citation, in which authors obligingly cite one another. The result is that the same sources are repeated over and over, which produces a kind of pseudoconfirmation. If a source is cited many times, it must be true. Because the claims made by conspiracy theorists are usually nonfalsifiable, the multiplication of sources may leave the impression of validation without
