compensation for what might otherwise be insupportable feelings of powerlessness—the sense of being a minority in a world of scoffers. The popularity of conspiracy films does not inevitably translate into a feeling of empowerment for conspiracy theorists. To the extent that their common currency is placed in everybody’s hands, it is devalued. It is also potentially trivialized, for there is no assurance that those watching a conspiracy film really believe it. It is, after all, only a story. So the popularization of conspiracism is tinged with ambivalence for conspiracists, combining a sense that they were right all along with a fear that the newly enlightened will not take the ideas seriously enough to act on them.
We can gain some sense of this ambivalence from a practice mentioned earlier: that of treating some films and novels as encoded messages created by the conspirators. That claim has apparently not yet been made about either Conspiracy Theory or The X-Files, but it has been made about numerous science-fiction films. The belief in hidden messages has two advantages. First, it locates a level of meaning in popular culture that the mass audience is unaware of but that the knowing few can read. Second, it maintains a consistent view of the world as controlled by powerful, hidden forces, since if the forces are as powerful as the conspiracists assert, then they would surely be able to control the content of movies and books.
As I have indicated, believers in stigmatized knowledge assume that any widely held belief must necessarily be false—the result of indoctrination, suppression of the truth, or some other insidious mind-control technique. As ideas from stigmatized knowledge migrate into popular culture, conspiracy theorists must burrow ever deeper to discover the truths hidden by appearances. One of the chief exemplars of this technique is Milton William Cooper, who became widely known for his 1991 “exposé,” Behold a Pale Horse, of the alien control of the American government. By 1995, however, Cooper had decided that UFOs were a creation of an all-too-earthly conspiracy and that the revelations of ufologists were “intentional disinformation projects designed to promote the alien threat scenario while allowing for complete deniability on the part of government.”29
Thus the larger audience that popular culture has given to the culture of conspiracy must be balanced against the loss of special knowledge that conspiracy believers suffer—the threat that conspiracy knowledge, once the ultimate secret, will become merely another artifact of mass entertainment. It is far too early to know which set of forces will turn out to be the more powerful. One possibility is that the normal politics of compromise, openness, and incrementalism will give way to an orthodoxy of conspiracist politics dominated by belief in secrecy, dissimulation, and covert control. Another possibility is that conspiracism will become a diverting convention, with no greater claim to realism than, say, the antics of James Bond.
A more radical approach lies in Dean’s suggestion that, at least where political matters are concerned, there is no longer a consensus reality about the causes of events and the reliability of evidence. In such a situation of uncertainty, she argues, “conspiracy theory, far from a label dismissively attached to the lunatic fringe, may well be an appropriate vehicle for political contestation.” She is at pains to make clear that “the sort of conspiracy theory I’m advocating here has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.” That is no doubt the case; however, the desire to distinguish “good” conspiracy theories from “bad” ultimately founders.30
First, although Dean is clearly correct in suggesting that the domain of consensus reality has shrunk and that formerly stigmatized beliefs have joined the mainstream, the wish to possess secret knowledge unavailable to or shunned by the majority keeps regenerating. Even as parts of stigmatized knowledge get swallowed up by popular culture, novel forms of esotericism and the forbidden arise in their place.
Second, the relation between conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism is far more problematic than Dean indicates. There can certainly be conspiracy theories that are not anti-Semitic; some are described in chapters 3 and 4. But contemporary conspiracy theories manifest a dynamics of expansion—the movement from event conspiracies to systemic conspiracies to superconspiracies. As this progression occurs, two characteristics appear. First, the more a conspiracy theory seeks to explain, the larger its domain of evil; the conspiracy includes more and more malevolent agents. Second, the more inclusive the conspiracy theory, the less susceptible it is to disproof, for skeptics and their evidence are increasingly identified with the powers of evil.
The result of these processes is that the villains who populate conspiracy theories tend to multiply rapidly. Conspiracists find it difficult to keep out new putative evildoers. Ufologists—the very subculture on which Dean focuses—began with conspiracy theories that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, yet in some cases ended up testifying to the veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Whichever path becomes dominant, it seems unlikely that the domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims will disappear. Some will, no doubt, become the victims of their own success; that is, they will become so widely accepted that they will lose their stigma and become indistinguishable from the mainstream ideas they challenged. To a great extent, that has already happened to alternative medicine, now the beneficiary of government funding, with at least some access to conventional medical journals. Notwithstanding the increased permeability of boundaries, however, a domain of stigmatized knowledge seems likely to remain stigmatized, if only because it reflects the alienation and suspicions that some continue to direct toward government, science, higher education, and mainstream religion. As long as those suspicions remain, so too will the belief in a realm of hidden or forbidden knowledge. As ideas pass across the border that separates the world of the stigmatized from the world of the accepted, the world of the stigmatized must be reinforced with new additions. If the past is any guide, the cultic milieu provides a seemingly bottomless reservoir from which new knowledge claims can be drawn. Thus the attractions of the taboo and proscribed can always be met by visions of ever darker plots and ever more shocking revelations.
The existence of a self-perpetuating domain of stigmatized knowledge means that the raw material for improvisational millennialism will remain plentiful. We can see the flourishing undergrowth of improvisationalism in the development of increasingly complex beliefs about conspiracies. Although belief in malevolent plots has a long history in American culture, it is safe to say that no period has evinced so strong an appetite for conspiracism as the final two or three decades of the twentieth century. Conspiracism increasingly manifests itself in depictions of plots so vast that they can be undone only in an Armageddon-like conflict. Small wonder, then, that so much improvisational millennialism revolves around visions of conspiracy that purport to describe a coming diabolical New World Order—the focus of the next two chapters.
3
New World Order Conspiracies I
The New World Order and the Illuminati
Although styles of millenarian thought have become increasingly diverse, the result has not been the cacophony one might expect. Despite the unprecedented millenarian pluralism in contemporary America, the varieties described in the preceding chapter—religious, secular, and improvisational—have been integrated by the wide acceptance of a unifying conspiracy theory commonly denoted by the phrase New World Order. This theory may be found in religious, secular, and improvisational versions. In this chapter I examine its disparate origins, for it appears to have developed separately out of religious and secular ideas that subsequently converged.
New World Order theories claim that both past and present events must be understood as the outcome of efforts by an immensely powerful but secret group to seize control of the world. Most commonly, these theories now include some or all of the following elements: the systematic subversion of republican institutions by a federal government utilizing emergency powers; the gradual subordination of the United States to a world government operating through the United Nations; the creation of sinister new military and paramilitary forces, including governmental mobilization of urban youth gangs; the permanent stationing of foreign troops
