however different they are from each other, have two common characteristics: each one’s adherents consciously place it within a well-defined tradition, often positioning it as an alternative to some reigning orthodoxy; and each is centered on a body of canonical literature or teaching (e.g., the Bible or Marx’s writings), whose exegesis is believed to illuminate the essence of history.
Religious and secular millennialism have certainly not been immune to conspiratorial ideas, but they have normally adopted only those grounded in the particular vocabulary of a specific tradition. Thus, Christian millennialists could develop conspiracy ideas by elaborating the scriptural Antichrist, while Marxists could develop notions of a capitalist plot. Neither religionists nor secularists, however, could easily construct conspiracy theories not already rooted in their own texts and traditions.
Improvisational millennialism, by contrast, has a much freer hand. It is by definition an act of bricolage, wherein disparate elements are drawn together in new combinations. An improvisational millenarian belief system might therefore draw simultaneously on Eastern and Western religions, New Age ideas and esotericism, and radical politics, without any sense that the resulting mélange contains incompatible elements. Such belief systems have become increasingly common since the 1960s, and freed as they are from the constraints of any single tradition, they may incorporate conspiracist motifs whatever their origin. As we shall see, this has given conspiracy theories an unprecedented mobility among a wide range of millenarian systems.
CONSPIRACY BELIEFS AND FOLKLORE
Because improvisational millennialisms are bricolages, they can be treated both holistically and in terms of their constituent elements. The latter become particularly important, as they can appear simultaneously in a broad range of belief systems, having a slightly different significance in each, depending on the other elements with which they are combined. The chapters that follow examine a series of conspiratorial ideas both individually and in combination, among them concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), implanted mind-control devices, and the Illuminati. Each can be separately traced, as well as related to other ideas with which it may appear, and each moves among different audiences. Because the dualism inherent in conspiracy ideas makes them ideal vehicles for apocalyptic anxieties, their prevalence in the years leading up to 2000 was scarcely surprising. “Ideas and images about the end of the world,” Daniel Wojcik writes, “permeate American popular culture and folklore, as well as popular religion.”12
The nature of conspiracy ideas can best be illuminated through the category of folklore known as the urban legend. According to one of its most prominent students, Jan Harold Brunvand, “Urban legends belong to the subclass of folk narratives, legends, that—unlike fairy tales—are believed, or at least believable, and that—unlike myths—are set in the recent past and involve normal human beings rather than ancient gods or demigods.” These stories are almost always false, “but are always told as true.” As Patricia A. Turner points out, urban legends—those that deal with distinctively modern themes—are closely related to rumors. Both purport to be true, or at least to be believable, and both circulate rapidly, though legends are likely to be more long-lived and complex. Beliefs that originally circulate as rumors may subsequently appear as elements of legends.13
There is, however, one complication in dealing with conspiracy beliefs as urban legends: the modes of transmission. The bias of folklorists is toward oral transmission as the primary medium. Legend texts are often secured in tape-recorded examples with accompanying data about the teller and how he or she learned the story. Conspiracy ideas clearly circulate widely in oral form, as evidenced by Turner’s important study of conspiracy legends in the African-American community; but the media-rich, technologically sophisticated society that exists in both the United States and other developed countries opens up new avenues for transmission.14
Brunvand, writing in 1981, conceded that “today’s legends are also disseminated by the mass media.” During the succeeding two decades, the Internet emerged as a major new medium. Wojcik notes: “Folklore is not only transmitted through printed sources and electronic media but now through the Internet and e-mail, as members of global subcultures who never interact face-to-face exchange and create folklore in cyberspace. Despite predictions to the contrary, technology and industrialization have not necessarily destroyed traditions but have altered the ways that traditions are expressed and communicated, and have helped to generate and perpetuate new types of folklore.” Such technological innovations are particularly important for the subcultures in which conspiracy theories have taken root.15
Conspiracy ideas are particularly prevalent in what I call the realm of stigmatized knowledge—knowledge claims that have not been validated by mainstream institutions. Subcultures dominated by belief in some form of stigmatized knowledge—such as those defined by commitments to political radicalism, occult and esoteric teaching, or UFOs and alien beings—are therefore most likely to nurture conspiracy ideas. These are also precisely the kinds of subcultures most attracted to the Internet.
The Internet is attractive because of its large potential audience, the low investment required for its use, and—most important—the absence of gatekeepers who might censor the content of messages. To some extent, of course, the subcultures referred to above have access to conventional mass media. They publish books and periodicals, though these are often restricted to distribution by mail or only the largest book stores, which may also screen out overtly anti-Semitic or racist material. Access to radio and television appears limited to shortwave stations and community-access cable channels. There have been, to be sure, exceptions, such as the newspaper The Spotlight, once the right-wing publication with the largest circulation in the United States, and which ceased publication in 2001; and the Australian New Age–conspiracy magazine Nexus. For the most part, however, stigmatized knowledge subcultures are at a distinct disadvantage as far as mass media are concerned, for the latter are precisely the mainstream institutions best positioned to confer stigma on certain knowledge claims, including those that are overtly conspiracist. This contempt is reciprocated by conspiracists themselves. Not only do conspiracists distrust the mass media as distorters and concealers of the truth; they also regard them as part of the conspiracy, a tool controlled by the plotters in order to mislead the public.
Consequently, those whose worldview is built around conspiracy ideas find in the Internet virtual communities of the like-minded. Copyright and other issues of intellectual property appear to count for little among many who engage in Internet posting. Multiple versions of the same document are likely to appear in various places, some identical, some slightly different, some with annotations by the poster. The result is not unlike the variant accounts of urban legends that circulate by word of mouth. Unlike oral versions, however, all of the variants may in principle be simultaneously accessible to the Web surfer, who may then be tempted to judge the credibility of a story by the number of times it is told. Here repetition substitutes for direct evidence as a way of determining veracity. The dynamics of rumor provides a helpful analogy, for it is in the nature of rumors to appear precisely in those situations in which normal means of determining reliability are not available, so the potential consumer of rumors may end up determining truth on the basis of how widely a particular one circulates. This gives to rumors—and, by extension, to Internet conspiracy accounts—a self-validating quality. The more a story is told, and the more often people hear it, the more likely they are to believe it.
In a somewhat different way, search engines’ placement of a page in a list of responses can reflect searchers’ preferences. Google, for example, ranks pages produced in response to a search on the basis of both the page’s content and the frequency with which it is linked to other pages. The more frequently other pages include it as a link, and the more prominent the pages that include the link, the higher the placement.
This communications milieu, in which self-validating rumors and urban legends can spread with unrivaled rapidity, has had particularly important implications for the spread of millenarian and apocalyptic
