Remember when conspiracy theories were fun? Remember Mulder and Scully and the Smoking Man? Remember Oliver Stone at his manic peak tracking the course of the magic bullet? The Da Vinci Code smashing sales records? Shadowy groups, secret knowledge, hidden hands on the levers of power—the best conspiracy thrillers encouraged a kind of half belief in their wild propositions, a flirtation with seemingly forbidden ideas that added depth to their charge. They created space in the center for you to play at being on the fringe.
It’s impossible, after the events of the past few years, not to wonder if that sort of play isn’t dangerously naive. Conspiracy theories and the people who believe them have moved from the margins into the mainstream, from the grassy knoll to the Capitol steps. Covid burned a hole through the country—how many chose not to vaccinate because of something they read on the internet? Because they believed the truth was something other than what American institutions were telling them? I want to believe—in aliens and shapeshifters and the Jersey Devil, yes, and their implications of a reality richer and more transcendent than this one, but also, apparently, in ivermectin, in homeopathy, in voting machines rigged for fraud.
How did we get here? How did things that seemed like entertainment turn so deadly?
A glib answer first: we were always here. Those times were not so innocent. The X-Files was nearing the end of its second season when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols incinerated 168 people, 19 of them children, because they believed the government was at war with its citizens. Popular culture sanitized conspiracy theories, neutered adherents into lovable outcasts or quixotic heroes, but the connections to extremist beliefs were always present, even if they weren’t broadcast.
Yet even allowing for those enduring ties to political extremism—particularly, though not exclusively, of the hard right variety—there is no question that the way we think of conspiracy theorists has shifted over the years. In the post-Vietnam era conspiracism was a staple of the counterculture, a way of displaying not gullibility but its opposite—a healthy skepticism of power. Films like Three Days of the Condor, The Domino Principle, The Parallax View, Winter Kills and The Manchurian Candidate (both adaptations of novels by Robert Condon, a master of this critical conspiratorial style) matched their protagonists against pervasive, invisible systems, dramatizing the abstract horror of the rising Cold War national security state. In literature, Pynchon composed his masterpieces to the rhythm of this paranoia—it’s the thread running through his labyrinths of science, history, psychedelia, physics, and psychology, an assurance that no matter how lost you become there is one thing you can always be sure of: only a rube would trust them.
As for who, exactly, constitutes that nefarious them? For Pynchon, like for the rest of the country, the precise answer is always shifting, even as the general outline holds—some combination of corporate interests, the military, and politicians. The defining conspiracy theory of my generation, 9/11 Truth, cast a Republican president and his allies in the role of arch-villains, murdering Americans in order to achieve their policy goals and enrich their cronies in the private sector. 9/11 Truth never reached the same heights as theories about the JFK assassination—two-thirds of the country think that Oswald had help, while suspicion of government complicity in the World Trade Center attacks peaked in the mid-2000’s at roughly half that—but its continued hold on popular culture is a testament to the deep cynicism and distrust of the political class and the rich capitalists who fund them.
Trump, as we all know, was able to weaponize this distrust—the fact that he shared a party with the supposed perpetrators of 9/11 didn’t hurt his standing among conspiracy theorists because Bush and Cheney’s identities as Republicans was never salient—what mattered was that they were institutional Republicans, from the same class of career politicians as Clinton and Reagan, beholden to wealthy donors and the whims of the national security apparatus. (This remains a view that many outside of the conspiracy world find difficult to accept, that Republicans and Democrats are fundamentally the same because both are the parties of power, and therefore equally responsible for the deprivations and insults—real or imagined—that motivate conspiracists.) Trump’s unlikely—but successful, to his supporters—positioning of himself as an enemy of this political elite cracked the door for many conspiracy believers to view him as their champion, someone positioned to challenge a system they despised. It resulted in a mainstreaming of conspiracy theories not seen since Lyndon LaRouche, and we all lived—are still living—through the fallout.
So where does that leave conspiracy fiction? What to do if you are, like me, a fan, both of the acerbic paranoia of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s as well as the more playful, encyclopedic works like The X-Files? How do you write the genre when the hero has become the villain; when, by any honest reckoning, Fox Mulder would suspect that Covid was derived from alien DNA, when Robert Langdon would be decoding Q drops? Why even make the attempt?
There is a political reason—because power hasn’t changed. Because the FBI that is apprehending suspects in the June 6th Capitol attack is the same organization that, in the summer of 2020, paid an ex-con to infiltrate a Black Lives Matter protest in Denver and steer it toward violence. Because anti-terrorism laws are still routinely used to trample civil rights. Because corporate behemoths collect massive amounts of data on all of us without any obligation to disclose what they have or how they plan to use it. As much as we may support the fight against Trump and Trumpism, it is imperative that we monitor the way that fight is conducted and the weapons that are wielded within it—because it’s naive to assume that they will not one day be turned on us. Our history has shown us again and again that they will.
But there are other reasons, that speak to why conspiracy theories endure. To view these ideas entirely along their political dimension is to miss a large portion of their point. They are truly held beliefs about the world, and although beliefs have consequences those consequences are rarely the reason for holding them. Conspiracy theories develop through the same process as any other beliefs, congealing from the slurry of what we read or watch or hear, what our community advocates, which actions are rewarded and which are punished. To care about conspiracy theory as a subject means caring about epistemology, about how knowledge is formed and why we privilege some methods over others. What does it mean to know something about the world? What counts as evidence? If you’re a gregarious, outgoing person born in early December, and you read that Sagittarians are typically gregarious and outgoing, is this a reason to believe that astrology is true? If you hold that Jews are trafficking children to be abused by the rich and powerful, and then Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are uncovered, were you correct? The world abounds with real life Gettier problems, and if you don’t understand the appeal of their logic you are missing something fundamental about the way in which people process the world.
We all believe false things. Given the dizzying number of subjects on which different people hold varying and incompatible beliefs the statistical likelihood that any individual holds the correct position on all of them is essentially zero. Most of us accept this intellectually but it rarely affects our behavior, in part because we have no way of knowing which of our beliefs are false—if we did, we would change them. The best we can manage is to try to form a habit of epistemic humility—but given the role that shared beliefs play in forming communities and maintaining social networks, even that limited gesture proves difficult to sustain. We tend to believe what the people we admire believe, because we want to be admired by people like them. Depending on who those people are your conviction that vaccines are not poison may earn you respect or approbation, but don’t kid yourself that this conviction exists in a vacuum, that it’s based on some pure reading of scientific research. Humans are a swamp of messy emotions, desperate for affirmation, terrified of being alone—our reasoning can’t be salvaged from this muck, polished, made capable of reflecting a pure truth. Our beliefs, like the rest of us, are hopelessly moored to our animal selves.
As I sat down to work on what would become Octopus—my current work in progress—I knew that I wanted to write about people and why they believe things. I wanted to write about this fraught American moment and how it came to be—and I wanted to write it in a way that called back to those thrillers that I loved, their secrets and suspense, their emphasis on evidence, red herrings, and shocking reveals, so suited to epistemological themes. I knew I couldn’t do that with complete sincerity, without acknowledging the way conspiracy theorists are viewed in a post-QAnon world.
For years I’d had a character in mind, someone suddenly possessed of wealth he didn’t earn, who had lost his only calling, his friends, and now had no direction but also no hindrances—how lost could such a person get? How tempting a target would he make? I began to wonder what would happen if a person like that, aimless and disappointed, hungry for significance, encountered a world as rich with meaning as the one offered by conspiracy theories—and what would happen if, after doing so, his life began to take on the shape of a paranoid thriller, his hold on reality slipping as the strength of this belief increased, bolstered by his new community. What if we, the reader, had reason to believe—as this character does—that he might be correct, that something real and nefarious is happening—people are dying, plots are in motion—even as we have the advantage of knowing how much of the beliefs that orbit those plots are baseless, or worse—actively destructive? Could it be possible to replicate that sense of paranoia, of epistemic confusion, that marks a conspiracy theorist while acknowledging that this is a country—a world—still darkened by true menace?
Working through this scenario I remembered an answer Umberto Eco gave, when asked if he felt that The DaVinci Code bore any relation to his conspiracy masterwork Foucault’s Pendulum: “The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.” To write a world in which conspiracy theories are true—however interesting such a world might be—is to put yourself at risk of becoming a character in someone else’s fiction. That many conspiracies are true—and by that I mean that there are numerous documented instances of the government or corporate interests harming people and then lying about it for years afterward—doesn’t lessen this risk, it enhances it, as you are always in danger of failing to sort the credible from the incredible, of falling into the same trap as the tin hat YouTuber who thinks that because the CIA traded cocaine for machine guns they also rigged bombs in the Twin Towers—that nefarious once, nefarious every time. So a certain amount of distance is required. You don’t have to write metafiction but you have to be aware of the way your themes work in the world. You must understand that your hero is a fool—that even as real injustice pervades, as power conspires to crush any threats to its hegemony, the task of sorting threats from shadows is frequently muddled. You have to understand that hate blooms in the ashes of trust. You have to accept that people blame the wrong forces for real injustices, and that by doing so perpetuate further injustices—that almost everyone is someone else’s victim—while never forgetting that those few who aren’t, those untouchables, are still windmills worth tilting at.