Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
I Think I’m Paranoid (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
50 Plays1 year ago
Episode 404 - should we do an "error: podcast not found" gag? Probably not worth the effort - not when the actual episode is doing double duty as a Conspiracy Theatre Masterpiece Theater (sort of) and a Back to the Conspiracy (sort of). Yes, we're looking at Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" from 1965 - one of the works that kicked off the philosophical literature a few decades later. We start, as you'd imagine, with a sketch based on the 1995 horror film "The Mangler".
—
You can contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
The Mangler: Machine or Monster?
00:00:00
Speaker
Good evening, my name is Jared and I'm here from Health and Safety. I believe there's been a bit of an issue on the factory floor. Yeah, this bloody big thing. It's dangerous. The union delegate is gesturing towards the mangler, indicating that he takes it to be a pace of dangerous machinery. Yeah, it's the wrong paper.
00:00:19
Speaker
Ah, that is to be seen. So please tell me for my record why this machinery should be the topic of a health and safety review. Well, in the last week it's killed three people. It devoured Mrs. Frawley when she dropped her intestines on its rollers. Devoured? A curious set of words, Mr... Sorry, I didn't get your name. King. Jason King. Mr. King. Machinery-based accidents aren't usually described as devouring or devourment. You sound a little...
00:00:48
Speaker
paranoid. Now I see where you're going with this. Indeed. So what else has happened with this machine? Well, we discovered that upper management have been sacrificing their daughters to the machine for wealth and glory, that the town is in on it. Oh, and the mangler now moves about the factory floor on its own devices.
00:01:04
Speaker
Hmm, this all sounds like the delusions of an adult mind. Adult on cocaine? You aren't helping your case, Mr. King. Ah, just adding some flavour. Anyway, what are you going to do about it? Well, Mr. King, I'm no psychologist, so I don't want to engage in a clinical diagnosis here. But your mode of thinking seems...
00:01:22
Speaker
Well, paranoid. Manglers killing people, a large-scale conspiracy by village elders, and a roving machine. I think that maybe you need to harden up and, well, stop being so mental. It's the 1960s, Mr King. We expect men in your place of society just to adhere to the status quo.
00:01:43
Speaker
Well, when you put it like that, I guess I should just straighten my tie, adjust my cap and return to
Introducing the Mangler Film Podcast
00:01:48
Speaker
being a dutiful member of society. Well, I'm glad that's sorted. Are there any other issues you want brought to the attention of management? Well, my computer has virus, and Lance Henriksen is my boss. So on the balance, everything is fine.
00:02:08
Speaker
The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Edison and Em Dintus.
00:02:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Actually, hang on, hang on. I've completely forgot. I had a bunch of intros I was going to use for you. But they were all based around the fact that the two of us sitting next to each other. And then we haven't been sitting next to each other for like three weeks. OK, here we go. This is how the sausage is made, people. This is how the sausage is made. We're keeping this all in the program. Sure we are.
00:02:44
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy here in Auckland, New Zealand. I am Josh Addison and sitting next to me so close I can see my reflection in their monocle.
Exploring Conspiracy Theories through Hofstadter
00:02:54
Speaker
It's Dr. M. R.X.Dentit. And the monocle's just popped. That's basically all monocles are for, aren't they? Popping out to indicate surprise. Down, down.
00:03:03
Speaker
So that opening sketch was brought to you by The Mangler. Interesting film. Classic film. Toby Hooper. And a Toby Hooper film that Toby Hooper definitely directed. Unlike allegations about Poltergeist. Bad sequel.
00:03:21
Speaker
Haven't seen the sequel. It's about a computer virus called The Mangler starring Lance Henriksen. The third film I haven't seen, The Mangler Reborn, but it appears to be a direct sequel to the first film and once again features The Mangler. It's based upon a 23 page short story by Stephen King.
00:03:41
Speaker
And the film goes a lot further than the short story does. Yes. It keeps coming up with excuses for people to stick, because the mangler for the most of the film is just a stationary object. So it's kind of hard to make it. Powered by antacids. Kind of hard to make it. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's not what we're here to talk about today.
00:03:59
Speaker
Well, I mean, it might be. It could be. We'll see where we get to, but we've got sort of a combination conspiracy theory masterpiece theater with a little bit of back to the conspiracy, but not really. Yeah, so we're going to do a bit of a different
00:04:15
Speaker
angle on Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre for the next few sessions. In that, whilst there are some great papers in Philosophy coming up in the list, excepting of course the ones that I've written which we don't cover for reasons which are fairly obvious,
00:04:32
Speaker
we are also getting awfully close to the present day. And thus they're not really masterpieces as such because they haven't been in the oven long enough. So I thought it would be a good idea to go back to some classic pieces from outside of philosophy. And we actually were going to do Dangerous Machinery by Jenna Husting and Martin Orr. And as is evident from the way I talk about this podcast, I never remember what we do on this podcast.
00:05:02
Speaker
Because Josh... Yeah, we did it in like episode 365 or something. Yeah, so we've actually already covered it. So this new series of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre technically starts with that episode on Dangerous Machinery. So it's incorporated into the series of papers outside of philosophy. So we're not ignoring Marty and Jenna's work here. It's just that we've already covered it.
00:05:28
Speaker
So if you want to include it, just go back, listen to it and then catch up with this one. But yes, we're going back all the way to the 60s and looking at possibly the most seminal paper in the wider conspiracy theory theory literature, the work of one Richard Hofstadter. So I guess we should play a sting to make things official. And then we can start talking about the paranoid style of American politics. Indeed, we shall.
00:05:59
Speaker
Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre.
00:06:08
Speaker
Yes, so the paranoid style in American politics. This is it. This is like when we very first started doing conspiracy theory, it must be said, we looked at the papers from Brian and Charles. Charles was the first one. Both of which basically went back to this essay as sort of the foundation for what they mean. Well, I mean for Charles, it's more proper.
00:06:34
Speaker
Yes, sorry, Popper and Hofstadter were the two, but Popper sees he's not as much fun. And also, Popper's talk about the conspiracy theory of society really is only about four scattered references in the open society and its enemies. There's no sustained piece on the conspiracy theory of society. It's just mentioned in passing a few times. But for some reason, kind of became a default view amongst philosophers. Was Hofstadter,
00:07:01
Speaker
is talking about conspiracy theories in this essay from 1965, although technically it was first given in November of 1963. Josh, what important event happened in November 1963? If I knew more than one thing, I'd make a humorous reference, but I don't. The only thing I'm aware of of note that happened in November of 1963 is, of course, that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Incorrect.
00:07:27
Speaker
Doctor Who started on November the 23rd 1963. Oh the day after. Yeah there's actually there's an entire story that claims that the broadcast was delayed because of the assassination of JFK but if you actually go and look at the radio times it was scheduled for the day it played in any way so that is an urban legend about Doctor Who connected to Doctor Who
00:07:51
Speaker
which is also connected to the assassination of JFK by a book called Who Killed Kennedy, which is an investigative reporter investigating the appearance of a strange blue box surrounding the events of the assassination of the president, which was written by a New Zealander whose name has completely escaped me, but published by Virgin Books.
00:08:14
Speaker
There you go. An official Doctor Who novel about the death of JFK and I've met the author so I really should know what their name is. Oh well. Maybe we can update it later.
00:08:26
Speaker
But no, so this paper we're reading, the paper we're reading was published in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, published in 1965, but it was first delivered as a lecture in Oxford in 63, a bridge version of it appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1964.
The Impact and Style of Richard Hofstadter's Writing
00:08:44
Speaker
David Bishop. David Bishop. Okay.
00:08:46
Speaker
So the paper that we're going to be reading does actually make references to Kennedy's assassination, although I would doubtful that the original lecture would have, because even if it had occurred afterwards, it would have been very soon afterwards. But anyway. Although, I mean, given that we don't, I don't think there is... It would have been prepared a long time before.
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think there is a copy of the original transcript, actually there might be, I did not check that. But yes, given Kennedy's death is also fairly late in November, it would be quite astounding if he managed to make it into the talk, if indeed the talk occurred that late in November anyway.
00:09:26
Speaker
So it is a talk. It's a lecture that was given. It's not a philosophical essay like the ones we've looked at in the past. It isn't structured with your typical abstract and conclusion and what have you. It's just a long talk that advances a viewpoint. One thing I was never actually aware of, even though he gets mentioned all the time, who is or who was Richard Hofster?
00:09:46
Speaker
So Wals is the operative term because Hofstadter died in 1970 of leukemia at the age of 54, so died quite young. He was an historian and public intellectual and depending on who you talk to, he's either famous for his political views, he's either famous for his political philosophy, or he's famous for his views on history.
00:10:11
Speaker
He won the Pulitzer twice, once in 1956 for the Age of Reform, and once in 1964 for the book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He was a communist, but the Moscow trials in the 1930s kind of made him disillusioned with the entire Soviet communist project.
00:10:33
Speaker
He was also disillusioned by student... student? Yes, it is right way of saying it. Student, student, student, student. I'm just going to say strudel. He was also disillusioned by strudel activism in the 1960s. So he's a very classic case of someone who was a liberal progressive when he was younger and then thought the kids weren't all right when he was older.
00:11:01
Speaker
He was criticized during his academic career for preferring secondary sources to primary ones, and many people felt that he wrote in a far too lively and engaging fashion. Because in those days, and actually it's still true to a large extent to this day, people like their academics to be dry and boring. And one thing you can't say about Richard Hofstadter is that he has dry prose.
00:11:28
Speaker
No, no, that was a bit of a... It made it difficult to pull quotes out of this essay, I have to say. So I sort of got a few fairly decent sized blocks of text in some case, because you just have to let the whole thing run to... Yeah, it's one of those arguments that needs to breathe through the way that he uses language to express his points. So with that in mind, I'll start with a chunk of section one. So the whole paper begins.
00:12:00
Speaker
Although American political life has really been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today, this fact is most evident on the extreme right wing, which is shown particularly in the Goldwater movement.
00:12:19
Speaker
How much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority? Behind such movements there is a style of mind not always right-wing in its affiliations that has a long and varied history. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
00:12:40
Speaker
When I speak of the paranoid style, I use the term much as a historian of art might speak of the baroque or the mannerist style. It is, above all, a way of seeing the world and of expressing oneself. Webster defines paranoia. This is probably an earlier case of webster defying. You should never ever rely on dictionary definitions.
00:13:00
Speaker
Webster defines paranoia, the clinical entity, as a chronic mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions of persecution and of one's own greatness. In the paranoid style, as I conceive it, the feeling of persecution is central, and it is indeed systematized in grandiose theories of conspiracy.
00:13:17
Speaker
but there's a vital difference between the paranoid spokesman in politics and the clinical paranoic. Although they both tend to be overheated, over suspicious, over aggressive, grandiose, and apocalyptic in expression, the clinical paranoic sees the hostile and conspiratorial world in which he feels himself to be living as directed specifically against him, whereas the spokesman of the paranoid style finds it directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life, whose fate affects not himself alone, but millions of others.
00:13:43
Speaker
In safari, he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy. He's somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. Of course, the term paranoid style is pejorative, and it is meant to be. The paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing entirely prevents a sound program or a sound issue from being advocated in the paranoid style, and it is admittedly impossible to settle the merits of an argument because we think we hear in its presentation the characteristic paranoid accents.
00:14:13
Speaker
Style has to do with the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content. And right away, that's quite interesting, given what will come after this essay. Here he is saying right away that just because something's expressed in the paranoid style doesn't necessarily mean that it's no good. And yet that's kind of what a lot of the work afterwards that in some cases quotes and appeals to Hofstetter ends up sort of saying.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yes, there's a very interesting aspect to Hofstadter's work and that he is very well cited and very widely cited. I don't think he's widely read by people to this day. Well certainly we've been doing Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre for a few years now and I hadn't read him until you assigned it to me. Yeah well I, because I mean I review a lot of articles
00:15:06
Speaker
and you'll get people who will say, and you know, Hosteta classifies conspiracy theorists as being paranoid, and I'll go, no, he does not. He's actually very careful to say it's a paranoid style, not a clinical diagnosis of paranoia,
00:15:23
Speaker
And nothing about the style tells you that the content of the proposition in the style is true or false. It simply tells you that there's a style which is associated with something akin to, but not exactly like, paranoia, which generates suspicion. But at the same time, as he points out, you could engage in a research project in the paranoid style and get to the truth of some kind of conspiratorial claim.
00:15:50
Speaker
So he gives a few examples of the paranoid style in action, including anti-fluoride conspiracy theories, which were a thing back in the 60s, it seems. Oh, yeah. Essentially, as soon as we started putting fluoride into water, people objected to it. I mean, this is something which could possibly have come up in the bonus episode. But the people of Christchurch are very annoyed they're putting chlorine in the water now.
00:16:14
Speaker
because Christchurch uses boar water and until recently has not chlorinated their water, but there's been a whole bunch of boars which have got into water.
00:16:32
Speaker
and the water regulator in this country has gone, yeah, you've got there because you might think the water is safe now, where the people of Havelock North thought that their water was safe now and some people actually died. So the people of Christchurch are going to try to sow the regulator so they don't have to chlorinate the water because they think the personal freedom of tasty water and the potential for giardia is more important than the population's health.
00:16:59
Speaker
It's one of the most important freedoms in the world, is the freedom to shit yourself to death. I know. It's un-American to not do so. Anyway, so he's going to want to show that this paranoid style that he's
Historical Conspiracies and Paranoid Narratives
00:17:13
Speaker
describing is something that's been around for a long time and it's sort of constantly recurrent.
00:17:18
Speaker
One of the most impressive facts about the paranoid style in this connection is that it represents an old and recurrent mode of expression in our public life which has frequently been linked with movements of suspicious discontent and whose content remains much the same even when it is adopted by men of distinctly different purposes. Our experience suggests too that when it comes in waves of different intensity it appears to be all but ineradicable.
00:17:39
Speaker
He then says at the front that he's choosing to talk about America in this essay, but he does say that notions about an all-embracing conspiracy on the parts of Jesuits or Freemasons, international capitalists, international Jews or communists are familiar phenomena in many countries throughout modern history.
00:17:57
Speaker
And apparently, something I wasn't aware of, he says that at the time that he's writing this essay, so by the time this version came out it's 65, he said that apparently Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, according to him, have a far wider currency in Europe than they do in the United States. Possibly in the States it was a bit unpatriotic maybe, a bit too close to home. Possibly.
00:18:18
Speaker
In Europe, if we include the UK, you have Bertrand Russell who's raising questions about the investigation. You also have communists who are raising questions about the investigation as well, since there was a push by the Soviets to try and cast doubt on the results of the Warren Commission. So there was a European
00:18:38
Speaker
flavor of discontent towards America which expressed itself in JFK conspiracy theory sometimes because they were sincerely asking questions and sometimes because there was a culture war going on between America and the old world at that time.
00:18:54
Speaker
So he says, my intention here, however, is not to make such comparative judgments, but simply to establish the reality of the style and to illustrate its frequent historical recurrence. And then he rounds out section one by giving a bunch of quotes of people speaking in this paranoid style. The first one he gives it is dated 1955. He manages to go all the way back to 1798 for a recorded speech or sermon given by someone speaking in this paranoid style that he wants to identify.
00:19:23
Speaker
And so then sections two and three, we can probably sort of lump together because this is where he sort of gets historical. Section two, he's talking about anti-Illuminati, anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, and then section three is about anti-Catholic theories that both exhibit what he calls his paranoid style. So he talks about
00:19:43
Speaker
He talks about various things in the US that got blamed on the Illuminati, specifically the Bavarian Illuminati, who we've talked about on this very podcast, and then after the end of the Freemasons and gives a bit of a history of anti-Masonic conspiracies in the States. He actually mentions near the start, when talking about the Illuminati, he says, these notions were quick to make themselves felt in America, even though it is uncertain whether any member of the Illuminati ever came here.
00:20:07
Speaker
Which, frankly yeah, given that the Bavarian Illuminati, as we said, didn't actually last particularly long, it's probably entirely possible that no member of the original, your actual proper illuminatists, what are they called? The Illuminati.
00:20:24
Speaker
the illumed ones? I feel there's a word, but I don't know what it is anyway. Probably didn't go there. Yes, so he basically spends the section talking about all the things that people blamed the Illuminati on, including, as we said before, the French Revolution was something that people felt that it's impossible that the poor people were just sick of being treated by crap, like crap by the rich people.
00:20:50
Speaker
No, there must have been some evil conspiracy pulling the strings the whole time and playing it on the Illuminati. And then once the Illuminati were gone, the Masons were still around, so they got blamed for a whole lot of stuff. I did like the passage that he talks about. I'm a Scottish scientist called John Robeson. It seems to me he's a Scottish scientist and most people would think of him as a leading light in Illuminati conspiracy theories. Well, he certainly is. Yes, if you're into your Illuminati conspiracy theories.
00:21:16
Speaker
But no, he says a whole bunch of stuff. The one thing that interested me was that apparently he said the Illuminati's members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion, a secret substance that blinds or kills when spurted in the face, and a device that sounds like a stench bomb, a method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours. Frankly, I'm disappointed in us for not mentioning that when we talked about the Illuminati, because that sounds like a much more interesting
00:21:42
Speaker
I know people who can fill bird chambers with pestilence or vapours. Yes, probably best not to speak of that though. Nor about any substances that may blind when spurred in your face. Anyway, one thing he likes to talk about is
00:21:57
Speaker
The flights of fancy that people get involved in when they start talking about all the horrible, horrible things that these people get up to and the real gory details. So at one point in this section too he says, many anti-Masons were particularly fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations and these penalties were ingeniously and bloodily imagined.
00:22:16
Speaker
The mark master mason was alleged to call down upon himself having my right ear smote off and my right hand chopped off as an imposter in the event of such a failure. My own favourite is the oath attributed to a royal arch mason who invited having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun.
00:22:37
Speaker
The sanguinary character of masonry was also thought to be shown by the rituals of the lodges, which supposedly required drinking wine from human skulls. This, in temperance communities, where drinking wine from any kind of container was considered a sin. Indeed. Not particularly great bearing on the actual thrust of the essay, I just like that passage.
00:22:58
Speaker
And as he goes through this, right away, right from section two, I can see how this essay sort of endures, because you hear the way he talks about these things, and it all starts to sound distressingly familiar. As he talks about the Uranity Illuminati people and Uranity Mason people will say, this is an existential threat. These people want, want, not are going to inadvertently, these people want to destroy the society that we live in currently,
00:23:26
Speaker
They must be stopped and which then of course eliminates any idea of compromise or understanding or anything like that. These people are utterly, utterly evil. To tolerate them would be to invite utter destruction and therefore we must do anything we can to get rid of them.
00:23:41
Speaker
when you hear, I mean, quite aside from your QAnons and what have you, even just some of the political types in the States, talking about how Democrats want to destroy America. Well, I mean, like one Tucker Carlson. Exactly. I mean, here in New Zealand, I haven't heard rhetoric that strong from our actual politicians, although, of course, they'll be quick to say that, you know, these policies will harm the country, but they would actually say that the people
00:24:06
Speaker
putting them forwards want to destroy New Zealand just that they're, you know, too stupid to realise what they're proposing or what have you, but anyway. And this is the kind of thing that you'd expect from, say, a Peter Williams or a Sean Plunkett in this country. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so he gives a nice overview of the paranoid style as it relates to the Illuminati and the Masons in Section 2, and then Section 3 talks to the history of anti-Catholicism in the US, starting once again with the Orcaps. FEAR!
00:24:34
Speaker
Of a Masonic plot, it had hardly been quieted when rumours arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One finds here again the same frame of mind, the same conviction of a conspiracy against a way of life, but now a different villain. Now, this is actually a topic we should probably consider devoting an episode to. Anti-Catholicism in the US was a very vibrant strain of conspiracy theory, and arguably still is. So when... I mean, it was kind of controversial that Kennedy
00:25:04
Speaker
Well, yeah. And actually, there's also a kind of anti-Mormon strain in American politics as well, because Mormons are treated as being a suspicious class of Christian as well. And no one really knows what they're doing with their secret leadership and their enclaves. So there has been this kind of America is a Christian nation, but it's a staunchly Protestant Christian nation.
00:25:34
Speaker
And so the different Christian creeds which do not fit into the standard Protestant ethos have been the subject of massive conspiracy theories. And of course Catholicism has the problem for Americans in that they take it that Catholics are or have more allegiance to Rome than they do to Washington.
00:25:59
Speaker
The idea is you can't trust a Catholic because they may swear to be a patriot, but their true patriotism lies with the Pope. It's patriotism, not patriotism. That fear of sort of a dual loyalty comes up a bit. Again, it's Catholics, it's Jews, afraid they might actually be more loyal.
00:26:17
Speaker
The idea that they're going to be more loyal to Marx's ideology than their government. Yes, all of that. But anyway, so I did notice throughout this part, the Jesuits also come up a lot. They seem to be recurring. Well, I mean, if you're talking about bad Catholics, Jesuits are taken to be the worst of the Catholics. Well, yeah, it really does seem that way.
00:26:38
Speaker
Another topic we could possibly look at, the role that Jesuits played during the Crusades, because one of the reasons why there's a stereotype about interfering Jesuits with plots and capers, is they have been involved in
00:26:54
Speaker
quite a lot of very unusual activities. So during the Crusades, Jesuits were often sent to border areas between Christian and Muslim territories, and their job was to basically cause as much havoc between neighbors to then legitimize the reason why the Christians would need to go to war. And then the other issue is the Jesuits were the first missionaries into China,
00:27:24
Speaker
And then when China went through it, we're getting rid of all the Christians. The Jesuits stayed behind as advisors to the Emperor. And people have always gone, this seems ever so slightly unusual because there's always been a suggestion that maybe it was the Jesuits who suggested the
00:27:47
Speaker
expulsion of the Christians in the first place. So there's been this long history of weird, Jesuitical behaviour in history, which has then led into, well, they've done these weird things in the past, so you can't trust them now. So section three goes on in this vein a bit. One section that stuck out to me was the phrase or the line, anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.
00:28:14
Speaker
Whereas the anti-Masons had imagined wild drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with fantasies about the factual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths, the anti-Catholics had developed an immense law about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries, and the like.
00:28:31
Speaker
which, yes, the idea of these people working themselves into a lather about all the dirty, dirty things these people they don't like get up to, it always seems a little bit of a projection, a little bit confessional at times. But one thing this section
00:28:50
Speaker
brought up, which I hadn't heard of before, was the book Awful Disclosures, which I gather is something of a protocol of the elders of Zion, but for Catholicism instead of Judaism. Yeah, so this was a book that was published in 1836. The author is one Maria Monk.
00:29:09
Speaker
The book is largely considered by scholars to be an anti-Catholic hoax and in awful disclosures, Maria Monk claims that the nuns of a religious hospitaliers of Saint Joseph of the Montreal convent of the Hôtardieu
00:29:24
Speaker
Whom she called the black nuns, and this is a quote from Wikipedia,
00:29:44
Speaker
disappeared. And so this is a confessional by someone who escaped this nunnery and is trained to expose the libertine nuns and priests and their satanic practices to the world. As I say, it's considered to be a hoax by most scholars, in part because Maria Monk's life
00:30:02
Speaker
was a sad one. She
Paranoid Scholarship: Coherence vs. Reality
00:30:04
Speaker
spent quite a lot of time in an asylum and one of the characters she puts forward is leading the conspiracy at nunnery, was a fellow inmate in the asylum. So it seems like she has created a fantasy to work out her issues with a fellow patient. But I'm going to read you
00:30:24
Speaker
a selected version of the preface of the volume, because it gives you an idea of the kind of thing that Maria Monk was, if not exposing, hallucinating.
00:30:37
Speaker
This volume embraces not only my awful disclosures, but a continuation of my narrative, giving an account of an event after my escape from the nunnery and of my return to Montreal to procure a legal investigation of my charges. I present this volume to the reader with feelings which I trust will be in some way or some degree appreciated when it has been read and reflected upon.
00:31:00
Speaker
A hasty perusal and an imperfect apprehension of its contents can never produce such impressions as it has been my design to make by the statements I have laid before the world. I know that misapprehensions exist in the minds of some virtuous people.
00:31:16
Speaker
I am not disposed to condemn their motives, for it does not seem wonderful that in a pure state of society and in the midst of Christian families there should be persons who regard the crimes I have mentioned as too monstrous to be believed. It is certainly is credible to American manners and character that the people are inclined at the first sight to turn from my story with horror.
00:31:40
Speaker
I would now appeal to the world and ask whether I have not done all that could have been expected of me and all that lay in my power to bring to an investigation the charges I have brought against the priests and nuns of Canada. Although it was necessary to the cause of truth that I should in some degree implicate myself, I have not hesitated to appear as a voluntary self-accuser before the world.
00:32:03
Speaker
I determined to make my accusations to the press, and through misrepresentations and scandals, flattery and threats have been resorted to, to nullify or to suppress my testimony. I have persevered, although, as many of my friends have thought, at the risk of abduction or death." Sounds a little bit cliched. A cliche from 1836.
00:32:30
Speaker
I have, I think, afforded every opportunity that could be reasonably expected to judge of my credibility. I have appealed to the existence of things in the Hotel Dune nunnery as a great criterion of the truth of my story. I have described the apartment and now in this volume have added many further particulars with such a description
00:32:50
Speaker
of them as my memory has enabled me to make. I have offered, in case I should be proved an imposter, to submit to any punishment which may be proposed, even to re-delivery into the hands of my bitterest enemies to suffer what they may please to inflict. Now in these circumstances I would ask the people of the United States whether my duty has not been discharged.
00:33:12
Speaker
Have I not done what I ought to, to inform and to alarm them? I would also solemnly appeal to the government of Great Britain, under whose guardianship is the province oppressed by the gloomy institution from which I have escaped, and ask whether such atrocities ought to be tolerated, and even protected by an enlightened and Christian power.
00:33:32
Speaker
I trust the hour is near, when the den to the hotel dew will be laid open, when a tyrant who have polluted it will be brought out with the wretched victims of their oppression and crimes." So this book, despite its provenance being somewhat dubious, was seized upon at times.
00:33:55
Speaker
Look, here we go. Here we go. This is exactly what we're talking about, those evil Catholics. Look at what horrible things they get up to, much as the protocols of the elders of Zion was pounced upon by people who were very willing to be told what it had to say.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yeah, so basically if you're already an anti-Catholic this book was evidence of the sins of Catholicism and if you were flirting with anti-Catholicism this book appeared to be evidence that there was some reason to be concerned.
00:34:28
Speaker
And I mean, I understand there have been some severely dodgy goings on in Ireland with mass baby graves and what have you and some of the orphanages and stuff, but nevertheless. Well, I mean, there's even been issues in Canada where there's been, where church institutions have found mass graves of Indigenous
00:34:49
Speaker
So this is not to say the Catholic Church hasn't done some very bad things. What is of note with respect to Maria Monk is that this book caused such a scandal there was an investigation. So the nunnery in question did exist.
00:35:08
Speaker
It was investigated by the Canadian government and the Catholic Church. They found no evidence that any of these claims were true. Of course, people who believe the book claim that's all part of a state-led cover-up with the Catholic Church being involved in it. But the book did cause enough of the scandal for investigations to be made at the time.
00:35:29
Speaker
But anyway, that's an interesting little side road there. It's not the main thrust of this paper in particular. It's just an interesting look at how these people in the paranoid style work, basically.
00:35:45
Speaker
But so he goes from sections two and three where it's all been about history, section four moves on to American politics in what was then the current day. So he says if we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from those 19th century movements.
00:36:00
Speaker
The spokesman of those earlier movements felt they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country, that they were fending off threats to a still well-established way of life in which they played an important part. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed. America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try and repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.
00:36:25
Speaker
And so, again, the title of the paper is The Paranoid Style in American Politics. This is what he's mostly interested in talking about. So now he goes from talking about historical examples of the paranoid style. He starts talking about more, or at the time, contemporary examples of it, which he sees in right-wing politics.
00:36:46
Speaker
An interesting section of it is where he talks about the role of the media, which these days when people talk about this sort of thing, they'll talk about the role of the internet in particular, is how that's changed things, that's allowed, that's changed the way in which these things can possibly spread or be talked about. But in this one,
00:37:04
Speaker
Speaking in 1963 and then writing in 1965, he says,
00:37:25
Speaker
For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the Martyr conspiracies, we may now substitute imminent public figures, like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower,
00:37:41
Speaker
Secretaries of state like Marshall, Acheson and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid conspirators headed by Alger Hiss, I found that very interesting that apparently at one point John Foster Dulles, there were conspiracy theories about him being a communist agent.
00:38:01
Speaker
Which would be very curious given the role that John Foster Dulles played with the Dulles plan. Yeah, the Dulles brothers. I can't remember if it was him or his brother who was the head of the CIA. One of them was like rabidly anti-communist. One of them was just convinced that, you know, was exhibiting the paranoid style, essentially. He was convinced that these communists are everywhere and if we don't fight them in any way we possibly can. Well, if it turned out his brother was a communist, he was probably right. Well, there you go, yeah.
00:38:27
Speaker
It also talks, when it gives these examples of, they're not particularly meaningful to us now, I guess, given that it's stuff that's sort of 50 years old, but it does get a bit more sort of pertinent today when he talks in more general terms about things like the phenomenon of people who prefer conspiracy to the idea of a mere coincidence or just sort of an era. So he says,
00:38:53
Speaker
Any historian of warfare knows that it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence. But if, for every error and every act of incompetence, one can substitute an act of treason, we can see how many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. Treason in high places can be found at almost every turning. And in the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position, but how it has managed to survive at all.
00:39:21
Speaker
And then finally, he goes on when he actually talks about this paranoid style in the right wing. He sort of, he boils it down to this sort of description. He says, the basic elements of contemporary right wing thought can be reduced to three. First, there has been the now familiar sustained conspiracy to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government and to pave the way for socialism or communism.
00:39:46
Speaker
The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by sinister men who are shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests. The final contention is that the country is infused with a network of communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents,
00:40:06
Speaker
So that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans. Which, I mean, these days, like communism, the red scare hasn't gone away 100%, but it's not really the thing that really seems to motivate current politicians. But nevertheless, you hear the same sort of thing about if it's, if it's your CRT or these days that the trans community has been getting in the neck. It's sort of a
00:40:31
Speaker
Well, I mean, you have quite a lot of Republican talking points about the Democrats as they want to socialise everything. They want to socialise healthcare, which apparently is a very bad thing to provide healthcare for the general population.
00:40:46
Speaker
And they want to extend the franchise of benefits to more people, which is increasing the welfare state. To the rest of a general tenor of the Democrats are communists in disguise going on within the American political landscape.
00:41:05
Speaker
But you might say it's now so normalized in American politics. It's kind of taken to be just a de facto view. And we see a little bit about that in the local political sphere in Aotearoa, because every so often,
00:41:23
Speaker
you'll get political commentators or leaders of minor parties like ACT who will try the the Labour government or the Labour government and the Green Party are trying to bring in communism through stealth and they're trying to use those American style talking points where the term communist is a pejorative and the problem is communists may be a pejorative in the United States
00:41:47
Speaker
but it doesn't appear to be a pejorative here. Socialist is definitely not a pejorative in Aotearoa, or indeed I'd say in the Antipodes in general. There's nothing wrong with socialism in our political sphere. It's still a dirty word in America, but it's so commonplace as a dirty word that it's hard to actually see the explicit conspiracy theorizing now. It's just that's the way American English works now.
00:42:18
Speaker
So this moves on to the last section, section five, which is where he's sort of, he's now pulling this all together to talk about his, having gone through all the examples both past and at the time contemporary, he's bringing together everything to just talk about the paranoid style itself.
00:42:34
Speaker
So he starts the section by saying, let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and to destroy a way of life. One may object that there are conspiratorial acts in history and there is nothing paranoid about taking note of them, an interesting point that I'm pretty sure... I think Brian...
00:42:58
Speaker
I think that line has been referred to in the past when people also say there are conspiracies in history. But anyway, there's nothing paranoid about taking note of them. This is true. All political behavior requires strategy. Many strategic acts depend for their effect upon a period of secrecy and anything that is secret may be described, often with little exaggeration, as conspiratorial.
00:43:18
Speaker
The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a vast or gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat is not the usual methods of political give and take, but an all-out crusade.
00:43:42
Speaker
Now here we find that the paranoid style and Popper's conspiracy theory of society are almost identical because Popper's characterization of the conspiracy theory of society is that people who believe in the conspiracy theory of society see conspiracies as the motive force in history. It's not the recognition that conspiracies occur
00:44:08
Speaker
It's the claim that people who subscribe to that mindset think that conspiracies are the only way that events come about. People are always plotting in the background to bring about their ends. So conspiracies are the way you get to things. So it's actually interesting how similar the views here are between Hosteta and Papa.
00:44:31
Speaker
And that section there calls to mind the malevolent global conspiracies that Lee Basham will be talking about sometime after this. Which we've already covered. We certainly have. Prior to this. Time. It's all over the place. It keeps marching on.
00:44:48
Speaker
So yeah, that's sort of the theme of section five. He's describing this paranoid mindset in some detail now that he's given all the examples of it. He says, the paranoid spokesman constantly lives at a turning point. It is now or never an organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out, which is a thing that bugs me a little bit with the sort of conspiracists, but also with some of the
00:45:15
Speaker
some of the dooming and glooming that goes on in both sides. It always strikes me that there's a little bit of arrogance in believing that you're the last generation, that you're the people who are going to see the end of the world. That really does make you extra special if you're the last ones there are.
00:45:32
Speaker
Especially if, as some historians note, you only know your civilizations in decline once you've gone past the point of no return. So if Alex Jones is right, and he has spotted that the American civilization is in danger of collapse,
00:45:53
Speaker
Then, presumably, actually, the collapse has already started, and to quote Babylon 5, it is too late for the pebbles to vote. So he continues, Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise, but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated, if not from the world,
00:46:20
Speaker
at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals. And since these goals are not remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's frustration.
00:46:35
Speaker
That's the mindset of the person that's going on. He then turns to the way they characterize the enemy in particular. He says, this enemy is clearly delineated. He has a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman, sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury loving.
00:46:54
Speaker
which, again, was something that came up in those historical ones. There's always an element of decadent people these days I've talked about lately, even when the people themselves were making these claims could only really be described as elite. Nevertheless, they're the worst of all. They're the ones who are out of touch. But Hosteter continues, he makes crises, starts, runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactured disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.
00:47:23
Speaker
And then a little later, very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power. He controls the news. He directs the public mind through, quote, managed news. He has unlimited funds. He has a new secret for influencing the mind, brainwashing. He has a special technique for seduction, the Catholic confessional. He is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.
00:47:44
Speaker
still sounding kind of familiar well i mean look at critical race theory look at governor de santis and trying to snatch back the education system from the woke so having talked about the paranoid mind see it the way the the the the people in the paranoid style characterize the enemies he then talks about
00:48:05
Speaker
how they actually argue their point and how the paranoid style is expressed in writing. He says,
00:48:23
Speaker
One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this political style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.
00:48:41
Speaker
Paranoid writing begins with certain defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons, after all. A secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivably pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality, individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogenous civilization.
00:49:05
Speaker
The typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with such defensible assumptions, and with a careful accumulation of facts, or at least what appear to be facts, and to marshal these facts toward an overwhelming proof of a particular conspiracy that is to be established. It is nothing if not coherent. In fact, the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures, or ambiguities.
00:49:28
Speaker
which speaks to some of the earlier stuff that Brian talked about, with this sort of errant data and everything, the conspiracy theorists will actually be able to explain everything at all, everything completely, and then use that as their way of saying that their theories are superior to countervailing ones that maybe leave some of these things behind.
00:49:48
Speaker
Yeah, so the unaccounted for or unaccountable data. Mmm, yeah. And so that basically sums up his summing up of the paranoid style, and he concludes his entire paper as follows. The recurrence of the paranoid style over a long span of time and in different places suggests that a mentality disposed to see the world in the paranoid's way may always be present in some considerable minority of the population.
00:50:14
Speaker
But the fact that movements employing the paranoid style are not constant but come in successive episodic waves suggests that the paranoid disposition is mobilized into action chiefly by social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds rather than negotiable interests into political action. Catastrophe, or the fear of catastrophe, is most likely to elicit the syndrome of paranoid rhetoric.
00:50:36
Speaker
In American experience, ethnic and religious conflicts, with their threat of the submergence of whole systems of values, have plainly been the major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but elsewhere class conflicts have also immobilized such energies. The paranoid tendency is aroused by a confrontation of opposed interests, which are, or are felt to be, totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise.
00:51:00
Speaker
The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular political interest, perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of their demands, cannot make themselves felt in the political process. Feeding that they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception of the world of power as omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power, and this through distorting lenses, and have little chance to observe its actual machinery.
00:51:26
Speaker
Al B. Namier once said that the crowning attainment of historical study is to achieve an intuitive sense of how things do not happen. That it's precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
00:51:54
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting point right at the end there. A feeling of impotence, which I notice sometimes, this is something I've been seeing talked a lot about politics in Britain at the moment, a feeling of being the underdog even when you're in power. There are people who actually exhibit a lot of power but will still speak as though
00:52:15
Speaker
They're the underdogs. They're constantly assailed by these forces. I mean, Trump is a great example of that. Exactly, yeah. So this was a comment that Joe Yousinsky made. So when he and Joe Parent wrote American conspiracy theories, they coined the notion of conspiracy theories are for losers. And by that, they mean people who are on the losing side of political debate.
00:52:41
Speaker
are often the ones who put forward conspiracy theories to explain why their lot isn't in power at this particular time. And people pointed out to Joe, and also presumably also Joe, given it's Joe and Joe, that Trump was not the loser of the American election. Trump was the winner. But Trump was engaging in conspiracy theories typically associated with Republicans when they're not in power.
00:53:09
Speaker
And Joe, and presumably also Joe's response was, well, yes, but that's because Trump is acting as if he's under assault the entire time. And indeed, that's going to be something we'll be talking about in the bonus episode, because, of course, one of the assaults that Trump claimed was happening during his presidency, or at least post his presidency, sorry, during his presidency, was that the FBI
00:53:37
Speaker
engaged in inappropriate surveillance of him as part of a Obama level plot to destabilize his government. So Trump was always talking as if he were the loser. And people have argued was that a rhetorical move that Trump engaged in? Or did Trump sincerely believe that he was being assailed from all sides? But whatever the case,
00:54:01
Speaker
you get that kind of weird paranoid-esque mentality in people like Trump, like Johnson, like Orban in Hungary, which explains some of the phenomena that we say.
00:54:19
Speaker
And so that is the paranoid style in American politics. So yeah, good to actually have read that paper now that so much of what we've looked at in the past sort of was in a way based on or certainly which provided a starting jumping off point for a lot of it. I can see how people could read that paper and take away the idea that conspiracy theorists are crazy paranoid people.
00:54:45
Speaker
Although I don't think that's what the paper's saying at all. It's talking about a particular kind of thinking, but it never says this is what all conspiracy theorists are. It certainly says here's a kind of thinking which is given to conspiracy theories, but it isn't the only kind of thinking around conspiracy theories.
00:55:03
Speaker
So I have a theory about this paper. It's widely cited, very widely cited. I don't think it's widely read. I think it's one of those foundational papers that you tap when you're doing your literature review. And the common wisdom has become that Hosteta talks about conspiracy theorists as being paranoid. And people then don't recognize, no, it's a paranoid style. He's very careful at the beginning of the paper
00:55:32
Speaker
to distinguish between paranoia in a clinical sense and the paranoid style as a argumentative or rhetorical sense he talks about. But also interesting to note, because some people will go away and they'll skim the paper to confirm they've got Hofstad all right.
00:55:49
Speaker
At the beginning of the paper, he's very careful about the paranoid style. But towards the end of the paper, a little bit like our complaint about Brian's work with respect to mature conspiracy theories. At the end of the paper, he slips and slides and starts talking about the paranoid. And so it seems that maybe, once again, it's a foundational paper. People are inventing terminology.
00:56:18
Speaker
There's, it's also a paper that was given as opposed to written as an academic piece. Maybe some people are scanning through, well, he talks about conspiracy theorists as paranoid towards the end. So that's what he must make. So there is some sliding of terminology in the piece. And so for
00:56:38
Speaker
the not so careful or the attentive reader, they might go, well he talks about paranoia towards the end, so he thus must be talking about conspiracy theorists being paranoid, in the same respect that a careful reader of Keighley will go and actually, Brian defines what he means by the conspiracy theories he's interested in at the beginning of the paper, the mature unwanted conspiracy. Unwanted? Unwanted and unwarranted.
00:57:08
Speaker
the mature unwarranted conspiracy theory. And yes, he starts talking about conspiracy theories towards the end, but it's fairly clear from the context he's actually talking about a specific kind of conspiracy theory when he describes the ills those conspiracy theories have. And yeah, just again,
00:57:30
Speaker
It was, I guess, a bit depressing, really, to be reading this paper from the 1960s and recognizing in the stuff he says, the rhetoric that we still see to this very day. Although if, as he says, it's something that's been going around, it's been around for centuries, then I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it's persisted.
00:57:47
Speaker
No, no, there's a paper we'll be reading at some point very soon, which is kind of a reply to this paper, I believe it was by Gordon S. Wood, in which he kind of fisks Hofstadter on the history that Hofstadter uses to establish this particular case. And so it's going to be interesting to see what your response is to a criticism
00:58:15
Speaker
of Hofstadter, where Wood doesn't necessarily disagree with Hofstadter's overall thesis, but he claims that Hofstadter gets the history of conspiracy theorising in America wrong. But for now, that's all we have for you. When I say you, I mean you the regular listener, but not you the patron.
00:58:39
Speaker
Not you, our most beloved patrons. Our most precious, precious children. We have such sights to show you. And by which we mean a bonus episode. We do. Accessible only to our patrons. Are we going to be talking about a Naomi or two?
00:58:55
Speaker
Yeah, you've got to have a Naomi or two. Oh, you've got to have a Naomi or two. A bit more of a bit more of wacky, classified information showing up in places where it probably shouldn't. And as we suggested during this episode, we're going to talk a bit more about the FBI and Trump and Russia and all of that fun, fun, interesting, fun stuff. You know, if Trump
00:59:21
Speaker
does somehow get back into power are we going to have another trumpatorium we had a trumpatorium for a while we did yeah it just got too just too dull to talk about the man because he was everywhere and it was always the same yeah i think we might have to
00:59:39
Speaker
I keep hoping that Andy Bushiago is going to run for president again, but Andy, the president, has not been updated in a long time. Maybe he's back on Mars. Yeah, probably. I mean, he does go to Mars a lot as part of his work as a time traveller.
00:59:55
Speaker
Yeah, good for him, frankly. Why not? So that's all we have for this main episode of the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Again, if you want to become one of our patrons, it's as simple as going to patreon.com and searching for the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I think the URL might be patreon.com slash Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, but I won't swear to that. But I know that definitely if you search for the podcast name, you'll find it straight away. But if you don't want to sign yourself up,
01:00:23
Speaker
to be one of our patrons that's fine too because you're one of our listeners. What is a podcast without listeners? Not much. Not much at all. It's a conversation is what it is. Recorded for what benefit? I don't know. Fortunately we have listeners so we'll never have to find out. So with that very cheery thought in mind I think I'm just going to leave you with a goodbye. I'm going to say lessitude because that's going to be appropriate with the bonus episode coming back up. Lessitude.
01:00:55
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Stentors. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember,
01:01:23
Speaker
Nothing is real. Everything is permitted. But conditions apply.