There is a Hand, my friends, which guides our destinies toward other ends than we planned. And I wish He’d cut it out.
Bill Veeck, Thirty Tons a Day
Talking recently with my publisher and friend, I said that I found most conspiracy theories tough to embrace, because in my experience people were unable to keep their mouths shut or their purposes in mind for prolonged periods – a requisite for any successful conspiracy. As usual, I seem to be in the minority. My fellow humans have happily subscribed to one conspiracy theory after another for many centuries, and they show no signs of growing disenchanted with this mode of looking at life.
I: Wachet Auf
QAnon conspiracy theory alleges that there is a battle between good and evil in which the Republican Mr. Trump is allied with the former. QAnon followers are awaiting two major events: the Storm and the Great Awakening. The Storm is the mass arrest of people in high-power positions who will face a long-awaited reckoning. The Great Awakening involves a single event in which everyone will attain the epiphany that QAnon theory was accurate the whole time. This realization will allow society to enter an age of utopia.
The Qanon Great Awakening is far from the first such in our history. The first Great Awakening took place in the early decades of the 18th Century, during which self-appointed “reformers” from newly formed or forming Protestant sects took on the Puritan establishment in the names of reviving intensity of religious conviction and encouraging individual laymen to rely on their own interpretations of scripture. One of the leading reformers, Gilbert Tennent, “expressed the revivalists’ view of the older clergy . . . . as crafty, cruel, cold-hearted, bigoted, faithless hypocrites who held the people in contempt. Tennent found the motives and the piety of the unawakened ministers suspect, and he regarded them not as co-workers but as enemies” (Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism 76). While most of the reformers limited themselves to increasingly violent invective directed against the Puritan establishment, some “tried to bully the colleges and at a few moments of extremism they had gone in for book burning” (ibid 82).
This original Great Awakening demonstrated a number of characteristics that have persisted through succeeding outbreaks – rejection of established authority, of reason, of civility – the latter seen as evidence of hypocrisy and insufficiently passionate faith. Also to be repeated was the view of the establishment as diabolically clever, cruel and contemptuous of “the people.” What these first reformers lacked was a foreign enemy. The second wave of Great Awakening, about a hundred years after the first, found an excellent one in Catholicism.
“Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the American way of life, and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse . . . . ‘A conspiracy exists,’ Morse proclaimed, ‘and its plans are already in operation . . . we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies’ . . . . The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government: ‘Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here’ . . . . ‘It is an ascertained fact,’ wrote another Protestant militant, ‘that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the names of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners'” (Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 517).
Many of these claims have been echoed in later times, applied to other diabolical foreign enemies: the confident assertion of a vast conspiracy with no evidence offered for its existence (except the purported testimony of an un-named source), the assertion of the “ascertained fact” (no indication who’s done the ascertaining), the suggestion that anyone may be a conspirator. If you can’t even trust your dancing master, who can you trust? Obviously, only the man who’s brought this danger to your attention.
Also eerily familiar is the attribution of revolting crimes to the foreign or foreign-sponsored enemy. In The Paranoid Style, Hofstadter reports “the anti-Catholics developed an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seductions, licentious convents and monasteries, and the like. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hôtel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after a residence of five years as novice and nun, reported her convent life there in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She recalled having been told by the Mother Superior that she must ‘obey the priests in all things’; to her ‘utter astonishment and horror,’ she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. A high point in the Awful DIsclosures was Maria Monk’s eyewitness account of the strangling of two babies. Her book, hotly attacked and as hotly defended, continued to be read and believed even after her mother, a Protestant living near Montreal, gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood when she had rammed a pencil into her head” (517).
Populist preachers have succeeded one another on the American stage into our own time. An early 20th Century example, ex-baseball player Billy Sunday, wandered the country conducting “crusades,” converting millions. His sermons and pronouncements were characterized by sweeping vituperation of all non-believers in his brand of religion and an aggrieved stance as victim of Satanic forces in society. This mentality spread more thoroughly into the political realm as the 20th Century went on, reaching what was then its high point with the passage of the Volstead Act and in the first Red Scare of 1919.
Sunday had plenty of company in his efforts. The prohibitionist crusader Carry Nation expressed the reformers’ certainty that their own views were the only correct ones concisely: “It is not possible,” she said, “to make a bad law. If it is bad, it is not a law.” No one seemed to notice that such a pronouncement advocated anarchy more definitively than any demon the Red Scare was warning against.
Great Awakenings, with their attendant rejection of authority and employment of devilish, conspiratorial scapegoats, have scarcely been confined to the United States, or to the modern age. Norman Cohn’s remarkable study The Pursuit of the Millennium exhaustively examines the succession of such movements in Europe during the centuries that we now call the End of the Middle Ages, centuries in which the old order was visibly falling apart and blatantly corrupt and the birth of The Renaissance hadn’t been announced to anyone. In those movements Cohn discovers much that sounds depressingly familiar.
Various millennial movements throughout the period produced charismatic leaders who projected or to whom their followers ascribed similar attributes: “His armies will be invariably and triumphantly victorious, his presence will make the earth yield prodigious crops, his reign will be an age of such perfect harmony as the old, corrupt world has never known” (Cohn 70). Cohn goes on to observe that, “This image was of course a purely phantastic one, in the sense that it bore no relation to the real nature and capacity of any human being who ever existed or ever could exist. It was nevertheless an image which could be projected on to a living man; and there were always men about who were more than willing to accept such a projection, who in fact passionately desired to be seen as infallible, wonder-working saviours . . . . the secret of the ascendancy which they exercised never lay in their birth nor to any great extent in their education, but always in their personalities . . . . their commanding bearing and their personal magnetism” (Ibid 70 ). In today’s terms, members of these movements expected their leaders would bring on The Storm and The Great Awakening.
Such movements were given fertile ground by the arrival of ugly surprises, such as the Black Death. In the sadly typical human response to disaster, people immediately set out to discover someone to blame. Cohn reports, “when the Black Death reached western Europe in 1348 it was at once concluded that some class of people must have introduced into the water supply a poison concocted of spiders, frogs and lizards . . . . As the plague continued and people grew more and more bewildered and desperate, suspicion swung now here, now there, lighting successively on the lepers, the poor, the rich, the clergy, before it came finally to rest on the Jews, who were thereupon almost exterminated” (72-24).
The figures of the Antichrist, the Devil, and his subaltern demons had lost their grip on many humans’ imaginations by the 20th Century. But the tendency to seek scapegoats during times of social turmoil had weakened not at all.
In 1905, Russian mystic Sergei Nilus published a document, secretly written by the Czar’s secret police – or, rather, secretly plagiarized and adopted to anti-Semitic ends by them from a French satire that made no mention of Jews – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. By 1917, translations had been published in Europe, the Americas, the far East. The Nazis leaned heavily on it as “evidence” in their campaign and eventual genocide against the Jews.
In 1921, the London Times documented the original sources of the Protocols, showing conclusively that the document was a fraud, the “Elders” nonexistent. Courts in Switzerland and in Russia have declared the Protocols “obvious forgeries” and “ridiculous nonsense.” The US Senate declared them “fabricated” and “gibberish.” No amount of documented debunking has slowed The Protocols’ spread or deterred its believers. It lives on today on the internet, fueling the fantasies and hatreds of neo-Nazis and other anti-semites.
II: I Scapegoat, Therefore I Am Human
When our daughter was in her third year, my wife and I left her one night alone at the kitchen table for some reason. Alone, except for a full bottle of strawberry jam. When we returned after only a few minutes, the jam had been transferred to every surface within our daughter’s reach, starting with her face and shirt. While I think we both instantly recognized that the art project should have been predictable, my wife expressed her dismay vocally while I attempted to look censorious. Our daughter withstood this initial reaction and said, with great calm and utter conviction, “I blame Mommy.”
Seeking out a scapegoat to evade personal responsibility for a misdeed is, I think, a nearly universal human trait. Some of us are brought up or trained to try to resist the impulse, to Be Accountable, to Fess Up. Some of us are not, and go through life blaming others for our screwups. Most of us fall somewhere between those two poles, taking responsibility one day, ducking it the next. Neither of these options constitutes what could rightly be called addictive behavior. Only when a person or group of people begin to organize their lives around a perpetual sense of resentment and a perpetual need for scapegoats might the concept of addiction become useful.
III: Vengeance Is Mine, Saith Me
She began to feel what life was like when you live it with a man with a grievance. Like being swallowed by a very big lazy shark, who can’t stop if he wants to, because his teeth all point one way, towards the dark.”
– Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth
If you’ve not been cursed to live with someone addicted to grievance, it’s pretty near certain that you’ve known people whose first response, whenever anything goes wrong in their lives, is to search for someone else to blame. When they seem to have no immediate problems, they obsess about distant, often imaginary agents who are plotting some terrible threat to humanity, such as planning to raise taxes or legalize something that ought to be a capital crime. In short, you’ve known someone addicted to Grievance.
I say “addicted” advisedly – on the advice of James Kimmel, Jr., co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies. He asserts, citing a number of clinical studies employing positron emission tomography and analysis of gaming behavior, that “experiencing or being reminded of a perceived wrong or injustice – a grievance – activate[s] . . . [the] same reward and habit regions of the brain [as do cue situations for the drug addict], triggering cravings in anticipation of experiencing pleasure and relief through retaliation . . . . the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent – an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.”
After reviewing brain-imaging studies from a variety of researchers around the world, Kimmel summarizes their results: ” . . . many individuals, particularly males, seek justice in the form of revenge against perceived wrongdoers despite the high personal cost because of the narcotics-like brain-biological pleasure that is derived from punishing perceived wrongdoers.”
Since “many” are not “all,” Kimmel, citing in particular the work of German researchers (Strobel, A., et al, Beyond Revenge: Neural and Genetic Bases of Altruistic Punishment, NeuroImage, 54(1), 671-680), Kimmel suggests “the hypothesis of a ‘vulnerable brain’ — a brain that is vulnerable both to substance abuse and justice-seeking, leading to enhanced antisocial/violent/criminal behavior. We are also left to wonder whether punishing these individuals with confinement (when public safety does not require it) only exacerbates their condition and cravings for justice, and whether a better strategy for reducing crime and increasing public safety would be to develop effective interventions that help reduce or control the justice-seeking compulsion—such as 12-step programs . . . cognitive/behavioral therapies, or pharmacological interventions.”
Looking at the faces of the January 6 Capitol rioters, I find it difficult to imagine them volunteering for any 12-step or other therapeutic programs or willingly submitting to any “pharmacological interventions” other than those they’ve already chosen to engage in. I wonder how Kimmel imagines these people could be reached for treatment other than by initial and sustained coercion.
IV: A Smoker’s Story
“We don’t try to scare you with medical claims.”
I began smoking cigarettes in about 1956. I was a freshman in high school, so my smoking had to be surreptitious. My parents had been smokers but both had quit by then and disapproved of the habit, and smoking was at least ostensibly forbidden on high school grounds, though the prohibition was spottily enforced.
Why did I take up cigarettes? I think my strongest motive was simply that most adults smoked, especially actors in movies and television, sports stars, musicians, and various other culturally admirable people. In the movies, on tv, everybody smoked, constantly. I desperately wanted not to be a kid, and here was a relatively easy way to act like a cool adult. By the end of high school, I was a smoker, never giving a thought to any discouraging words I might have heard about the practice.
Friends quit; I didn’t. I became a parent; I kept smoking. Cigarettes were more and more heavily taxed; I ponied up. I read the increasingly dire health warnings on my Camel packs; my steed and I plowed on, undeterred. It took a stroke to stop me from smoking, and I have no idea how the stroke accomplished that feat. When I emerged from rehab, I simply didn’t want to smoke any more.
In other words, not Reason nor Authority nor Economic Disincentives nor a sense of responsibility could persuade or force me to abandon my addiction. It took a bio-chemical catastrophe. Was I addicted to tobacco or nicotine or both, or to their innumerable associations with other activities built up over the years? The first time I tried seriously to quit smoking, when I was about 30, I wrote a song to memorialize the event:
Goodbye, My Camel
Two o’clock Saturday morning, a half-shot of bourbon to go
The night’s dark with stars, soon they’ll close all the bars,
And what I’ll do then I don’t know
In my room, the old lightbulb is burning, on the corner the streetlight’s sad glow
There’s no one to ease this sad yearning
No one to ride me down slow
Because my Camel is gone, and I’m all alone
Alone as that star in the sky
Goodbye – goodbye, my little Camel, goodbye
Your eye use to glow in the darkness
I could smell your sweet breath in the dawn
You rode me through deserts of weakness
You queen, I’m your eternal pawn…
Now they’re all sayin Thank God it’s Friday, but the cheap drinks just don’t satisfy
Not the click of the cubes, not the news on the tube,
Not my friends tellin comfortable lies
Because my Camel is gone, I’ve thrown her away
I don’t even remember why
Goodbye – goodbye, my little Camel, goodbye
I identified in that lyric a lot of functions cigarettes performed in my life, starting with a Siamese-twin brotherhood with booze and including the gift of a kind of company for a habitually solitary man. As anyone hearing the song might have predicted, I lasted three weeks that first time.
Twenty years later, I took another shot at quitting. This time, I’d figured out that having something for my hands and mouth to fool with was part of the habit of smoking, so I got me a classic corncob pipe and carried it with me everywhere with no tobacco in it – just the pipe, with a stem to chew on and a bowl to manipulate. That worked pretty well. I got through three months without a smoke. By the end of that time, people were nearly begging me to start again, since I’d become insufferable – short tempered, impatient, snapping angrily at the least annoyance. After that, I gave up trying to give up cigarettes.
I had a couple of college degrees. I held all advertising, especially from the tobacco companies, in contempt. I believed the scientific method was the best way to operate our brains that we’d yet found, and I respected its conclusions about tobacco. I respected other people’s desire to avoid my smoke, and limited my smoking to solitary, outside spaces. But I kept at it, rain or shine, summer or winter.
V: A Rare Success Story
– Magazine Ads from the 1930s
Perhaps I have a “vulnerable brain,” or what used to be called an “addictive personality.” For the less vulnerable, a comprehensive campaign – run by health officials, government, the schools, the entertainment industry, and private anti-tobacco groups – has been surprisingly effective. In 1991, 27.5% of both adults and young people were smoking cigarettes. By 2018, cigarette smokers had declined to 13.7% of adults and 8.8% of younger people. The latter decline is particularly significant. According to the American Lung Association, “People who start smoking at an early age are more likely to develop a severe addiction to nicotine than those who start at a later age.”
Though various researchers have tried, it’s highly unlikely that anyone can reliably determine which aspects of this comprehensive campaign have produced these pretty impressive results. Too damn many variables motivate changes in human behavior, and the motivations are often not even conscious. I can only speak for myself, then, and report that the elimination of images of smoking in the entertainment industry is the one strategy that I think might have kept me from starting to smoke. Without the mental image of a cigarette drooping casually from Robert MItchum’s lip, maybe I’d have chosen another route to feeling Cool.
And maybe that suggests that the most likely way to quell the grievance addiction and conspiracy addiction that seem to be tearing our country apart is to put a lid on the promulgation of this mode of thinking, as we put a lid on the tobacco companies’ ability to advertise their wares directly in public spaces and indirectly through product placement in the entertainment media.
Such a suggestion will immediately raise objection on First Amendment grounds, but speech has already had limits placed on it by the Supreme Court over the years. Prohibited speech includes that which is defamatory, that which “presents a clear and present danger” of causing panic that would put others in peril, and that which is “obscene.” Certainly a case can be made that Qanon and other such conspiracy theories meet the criteria for the first two limitations, and probably the third as well.
But who will take action against the Grievance Industry? Kimmel himself recognizes the difficulty of finding a champion to take it on: “Political parties and interest groups have come to rely upon inflaming grievances and stoking vindictiveness to generate donations and motivate voters. Media, entertainment and social networking giants also rely upon grievance and revenge-based content to attract viewers and users and increase advertising and sales.” If we eliminate political parties, interest groups, the media and the internet as potential sources of resistance, who or what is left?
VI: What Is to Be Done?
The Christian quick trip from love to hate and murder is our principal entertainment. We might call it “Christianity Fails Again,” and how satisfying so many of us have been trained to find it when it fails and fails.
– Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death
If you think for a moment about most popular movies, radio and television shows, you’ll have to admit the accuracy of Vonnegut’s summary. A good American, who loves his family and/or his co-workers is presented with a challenge to the security of same by some utterly, irredemiably evil person – an outlaw, a serial killer, a terrorist, a feminazi – and the good American must ultimately abandon his/her civilized restraints in order to destroy the evil one. A good American: a sheriff, a cop, a soldier, perhaps (though rarely) an independent private citizen. Catastrophe averted; the hero can go home and hug his kids and pet the dog.
This is the view of life we’re presented with by everyone from the late John Wayne to Donald Belasario to George W. Bush to the late Rush LImbaugh. They hate us for our freedom. They’re diabolically clever and never quit plotting against us. So we’d better kill them quick. The exact identity of the “they” is, as they say in Econ 101, fungible.
The twin myths – that some humans are absolutely good, some absolutely evil and that True Americans are absolutely good – lie at the root of our long romance with conspiracy theories, and it’s the root that must be dug out before its poisonous vine finally strangles us. The non-stop cable “news” shows, whether of the right or the left, the non-stop ranting of talk radio, of many podcasts and videos and blogs on the internet – all are devoted to promoting these myths, over and over and over.
I frankly can’t think of what can be done to curb these sources of mental pollution, except to try to keep younger people from being exposed to them. Yes. Good luck with that, as people are fond of saying these days, the ironically hip counsel of despair.
VII: Something to Say Yes To
When they’ve said no to crack, can we someday give them something so say yes to?
– Robert Stone, “A Higher Horror of Whiteness”
My sole prescription is meant for individual use. My involvements with local and national politics over a lifetime have taught me only that I know nothing useful about political action except that I know nothing useful about it. Still, I can’t escape the myth of America I imbibed in the milk of my Frosted Flakes. Robert Penn Warren put it nicely: “You know, the grandpas and the great-grandpas carried the assumption that somehow their lives and their decisions were important; that as they went up, down, here and there, such a life was important and that it was a man’s responsibility to live it” (Malcolm Cowley, ed. Writers at Work). So here are some things an individual might do to counteract the virus of Grievance.
1. Turn off the 24-hour news cycle. If you must use the tv as a source of information, limit your use to a half hour broadcast by one of the original networks and a half hour from one of your local channels. God knows that’ll leave you uninformed, ill-informed or misinformed often enough, but probably not stirred to righteous rage.
2. Detach yourself and your kids from “social media.” If you or they feel the need for friends, go make some in the actual world, where you can smell them. Avoid anything called a “blog” or a “podcast.” If you want to understand what’s going on, read a book. Then read another, and another. If you’re lucky enough to have a local library that hasn’t thrown out all its books, you can still find a lot of free information and free thought. (If you think about it, you’ll find that all the purportedly free information on the internet comes at a pretty high price.)
3. Make a lot of those books history, written by historians who list their sources. Doesn’t really matter what period or focus you choose. As Flaubert supposedly said, “Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.”
4. Talk about what you learn from those history books with your kids. Read aloud to them. Pick out the interesting bits, the naughty bits, the surprising bits to start with. Try to seduce them into reading books on their own.
5. I think that the primary task of parents is to educate their kids against the prevailing myths that govern the curriculum committees and school boards throughout the land. Whether the myth that Americans are somehow different from and superior to all other humans, or that they are different from and morally inferior to all others, these myths are poisonous. If we can somehow raise a generation that proceeds from a core belief that all humans, wherever, whenever, are sometimes guilty of treating others humans terribly, guilty of ignoring obvious injustice, but also capable of acting selflessly, honorably, courageously, and that human life is an unending series of opportunities for either sort of conduct, then perhaps we can begin to become the country described in the Declaration of Independence.
6. Stop choosing “Christianity Fails Again” for entertainment. Seek out stories, whether in books or films or television shows, that do not depend on the employment of righteous violence against blatantly evil villains for their plots. Stop listening to radio and tv shows composed of angry screeching about “them.” Turn off the hate machines. If Christianity often fails, as it undeniably has, maybe that’s because we’ve never really tried it.
Works Cited
Cary, Joyce, The Horse’s Mouth, Michael Joseph, 1944.
Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millenium, Harper Torchbooks, 1961.
Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Library of the Americas, 2020.
—The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Library of the Americas, 2020.
Stone, Robert, “A Higher Horror of Whiteness,” Harper’s, December 1986.
Veeck, Bill, Thirty Tons a Day, Viking Press, 1972.
Vonnegut, Kurt, Fates Worse Than Death, Putnam, 1991.
