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Millennialism, Conspiracy, and Stigmatized Knowledge

It has become a commonplace that America is in the throes of an unrivaled period of millenarian activity. In 1978, William McLoughlin spoke of a religious resurgence that constituted a new “great awakening.” He expected it to end by about 1990. Instead, it intensified, driven in part by the proximity of the year 2000. Even the heyday of the Millerites, Shakers, Mormons, and Oneida Perfectionists in the 1830s and 1840s cannot compare to it, and there is no sign that millenarian anticipation will diminish anytime soon. The uneventful passage from 1999 to 2000 has had little effect on many millenarians, who merely set the date of the apocalypse ever further in the future.¹

What makes the present period an era of particular interest to observers of millennialism, however, is less the sheer volume of activity than its bewildering diversity. Attempts to map contemporary millennial ferment have become increasingly difficult and frustrating. The reason, I suggest, is not simply that there is so much “out there,” but that old categories no longer fit well. Much of the proliferating millennialism is neither of the old religious variety, whose roots lie in the theological controversies of earlier centuries, nor a product of secular ideological battles that dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While neither of the latter strains of millennialism has vanished, they share the stage with a rapidly growing third variety, which is the subject of this chapter.

RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR MILLENNIALISM

The Christian idea of the millennium is rooted conceptually and etymologically in the New Testament passage that prophesies that at the end of time, the saved will “reign with Christ a thousand years” until the Last Judgment (Rev. 20:4). By extension, millennialism—belief in this end-time—came to mean any religious vision that saw history reaching its climax in a collective, this-worldly redemption. In this redeemed state, those who had once suffered would receive justice, and the poor and powerless would gain what had formerly been withheld from them. Although religious institutions often had a decidedly ambivalent attitude about this implied rejection of the status quo, the origin of millennialism in a canonical text insured its survival, and resilient strains of millenarian popular religion continue in Christianity into the present. They can be seen especially in the many contemporary religious fundamentalisms, most of which contain millenarian elements.

By the late eighteenth century, however, a second form of millennialism was developing, unconnected to religious concepts. This consisted of secular visions of a perfect future—ideas propelled by faith in transcendent but not conventionally religious forces. These forces were sometimes identified with reason, and sometimes with science or history. By the late nineteenth century, secular millenarian visions had become closely linked with political ideologies, especially those that grew out of ideas about nationality, class, and race. Hence the twentieth century was both dominated and scarred by Marxism, Nazism, and a host of nationalisms, all of which promised a millennial consummation to some group judged to be particularly worthy. Like earlier religious millenarians, these secular ideologists linked the end-times with a great battle between the forces of good and evil—not a literal, biblical Armageddon, but a struggle of comparably cosmic importance.

Thus, by the mid- to late twentieth century, millenarian beliefs could be conveniently classified in either of these two broad categories. To be sure, disagreements might arise. The more religiously inclined might question whether any secular beliefs not grounded in sacred texts could be considered millenarian. Millenarians in the West sometimes disputed the application of the label to non-Christian belief systems, especially those in the non-Western world, such as the cargo cults of Melanesia. (Members of these South Pacific island sects claimed to possess secret knowledge, allegedly hidden from them by Christian missionaries. They believed the manipulation of this knowledge would bring them a utopia of unlimited manufactured goods of the kind introduced by their colonizers.) Some secular millenarians, notably Marxists, resented the application to themselves of any term that might associate them with religionists. These objections, however, tended to originate from believers rather than scholars, most of whom have been willing to apply millenarian to both secular and religious manifestations far outside the term’s original Christian frame of reference.

A tacit consensus thus developed, at least in academic quarters, about the idea of two streams of millenarian beliefs, one flowing from religious traditions and the other from secular thought. This division provided a handy classificatory schema, especially for Western history, which seemed to move from an age of religious struggles to one of ideological warfare. This simple schema, however, does not work well any longer.

The reason has little to do with the relative health of religious and secular millennialism. Both have flourished. Although it was once believed that forces for secularization would inevitably marginalize religion, the last three or four decades of the twentieth century demonstrated the vitality of many religious traditions. This is particularly evident in the growth of fundamentalisms—religious movements that seek to restore what believers consider a pristine, uncorrupted tradition. Such movements are characterized by their emphasis on the literal reading of sacred texts and the drive to remold society in conformity with religious norms. Such movements—whether in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Islam—have demonstrated both rapid growth and the ability to mobilize to pursue political objectives. While not all fundamentalisms are millenarian, many, in their quest for doctrinal purity, give millenarian teachings a position of prominence.²

Secular millennialism has been less vital, a product of what Daniel Bell famously referred to as “the end of ideology.” The great left-right battles that polarized Western politics for more than a century have largely died down. Whether the collapse of the Soviet empire was a cause or an effect of this process is a question beyond the scope of this inquiry. Nonetheless, the Soviet collapse seemed to some the definitive end of ideological battle, a point made in a triumphalist manner by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man. Samuel Huntington, who reacted somewhat differently, argues that the resurgence of religion as a polarizing force was the result of the diminished salience of ideology. In any case, in the hands of ideologues, Cold War battles developed a significant millenarian dimension, seeming to pit the forces of light (“the free world”) against the forces of darkness (“the evil empire”), with the prospect of nuclear Armageddon ahead.³

While it may seem that ideology has died out in a post–Cold War world, islands of secular millennialism remain. They appear in the resurgence of ethnic nationalism in many parts of the world, notably the Balkans, the Caucasus, and South Asia. They also appear in the racist and xenophobic movements that are prominent in western and central Europe and, to a lesser degree, in North America. Finally, they emerge in some antiglobalization rhetoric, with its implied nostalgia for a lost golden age of small, self-sufficient communities. Thus it would be incorrect to say that the older millennialisms, whether religious or secular, have disappeared; both can be found in numerous vital forms. Nonetheless, they have been joined by a third variety, which I call the improvisational millenarian style.

THE RISE OF IMPROVISATIONAL MILLENNIALISM

The improvisational millenarian style is distinctive for its independence from any single ideological tradition. Its predecessors—the religious and secular styles—consisted of variations on or deviations from some well-defined set of ideas, whether grounded in sacred texts, political ideologies, or philosophical teachings. By contrast, the improvisational style is characterized by relentless and seemingly indiscriminate borrowing. For example, Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, drew not only on esoteric Buddhism but also on the New Testament Book of Revelation, Nostradamus, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Aum Shinrikyo was the Japanese religious organization whose members tried to set off an apocalyptic war by releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1993. In his indiscriminate combination of beliefs, Asahara was typical of contemporary millenarian entrepreneurs—by which I mean individuals who create apocalyptic belief systems outside of customary religious or secular traditions. In a similar vein, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, until 1999 the head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, combined Christianity with Theosophy, channeling, and conspiracy theory. Her Montana-based church, near Yellowstone National Park, built elaborate underground bomb shelters after Prophet became convinced that a Soviet nuclear attack was imminent. In 1990, hundreds of her followers took to the shelters, only to emerge eventually into the same world they had left.

These idiosyncratic combinations highlight the improvisational style’s characteristic bricolage. Such odd conceptual structures are apt to contain elements from more than one religious tradition, together with ideas from the New Age, occultism, science, and radical politics. The combinations do not appear “natural,” since the elements often come from seemingly unrelated domains, such as conspiracy theories and fringe science, or from domains that appear to be in opposition, such as fundamentalist religion and the New Age. “New Age” is clearly the most recent constituent, and its very recency poses definitional problems. For present purposes, I employ J. Gordon Melton’s definition, which includes the following elements: mystical individual transformation; an awareness of new, nonmaterial realities; “the imposition of [a] personal vision onto society”; and belief in universally pervasive but invisible forms of energy.⁴

The appeal of these collages lies in their claim to provide holistic and comprehensive pictures of the world. The variety of their elements implies that the belief system can explain a comparably wide range of phenomena, from the spiritual to the scientific and the political. The combinations also suggest that apparent oppositions and contradictions can be resolved, and that an underlying unity transcends outward differences.

Such belief systems can flourish only in an environment in which two conditions are present. The first requirement is that a wide range of potential material—motifs that might be incorporated into a belief system—be easily accessible. The second is that existing authority structures be sufficiently weakened so that novel combinations of ideas can be proposed and taken seriously. The first condition, accessibility, has resulted from cultural exchanges now taken for granted, and from the communications infrastructure through which diverse messages move. New technologies and marketing devices have vastly increased the ease with which unusual and unpopular ideas may be spread. For print media, this has been facilitated by the ubiquitous availability of mass-market paperbacks through large bookstore chains, such as Borders and Barnes and Noble, and specialty stores catering to niche audiences such as evangelical Christians and New Age believers. Millenarian books have proved to be massive sellers—epitomized by the extraordinary success of the Left Behind series of millennialist novels by Tim La Haye and Jim Jenkins, which has sold more than fifty million copies. In addition, computer, photocopying, and other technologies have made possible the production of self-published print periodicals (zines) by individuals and groups who previously had no access to this medium.⁵

But changes in electronic communication have been far more important. Cable television, including its legally mandated community access channels, has given exponents of fringe ideas who were traditionally relegated to subcultures entrée to mass audiences. Related technology permits the sale of videocassette recordings to the general public. A number of radio talk shows cater to the conspiracist audience, sometimes stressing political plots, sometimes with an emphasis on the occult or what they consider “alternative science.” The most prominent hosts have included Art Bell, Hal Turner, and Alex Jones. In addition to spreading the “real news” through exposés, they also offer national platforms for the ideas of prominent conspiracy theorists through interviews. The influence of these media, however, pales beside that of the Internet.⁶

By the beginning of the year 2000, there were in excess of a billion Web pages in existence, as compared to only 1.3 million five years earlier. Besides the sheer volume of material it can accommodate, the Internet is the first mass medium without gatekeepers. No intermediaries, such as editors, publishers, or producers, stand between the content provider and the distribution of the message. In addition, the creation and dissemination of content require only a modest financial investment. Anyone can place a message before a potentially global audience.⁷

One effect of the Internet is to obscure the distinction between mainstream and fringe sources; another is to bind together individuals who hold fringe views. The validation that comes from seeing one’s beliefs echoed by others provides a sense of connection for otherwise isolated individuals. Excessive claims have sometimes been made for “virtual community,” but surely one effect of the Internet is to confirm and embolden those whose beliefs normally receive scant social reinforcement. The result insofar as millennialism is concerned is that the dissemination of a message is no longer linked to such traditional requirements as financial investment, popularity, or social acceptability. The bizarre, eccentric, and obscene appear on the same screen that might display the Times of London or CNN.com.

The second condition for the flourishing of improvisational millennialism, as mentioned earlier, is the erosion of existing authority structures. Even repressive governments find it difficult to block unwanted communications. Although secularization has not marginalized religion, it has weakened many traditional religious authority structures. Contributing factors to this decline have been the prestige of science and technology; population migration to diverse, media-rich urban areas; and the spread of compulsory secular education. Many religious authorities have responded by attempting to withdraw into enclaves, while others have tried to adapt their teachings to avoid conflicting with secular ideas. In either case, a reduction in power, scope of authority, and prestige have commonly resulted. Paradoxically, although science has contributed to the decline of religious authority, science too has seen its standing decline, especially in the last three decades of the twentieth century. The fruits of scientific research—whether they be nuclear weapons and nuclear power, the application of fossil fuels, or the manipulation of genetics—appear morally ambiguous. Hence science itself, instead of emerging as a surrogate for religion, has faced challenges to its authority, notably from those claiming access to nonrational forms of knowledge.

In short, many forms of authority that might in other circumstances have interfered with the ability of new belief systems to arise have proved unable to do so. Taken together, open communications and weakened authority create an environment favorable to millenarian entrepreneurs. Unconstrained by confessional traditions or ideological systems, they are free to engage in the kind of bricolage that distinguishes the improvisational millenarian style. They can borrow freely from many religious traditions, from occultism and the esoteric, from radical politics, and from both orthodox and fringe science.

In an environment in which authority has come into question, the very unclassifiability of these belief systems makes them attractive. Are they Christian or Buddhist, Western or non-Western, scientific or antiscientific, religious or secular? The very questions and categories seem out of place when the belief systems themselves ignore such boundaries. In the act of ignoring boundaries, improvisational millenarians implicitly challenge orthodox conceptions of belief and knowledge. By picking and choosing among a variety of beliefs, improvisationalists convey the message that no single belief system, whether religious or secular, is authoritative. By implication, only the idiosyncratic combination associated with a particular leader or group is deemed to be valid. The millenarian entrepreneurs who construct such collages of beliefs assert that they alone possess insights that transcend conventional differences, whether among religious traditions, between religion and politics, or between science and esotericism. The result has been a dramatic proliferation of millenarian schemata, both in terms of the number of competing visions and in terms of their diversity.

THE SOURCES OF IMPROVISATIONAL MILLENNIALISM

Where does improvisational millennialism come from? The religious and secular forms of millennialism described earlier in this chapter have relatively unproblematic origins, because they rose out of well-defined bodies of religious and political ideas. Even systems of millenarian thought that are clearly heretical or deviant define themselves in opposition to a known orthodoxy. For instance, the more militant forms of late medieval Catholic millennialism emerged in opposition to the official Augustinian doctrine of the church, just as fringe Maoist revolutionary groups later placed themselves in opposition to more established custodians of Marxist thought.

Religious and secular millennialism are, to be sure, never absolutely pure types, emerging solely from within a single tradition with no outside influences. Soviet Marxist-Leninism surely absorbed and secularized some of the religious salvationism of the Russian Orthodox Church, and many in the Nazi inner circles combined racial pseudoscience with occultism. Nonetheless, neither participants nor observers have much difficulty in assigning most millenarian movements to some single, dominant category. A movement is religious or secular. If the former, it may be Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, or some such; if the latter, racialist, socialist, and so on. Classification problems can sometimes emerge concerning particular cases (to what secular category does one assign French revolutionary Jacobinism?), but it is rarely in much doubt that some appropriate category can be identified.

The belief systems with which this inquiry is concerned, however, permit no such easy pigeonholing. They are beholden to no dominant set of ideas. They are not the work of religious heretics rebelling against the constraints of orthodoxy; nor are they the product of deviationists defying received political doctrines. Instead, they combine elements so disparate that it is often impossible to determine what if any influence predominates. The practitioners of improvisational millennialism are not mere syncretists, hybridizing a few belief systems that happen to impinge on their consciousness. Rather, they construct wholly new creations out of bits and pieces acquired from astonishingly diverse and unrelated sources. It is as though there were some reservoir of motifs into which the new millenarians can dip, acquiring scraps of this or that ideology, idea, or creed. But what sort of reservoir is this that encompasses not only the familiar themes of religious and secular millenarians but also the more outré elements—Jesuit-Masonic conspiracies, Jewish cabals, sudden shifts in the polar axis, UFOs bearing alien emissaries, subterranean tunnel systems populated by strange races? This is a mélange that we may intuitively recognize as standing outside the boundaries of even most typical millenarian discourse.

Three ideas will help us to gain a clearer understanding of the reservoir from which improvisational millennialists draw their ideas: rejected knowledge, the cultic milieu, and stigmatized-knowledge claims. Rejected knowledge is a concept developed by James Webb to aid in mapping the outer boundaries of the occult in Western culture. The closely related concept of the cultic milieu was devised by sociologist Colin Campbell to designate the sources from which many New Religious Movements draw their inspiration. Finally, in reaction to these ideas, I use the concept of stigmatized knowledge claims to designate a broader intellectual universe into which both rejected knowledge and the cultic milieu may be fitted.⁸

Rejected Knowledge

In his histories of European occultism, Webb describes the occult as “rejected knowledge.” This term refers less to the possible falsity of knowledge claims (though they may indeed be false) than to the relation between certain claims and the so-called Establishment—the dominant institutions associated with the spread of European Christianity. Christianity, in the course of achieving cultural hegemony, suppressed or ignored bodies of belief deemed to be irrelevant, erroneous, or outmoded. By the same token, those whose beliefs seem to conflict with dominant values sometimes choose to withdraw into subcultural undergrounds. The result is the creation of worldviews that exist in opposition to the prevailing ones and manifest in such forms as “Spiritualism, Theosophy, countless Eastern (and not so Eastern) cults; varieties of Christian sectarianism and the esoteric pursuits of magic, alchemy and astrology; also the pseudo-sciences.”⁹

Such underground worldviews tend to be ill-defined potpourris in which are “jumbled together the droppings of all cultures, and occasional fragments of philosophy perhaps profound but almost certainly subversive to right living in the society in which the believer finds himself.” This cultural dumping ground of the heretical, the scandalous, the unfashionable, and the dangerous received renewed interest in the nineteenth century, when at least some in the West became bored or disillusioned with rationalism. Such ideas were often presented under the rubric of “ancient wisdom”—the alleged recovery of a body of knowledge from the remote past supposedly superior to the scientific and rational knowledge more recently acquired.¹⁰

Webb’s conception of the occult as rejected knowledge is not universally accepted by scholars of occultism, in part because not all traditions of sectarianism, mysticism, and deviant spirituality were rejected by the mainstream. Until the end of the seventeenth century, and especially during the Renaissance, they enjoyed high levels of social acceptance. This quarrel among students of the occult need not detain us, however, for our concern is with the present, not the past; and for that purpose, rejected knowledge remains a useful idea. Improvisational millenarians are frequently drawn to beliefs that have an occult provenance— for example, the belief that a superior civilization on the continent of Atlantis before it sank constructed a global system of tunnels connecting its cities to other parts of the world. Improvisationalists do indeed seem attracted to precisely the kinds of ideas Webb had in mind, those that have been discarded or whose believers have chosen to withdraw into a secretive domain of their own. Cultural rejection is clearly a powerful force that gives believing in the occult a certain frisson, and that same thrill of the forbidden is often found among conspiracy believers.¹¹

The Cultic Milieu

Attractive as the concept of rejected knowledge is, it has limitations, and not only with regard to the place of occultism in earlier periods. A more significant problem is its limited focus. Webb was concerned with mapping the occult in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, based on a conventional understanding of what that term encompassed, including such subjects as spiritualism and Theosophy. But the domain of the occult omits much of both millennialism and conspiracism. Improvisationalists are ideological omnivores. They draw on the “ancient wisdom” claimed by occultism, but they do not necessarily limit themselves to such sources; their reservoir of knowledge claims is partly but not entirely defined by the concept of occult-as-rejected-knowledge. Hidden knowledge may suffer not only from overt rejection but merely from lack of attention. That is to say, it may never be addressed, even negatively, by knowledge-validating institutions. Those who accept knowledge claims that stand on the fringes often confuse inattention with rejection. As far as they are concerned, those who do not address their claims have in fact rejected them. To grasp the novel character of the improvisational style, therefore, requires a concept broader than rejected knowledge. Just such a concept is available in the form of the cultic milieu.

The term cultic milieu was introduced in the early 1970s by British sociologist Campbell. It was subsequently applied to some of the New Religious Movements that flourished during the period, but it remained little utilized until recently. Campbell was concerned with the process by which so-called cults develop, but he was not employing cult as the word is now commonly used. In keeping with predominant usage in the sociology of religion, Campbell did not regard the term as inherently pejorative. Thus, his use does not carry the conventional implications of violence, irrationality, or brainwashing currently associated with the term. Rather, he treated cults as loosely structured religious groups that make few demands on their members and that are often based on belief systems that deviate from the dominant culture. Unlike sects, they are not groups that have broken away from existing religious organizations over disputes about leadership, doctrine, or personality. Since they are not breakaway groups, Campbell sought to determine how they came into being, a question made more significant by the fact that cults constantly form and dissolve.¹²

Campbell argued that cults emerge out of a supportive social and ideological environment, which he called the cultic milieu. This cultural underground encompasses Webb’s concept of rejected knowledge, but is broader in two ways. First, it includes “all deviant belief systems,” not merely those that find their way into occultism, though the occult remains a major component of the cultic milieu. But that milieu also includes such areas as alternative medicine and healing, not normally considered part of the occult domain. Second, the cultic milieu includes not simply beliefs and ideas but also their related practices, “the collectivities, institutions, individuals and media of communication associated with these beliefs.” There is, in other words, a world of persons, organizations, social interactions, and channels of communication that makes the cultic milieu a genuine subculture rather than a mere intellectual or religious phenomenon.¹³

The cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities, and because no single institution within the milieu has the authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds in it “unifying tendencies.” One such tendency is its opposition to “dominant cultural orthodoxies.” This is a point I shall return to many times, for it is also a major characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. The very oppositional situation of the cultic milieu makes it wary of all claims to authoritative judgment. Its suspiciousness makes it intrinsically receptive to all forms of revisionism, whether in history, religion, science, or politics.¹⁴

If disdain for orthodoxy is one trait of the cultic milieu, another is its fluidity. Ideas migrate easily from one part of the milieu to another, their movement facilitated by both a general receptivity to the unorthodox and a communication system of publications, meetings, and (more recently) interlinked Web sites. According to Campbell, “the literature of particular groups and movements frequently devotes space to topics outside its own orbit, includes reviews of one another’s literature and advertises one another’s meetings. As a direct consequence of this individuals who ‘enter’ the milieu at any one point frequently travel rapidly through a variety of movements and beliefs and by so doing constitute yet another unifying force within the milieu.” As we shall see in succeeding chapters, such currents can connect antigovernment, fundamentalist, and UFO subcultures, permitting both individuals and ideas to move among them with astonishing rapidity.¹⁵

Campbell’s essay is among the most acute and perceptive descriptions of the dynamics of contemporary religious experimentation. Its major limitation lies in its concentration on religious movements to the exclusion of other kinds of groups. Indeed, the very logic of the concept of the cultic milieu suggests that under certain circumstances, a person’s religion becomes indistinguishable from political ideology and the occult. Thus, without discarding Campbell’s valuable insights, we need to extend the cultic milieu to encompass a broader range of phenomena. This can be done through the concept I call stigmatized-knowledge claims.

Stigmatized Knowledge Claims

By stigmatized knowledge I mean claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error—universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like. Although this definition encompasses rejected knowledge in both Webb’s and Campbell’s senses, it also includes a broader range of outsider ideas. The domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims may be divided into five varieties:

Forgotten knowledge: knowledge once allegedly known but lost through faulty memory, cataclysm, or some other interrupting factor (e.g., beliefs about ancient wisdom once possessed by inhabitants of Atlantis).

Superseded knowledge: claims that once were authoritatively recognized as knowledge but lost that status because they came to be regarded as false or less valid than other claims (e.g., astrology and alchemy).

Ignored knowledge: knowledge claims that persist in low-prestige social groups but are not taken seriously by others (e.g., folk medicine).

Rejected knowledge: knowledge claims that are explicitly rejected as false from the outset (e.g., UFO abductions).

Suppressed knowledge: claims that are allegedly known to be valid by authoritative institutions but are suppressed because the institutions fear the consequences of public knowledge or have some evil or selfish motive for hiding the truth (e.g., the alien origins of UFOs and suppressed cancer cures).¹⁶

Two characteristics of the stigmatized-knowledge domain require particular attention: the special place accorded to suppressed knowledge and the empirical nature of the claims. The suppressed knowledge category tends to absorb the others, because believers assume that when their own ideas about knowledge conflict with some orthodoxy, the forces of orthodoxy will necessarily try to perpetuate error out of self-interest or some other evil motive. The consequence is to attribute all forms of knowledge stigmatization to the machinations of a conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories therefore function both as a part of suppressed knowledge and as a basis for stigmatization. At one level, conspiracy theories are an example of suppressed knowledge, because those who believe in conspiracy theories are convinced that only they know the true manner in which power is held and decisions made. The conspiracy is believed to have used its power to keep the rest of the populace in ignorance. At another level, conspiracy theories explain why all forms of stigmatized-knowledge claims have been marginalized—allegedly the conspiracy has utilized its power to keep the truth from being known. So the distinction between hidden knowledge on the one hand, which is “true,” and orthodoxy on the other, which is “false,” acts to push believers in stigmatized-knowledge claims toward beliefs about plots to suppress the truth, and hence in the direction of conspiracism.

Stigmatized knowledge appears compelling to believers, not only because it possesses the cachet of the suppressed and forbidden, but because of its allegedly empirical basis. Some stigmatized knowledge appears to rest on nonempirical or antiempirical foundations—for example, knowledge claimed to derive from spiritual entities channeled through human intermediaries. To a striking extent, however, stigmatized knowledge rests on asserted empirical foundations: those who make the claims explicitly or by implication challenge others to test their facts against evidence. For example, people who traffic in conspiracy theories do not claim for their beliefs the status of revelation, nor do they ask that their beliefs be taken on faith. Yet the version of empiricism that operates in the domain of stigmatized knowledge has its own peculiar characteristics.

In the first place, stigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth—for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth? Hence stigmatization, instead of making a truth claim appear problematic, is seen to give it credibility, by implying that some malign forces conspired to prevent its becoming known. A presumption of validity therefore attaches to stigmatized claims, which greatly facilitates the flow of such claims through the cultic milieu. As Campbell observed, beliefs in the cultic milieu tend to move and combine freely, so that individuals in the milieu quickly become exposed to previously unfamiliar ideas, which they often appear predisposed to accept. It seems to matter little whether the belief in question concerns the Kennedy assassination, Atlantis, Bigfoot, or UFOs. The belief must be true because it is stigmatized.

At the same time that stigmatization is employed as a virtual guarantee of truth, the literature of stigmatized knowledge enthusiastically mimics mainstream scholarship. It does so by appropriating the apparatus of scholarship in the form of elaborate citations and bibliographies. The most common manifestation of pedantry is a fondness for reciprocal citation, in which authors obligingly cite one another. The result is that the same sources are repeated over and over, which produces a kind of pseudoconfirmation. If a source is cited many times, it must be true. Because the claims made by conspiracy theorists are usually nonfalsifiable, the multiplication of sources may leave the impression of validation without actually putting any propositions to the test of evidence.

This pattern was noted almost thirty-five years ago by Richard Hofstadter in his examination of the paranoid political style. He observed that the more sweeping the claims, the more “‘heroic’ [the] strivings for ‘evidence’ to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.” The result is a literature that, “if not wholly rational, [is] at least intensely rationalistic.” Indeed, conspiracy theorists insist on being judged by the very canons of proof that are used in the world they despise and distrust, the world of academia and the intelligentsia. For all its claims to populism, conspiracy theory yearns to be admitted to the precincts where it imagines the conspirators themselves dwell.¹⁷

FACT-FICTION REVERSALS

The commonsense distinction between fact and fiction melts away in the conspiracist world. More than that, the two exchange places, so that in striking ways conspiracists often claim first that what the world at large regards as fact is actually fiction, and second that what seems to be fiction is really fact. The first belief is a direct result of the commitment to stigmatized-knowledge claims, for the acceptance of those claims rests on the belief that authoritative institutions, such as universities, cannot be trusted. They are deemed to be the tools of whatever malevolent forces are in control. Hence the purported knowledge propagated by such institutions is meant to deceive rather than enlighten. The baroque conspiracy theories that are so much a part of the stigmatized-knowledge milieu are presumed to be explanations that expose the misleading—and therefore fictional—character of public knowledge. Because stigmatized-knowledge claims and conspiracism insist on the illusory character of what passes for knowledge in the larger society, the equation of fact with fiction seems relatively straightforward. The belief that fiction is actually fact, however, is less obvious.

Conspiracy literature is replete with instances in which manifestly fictional products, such as films and novels, are asserted to be accurate, factual representations of reality. In some cases, they are deemed to be encoded messages, originally intended for the inner circle of conspirators, that somehow became public. In other cases, truth is believed to have taken fictional form because the author was convinced that a direct representation of reality would be too disturbing and needed to be cloaked in fictional conventions. In still other instances, fictionalization is deemed to be part of the conspirators’ campaign to indoctrinate or prepare a naive public for some momentous future development.

The most common fiction-is-fact assertions deal with films, and especially the science-fiction films that have played to an immense audience in recent decades, such as the Star Wars cycle and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a 1987 press statement, John Lear, the estranged son of inventor William Lear, claimed not only that the U.S. government had close and continuing contacts with extraterrestrials but that an inner circle of powerful officials had “subtly promoted” the films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that the public would come to think of extraterrestrials as benevolent “space brothers.” Somewhat similar claims were made by conspiracy writer Milton William Cooper, who said that the films were “thinly disguised” descriptions of contacts that took place in the early 1950s between extraterrestrials and the government. The most sweeping claims of this kind have been made by Michael Mannion, whose “mindshift hypothesis” asserts that the “shadow government,” whose members know about aliens, has been systematically “reeducating” the American public. According to Mannion, this campaign has touched virtually every area of popular culture, from films and television programs to the lyrics of popular songs. Hence every fictional reference to UFOs and their occupants is actually a purposeful representation to serve the ends of the secret elite who deal with the aliens behind the scenes.¹⁸

Such views have been met with skepticism by some conspiracists, either because the use of motion pictures in this way would mean that too many people would know the “real truth,” thus making secrecy harder to maintain; or on the grounds that films have as much potential to mislead as to enlighten or indoctrinate. Thus Jon King suggests that the prominence given to the mysterious Area 51 in the 1996 film Independence Day is a “smoke screen,” for the most secret alien-related activities have actually been transferred elsewhere. Nevertheless, he still sees a sinister hand behind the film: “It is highly unlikely that any blockbuster movie focusing so heavily on Area 51 would be allowed out into the public domain unless sanctioned by an ulterior motive.”¹⁹

John Todd, an itinerant evangelist who spread conspiracy theories through Pentecostal churches in the 1970s, saw the Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back as depicting a battle between satanism and the false Christianity of the Illuminati, while the Robert Redford film Three Days of the Condor contained a doubly encoded message. Todd believed the book on which Redford is working as a CIA analyst early in the film was Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, itself an encoded conspiratorial work. According to Todd, Rand had been commissioned to write the novel by “Philip [sic] Rothschild,” allegedly the leader of the Illuminati. Todd claimed that “within the book is a step-by-step plan to take over the world by taking over the United States.”²⁰

Todd’s bizarre claims about Rand’s novel had a deep influence not only in fundamentalist churches but in the Covenant, Sword, and Arm of the Lord, a heavily armed commune in the Ozarks affiliated with the anti-Semitic and millennialist Christian Identity movement. Todd’s ideas about Atlas Shrugged were incorporated into a CSA pamphlet titled Witchcraft and the Illuminati. The community apparently learned about Todd’s theory from the pamphlet’s author, Kerry Noble, who had been given one of Todd’s audiotapes by a friend in Texas. Noble went on to read Rand’s massive novel (supposedly in only two days!), and believed that the novel was an Illuminati code book swept the CSA community. Indeed, Noble attributes CSA’s program of arming and military training to the fears raised by Todd. The community dissolved shortly after a raid by federal law-enforcement agencies in 1985.²¹

As eccentric as Todd’s ideas were, an even stranger example of fact-fiction transposition concerns literature about a subterranean world, according to which alien races inhabit caverns and tunnels below the earth’s surface. The earliest fictional work to attract the attention of those in the stigmatized-knowledge milieu was Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel, The Coming Race. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73) is far better known for having written what is said to be the worst opening line in English literature: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Quite apart from his dubious literary talents, however, it is the substance of The Coming Race that commends it to devotees of stigmatized knowledge.

The Coming Race purports to describe the journey of a young American narrator into the bowels of the earth, where he discovers a hidden civilization whose members represent a hitherto unknown race. They lead a pleasant and harmonious life underground, made possible by their discovery of a mysterious and unlimited source of energy called vril. Bulwer-Lytton’s novel obeyed the conventions of utopian fiction and, like many utopian novels, was a vehicle for social satire and commentary. Within a short time, however, it had acquired a different sort of reader, who insisted it was true.²²

The transfer of The Coming Race from fiction to fact was facilitated by Bulwer-Lytton’s own flirtations with occultism, which led some in the occult subculture to assume he had adopted the conventions of fiction to cloak an astonishing but hidden feature of the real world. His most influential occult reader proved to be Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91), the cofounder (with Henry Steel Olcott) of the Theosophical Society. “The name vril may be fiction,” she wrote, but “the force itself is doubted as little in India as the existence itself of their Rishis, since it is mentioned in all the secret works.” While a contemporary writer on the occult, Alec Maclellan, also grants that Bulwer-Lytton may have yielded to some poetic license, he insists, “If, as an initiate, he concealed some of its [vril’s] attributes this is understandable.”²³

Believers in vril and The Coming Race kept alive not only the idea of a pool of free energy, but also that of an underground world with its own species and civilizations, a concept that has ramified in ways Bulwer-Lytton could scarcely have imagined. One result has been a vast contemporary literature purporting to describe subterranean caverns, tunnels, and races and speculating that flying saucers come not from outer space but from this underground world, whence they allegedly reach us through hidden openings in the earth’s surface.

The most influential examples of this genre are a set of science-fiction stories published in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories between 1945 and 1948. The stories and their surrounding circumstances came to be known as “the Shaver Mystery,” after their principal author, Richard Shaver, a welder from Pennsylvania. Shaver claimed to have been in psychic communication with a subterranean race and to have once physically visited their underground civilization. The “mystery” deals in part with the basis of Shaver’s bizarre claims, and in part with the question of authorship. Some have attributed much of the actual writing, and especially the use of the literary conventions of science fiction, to Shaver’s editor, Raymond A. Palmer. Palmer himself claimed to have written the first Shaver story, based on a ten-thousand-word letter Shaver had sent to Amazing Stories. In an account written during Shaver’s lifetime, Palmer claimed, “While it is true that a great deal of the actual writing of the stories published under Mr. Shaver’s name have been written by me [sic], it has been in an editorial and revisional [sic] capacity, and although the words are different, the facts of the Shaver Mystery are the same and remain original with him.” Shaver himself strongly disputed this account and claimed, “There is very little revision in any of my work, just cutting where it didn’t fit.”²⁴

Regardless of who may have authored the published stories, they took on a life of their own and have come to be treated not as science fiction but as factual accounts. While some writers on the occult, such as Maclellan, regard Shaver’s work as a hoax based on earlier writings such as Bulwer-Lytton’s, an immense Shaver Mystery literature has proliferated, some of it in print but much on the Internet. It has fused with later claims about secret underground bases and tunnels, some of which are alleged to have been constructed by the government and others by alien races. As in so much of the literature from the stigmatized-knowledge domain, complex patterns of cross-referencing and cross-citation have come to be taken as proof. Thus if a claim is made that a contemporary government tunnel system exists, that is deemed to be proof that Shaver was correct, and vice versa. By most accounts Shaver himself believed with absolute conviction in the truthfulness of his stories. This, combined with their appearance in a pulp-fiction venue, served further to blur the already uncertain boundary between fact and fiction.²⁵

STIGMATIZED KNOWLEDGE AND POPULAR CULTURE

The volume and influence of stigmatized knowledge have increased dramatically through the mediation of popular culture. Motifs, theories, and truth claims that once existed in hermetically sealed subcultures have begun to be recycled, often with great rapidity, through popular culture. Although this movement may be observed in a variety of forms, including television and mass-market fiction, the most important and visible venue has been film. Two particularly notable examples are Conspiracy Theory (1997) and The X-Files (1998).

The significance of Conspiracy Theory lies in both the construction of the protagonist and the surprising and dramatic denouement. The protagonist, played by Mel Gibson, gives every indication early in the film of being delusional to the point of paranoia. He lives in a fortresslike apartment, complete with an escape hatch and self-destructive capability. The rooms are a warren of securely locked spaces; even the refrigerator is padlocked. Surrounded as Gibson is by shadowy, imagined enemies, the viewer is surprised by the gradual realization that indeed, there is a conspiracy, one of whose aims is to destroy this lone eccentric who has stumbled across truths that have been successfully concealed from his supposedly normal fellow citizens. In the film’s final frame, the sky above the conspiracy theorist fills with emblematic and all-too-real black helicopters.

The film’s conversion of its seemingly lunatic central character into a seer illuminating the dark side of American life clearly resonated with at least one real-world conspiracy theorist. Michael A. Hoffman II, a Holocaust denier and exponent of multiple conspiracy theories, seemed to find personal vindication as well as a convincing conspiratorial message. The film was, he writes, “a new revelation . . . which restores credibility to the investigators and validates their concerns.” He acknowledges Gibson’s wild, delusional ideas but concentrates on the awareness that while “much of what he says is nonsense . . . the kernel of truth is so potentially lethal that it justifies his paranoia.”²⁶

If Conspiracy Theory implied that militia claims about black helicopters were grounded in reality, conspiratorial preoccupations were presented in a far more detailed and literal fashion in The X-Files motion picture. The film, which grossed $150 million worldwide, joined T-shirts and a veritable library of books and magazines as part of the industry generated by the original television series. While the film contains the expected quota of references to black helicopters and alien abduction, its most striking characteristic is its demonization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Since the 1970s, FEMA has been a target of conspiracy theorists. The film’s principal conspiracy theorist, the ill-fated Dr. Kurzweil, predicts that when the conspirators are ready to strike, the president will declare a “state of emergency. . . . All federal agencies will come under the power of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—FEMA—the secret government.” This belief, which has circulated widely on the radical right for decades unbeknown to the general population, suddenly was presented to an audience of millions.²⁷

The appearance of conspiracism in major motion pictures signals a major change in the relation between stigmatized and mainstream knowledge claims. The coteries within which stigmatized knowledge was refined and nurtured were traditionally insular and marginalized—the worlds of occultism, alternative science and medicine, sectarian religion, and radical politics among them. These domains were marginalized in part because they were so closely associated with stigmatized knowledge. At the same time, the reverse was also true—some knowledge claims were stigmatized because they were identified with marginal subcultures. Now, however, the boundary between the stigmatized and the mainstream has clearly become more permeable. Themes that once might have been found only in outsider literature or on the more outré Web sites have become the stuff of network television and multimillion-dollar motion pictures.

It may be, as Jodi Dean suggests, that such easy cross-boundary movement has erased any distinction between “consensus reality” (the version promulgated by powerful mainstream institutions) and deviant, alternative realities, including those in which conspiracies figure prominently. On the other hand, as Dean herself concedes, stigmas have not been wholly erased, giving to those who traffic in the forbidden the thrill of the taboo. Thus, for example, “the very stigma makes UFOs and alien abduction seductive, transgressive.” The as-yet-unanswerable question is whether the partial absorption of these ideas by popular culture will increase or decrease their potency and appeal.²⁸

Surely the appearance of conspiracy themes in popular culture at least partially destigmatizes those ideas, by associating them with admired stars and propagating them through the most important forms of mass entertainment. They are sometimes identified with stigmatized sources, as is the case with the strange cabdriver at the center of Conspiracy Theory, who clearly reads publications and pursues issues omost people are unaware of, making them part of his reclusive lifestyle. But at other times, as in The X-Files, the claims may appear strange, but their sources are never identified, other than through tipsters in the film such as Kurzweil. And even Kurzweil is literate, well-spoken, and far better dressed than his fugitive life would lead one to expect.

Popular culture can also reduce the potency of conspiratorial themes by depriving them of some of their allure. Once hidden, they are now revealed. Once intended only for the knowing few, they are now placed before the ignorant many. Once mysterious, they can now appear banal, the building blocks of not particularly distinguished popular entertainments. Those who frequent the domain of stigmatized knowledge do so in part because it confers feelings of chosenness: only we few know the truth. That sense of constituting an elite provides partial compensation for what might otherwise be insupportable feelings of powerlessness—the sense of being a minority in a world of scoffers. The popularity of conspiracy films does not inevitably translate into a feeling of empowerment for conspiracy theorists. To the extent that their common currency is placed in everybody’s hands, it is devalued. It is also potentially trivialized, for there is no assurance that those watching a conspiracy film really believe it. It is, after all, only a story. So the popularization of conspiracism is tinged with ambivalence for conspiracists, combining a sense that they were right all along with a fear that the newly enlightened will not take the ideas seriously enough to act on them.

We can gain some sense of this ambivalence from a practice mentioned earlier: that of treating some films and novels as encoded messages created by the conspirators. That claim has apparently not yet been made about either Conspiracy Theory or The X-Files, but it has been made about numerous science-fiction films. The belief in hidden messages has two advantages. First, it locates a level of meaning in popular culture that the mass audience is unaware of but that the knowing few can read. Second, it maintains a consistent view of the world as controlled by powerful, hidden forces, since if the forces are as powerful as the conspiracists assert, then they would surely be able to control the content of movies and books.

As I have indicated, believers in stigmatized knowledge assume that any widely held belief must necessarily be false—the result of indoctrination, suppression of the truth, or some other insidious mind-control technique. As ideas from stigmatized knowledge migrate into popular culture, conspiracy theorists must burrow ever deeper to discover the truths hidden by appearances. One of the chief exemplars of this technique is Milton William Cooper, who became widely known for his 1991 “exposé,” Behold a Pale Horse, of the alien control of the American government. By 1995, however, Cooper had decided that UFOs were a creation of an all-too-earthly conspiracy and that the revelations of ufologists were “intentional disinformation projects designed to promote the alien threat scenario while allowing for complete deniability on the part of government.”²⁹

Thus the larger audience that popular culture has given to the culture of conspiracy must be balanced against the loss of special knowledge that conspiracy believers suffer—the threat that conspiracy knowledge, once the ultimate secret, will become merely another artifact of mass entertainment. It is far too early to know which set of forces will turn out to be the more powerful. One possibility is that the normal politics of compromise, openness, and incrementalism will give way to an orthodoxy of conspiracist politics dominated by belief in secrecy, dissimulation, and covert control. Another possibility is that conspiracism will become a diverting convention, with no greater claim to realism than, say, the antics of James Bond.

A more radical approach lies in Dean’s suggestion that, at least where political matters are concerned, there is no longer a consensus reality about the causes of events and the reliability of evidence. In such a situation of uncertainty, she argues, “conspiracy theory, far from a label dismissively attached to the lunatic fringe, may well be an appropriate vehicle for political contestation.” She is at pains to make clear that “the sort of conspiracy theory I’m advocating here has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.” That is no doubt the case; however, the desire to distinguish “good” conspiracy theories from “bad” ultimately founders.³⁰

First, although Dean is clearly correct in suggesting that the domain of consensus reality has shrunk and that formerly stigmatized beliefs have joined the mainstream, the wish to possess secret knowledge unavailable to or shunned by the majority keeps regenerating. Even as parts of stigmatized knowledge get swallowed up by popular culture, novel forms of esotericism and the forbidden arise in their place.

Second, the relation between conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism is far more problematic than Dean indicates. There can certainly be conspiracy theories that are not anti-Semitic; some are described in chapters 3 and 4. But contemporary conspiracy theories manifest a dynamics of expansion—the movement from event conspiracies to systemic conspiracies to superconspiracies. As this progression occurs, two characteristics appear. First, the more a conspiracy theory seeks to explain, the larger its domain of evil; the conspiracy includes more and more malevolent agents. Second, the more inclusive the conspiracy theory, the less susceptible it is to disproof, for skeptics and their evidence are increasingly identified with the powers of evil.

The result of these processes is that the villains who populate conspiracy theories tend to multiply rapidly. Conspiracists find it difficult to keep out new putative evildoers. Ufologists—the very subculture on which Dean focuses—began with conspiracy theories that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, yet in some cases ended up testifying to the veracity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Whichever path becomes dominant, it seems unlikely that the domain of stigmatized-knowledge claims will disappear. Some will, no doubt, become the victims of their own success; that is, they will become so widely accepted that they will lose their stigma and become indistinguishable from the mainstream ideas they challenged. To a great extent, that has already happened to alternative medicine, now the beneficiary of government funding, with at least some access to conventional medical journals. Notwithstanding the increased permeability of boundaries, however, a domain of stigmatized knowledge seems likely to remain stigmatized, if only because it reflects the alienation and suspicions that some continue to direct toward government, science, higher education, and mainstream religion. As long as those suspicions remain, so too will the belief in a realm of hidden or forbidden knowledge. As ideas pass across the border that separates the world of the stigmatized from the world of the accepted, the world of the stigmatized must be reinforced with new additions. If the past is any guide, the cultic milieu provides a seemingly bottomless reservoir from which new knowledge claims can be drawn. Thus the attractions of the taboo and proscribed can always be met by visions of ever darker plots and ever more shocking revelations.

The existence of a self-perpetuating domain of stigmatized knowledge means that the raw material for improvisational millennialism will remain plentiful. We can see the flourishing undergrowth of improvisationalism in the development of increasingly complex beliefs about conspiracies. Although belief in malevolent plots has a long history in American culture, it is safe to say that no period has evinced so strong an appetite for conspiracism as the final two or three decades of the twentieth century. Conspiracism increasingly manifests itself in depictions of plots so vast that they can be undone only in an Armageddon-like conflict. Small wonder, then, that so much improvisational millennialism revolves around visions of conspiracy that purport to describe a coming diabolical New World Order—the focus of the next two chapters.