Conspiracies of Conspiracies

How Delusions Have Overrun America

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

THE INVENTION OF CONSPIRACY THEORY

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI

The intelligent saw in the open system of the Jacobins the complete hidden system of the Illuminati.

John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy (1798)

It is not at all unusual for people to think that conspiracism and the conspiracy theories associated with it have a "deeply rooted" past. Conspiracists themselves frequently extend their conspiracies back to ancient times in order to add mystery to their narratives, suggesting constant linkages over long periods between suspicious groups and events. Nesta Webster, whose writing in the wake of the Russian Revolution set the template for modern conspiracy theory, claimed to have traced the origins of revolutionary activity to the "first century of the Christian era." In fact, Webster went back even further, to the time of Moses, in order to capture the "forces" that had been "gathering for an onslaught not only on Christianity but on all social and moral order."

The mere existence of conspiracies does not, however, automatically give rise to conspiracy theories or conspiracism. Conspiracies, in the sense of the plots that pepper history, have been integral to politics from the beginning and, thus, unremarkable. Julius Caesar was, after all, the victim of a conspiracy. The historian Gordon Wood has argued that the innumerable "schemes of antiquity and the Renaissance ... flowed from simplicity and limitedness" of a politics dominated by elites, and so the conspiracy "was taken for granted as a normal means by which rulers were deposed." In such times, there was no need for theory beyond the all-encompassing one that elites are constantly conspiring against each other.

Writing in late seventeenth-century England, Daniel Defoe described an "Age of Plot and Deceit" featuring "court conspiracies, backstairs conspiracies, ministerial conspiracies, factional conspiracies, aristocratic conspiracies." It is important to note that none of these plots or coups involves any effort to deceive the public — an essential aspect of a genuine conspiracy theory — because the public played no role in politics. In fact, from a political standpoint, "the public" did not exist; people were subjects, not citizens, and no one thought them important enough to try to deceive. By the eighteenth century, a somewhat wider array of participants was making politics more complex. Conspiracy explanations became broader and more subtle: "Accounts of plots ... were no longer descriptions of actual events but interpretations of otherwise puzzling concatenations of events."

The increasing tensions between the British government and the colonists of North America illustrate the point. The British perception of discontent in the colonies began to turn toward conspiracy in the 1770s, and "secret emissaries" from France were credited with fomenting discontent. Shortly before the revolution, General Burgoyne reported that John Adams was "as great a conspirator as ever subverted a state." In the American colonies, where political control was still narrowly applied, people had originally thought of "political conspiracy in terms of selfish factions of public officials seeking personal power and wealth by manipulating the machinery of government." This view gradually was supplanted by the more conspiratorial idea of "a coterie of the King's friends ... working secretly to deprive them of their liberties."

The eighteenth-century conspiracy explanation was a rational assessment of politics, even if not always accurate. It combined a modern approach to understanding social change with a traditional determination to hold individuals accountable for their actions. Instead of offering a counter-discourse, as today's conspiracy theories do, conspiracy explanations were widely shared, thus becoming mainstream views of how politics operated. This enlightened view was, however, overwhelmed by the complexity and confusion of the French Revolution, which seemed to require some theory to explain its scope and force, for "no small group of particular plotters, ... only elaborately organized secret societies like the Illuminati or the Freemasons, involving thousands of individuals linked by sinister designs, could be behind the Europe-wide upheaval."

The French Revolution was the most dramatic threat to the established powers in Europe since the fall of Rome. Soon, people were imagining the vast sinister designs of unseen manipulators.

The First Conspiracy Theory: Illuminized Freemasonry

Two prominent opponents of the French Revolution took up the challenge of uncovering these sinister designs: John Robison, a Scottish chemist of considerable reputation, and the Abbé Augustin Barruel, a French cleric living in England. Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies was published in 1797 and achieved immediate widespread success. At the same time, Barruel published the first part of his multivolume history of Jacobinism to roughly equal acclaim. Neither publication was an accurate or even plausible guide to the revolution, but they did mark the beginning of conspiracy theory.

Robison, a traditionalist, had been fighting for some time against Enlightenment chemistry, which he found godless and mechanistic. This view put him at odds with Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestly, and his own colleagues. By the time he began work on Proofs, moreover, Robison was a very sick man, subject to bouts of insanity and "vulnerable to melancholy, confusion, and paranoia." In Proofs, Robison denounced Lavoisier and Priestly as Illuminists and accused Madame Lavoisier of using her famous salons as "venues for sacrilegious rites where the hostess, dressed in the ceremonial robes of an occult priestess, ritually burned the texts of the old chemistry." His defenders attributed questions about Robison's mental state to the fact that he had exposed the "dark designs" of his attackers.

His idiosyncratic arguments about chemistry aside, Robison's basic contention was that Adam Weishaupt's Bavarian Illuminati, created in 1776, led the conspiracy behind the French Revolution in order to destroy all the religions and governments of Europe. The Illuminati, he maintained, had infiltrated French Freemasonry and brought the revolution about, under "the specious pretext of enlightening the world." Robison himself had been a Scottish Rite Mason but had been shocked to find continental Masonic lodges to be, as he saw it, irreligious and decadent. Accordingly, in his conspiracy, Scottish Rite Masons were blameless while French Grand Orient Freemasonry bordered on the diabolical. (This distinction between blameless and corrupt Freemasonry is still observed by some conspiracists, causing confusion to this day.) Within a few years, Proofs began to besmirch Robison's professional reputation; even Barruel criticized his errors of fact. A fellow chemist handled the issue delicately: "The alarm excited by the French Revolution had produced in Mr. Robison a degree of credulity which was not natural to him."

Augustin Barruel had been an anti-Enlightenment, anti-philosophe writer even before the revolution. Having fled France, he wrote his call to arms against the revolution in London, publishing the first two volumes of Memoirs in 1797. An abridged English translation appeared in 1798. Barruel's conspiracy outdid Robison's in both complexity and duration. He linked continental Freemasonry to the Knights Templar, implicitly pushing the origin of the conspiracy back at least to the Crusades. Barruel did not invent this historical linkage; as early as 1736 some Freemasons had tried to establish it. But by portraying the Knights Templar as bitterly anti-Christian, Barruel could link them — and thus Freemasonry — to Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Weishaupt. All these links are uncertain at best, and Barruel appears to have confused the Illuminati with mystical groups such as Martinists and Rosicrucians on occasion. The poet Shelley reviewed Barruel's tome as "half filled with the vilest and most unsupported falsehoods" but recommended it anyway.

Barruel's views changed with newer editions of his work, each one "wilder and more vituperative than the last." The most important change was inspired by a letter purportedly from a Captain Simonini, known as the Simonini letter, which ostensibly exposed the role of the Jews in the revolution as an "unseen and controlling presence" over the Freemasons, Knights Templar, and even the Illuminati. Despite doubts about the letter's authenticity even at the time — it seems to have been the work of the French police — editions of Barruel's work from 1806 on endorsed the idea and, indeed, seem to have created the enduring notion of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy.

What Makes All This a Conspiracy Theory?

By today's standards, neither Robison's Proofs nor Barruel's Memoirs seems powerfully conspiratorial. Each work incorporates lengthy descriptions by other writers of specific Freemasonic lodges and the careers of Jacobin leaders. The critical feature that makes their ideas conspiracy theories rather than mere explanations lies in how they piece together disparate facts and notions into a story they imbue with a deeper meaning. Each creates a dualistic narrative in which the malevolent conspirators secretly work to destroy everything that is good and pure. This amounts to an alternative historical "construct," which one scholar has likened to "a theatrical performance" embodying the fears and fantasies of its creators. Its conspiratorial dualism makes the construct an oversimplification that ignores the "complexity and dynamics of historical processes." The underlying psychological mechanisms that conspiracy theorists use to piece things together in this way are today referred to as patternicity and agenticity — both normal mental processes carried to an extreme.

Contemporary researchers have placed these mental processes at the forefront of their attempts to understand conspiracist thinking. As Michael Shermer, who coined the term "patternicity" put it: "Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns (patternicity) and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency (agenticity)." Conspiracy theorists themselves are often aware of this process, which they sometimes report as an epiphany, although their sudden awareness may well be apohenia, which, "unlike an epiphany — a true intuition of the world's interconnectedness — is a false realization ... a weakness of human cognition." Contemporary conspiracy theorist James Perloff, describing his first encounter with Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy, recalls: "For the first time, history began making sense: it had a pattern to it, and was not the haphazard amalgamation of events I had been taught in school." Even more dramatically, Gary Wean prefaced his revelations about the O. J. Simpson case with this explanation: "Suddenly you realize, you awaken, the picture is clear, you are not becoming mentally disordered at all. You have been merely, slowly becoming aware that all the dastardly, evil past events that have been occurring have emanated from a single source; everything is connected."

Researchers have noted that such extreme versions of patternicity amount to "illusory pattern perceptions," typically accompanied by "hyperactive agency detection." The first step in this process depends on the certainty that there must be an agent, whose nature is informed by one's fears or obsessions. The Depression era conspiracy theorist Gerald B. Winrod explained to his readers that he simply "knew" that the "hellish" events of his day "had to have their secret octopus-roots fastened in demon-possessed brains somewhere." Together, excessive pattern and agency awareness are vital conditions for conspiratorial thinking (which psychologists often call conspiracist ideation), as they allow the conspiracist to assign blame. As Richard Landes writes, such thinking creates a belief system in which "all details cohere, unnoticed or unexplained facts fit into place, and patterns emerge. Everything connects, gains shape, texture, and color. To the believer, now semiotically aroused with his new hermeneutic, the troubling world makes sense, compelling sense." Psychologists overwhelmingly consider conspiracist ideation as confused, and not just because of excess patternicity. The attribution of a purposive agent behind the pattern puts conspiracist ideation on a par with belief in the supernatural or in paranormal phenomena. This is, of course, the standard fixation of the schizophrenic. Less dramatically, it has been called the patchwork quilt fallacy. By either name, it describes how unconnected facts and claims are linked under a conspiratorial hypothesis to "explain" them even though "there is no real need to explain the unconnected facts, so the evidence does not help to take the hypothesis seriously."

The looseness of extreme patternicity makes it easy to define any person or group as the agent behind one's conspiracy. Thus, Barruel had no difficulty adding Jews to his conspiracy of Illuminists, Freemasons, Templars, and others. Over a hundred years later, Nesta Webster reinvigorated the Jewish-Freemasonic-Illuminist triad and added Bolshevism to bring the conspiracy up to date. Later, Webster managed to detect further patterns involving agents of Theosophy, birth control, the "Freud theory," the proposed universal language Esperanto, pan-Germanism, and the worship of Baphomet, the goat-headed pentangle-inscribed version of Satan. During World War II, the poet Ezra Pound, in his exposé of the "usurocracy," found conspiratorial connections between the American Revolution, Regius professorships ("founded to falsify history"), Alexander Hamilton's racial background, the supposed suppression of the works of Aristotle and Demosthenes, the Rothschild family, Lincoln's assassination, and Franklin D. Roosevelt ("a kind of malignant tumour"). Similarly, Christian Identity preacher Wesley Swift forged a vision linking Jewish control of the press, the Federal Reserve System, miscegenation, the Asiatic flu ("the devil's work, too"), World War II, and Hinduism.

The most critical aspect of this conspiracy-building process lies in making what Richard Hofstadter called the "curious leap" from everyday reality to the conspiracy theory, which he illustrates with Robison's Proofs:

For page after page he patiently records the details he has been able to accumulate about the history of the Illuminati. Then, suddenly, the French Revolution has taken place, and the Illuminati have brought it about. What is missing is not veracious information about the organization, but sensible judgment about what can cause a revolution. The plausibility the paranoid style has for those who find it plausible lies, in good measure, in this appearance of the most careful, conscientious, and seemingly coherent application to detail, the laborious accumulation of what can be taken as convincing evidence of the most fantastic conclusions, the careful preparation for the big leap from the undeniable to the unbelievable.

The creation of patterns and attribution of evil forces behind them makes such a leap of faith seem natural and defensible. Nesta Webster belittled her critics for maintaining that revolutions arose out of popular discontent when she had clearly demonstrated that revolutions were the work of "a deep-laid conspiracy that uses the people to their own undoing." It is primarily this leap that distinguishes everyday reality, in which "actual conspiratorial politics" may well take place, from the imaginary realm of "bona fide conspiracy theories."

The leap also reveals a key distinction between social critics whose work focuses on powerful elites and conspiracy theorists — a distinction the social critics have often noted. The "construct" created by conspiracy theories is a simplification that, social critics complain, ignores the fact that power structures can be "weak, fragmented, or pluralistic." Although power structure researchers and conspiracists do "share some specifics about how the social world actually works," the conspiracists "baffle us" only when they make the leap to the definitional "separation of conspiratorial groups from the rest of society, their boundless power and lack of scruples, as well as the no less boundless ignorance of ordinary people outside the conspiracy."