Conspiracy theory: Lacanian dynamics and mythic closure

The label ‘conspiracy theory’, while part of everyday media discourse, is considered by many as problematic. In this research, we posit that there exists diverging social representations associated with this label and that their relative endorsement is a function of preexisting beliefs. To evaluate this possibility, we examine how generic conspiracist beliefs are associated with two forms of rejection of the label: 1) Belief in a meta-conspiracy theory, that is, the belief that the label ‘conspiracy theory’ was purposely created by the elites in order to discredit dissent, and 2) a particularist view of conspiracy theories, that is, the idea that ‘conspiracy theories’ are too diverse to draw any generic conclusions regarding their (ir)rationality and that the label is therefore inadequate. Across two studies (<em>Ns</em> = 1297), using principal components (Study 1) and confirmatory factor analyses (Study 2), we found that generic conspiracist beliefs and belief in meta-conspiracy theory were tightly related. Moreover, in Study 2, generic conspiracist beliefs were substantially associated with the endorsement of a particularist view of conspiracy theories. Using lexicometric analyses of open-ended questions about the origin and the perceived validity of the label, we identified four main criticisms addressed to the label: historical (real conspiracies happen), conceptual (the label has no clear definition), normative (the label has a negative connotation), and political (the label is weaponized by powerholders). By contrast, acceptance of the label was justified by arguments referring to common psychological mechanisms, as well as similar narrative and argumentative structures. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Parliaments are settings where conspiracy theories can easily cause significant and lasting impacts. Despite this, there is a scarcity of academic literature on how conspiracy theories are utilised in parliaments. This study addresses this gap by examining how political parties in Turkey use and respond to conspiracy theories through an analysis of parliamentary debates. It employs the qualitative content analysis method, appropriate for the open-ended and exploratory nature of this inquiry. The investigation is guided by Weberian theory, which categorises types of thinking, to delineate the rationalities political parties use to interpret conspiracy theories. The findings indicate that Turkish political parties deploy conspiracy theories instrumentally to advance their agendas and discredit opponents. The research concludes that conspiracy theories are a regular and essential aspect of mainstream politics in Turkey, used pragmatically by political actors, rather than as marginal phenomena employed by extremists.

In April 1970, Susan Strange published an article in the Chatham House review which challenged the mutual exclusivity of international economics and international politics.(f.1) The consequence was a rebirth of the concept of political economy in international studies. She has continued consistently her liberation struggle from academic self-enclosure, disciplinary defensiveness, and turf wars. She insisted that the new international political economy be a broad church open to historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, and the whole range of humanistic studies, as well as economists and political scientists. In this, she echoed Fernand Braudel's appeal in 1958 for the integration of the human sciences in his famous essay on the longue duree. Her work never stood still. She moves forward in responding to her critics and, above all, by her acute perceptions of change in reality. She is not alone in perceiving that the field of international relations study (IR) is beset by an identity crisis.(f.2) The problem now is not just the need for a more ecumenical use of methods and approaches but also for a new ontology -- an updated view of the basic entities and relationships that constitute reality. This is what The Retreat of the State is all about. Susan Strange is a realist in the literal sense that she asks: Where does the power lie? What is the nature of the power? Who benefits? Who suffers? Conventional IR has said a priori that power lies with states. Susan Strange challenges the exclusivity of that assumption. Her enquiry into power and its workings contributes to a 'new realism' quite different from the 'neorealism' of established IR. It has, she writes, led her to a 'final parting of the ways from the discipline of international relations' (p xv). As a realist, Strange cuts through such currently fashionable euphemisms as 'regimes,'(f.3) 'interdependence,' 'globalization,' and 'global governance,' to demonstrate that these terms can act as ideological screens to obscure relations of dominance and subordination. Although she has been associated with the proposition that power is shifting from political authorities to markets,(f.4) in this book the classical notion of 'market' is also implicitly questioned. A market is no longer that abstractly defined infinity of buyers and sellers whose interactions are guided to a beneficent outcome by a providential unseen hand. There are many different markets, and they all need to be analysed as power systems. She illustrates with a few cases: telecoms, insurance, the big accountancy firms, and cartels. In all of these cases, the power systems work to strengthen big corporate translational business. On cartels, she asks why the subject of private protectionism seems to be taboo among liberal economists and concludes that 'while the rhetoric of free enterprise and open competition is necessary to a full integration of a world economy operating on a market principle, the rhetoric is often, in reality, empty of meaning' (p 60). The ontology of Strange's new realism includes a decline in the authority of states, an increase in the authority of big translational firms, a parcelling of authority downwards from states to smaller territorial entities, along with a general erosion of power based on territory and a rise in non-territorial power in economy, technology, and communications. Others have noted these tendencies; they give substance to Hedley Bull's vision of a new medievalism of overlapping authorities and loyalties.(f.5) While accepting this vision as foreshadowing present reality, Strange takes the next step and asks who governs in such circumstances. This must be the first question in reflecting upon the condition of the world and its future; and, of course, there is no clear answer to it. A conspiracy theory will not do. There is no effective conclave of big corporations with United States government power, though these forces do seem to be the predominate actors. A key word in this book is 'symbiosis. …

This article studies the hermeneutic and semiotic specifics of modern conspiracy theories. The conspiracy myth is a collection of mythological narratives that interpret socio-historical processes andphenomena as the result of a deliberate action by powerful forces carefully concealing their existence or any relation to these phenomena and processes. Today, conspiracy theories are turning into one of the mass ideologies, gaining supporters among various social, age, professional, and religious communities. The golden age of conspiracy myths is the postmodern era. The postmodern ideologeme of the plurality of truths and the equivalence of discourses turned out to be the paradigmatic basis for conspiracy theories. The analysis of the discursive conspiracy environment allows us to distinguish the following types of conspiracy theories: parascientific, religious, political, medical, technogenic, and fantastic. The agents and actors of a conspiracy and their opponents form hierarchical strata in terms of power, initiation into secret knowledge, and influence on social processes. Hierarchical models in conspiracy theories reinforce the illocutionary potential of discourse. The research concludes that the conspiracy myth is a special hermeneutic system that allows one to form competitive discourses claiming the ability to fulfil an etiological function and at the same time introduce sacredness into everyday life, interpreting it as a space of “sacred struggle” with powerful enemies. Being largely a product of archaic culture, the conspiracy myth preserves a special type of rationality inherent in the archaic, which is easily compatible with the epistemological ideas of contemporary mass culture.

This paper examines the impact of partisanship, rightwing media, and social media on attitudes about contemporary conspiracy theories. Mainstream scholarly views that ‘both sides’ of the political aisle indulge routinely in such theories are challenged. I adopt a Gramscian hegemonic framework that examines rising rightwing conspiracy theories as a manifestation of mass false consciousness in service of a political-economic system that serves upper-class interests. Issues examined include the QAnon movement, ‘big lie’ voter fraud conspiracism, and Covid-19 conspiracy theories, and the way they related to partisanship, rightwing media, and social media. I provide evidence that Republican partisanship, rightwing media consumption, and social media consumption are all significant statistical predictors of acceptance of modern conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy Theories (CTs) are a global phenomenon, but some societies are better equipped than others to resist them. This article discusses the characteristics of the China-related COVID-19 CTs in the Brazilian Facebook, based on 28,312 posts published from January 2020 to June 2021. We argue that, in Brazil, the spread of CTs was facilitated by a widespread political and knowledge institutions’ legitimacy crisis. The rise of the extremist politician Jair Bolsonaro to the Presidency provides evidence in this regard. In consequence, the boundaries between fringe and mainstream politics become porous. This article discusses which agents disseminate China-related COVID-19 CTs, and which topics receive more attention. We found a significant presence of actors belonging to mainstream politics and the media among the CTs’ main disseminators. Additionally, the CTs circulating in the Brazilian social media environment reproduce concerns about China’s growing presence in the global arena, which originate elsewhere. Still, they add a specific emphasis on the Communist threat. We sustain that this emphasis relates as much to Brazil’s internal politics as to China itself.

Problem setting. One of the distinguishing features of the modern era is the marginal and dubious nature of explanations of complex social realities. Cognitive and symbolic specifics of conspiratorial thinking, marked by a sense of predictability, regularity and explicit simplicity, contribute to the development and dissemination of political mythology.&#x0D; Recent research and publications analysis. In recent decades, concepts have been actively used in the body of social science works: paranoid style, conspiratorial narrative, power discourse, unstable ontologies, crisis of production of meanings, conspiratorial worldview. The latest scientific search takes place in the context of abandoning the strict framing of conspiracy theories in favor of a pluralistic approach that combines epistemic, existential and social dimensions of the subject.&#x0D; Paper objective. The aim of the article is to try to identify the features of conspiracy in the latest conditions of cultural development.&#x0D; Paper main body. The article shows the features of modern conspiracy theories in terms of its paradoxical stability, information and cognitive attractiveness. It is emphasized that the conspiracy discourse determines the peculiarities of the conspiratorial mentality, influencing, in particular, the existential aspects of human life. The consequences of the influence of conspiracy theories can be not only feelings of alienation from politics or radicalization of society, but also the blurring of semantic boundaries between conspiracy theories and more respectable forms of socio-political criticism. Such features make it possible to distinguish positive and critical understandings of conspiracy theory, as well as to outline the main vectors in further theoretical studies of conspiracy theories. Among the distinctive features of conspiratorial meaning formation are the cultural-temporal universality, the paradoxical combination of irrational and rationalist ways of perception, and others. The peculiarities of conspiratorial thinking in comparison with the radical-constructivist specifics of the explanation of the world, as well as in the communicative-narrative logic are analyzed. The difference between conspiratorial meaning formation and the picture of the world in unstable ontologies is shown. Differentiated conspiracy narrative and political imagination. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of agency in the context of a multi-vector model of social organization.&#x0D; Conclusions of the research. The dynamics of the multifaceted study of conspiracy correlates with the growing awareness that conspiratorial narrative tends to grow significantly and affect society and culture. The stability and success of the conspiracy narrative is ensured by the realization of the claim to "correct" understanding, which makes it quite convincing, and therefore in demand. Conspiracy theories, manifested in various ways of agent communication, range from simple conspiracy through complicity to structural prejudices and ideologies.

Since March 2020, three factors have created a window of opportunity for conspiracy theories in France: the development of a new coronavirus and related scientific questions, a long-established suspicion of government officials and the media, and the confusing, often contradictory, communications from the French government. These conspiracy theories are similar to those that have circulated during previous pandemics since the end of the nineteenth century. They not only spread on the Internet among far-right groups but also provoked street protests against mandatory vaccination and the introduction of a Covid-19 health pass. Conspiracy theories about an alleged forthcoming “heath dictatorship” are also encouraged by mainstream politicians from the smaller parties in the context of the 2022 presidential election.

Throughout the post-Soviet period various conspiracy theories, most of which have been anti-Western, have moved from the margins of intellectual life to the mainstream of Russian politics. The trauma of the Soviet collapse enabled political elites to offer a conspiratorial reading of the event, and use this both for the purpose of nation-building and for suppressing democratic opposition by accusing its proponents of having destroyed the Soviet Union from within. Russian political elites use conspiracy theories to tackle emerging challenges by dividing Russian society into a majority loyal to the Kremlin, and a minority which is supposedly out to destroy Russia. The state authorities, including top-ranking politicians, seem to be the main producers of this conspiracy discourse; however, they use it with great care, with much reliance on the support of intellectuals who take part both in the production and dissemination of these theories to the general public. Studying conspiracy theories in Russia provides us with a means to comprehend domestic politics and to explain the strategies of the Russian political elite on both the domestic and international levels.

Pizzagate and its progeny QAnon are two conspiracy theories with a growing number of believers worldwide. QAnon has entered mainstream conservative politics, with followers identifying themselves with posters and t-shirts at rallies for former President Trump beginning in 2018. With growing numbers of QAnon theorists the world over, psychiatrists will begin to encounter such individuals with increasing frequency. Because some individuals are motivated to engage in criminal behavior on the basis of their beliefs, forensic psychiatrists may also encounter QAnon more commonly in the future. It is therefore important that psychiatrists understand the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as how it is consistent with and different from other conspiracy theories. Particularly noteworthy is the rapid and global spread of QAnon via social media. Clinically, it is important for psychiatrists to be able to differentiate QAnon beliefs from other types of beliefs, including delusions and other delusion-like beliefs. For forensic psychiatrists, understanding the role that conspiracy theories may play in individuals' legal proceedings is particularly important.

This easy-to-read, scrupulously researched, and fascinating book addresses two critical, but stubborn problems which threaten to reduce the effectiveness of many externally-funded HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programs in Africa. First is the reluctance by biomedical and public health practitioners to recognize the essential value of qualitative and ethnographic data for the success of AIDS intervention programs in Africa. Second is the challenge of explaining the culturally coherent logic behind the seemingly irrational and contradictory views of Africans who blame sorcery and witchcraft for the HIV/AIDS epidemic. While this book will not completely solve both of these entrenched problems, it is a powerful statement about the value of systematically studying local explanatory models of the AIDS epidemic and offers a convincing and fine-grained analysis of the African quest to explain and account for personal misfortune in a time of significant social and economic uncertainty. Rodlach's description of AIDS-related sorcery accusations and conspiracy theories is rooted in over a decade of work and research in rural and urban Zimbabwe. Although the book focuses specifically on Zimbabwe, there are many similarities to accounts of the AIDS epidemic elsewhere throughout southern and central Africa. His methodology draws on the usual skill-set of a qualitative researcher (key-informant interviews, observation, focus-groups, printed media and archival research, etc) and his theoretical framework rarely veers far from the standard anthropological literature on witchcraft in Africa (Douglas, Herdt and Stoller, Comaroff and Comaroff, Geschiere, Ashforth); but his extended residence in Zimbabwe as a practicing priest in the local Catholic Church clearly distinguishes him from other social scientific researchers. Fluent in Ndebele, Rodlach gained the confidence of his informants as he ministered to their suffering; this trust made possible his frank discussions about deeply-held and often hidden explanations of AIDS misfortune. The chapters on conspiracy theories will be of most interest to clinicians, medical researchers, and other healthcare providers as these professionals feature prominently in local explanations of the origin of HIV and the spread of AIDS. In fact, these are Rodlach's strongest chapters because they are based on a broad and diverse range of evidence and, unlike accusations of sorcery and witchcraft, conspiracy theories are publicly discussed thus revealing a shared consensus and logic. The origin of HIV is sometimes attributed to clever (meaning selfish) western researchers and their Zimbabwean colleagues whose experiments on HIV in primates went awry and infected the human population. Rodlach suggests that this local disgust of biomedical research originates in strong taboos against transgressions of primate-human boundaries, the researchers' failure to adhere to other local knowledge and traditions, and the suspect intentions of anyone who is personally enriched by biomedical research. Clearly, this is fertile ground for the emergence of a conspiracy theory that holds biomedical research responsible for the spread of HIV. Rodlach then situates these seemingly irrational beliefs in the context of colonial medical practices during the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, rampant iatrogenic morbidity and mortality, and the poisoning of maize flour by white Rhodesian farmers. This serves to demonstrate that that which is seemingly irrational is, in fact, a logical interpretation of the origin of HIV/AIDS against these historical circumstances. Also of interest to healthcare practitioners is an explanation of why even literate and educated Zimbabweans can simultaneously hold both biomedical and conspiracy explanations for the origin and transmission of HIV. Elite and healthy civil sector professionals who initially discredit sorcery charges may later invoke these same explanations to account for why they are diagnosed with AIDS when others are not. To explain this, Rodlach argues that causality is ambiguous. Because a variety of biomedical and social factors can lead to the symptoms of AIDS, and these causal factors can be variously categorized as remote, intermediate, proximate, or ultimate, it is therefore possible for people to hold multiple and even contradictory explanations of HIV. Clearly, the most effective AIDS education programs engage with, rather than deny, these multiple explanations. However, the link between beliefs and behaviors was not substantially addressed in the book, and the cursory discussion of the A-B-C controversy needed more critical attention. Despite these small shortcomings, Witches, Westerners, and HIV is an engaging discussion of a difficult and complex topic, and as a result, this book is an important contribution to the literature on explanatory models of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Reviewed by: Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse Sam Stoeltje Keywords Western esotericism, occultism, anarchism, communism, Zapatista movement, Occupy movement, conspiracy theory, history of ideas, Enlightenment, hermeticism, Illuminati, Freemasons, Karl Marx, Marxism erica lagalisse. Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples. Oakland: PM Press, 2019. Pp. xix + 138. Erica Lagalisse's compact but brilliant The Occult Features of Anarchism involves a series of interlinked arguments about an unacknowledged inheritance of European occult and esoteric thought within modern and contemporary leftist theory. Published by the politically radical PM Press, Occult Features makes its primary (and at times quite critical) address to leftists and [End Page 160] anarchists of the West or Global North, but it will be accessible and compelling to a broad readership. This includes scholars of medieval and Renaissance esotericism, who will appreciate the careful intellectual genealogy indicated by the title. Lagalisse, an anthropologist, has been engaged in years of participant observation within anarchist communities, connected with both Zapatista solidarity and the Occupy movement. She offers two anecdotes that serve to illustrate her motivation in producing this volume. The first recounts an instance of an activist giving away his sympathy for an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, while the second describes a panel series in which leftists condescended to an indigenous activist, due to the synthesis of her politics with "irrational" spirituality (namely, Catholicism). These two anecdotes correspond to the two major impulses of the book. Lagalisse's objectives are: 1) to illustrate the occult and esoteric influence on early anarchist and communist thought, and 2) to better understand the (still rising) phenomenon of all manner of conspiracy theories in a post-Internet media and political landscape. (The possibly opaque connection between these two objectives eventually becomes clear). While working somewhat outside of her disciplinary purview as a social scientist, Lagalisse deftly accomplishes her historical-discursive task through precise genealogical work. She follows the emergence of the Corpus Hermeticum and its influence on emergent European secret societies, tracing a lineage that includes both scholastic alchemy and the order of the Freemasons, as well as the early utopian social theory of the Enlightenment, and eventually European idealists like Hegel. Her analysis, though Eurocentric by necessity, remains consistently attuned to gender critique and anticolonial politics; in this sense, its clearest forebear is the feminist-materialist genealogy of Silva Federici, whom she cites, and whose Caliban and the Witch argues for the economic function of the medieval witch trials along with the mutually constituting gendered and ecological violences of land enclosure. (The accuracy of Federici's historiography, it should be noted, is a matter of dispute.)1 All genealogies are, in some sense, narratives, and Lagalisse's story begins with the fifteenth-century "discovery" of the Hermetica. Citing canonical historians such as Frances Yates, she traces the influence of Hermetic concepts of correspondence and microcosm on natural magic and other Renaissance metaphysics (22–23). A rather dizzying network of intellectual correspondences (pun intended) brings together figures like Giordano Bruno, Robert [End Page 161] Fludd, Rene Descartes, and even Leibniz; "I offer" (she explains) "these surveys simply to demonstrate that the 'disenchantment' we often hear about in relation to the European Enlightenment is but a tale" (29). Her argument thus resembles an abbreviated, or crystallized, form of the one made by Jaron A. Josephson-Storm in his ambitious The Myth of Disenchantment, although Lagalisse's emphasis on the masculinist quality of the medieval and Renaissance occult, and her understanding of the witch trials as its misogynistic counterpoint, make for an at times more politically trenchant analysis.2 A first chapter on the Hermetic underpinnings of the Enlightenment is followed by two chapters on the similarly occult foundations of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and other European "revolutionary brotherhoods" (although Lagalisse is firmly skeptical of the "revolution" they had in mind). The following three chapters demonstrate the subsequent influence of these brotherhoods upon the International Workingman's Association (I.W.A.) and upon Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, thus making Lagalisse's case: that major anarchist thinkers like Proudhon and Bakunin, along...

The functional nature of conspiracy beliefs: Examining the underpinnings of belief in the Da Vinci Code conspiracy

Conspiracy theories and the conspiracy mindset: implications for political ideology

음모론은 현실에서 일어나는 부당한 상황에 대한 책임을 '사건의 뒤에서 모든 것을 조종하는 존재'인 큰 타자에 돌림으로써 비판론자들로부터는 책임전가이자 일종의 편집증이라는 평가를 받지만, 은폐와 불충분한 정보로 인해 총체성을 파악하기 어려운 이 세계를 해석하는 하나의 방식이자 일종의 정치사회적 하위문화 Sub-culture로서의 역할을 하기도 한다. 한편 최근 음모론 영화의 재현 방식은 외형적으로 가시적이고 리버럴하지만 내적으로는 더욱 촘촘한 은폐가 작동하고 있는 지금의 후기 자본주의 체제 하의 세계를 반영하며 그 안에서 파국의 정서와 무정치성이라는 어떤 이데올로기적 경향성을 드러낸다. 본고는 당대 헐리우드 음모론 영화들에서 보이는 변화된 재현의 특징과 그 재현이 지시하는 이데올로기를 분석해 봄으로써, 음모론이라는 정치 사회적 해석 기제가 후기 자본주의라는 정치사회적 자장을 배경으로 현재 내러티브 재현의 장에서 어떤 식으로 수렴 및 변화되고 있는지 살펴보고자 한다. Conspiracy theory is often considered as a kind of paranoid and an act of throwing all the blame solely on the Big Other who is presumed to control all the incidents behind the curtain. While, it is also assessed as a socio-political sub-culture and a way of interpreting the world full of closure and insufficient information, keeping us from grasping 'the totality'. Meanwhile recent conspiracy films reflect the ever dense and concealed anatomy of the world now. And it reveals some kind of ideological tendency which is, 'sense of catastrophe' and 'non-ideology' reflecting the world of late capitalism society. This article intends to examine the altered representational appearance and ideology in recent conspiracy films so as to understand how the conspiracy theory, the social-political interpretational mechanism, is converged into the film narrative against the backdrop of late capitalism, a socio-political condition we live in.