The following things, however, are true: firstly, that the Satanic Temple wants to secure abortion rights in America. It’s probably not true that there are mutilated children and dead babies in tunnels under Central Park, kept so their organs can be harvested by Satanists. And the same goes for conspiracies as well. Thus, fairy tales may be directionally true - even if not literally so. (There was in the Russian famine of 1921.) It’s probably not true that there was ever a witch with a gingerbread house but there might well have been cannibalism. In this context, Hansel and Gretel makes perfect sense as an only lightly embellished account of the dangers faced by orphaned or abandoned children, in a time of brutal scarcity. The Grimms’ stories, for example, emerged out of a folk culture profoundly scarred by the Thirty Years’ War: a 17th-century conflict that turned into three hellish decades of rapine, starvation and bloodshed for the peasantry of Central Europe. This is perhaps easier to see with a bit of historical distance, via an older form of such story: fairy tales. So much so, in fact, that the cosmos was understood as a kind of allegory, full of secondary meanings written by God.Īnd you can view conspiracy theories as a kind of crowdsourced allegory: pooled observations about the world, conveyed in story form. But prior to the modern world, stories that had both a literal meaning and a secondary one as an extended metaphor - allegories - were a high-status literary form. Today, tales of gods, monsters, and heroism are largely treated as nonsense for kids, or at best confined to the deprecated category of “fantasy fiction”. Rather, they exist in a space that’s neither true nor false, but closer to a mode of thinking that has fallen somewhat out of fashion: allegory. But it would be a gross insult to this intelligent, practical woman to suggest she uncritically views these stories as factually accurate. I look forward to our appointments at least as much for her chat as for her skill in civilising my hair. I get most of my updates on the conspiracy front from my hairdresser, who is always abreast of the latest twists, from Pizzagate to tortured children in tunnels under Central Park to Joe Biden being a deepfake (you have to look at his ears, apparently). And pointing out that conspiracy stories aren’t literally true misses the important sense in which, very often, they are. But it is a mistake to imagine that myth-making can be always “debunked”, no matter how superficially absurd its claims. This rising tide of feral hermeneutics has prompted a great deal of anxious commentary in recent years, as well as a growing corpus of (often themselves highly politicised) censorship regimes and self-appointed organisations dedicated to “fighting disinformation”. More from this series The truth about conspiracy BritainĪnd this mindset isn’t confined to America: according to UnHerd Britain polling this week, 38% of Britons agree that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”. Recent headlines on train derailments in Ohio, Texas, and South Carolina, for example, swiftly coalesced online with the Chinese spy balloon and three other mysterious “lying objects” shot down recently to become a lively new thread in the ever-evolving conspiracy narrative. In its wake, conspiracy discourse has become so common it barely registers as such. In the course of what Venkatesh Rao calls “ The Great Weirding”, the triumph of digital over print media has brought a sense of reality coming somehow unstuck. Cooper was certainly eccentric: among many other things, his 1991 book, Behold A Pale Horse - reportedly one of the most shoplifted titles in America, as well as one of the most commonly read in prison - claimed JFK was assassinated to prevent a secret pact with space aliens.īut whether or not his death really was a political assassination, the paranoid, colourful mindset inaugurated by his book is no longer unusual. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Or perhaps it really was just a case of a far-Right nutjob resisting arrest for fraud. On that day, Cooper made a number of further predictions: the US would respond with bombs, somewhere or other and shortly after that, new laws would impose draconian restrictions on the rights of American citizens.Ĭooper later made one further forecast: “They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. Two and a half months later, two planes flew into the Twin Towers. This attack, Cooper asserted, would be blamed on bin Laden.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |