In a TV debate that's part of the US presidential campaign we find once again Donald Trump refusing to disown the QAnon conspiracy theorists. QAnon believers have a bizarre take on reality; for them Donald Trump is the centre-piece hero in their convoluted conspiracy theory. As the Wiki entry for "QAnon" has it:
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory. It alleges that a
cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking
ring and plotting against US President Donald Trump, who is battling against
the cabal. The theory also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of
reckoning known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the
cabal will be arrested.
Regarding the TV debate this BBC article tells us that:
When moderator Savannah Guthrie asked Mr Trump whether he would reject them [QAnon], he replied: "I know nothing about QAnon." Ms Guthrie said she had just told him about the group, which has been labelled a potential terrorist threat by the FBI. The president said: "I know nothing about it, I do know they are very much against paedophilia, they fight it very hard
.....Mr Trump spent much of the broadcast arguing with the moderator
Looking at Trump's behaviour my conclusions are as follows: For Trump the presidency is less about serving one's country than it is about serving his ego and getting him back into the top seat where he can continue to throw his weight around among his personally selected sycophantic officials and yes-men. His preferred method of administration is that of by passing the country's democratic institutions as far as possible (which he encourages his followers to believe are compromised) via his tweetings, his rallies and above all his lying, his distortions of the truth and his encouragement of conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones and the QAnon group. It's unlikely he believes this drivel himself (any more than he believes Christianity) but he is content to make friendly noises toward these people in order get their support and votes. Trump seeks total dominance and this is why he has difficulty accepting the role of the broadcast moderator who's job in a democracy is to ask difficult questions. In any case Trump puts about the story that the media (except his own of course) is the source of "fake news"; Trump dislikes anything beyond his immediate control. In short Trump is made of the stuff of dictators.
Trump is poisoning America with his lies, lies which exploit and exaggerate underlying suspicions, animosity, hatred, conspiracy theories and inflame divisions; and he doesn't care; all that matters is getting enough votes to ensure he gets back into power where he will then do his damnedest to dismantle the democratic institutions of America and set up a Trump dynasty. He's actually the favoured candidate of China and Putin because they know he will weaken the Western alliances. This web article tries to get at the heart of Trump's appeal and in it we can read:
Trump
appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which analogizes out-groups to
parasites and poisons and other impurities.
That also sums up the sociopathic 'Libertarian' (sic) philosophy of the ultra-right Ayn Rand.
We find a helpful and erudite analysis of the US grass roots right-wing in a book I've been reading recently (and still reading) called "Strangers in their own land" by Arlie Russel Hochschild. Although a liberal Californian academic Hochschild shows great patience and understanding in getting behind what she calls the empathy wall and into the minds of the right-wing voters of the American south. She reveals them as practical and work-a-day human beings facing pressures and vulnerabilities that have helped skew their thinking toward the right and then supporting Trump in the 2016 election, a man who like Hitler knows how to exploit discontent by seeding the conversation with the poison of lies and hints of conspiracy for the purposes of his own power agenda.
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Unfortunately a large slab of the American evangelical church supports the Trump phenomenon. Blinkered Christian fundagelicals fail to see Trump's pride, corruption, lies, distortions and egocentricity as the worst of sins in the Christian canon. Instead they've focused on the pulse racing issues of abortion, evolution and above all their obsession with gender & sexuality. Trump has cynically sidled up to and courted the American church on these issues just as he has courted and sidled up to the conspiracy theorists. Hitler did same with the German church (although as one of the "ubermensch" and a social Darwinist he actually held with contempt what he perceived to be Christianity's concern for the weak). But in Germany, as in America today, the Church wasn't and isn't an entirely an innocent dupe: An authoritarian, right wing church already has various aspects of its culture in place which have helped ease through Trump's deceptions. Viz: A tendency to see politics through the lens of a hard socialist vs libertarian dichotomy (anyone left of the Republican party looks like a "socialist"), a simplistic in-groups vs out-groups fundamentalist outlook which favours law & order solutions to sin, marginalisation from the intellectual mainstream, an anti-academia ethos, prosperity teaching with little concern for the weak, quasi-gnosticism and a paranoid apocalyptic imagination which acts as a fine seed bed for conspiracy theories.
But crackpot conspiracy theorism, even in American, tends not to be mainstream: Instead it is mostly confined to a lunatic fringe. So it's not surprising that Hochschild doesn't cover it in her book, although one can see how the anti-federal, anti-elite feelings of the people she meets could well find expression in conspiracy theorist fantasies. But the book was written prior to the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory which recently has almost broken into the mainstream. This now brings me to the main subject of this blog entry; my unexpected meeting with a UK conspiracy theorist who seems to have been infected with the big viral conspiracy theories which have the jumped across the Atlantic pond; I shall call him "Steve Pastry".
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1. Conspiracy Theorism
Before I introduce Pastry properly I will do a quick resume of some of the aspects of conspiracy theorism. (More discussion of this can be found under my "conspiracy theory" label).
In my time (prior to Pastry) I have met several people who have been susceptible to conspiracy theorism. They have had chequered careers and faced difficulties fitting in to the status quo & established order of things. They have made heavy weather of life and one can understand why they would like to make sense of their failure to fit in and of the chaos around them. For them conspiracy theory brings a background order & explanation to the chaotic big picture and provides a rationale for their alienation from the established order over which they carry a big chip on their shoulders. Of course, the established order is far from perfect but like their Marxist opposite numbers they want to see that order overthrown in favour of their idealist (and unreal) notions. Also, like their Marxist doppelgangers they are drawn toward ideas of apocalypse and eschatological doctrines.
Conspiracy theorists see the world through a kind of convoluted Agatha Christie plot, a plot which runs solely in their heads. This plot, with its highly contrived twists and turns, is most unnatural of the real world dynamic: For them nothing is what it seems and reality is systematically skewed by malign hidden intelligences to deceive. But each conspiracy theorist finds consolation and a certain amount of self-esteem in the idea that they are one of a rare breed who can see through the deceiving façade. They find difficulty accepting that life events can be random. For them randomness is often read as a pseudo randomness with a hidden code and agenda behind it. For example, one of the conspiracy theorists of my acquaintance did not accept that the millennium bug was simply down to the limited perspective of many independent programmer coding monkeys (of whom I myself was one!) but instead followed the teachings of Christian fundamentalist Barry Smith who taught that it was a deliberate contrivance of covert controllers and part of their plot to bring down the system and take full control at the turn of the millennium. My acquaintance preached this view as part of their Christian eschatological beliefs during 1990s but had forgotten all about it by 2005 when I challenged this person, a person who went onto champion other conspiracy theories. This person was not equipped to conceive an army of programmers (including myself!) working independently and in quite haphazard ways. Instead, as is the wont of conspiracy theorism, this person preferred to believe that there was an involved conspiracy narrative of systematic control working away behind the scenes that accounted for the complexities of an otherwise haphazard activity.
Two of the conspiracy theorists of my acquaintance favoured the notion, if not believed, that the Earth is flat. Flat Earth theory, of course, would require that mainstream science from the Greeks & Ptolemy, through the scholastics of the middle ages to modern navigational techniques are not merely mistaken about the shape of the Earth but that this is in fact a deliberate deception maintained (for inscrutable reasons) by a huge highly organised conspiracy.
Conspiracy theorists will sometimes claim that "conspiracy theory" is a term invented by the unseen rulers of this world in order to label the musings of conspiracy theorists with a pejorative term. As will shall see Pastry is of this opinion. But conspiracy theorists are unable to conceive that their views actually fall under the general idea of "conspiracy theorism" which is in fact a world view, a view which is fallacious. One of the major fallacies of conspiracy theorism is that, contrary to Occam's razor, it multiplies actors, agents and chunks of narrative willy-nilly in order to join a haphazard collection of data dots into a single coherent but highly contrived big picture. As a theory gets more ramifying the possible routes through the decision network multiply exponentially thus reducing considerably the probability that a right route has been taken. Therefore, arbitrarily multiplying entities in order to fit the data dots of complex social objects to a theory are almost bound to be in error. Human intellectual resources are most effectively employed when constructing simple theories about simple objects (e.g. as in physics) because there are fewer opportunities to take a wrong route in the theoretical decision tree and therefore a greater chance of getting it right. In contrast those complex and chaotic social objects are best approached by us, not with unlikely ramifying theories, but instead with adaptive opportunism that befits what we truly are: Viz Complex adaptive systems.
For a Christian such as myself a world of senseless chaos actually makes some ironic sense of the human predicament: Sin, both Satanic and human, has difficulty planning because Sin looks after itself first and foremost - that is the definition of sin; it is the antithesis of Philippians 2:1-11. This aggressive independence promotes chaotic uncoordinated behavior. Moreover, in the Bible it's no coincidence that Satan is associated with the Dragon, the Serpent and the chaos beast who rises from the deep. (See Rev 13:2ff and also here)
The main reason why conspiracy theorism has gained so much ground today is no doubt down to the internet providing channels of infection for a large minority who, for a variety of reasons, are highly susceptible to persuasion by conspiracy narratives. Some of the web operators who promote these byzantine narratives may be cynical (& clever) trolls who get a control freak kick out of seeing how easily they can dupe gullible people like Steve Pastry.
2. Steve Pastry
My brief acquaintance with Steve Pastry started on a Church private members Facebook page where I published this link to an article on the web sight of Premier Christianity and merely suggested that people read the article and then sign a petition. The article is by a Dr Adrian Warnock and titled American evangelicals must stop spreading conspiracy theories about Covid-19, so it is fairly clear what the article is all about. Given that the church on whose FB page I published this link is a mainstream & moderate UK evangelical church I just wasn’t bargaining on attracting the attention of the otherwise unknown extremist Steve Pastry, who was hiding in plain sight on the FB page members list; how he got there I don't know; he's not a member of the church I'm glad to say. Pastry crept out of the woodwork to post his initial cranky outburst in response to my post. This outburst and most of the online conversation that ensued can be found in this PDF document.
For someone like myself whose epistemic method proceeds under the assumption that the anomalous, the erratics, the oddities, various phenomenal novelties, the paranormal and in fact anything bizarre (and that includes the Christian cults, the Christian lunatic fringe and spiritual weirdness in general) are the best test of one's world view, Pastry's response was actually a welcome windfall.
But set against this is the fact that getting information out of a fundamentalist conspiracy theorist is hard work and I don't have the skills of an Arlie Hochschild. They are of course set up to be suspicious of anyone who challenges their views and this was true of Pastry; after all he probably regarded me as an evil stooge of the illuminati. It was all very much a replay of my contact with other Christian cultists who have always assumed that, because I'm not one of them, I must be at best compromised and at worst an emissary of Satan. Although Pastry showed the usual sectarian reticence and kept his beliefs and sources close to his chest it is likely, however, that Pastry is into the QAnon conspiracy, now semi-mainstream among Trump followers. Nevertheless, when he was in outburst mode Pastry conveniently spilt of some of the beans; he's not only a UK Trump supporter but also believes the Earth is flat among other absurdities.
The worst thing about the kind of nonsense Christians like Pastry promote is that it brings Christianity into disrepute. Also, some of these theories can be damaging and harmful; I knew someone who refused cancer treatment because of a belief in cancer conspiracy theorism and died sooner rather than later as a result. And we have here the spectre of Christians who are making these insane claims being utterly convinced they are in the Spirit of Truth and even going as far as Pastry in accusing those who disagree with him as promoting the devil’s schemes. So we have the prospect that either moderate mainstream evangelicals (such as Dr Adrian Warnock above) are wrong about Covid 19 and the shape of the Earth or the ostentatiously devout sounding Christians conspiracy theorists are wrong. They both can’t be right, of course; one side or other is in error, almost certainly in my opinion people like Pastry who are into hard core conspiracy theorism. So not only does paranoid Christian conspiracy theorism compromise the authenticity of Christianity and its claim to being in Spirit and in Truth but it also has the effect of burying real threats to the church under a welter of junk theology.
It's no coincidence that Christian fundamentalism, conspiracy theorism, Trumpism, libertarianism and the extreme right-wing have gelled into an ugly congealed stinking mass of intellectual debauchery. The fact is (and I just have to face it) many parts of the evangelical church are not only in the intellectual doldrums but will actually defend those doldrums from a base that is a varying mix of fideism, Trumpism, conspiracy theorism and right-wing sentiments in general. Trump's toxic lies are seeping into and poisoning some parts of the Church. He's doing far worse covert damage to the Church than left-wing atheism ever could; at least with the latter they spare us the corrupting flattery and insidious delusional innuendos. Trump is fundamentalism's voice of Saruman. See the video below where we find two (sensible) American Christians who are critical of the drift American fundamentalist evangelicalism is taking. They tell us that in some evangelical minds Trump has been raised to a figure with an almost eschatological significance. If the election goes against Trump this entrenched eschatological idealism will make it difficult for these believers to accept. What do they do then? Get out their guns?