Conspiracism

Conspiracy theories, as we have seen, are both symptoms of confusion and powerlessness and tools of division and distraction that benefit elites.

The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm; it is to spread panic.

Intuitionism and the rejection of evidence and expertise are especially compatible with conservative populism.

when people place value on the role of evidence as a means of updating their beliefs, they are less likely to believe misinformation and conspiracy theories.

the imaginary waxes while the symbolic wanes.

In this context, conspiracy theories, as micro-narratives, are a remedy. They are taken up as resources that provide identity and meaning.

It is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.

As Gilroy-Ware puts it, “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.”

Conspiracy theories are particularly well suited to the creation of tribal biotopes on the internet because they allow for delimitation and exclusion, the mechanisms that constitute tribalism and its identity politics.