Are You a Conspiracy Theorist?
Chapter 8, if I can
I had a conversation with someone about Malone’s recent substack and the subject of Desmet came up. This person insists that Desmet has been misinterpreted and that he never said or implied that there was no conspiracy during Covid. “He was misquoted.”
So… back to the source, Desmet’s Psychology of Totalitarianism, chapter eight, “Conspiracy and Ideology,” page 121 of the hardcover version of the 2022 Chelsea Green publishing. If, that is, I can handle it, as by page 128 I again get that recurring thought: this makes no sense. At all.
Re-reading that chapter eight, I’m stunned that a somewhat casual study of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead is pertinent to an analysis of what Desmet is saying. Who would’ve thought? I was reading some Whitehead because, frankly, I need a break from the real world: I wish it well and if I didn’t care I wouldn’t be writing now, but like so many of us, I need a break. So, Whitehead. Whitehead is one of the most monumental and original thinkers of the twentieth century.
To cut a long story short, Whitehead states that the universe is shot-through with final causation. Things proceed according to purposes, or ends, or final causes.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “The final cause is that which is given in reply to the question: ‘What is its good?’. What is singled out in the answer is that for the sake of which something is done or takes place.”
Final causes are a central category of existence for Whitehead. We might argue whether nature really acts for final causes or whether instead elephants are made continually by happenstance that they all come out the same, but it’s much harder to argue that human beings don’t act with goals or ends in mind. We see it all around, and even a slovenly and lazy individual has somewhere along the line decided that he just isn’t going to care. For the rest of us, we all have plans and goals and hopes, and act toward those.
But note how oddly Desmet insists on a mechanistic view of human action: his entire theory rests on the assertion of an ideology of mechanistic thinking. His denial of conspiracy is a precise denial of an end to induce mass formation, for example. No one wanted to do it. It happened not because of a more-or-less “top down” end, but from a bottom-up mechanical unfolding, like a Sierpinski triangle.
I find that very odd.
Notice that I don’t deny mass formation, but the central disagreement is that I say that mass formation can be induced. Desmet asserts that it arises from within the people themselves, not through any conspiracy to cause psychological distress in a population. This, I think we can all see now, is nonsense.
It turns out that I decided that yes, it’s a waste of time to re-hash what I’ve already said about Desmet. If you want an in-depth analysis, read my prior essay. Desmet clearly says there was are no conspiracies, meaning secret planning to enact vast schemes, because things unfold not according to plans but according to the ideology of our own mechanistic thinking. This is plainly absurd because people and governments and institutions certainly do plan, and sometimes with vast schemes, and sometimes in secret. That’s no mystery. Since this is plain, Desmet has to save his theory by bringing in the idea of “manipulation,” so that people don’t plan but they manipulate things for their own ends, and so … well, here we have again the idea of “ends,” which implies planning or some vision toward which we work. So why can these “ends” be expanded to include well-thought-out, global conspiracies involving alliances of individuals and institutions who have something to gain if the planning goes well?
Of course Desmet says that there’s manipulation but no conspiracy. He wants to ground his theory in the idea that we’re captured by efficient causation, blind and proceeding according to the unfolding of an ideology derived from Enlightenment thinking. Thus there are no “ends,” only the “end” that the mechanistic vision gives us, which is, roughly, blind faith in technological progress. Yet I doubt this end truly governs the lives of most of the people on the planet, or even a significant minority. We know better. As we live and love and win and lose, we know very well that there is no technological utopia. Wars, pollution, medical malfeasance— we’ve seen what abuse of technology can do. Technology makes our lives easier of course, and in a sense we’re already all transhumanists in that we drive machines, use technology for entertainment, take various pills and potions to enhance our lives, etc. But this doesn’t mean we’re mechanistic thinkers in Desmet’s sense, even if it means we’re tool makers and tool users.
I don’t want Desmet’s confusion to be our confusion. So let’s look at the quote from Alexandre Solzhenitsyn that Desmet uses to start off his central chapter eight and try to understand where Desmet’s confusion lies:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, and who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
That people would do evil deeds, even unwittingly, is why thinkers throughout the centuries have considered how best to govern ourselves. In America, we decided that individual self-determination was the best policy, with minimal government to protect life, liberty, and property and checks and balances to restrain government power. This was an ideal (an end) decisively derived from Enlightenment thinking but also decidedly NOT a mechanistic vision. The end was liberty in a more-or-less self-governing society of individuals who were at least civil and decent to each other. This society of tool-makers would evolve technologically but to imagine that most of us would dream of a technological utopia is to ignore the critiques of the pollution and disasters and injustices of technological progress, and to ignore, especially, that prior to Covid those most against technological progress— the true believers in made-made CO2 catastrophe, who wished to stop industrial progress— were decidedly not “mechanistic thinkers” and yet were the ones most prone to follow the dictates that came through their TVs and censor those who disagreed with the authorities. Those people weren’t mechanistic thinkers so much as non-thinkers who swallowed propaganda without reflection.
The problem of tyranny is a political problem, a problem of censorship and propaganda and surveillance, not a psychological problem. What tyranny does to people is of course psychological, but this is a distinction that Desmet seems to miss.
So why does this even matter? Desmet has a theory, it’s just a theory, we have different theories so let it be.
The answer to this is that ideas matter. Ideas of liberty matter, of truth and justice. America was founded on an ideal. So were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, as Hannah Arendt eloquently demonstrated.
Frankly, Desmet’s theory makes no sense, but the kicker of it is: if we ever succumbed to a soft totalitarianism wherein we owned nothing but were happy, Desmet’s book might very well be the perfect psychological bible to warn dissenters off of conspiracy theories that might lead to mass formation (as Desmet says in his book!) and to consider their own mechanistic thinking as the real problem, and get their minds right according to authoritative guidance.
This is why I and many others consider Desmet’s theory an insidious one, and why I’m dismayed that those in the medical freedom movement believe that it offers insights. Yes, it does, into the psychological state of individuals in mass formation, but as to the cause of mass formation, he is woefully off the mark and deeply misleading.
two or more in agreement is a comspiracy, the most common of human actions....maybe of almost all animals
Masterfully done. I always enjoy and look forward to your writings.