Conspiracy Theories, Consumer Choice and Sovereignty born of Property Rights

I just read the Alan Moore quote about conspiracy theories; roughly speaking, it says they provide comfort in the face of chaos.

I think he's right. But I think there is more to say; specifically, about why they've seem to become so popular recently.

For those of you who don't know, many of my friends were deeply involved in staging 'Cosmic Trigger' - which has an explicit focus on conspiracy theories. I saw the play back in 2014 in Liverpool and then got a little more involved when it was re-staged in May 2017 for a 23 date run in London. The play's key protagonist is Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) who's work The Illuminatus! Trilogy (written with his friend Robert Shea) kick started the modern fascination with the Illuminati.

I also talk quite a bit about conspiracy theory and its relation to money in the extended interview I did with Prof Max Haiven and Cassie Thornton which appears in Burning Issue Super Deluxe Edition.

So conspiracy theories, and the question of the growth in their popular appeal, have been rattling around in my head for a while.

Two explanations tend to pop up to explain the rise.

First, social media is often credited with an important role. It can easily disseminate information to a wide audience without any verification or fact-checking.

And second - referencing back beyond the birth of social media to the 1950's when RAW's story (with Kerry Thornley et al) really begins - is the decline of religion. There's a saying that nature abhors a vacuum. When we no longer believe in God, we don't believe in nothing. Rather, something else comes along to help us fill the void. Conspiracy theories, as Alan Moore suggests, fulfill a need.

I want to suggest a third idea, though. I think conspiracy theories are more prevalent now because they're a byproduct of turbo-charged C21st capitalism. Specifically, I think that they arise from a belief that consumer choice (and the property rights upon which they're based) are constitutive of individual sovereignty. We tend to experience sovereignty - we enact it - by and through the choices we make as consumers - that is, how we spend our money.

Many articles have been written about how these days we act as 'spiritual consumers'; picking and choose elements from religions which seem to fit into, or enhance, our lifestyles and values. There is, I suppose, a way of seeing this as a good thing - in the way that we can pick all the good bits from religions - compassion, forgiveness, love - and leave out all the nasty bits like the sexual hang ups and the chopping off of various bits of our bodies (hands, foreskins, labia, etc etc).

But I'm not so sure that it's a good thing. I'm not sure that our veneration of consumer choice as our primary (and most commonly enacted) expression of sovereignty is really good for our soul, at all. In fact, I think acting as a consumer, especially in matters of spirituality, actually diminishes us.

Consumer choice depends on property rights and under capitalism (and neoliberalism) these are presented as the bedrock of liberty. Bitcoin, for example, is all about making property rights (in currency) unassailable - or, you might say 'sacrosanct'. We can be equal only in so far as property rights are equally enforced across the population. And failing that we can be equal only in so far as we all have the ability to inflict lethal violence at the level of the individual.

For the hardcore bitcoin bros, freedom is defined by cold storage and a gun. Much as I think this is a truly appalling vision of the possibilities for human liberation, I do think it is a legitimate extension of the logic of neoliberalism. It expresses an extreme form of the paranoia and alienation we see so clearly marked out in the territory of conspiracy.

But of course, as has been so apparent during this pandemic, most of us don't think like this at all. The logic arising from property rights (and consumer choice as constitutive of individual sovereignty) is repressed, or perhaps sublimated, and it turns out that people are prepared to make huge sacrifices (both of their lives and livelihoods) in order to save and help others.

Back at The Church of Burn last December 2019 (it seems like a lifetime ago but it isn't even six months) David Graeber talked about Money Burning as 'the breaking of a spell - 'a disenchantment'. This has stayed with me. I would add that I hope the ritual act also 're-enchants'.

By burning money the mode of thinking - from which conspiracy is born (the belief in the trinity of consumer choice, property rights and liberty) is exposed as a lie. True sovereignty, true freedom is contained within the giving up of property. True sovereignty stems from sacrifice.

___________________________

UPDATE: A comment from a friend on facebook made me realize that I could clarify my argument here quite easily by saying this:

We now feel - more than ever - justified in believing whatever we like. As if truth has become a commodity that we can summon at will... like a takeaway meal.
We end up with the situation where this or that conspiracy theory fits my particular set of prejudices - I want it - so therefore I have the 'right' to believe in it. I'm suggesting that this thought process has been accelerated by neoliberalism.

________________

I spent a long while trying to write piece on sovereignty and sacrificial logic for Burning Issue. I didn't manage to complete it, because I got too busy with editing the magazine. But here's an extract.

_____________________

The relation between sacrifice and sovereignty and how to conceive of them unbounded by ‘economic thinking’.

“You must become an ignorant man again

And see the Sun again with an ignorant eye

And see it clearly in the idea of it.” 

Sacrificial ‘Logic’ is a misnomer. It’s not really ‘logic’ at all. 

A starting point in understanding it is to consider that all systems must ‘waste’ the excess energy they can’t use for growth. As systems become more complex they have more say about how and where that energy is expended but however it’s done, excess energy must be sacrificed. The idea of sacrificial logic is that ‘the sacrificial process’ is a pattern written into the fabric of reality. It can explain everything from the Sun’s gift of heat and light to the world to the tragedy of meaningless wars.

Sovereignty is the “1+1=2” of sacrificial logic, in that sovereignty is both the result of, and foundation to, sacrificial logic itself. Sovereignty here refers to your experience of being in this very moment. And more than that, when combined with sacrificial logic it suggests a ‘pure’ or ‘ultimate’ experience of being, akin to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch. In short, the combination of sacrificial logic with sovereignty makes the 'sovereign individual' envisioned by libertarians appear as a mere slave subjugated to property rights. 

More importantly, The combination also extends the idea of the sacrificial process as a pattern written into the fabric of reality, to something even deeper - it becomes a blueprint for Being.

For us as human beings, the most profound expression of sacrificial logic is sacrificial ritual. But any action we take that is in some sense ‘wasteful’ - that is done apart from utility and economic exchange - sits in some relation to sovereignty. 

‘Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty’.

For me, Georges Bataille is the most important thinker on sacrifice and sovereignty. The following though, comes from Carl Jung. It points to an important and inevitable contradiction that tends to arise when we think about sacrifice and sovereignty.

“A sacrifice is meant to be a loss, so that one may be sure that the egoistic claim no longer exists. Therefore the gift should be given as if it were being destroyed. But since the gift represents myself, I have in that case destroyed myself, given myself away without expectation of return. Yet, looked at in another way, this intentional loss is also a gain, for if you can give yourself it proves that you possess yourself. Nobody can give what he has not got.”

Jung’s  ‘this intentional loss is also a gain’ captures the contradiction. It feels like there is a bit of double-entry book-keeping going on. 

We tend make sense of things by thinking about them in terms of exchange and so we have come to think of sacrifice as an ‘exchange with the Gods’. If you want a good harvest you sacrifice a goat to your God. But this is not the sacrifice of sacrificial logic, at all. Nor is it Bataille’s notion of sacrifice. And it’s not how I have come to understand sacrifice in my money burning. 

It is simply not possible to fully understand sacrifice in terms of exchange. The largest and most important aspect of it will always remain invisible to ‘economic thinking’. What sacrifice is - is the creation of NOTHING. We live in a material universe that is, in its most basic sense, ‘something’. Sacrifice creates an opposition to that.