{"id":113,"date":"2021-01-11T12:04:59","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T12:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/box5257.temp.domains\/~houghty5\/?p=113"},"modified":"2021-04-25T09:24:58","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T09:24:58","slug":"the-american-way-of-submission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thoughtsofstone.com\/the-american-way-of-submission\/","title":{"rendered":"THE AMERICAN WAY OF SUBMISSION"},"content":{"rendered":"

Americans’ conspiracy theories are blue pills<\/em><\/p>\n

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Why are Americans on the political Right so drawn to conspiracy theories, from the chemtrails<\/a> lore and QAnon<\/a> to the conviction that COVID-19 vaccines are harmful<\/a>?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say anything with certainty about the causes of social trends, societies not being very amenable to the types of experiments that can settle such issues in other realms of science. But to me a plausible hypothesis is that all this conspiracy-theorizing is a conversion of complex, partly unconscious, and above all inadmissible knowledge concerning existential threats, into a form that the average person can openly express.<\/p>\n

In other words, even if this conspiracy stuff seems ridiculous to most educated people, it is stuff that ordinary folks can understand and discuss, and even if the threats are in fact imaginary, they are in principle as salient and alarming as the real threats that are suppressed: Dire threats from the culture and media are converted into dire threats from the water and the air, even from medicines. Similarly, the implicit knowledge that America’s elite-driven culture corrupts young people is transformed, in the QAnon belief system, into a simpler narrative about a ring of elite pedophiles.<\/p>\n

To put it yet another way: on the Right the collective unconscious knows that something has gone terribly wrong and is causing great harm, but it tends not to acknowledge this directly\u2014it tends to acknowledge only imaginary wounds. Psychiatrists call such phenomena, when they occur in individuals, hysterical or somatoform or conversion disorders: For example, a woman\u2019s husband has been cheating on her, but instead of acknowledging this, she develops an ailment with nonspecific and unverifiable symptoms.<\/p>\n

Why can\u2019t Americans openly acknowledge what has harmed them? Most obviously because the principal causes of harm over the past half-century are the very things that American cultural and political elites have held up as holy and beyond criticism\u2014indeed, anyone criticizing them is, in the lexicon of America\u2019s new, feminized, despiritualized Puritanism, a hater<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Consider the general reaction if one were to make, on social media or in person in polite company, any of the following assertions (which I regard as essentially true):<\/p>\n