The mystery in our secular-minded age is what lacks proper phrasing, more sensitive language, or our participation in the symbolic construction of reality. The secret, for its part, refers to a missing link between the private and the public. If we take politics, in the broad sense, as the dialectical relation between the private and the public, then a secret is what makes up an important aspect of personal life, biography, or identity of a politician or a public figure without becoming available to the public. Yet this aspect, if exposed and widespread, may have crucial political implications for a person and his or her milieu.
As a fact of personal life concealed from the public and available to a tiny group of adherents, family members, or no one, the secret remains a highly ambivalent phenomenon: it always functions behind the scenes, yet it can shed light on societal life. Those people in charge of the covert life of a secret and its holder would never allow anybody else to expose it, yet some hints or insignificant parts of information extracted from the context and intentionally dropped to the public can make a secret even more significant and powerful.
This is how rumors come into existence. They may well be a popular response to the public perceptions of a person closely related to the existing power structure whose private life is beyond the reach of common people; yet these rumors may be manufactured and released deliberately by the powerful to divert political attention from the real stratagems of significant political actors. It suffices to recall antisemitic rumors and conspiracy theories forged in Tsarist Russia after 1905 to divert the political attention of working class people from real politics and to channel their suffering and anguish into bigotry and antisemitic hatred.
Why do secrets have to be kept strictly confidential as a covert aspect of an important person’s life, without becoming part of the overt side of the person’s politics or social existence? It is because the secret distinguishes an important figure from the second-rank ones. Nobody is interested in the secrets of those who do not have access to financial, ideological, and political power. To deprive people of their secrets means to disempower them, as exemplified in the work of twentieth-century dystopian writers. The secret is about power in both the most inclusive and exclusive sense. The secret always reveals itself as a critical aspect of power. Power calls for a secret or at least some covert and unavailable aspects of its emergence in the world.
The conspiracy theory evidently refers to the failure of a given society or culture to accept and contextualize one (or several) of its segments. At the same time, the conspiracy theory, as a response to such a failure, may well be employed by those who are perceived (by political or cultural majority) to be
Moreover, to be able to trace the ideological and moral implications of the conspiracy theory for modern consciousness, politics, and culture, we have to focus on a less attractive source of information—a subterranean world of pathological collective hatred, the world inseparable from political intrigues and manipulations, and also from literary fakes and forgeries.
Everyone knows Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Fewer will have heard Susan Sontag’s clever development of it: “I envy paranoids. They actually feel people are paying attention to them.” If conspiracism is a projection of paranoia, it may exist in order to reassure us that we are not the totally unconsidered objects of a blind process. If Marilyn was murdered, then she did not die, as we most fear and as we most often observe, alone and ingloriously. A catastrophe occurred, but not the greater catastrophe that awaits all of us.
aaronovitch, 2009, p. 308
As the phrase “nobody cares about you” sounds like a cruel verdict tantamount to proof that we are a nonperson or nonentity, we have only one tool at hand to actualize and fulfill ourselves as those who matter in this world, namely to convince the world around us that we deserve to be a target group or that we qualify for an object of conspiracy or desire to be destroyed. In a world of desperate attention-seeking, indifference becomes a failure, if not a liability.
In a way, the conspiracy theory of society bears a family resemblance to such phenomena of the age of indifference as exaggerated, politically exploited
The conspiracy theory of society appears as a crie du coeur against the wall of liquid-modern forms of social alienation, moral indifference, political disengagement, and silence. Like self-inflicted political martyrdom and a sense of self-cultivated victimhood, the conspiracy theory is a desperate attempt to win the hearts and minds of a world of mechanical rhetoric and polite indifference. This is the world where nobody responds to our letters or email messages and where nobody reciprocates our efforts unless we come up with a political sensation or a plausible account of our suffering, or unless we ourselves become good empirical evidence that may support someone else’s social theory or political doctrine.
This book I have co-edited with Olli Loukola, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, appears as an attempt to cover an immense territory of political imagination, fantasies, conjectures, fears, modern uncertainties, and insecurities that we tend to describe by appending to them a generic term “conspiracy theories.” The book resulted from a seminar at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, which marked the beginning of a larger joint undertaking by a group of Finnish, German, Lithuanian, and Romanian scholars to work on secrets, mysteries, and conspiracy theories.
Thanks to Olli Loukola, the aforementioned initiative was developed into this volume with additional contributions from other colleagues working in the fields of social and moral philosophy, political theory, and history of ideas.
Leonidas Donskis
Bibliography
Aaronovitch, David (2009). Woodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. London: Jonathan Cape.