Defending Ourselves From What Isn't Real

A fringe proposition

Image via Midjourney

While driving the other day, I found myself behind a car sporting an “Alex Jones was right” bumper sticker. Yes, I understand bumper stickers and t-shirts are a primary example of elevated communication. I am also aware of the claim, which I find deeply dubious, that someone would affix such a message to their car simply to “trigger” or “make other people mad.”

In this case, I was indeed mad and disgusted. The bumper sticker’s message references the conspiracy-fueled belief that the school shooting in Newtown never occurred and was instead staged by the government using crisis actors. I wrote here about some of the Newtown parents incredible and heart-rending journey to hold Alex Jones accountable, which meant simultaneously getting a court to acknowledge that their dead children were in fact real. Just typing those words is a nightmare. The bumper sticker also uses the verb “to be” in the past tense: “was.” It’s not that Alex Jones is right, has since passed away or—excuse me while laughing maniacally—changed his mind, it situates conspiracy theories in their safest space: the past. I guess one unintended bonus of this deeply cruel message is that Alex Jones is, when it comes to Newtown, over. He’s rightfully been neutered with heavy financial penalties, and since his “intellect” is entirely about profit, he has since moved on to peddling other fictions.

I mention this incident because, in the present, we tend to think “things are worse”—people are crazier; conspiracies are “new” rather than just ideas that science has disproved over time; and in terms of historical nuttiness, we are the final nutballs to end all nutballs. The nutball final boss, if you will.

Warning, here comes a rough transition…

So I’m reading War and Peace (I’m on page 900, so basically, I’ve just started), and it’s an amazing artwork. Tolstoy, a writer far ahead of his time in terms of systems thinking, pretty much produced a work that can serve as a full summary of human behavior for the rest of time… including conspiracy theories. Imagine my utter surprise when, turning the pages of War and Peace, Tolstoy takes a deep dive into numerology, the number 666, the antichrist, the nature of the beast, and some of Iron Maiden’s early catalogue! I’m not kidding!

The character in question is Pierre—a wandering, awkward soul who wants to fit in somewhere and simply belong. The Freemasons offer him such a possibility (cue sinister illuminati music, Tom Hanks, and eyes on dollar bills). Thus, we get the following passage that, if provided in isolation, you would say came from Fight Club:

One of his brother Masons had revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon, drawn from the Revelation of St. John.

In chapter 13, verse 18, of the Apocalypse, it is said:

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

And in the fifth verse of the same chapter:

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as the Hebrew, in which the first nine letters denote units and the others tens, will have the following significance:

      a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   k
      1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10
       l    m    n    o    p    q    r    s
      20   30   40   50   60   70   80   90
             t    u    v    w    x    y
            100  110  120  130  140  150
                        z
                       160

Writing the words L’Empereur Napoléon in numbers, it appears that the sum of them is 666, and that Napoleon was therefore the beast foretold in the Apocalypse. Moreover, by applying the same system to the words quarante-deux, * which was the term allowed to the beast that “spoke great things and blasphemies,” the same number 666 was obtained; from which it followed that the limit fixed for Napoleon’s power had come in the year 1812 when the French emperor was forty-two. This prophecy pleased Pierre very much and he often asked himself what would put an end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried by the same system of using letters as numbers and adding them up, to find an answer to the question that engrossed him. He wrote the words L’Empereur Alexandre, La nation russe and added up their numbers, but the sums were either more or less than 666. Once when making such calculations he wrote down his own name in French, Comte Pierre Besouhoff, but the sum of the numbers did not come right. Then he changed the spelling, substituting a z for the s and adding de and the article le, still without obtaining the desired result. Then it occurred to him: if the answer to the question were contained in his name, his nationality would also be given in the answer. So he wrote Le russe Besuhof and adding up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much, and five was represented by e, the very letter elided from the article le before the word Empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the answer he sought. L’russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery excited him. How, or by what means, he was connected with the great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that connection for a moment. His love for Natásha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion, the comet, 666, L’Empereur Napoléon, and L’russe Besuhof—all this had to mature and culminate, to lift him out of that spellbound, petty sphere of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and lead him to a great achievement and great happiness.

I haven’t thought of conspiracy theories this way but certainly should have—they’re vehicles for making people feel special; it’s not just a matter of “belonging,” but belonging to a select group of people whose “platform” doubles as a position from which to project feelings of superiority anchored in invented and thus unassailable knowledge. (My homies, see Derrida on “the transcendental signifier.”) In other words, “How can I be intellectually special without doing any of the real work?”

Alex Jones, Pierre, and countless people/characters marching back through time. Maybe we’re not the nutballs to end all nutballs. Maybe we’re just nutballs in a long line of nutballs. “A chip off the old nutball.” For the sake of experiment, let’s assume this “transhistorical nutball-ness” to be true—we have always and equally, as a species, been prone to conspiracy-theory thinking. There remains an important difference: with the weapons at our disposal, should we decide to act on conspiracy-driven beliefs we are far more dangerous now than in the past. In War and Peace, Pierre is accidentally fighting (long story, ha!) in the battle at Borodino where he engages in a fistfight with a French soldier. A fistfight. He didn’t even slap the Frenchman with a glove. Pierre doesn’t have vending-machine AR-15s and 3D-printed death machines at his disposal, just a funny white hat and a horse he can barely ride.

Warning: rough transition #2…

You know who does have access to such things and is a contemporary connoisseur of conspiracy theories? Ky** Ritten*****. Ritten*****, who drove to Wisconsin from Illinois and killed two people he didn’t know so he could protect the sanctity of a convenience store, is currently on tour for a series of campus speaking engagements, encouraging students to take up arms and, like he did, kill people they don’t know but feel threatened by (the current enemy are any students who stage protests about the conflict in Gaza).

So I will state the obvious. One of the reasons we cannot, in America, solve real and serious problems is because we’re too busy thinking about and defending ourselves against what isn’t real. You know how you sometimes fight arguments in your head and drive yourself nuts? Well, this is that, but with a Jungian-national-collective unconscious. How can we work toward clean water or basic housing for the homeless when we’re talking about “false flag” school shootings and something something Hunter Biden’s secrets are revealed if you play Taylor Swift’s new album backwards in a pizza parlor (bonus tracks must be included)? The border! The Chinese lab! Wokeness! Can’t we just fund education or work on our standard of living instead?

This situation is also dangerous. Gun violence in America is our national abomination, a global disgrace, and it scares the hell out of me. And, as you might have expected in terms of where this was all heading, most of the mass shootings we see are born directly from such conspiracy theories and thinking. If you don’t believe me, there’s this horror show of a development regarding a “Columbine Killers Fan Club.”

I’ve really come to believe only one thing will bring change at this point: gun owners themselves, most of whom simply hunt. Until gun owners take the lead on curing this national disease, there will just be more “events” that lead to someone making a profit off a bumper sticker that reads “[Insert conspiracy theorist here] was right.”

And yes, it feels hard to write about conspiracy theories without jumping all over the place and sounding exactly what you’re writing about. Noted!

Thanks for listening.