> > conspiracism is, first and foremost, a search for the
> > origins of a given phenomenon; only last and hindmost does it
> > address the CONSEQUENCES of the phenomenon, if it bothers with
> > them at all.
>
> I would offer a different formulation. Conspiracism in a public setting is
> a narrative form of scapegoating. It justifies the blaming of societal
> problems on a stigmatized "Them" who are demonized as wholly evil for
> plotting against the good "Us." Meanwhile, the scapegoater is acclaimed as a
> hero for revealing the plot against the common good.
by 'first and foremost' i sort of indicated that there are other aspects, which you tease out nicely. not adequately, though.
> So conspiracism starts with a grievance, those with the grievance blame a
> scapegoat, then write a narrative to justify blaming the scapegoat.
i'd quibble with 'write,' but not to be pedantic. here's why:
mythical accounts of the origins of (to be general) bad thing are, obviously, ancient. for example, take the kind of rhetor- ic that supposedly emanated from the 'essenes,' a turn-of-the- era jewish sect widely credited as being responsible (somehow) for the mishmash called 'the dead sea scrolls.' there's a lot of blabla in those documents about 'the children of light' vs. 'the children of darkness,' and enough extraneous material to allow conjecture as to who the darkness crowd was. but the es- senes, if indeed they existed, weren't 'conspiracists' in the sense that someone who firmly believes that JFK was killed by X or Y 'powerful force' is.
your definition of 'conspiracism' is trans/ahistorically soci- ological; it formally describes the phenomenon without making reference to its historical circumstances. and you can't just tack on some historical limitation to fix that.
'conspiracism' was born over time; as such, there are liminal, early, near-but-not-quite forms. heresiology contributed much to its modern incarnation, as did medieval anti-jewish tenden- cies. but, by your measure, most of human history amounted to an endless expanse of conspiracism.
fundamentally, 'conspiracism' relies on the belief that there is a secular world set apart from a divinized cosmos. the aim of 'ruling the cosmos' in accordance with some divine harmony was *the norm* throughout much of human history.
i think--and, fwiw, i came awful close to writing a phd about this--that the royal road to defining conspiracism is to look at the values it threatens: basically, meritocracy, democracy, and egalitarianism. therefore conspiracism cannot have exited prior to the formulation of these ideals.
i don't want to get into an interminable discussion about max weber but basically the ur-conspiracy was the protestant crit- ique of catholicism: 'we see your practices and we reject the idea that they are sanctioned by god: you don't rule the *cos- mos*, you rule *the world*.'
and from there it's been downhill: wherever the spirit of pro- testantism touched there flourished the requisite for conspir- acism. there were no allegations of ancient, secretive elites in byzantium, or in hinduism, or in buddhism, or in confucian- ism. or even in catholicism prior to the reformation.
> > an imaginary social
> > formation can serve just as well as a real model for present
> > and future activities.
>
> This is critical to understand why scapegoating and conspiracism is such a
> poewrful historical process.
it sure is.
> Carrol Cox argues: "I've never encountered an "irrational belief." I've only
> encountered very wrong beliefs based on inadequate informatio
> and/or training. Granting their premises, they are always
> quite rational."
i'm not sure that carrol's assessment of what is 'ir/rational' in X or Y period has much bearing on the events.
> Conspiracy theories sometimes use irrational leaps of logic, but that does
> not make them a result of individual pathological behavior. Once you grant
> the irrational Kierkegaardian leap, then, as Carrol points out, internally
> conspiracist theories often have an attractive and consistent kind of logic.
> If Jews are evil manipulators of the economy, then why not smash them and
> resolve the problem? The leap leads to the logical conclusion. This is why I
> am always carping that the logical result of conspiracism is the expulsion
> or elimination of the named scapegoat...sometimes to the point of genocide.
keep it simple: conspiracism is discursive.
chers, t