On the 6th of January, 2021, Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn election results they believed had been falsified, driving conspiracy theory to the forefront of the mainstream media’s attention
I have a co-worker named Josef, a resolute conspiracy theorist. I am very much enamoured of him, and believe the sentiment is reciprocated, though with difference in hue reflecting our differences in circumstance. He embodies many of the qualities I hope the passing years of early manhood will confer upon me; a laidback, sincere easiness, an incorrigible and charming sense of humour, and beneath it all an unwavering calmness and competency. The deep-felt respect and admiration I have for Josef was not, however, borne of our first meeting.
In the Spring of 2018, having recently graduated, I fell into working at an art and antique restoration company, assisting on jobs that demanded brute strength but not a conservator’s fine touch. After a few installations of paintings and collections of heavy sculptures I was called in for a larger job – a day on an estate in Oxfordshire assisting a furniture conservator. I remember arriving at the workshop in the early morning gloom and drizzle, where I was directed through the labyrinthine machine rooms and spray booths to the furniture department. Entering, my eye was first drawn to the many antique items populating the room – Tibetan prayer tables, longcase clocks, ornate Elizabethan four-poster beds – all in various states of disassembly and balanced in strange orientations. Beyond this surreal assemblage, stood by a bench mired in a chaotic miscellany of imperial brass screws, chisels, and fret saws, stands Josef sipping a cup of tea. He is middle-aged, of medium build, medium height, with a sandy yellow complexion. His hair is dark and wavy, streaked with grey, and swept back with the help of a pair of reading glasses, perennially worn on his forehead. He has a full beard, also fringed with grey. His eyes sparkle with a lively energy, the type that has always evaded me so early in the morning. The result is like a cross between a dashing woodsman and a shabby professor. Good-looking, quietly intelligent, unconcerned with style. “Cuppa tea and let’s get on the road”, he says. Friendly but no nonsense, delivered in an outlandish combination of Eastern European and cockney accents.
The drive to Oxfordshire took about two hours each way. For nearly its entirety, and that of the return, Josef chased a fleeting train of thought detailing the Earth’s true geometry (flat, apparently), the nature of the shadowy elites who obscure this reality from us, and the reverse rapture that will be the result of our deception. Initially I was pleasantly surprised at his unabashed openness and innocent acceptance of me, though this eventually turned to bemusement at the fantastical nature of his beliefs, and finally to an exhausted wonder at the lengths to which these subjects could be drawn out to. Despite the frankly unhinged nature of his beliefs, Josef was not without a degree of self-awareness; the stream of consciousness frequently punctuated by his asking “do you think I’m bonkers?”. To this I could only answer ‘no’. They were certainly the beliefs of someone with a tenuous grip on reality, but he himself was clearly sane. Upon return to the workshop, another furniture restorer approached me and with a wink asked if I now knew about the new world order. I suppose I proved a useful, and less derisory, outlet for Josef at the time.
Gradually I was brought into the workshop and given a technician role, and from there began to learn to work on art and antiques. Forming a friendship with Josef early on, I was often sent to assist him. Josef seemed to enjoy having a student to whom he could impart his substantial practical knowledge – he tutored me on the woodlathe, gave advice on mig welding, and played driving instructor in the work van out in the countryside. I was delighted by the bastardised idioms he’d come out with; an English breakfast is a “full-monkey (Monty)”; he gets caught “right (red)-handed”; and when he finds himself the butt of too many jokes he’ll tell you with endless good grace and playfulness “don’t get nippy (lippy) with me alright”. Not to mention his Slavonic substitution of ‘V’s for a ‘W’s, especially amusing when he would (routinely) burst into the office, spilling tea and dropping tools, exclaiming “I can’t find the v(w)an key”. Josef had a storied career, working for princesses in Qatar, shipping tycoons in Greece, several members of our own Royal Family, and nearly every museum, gallery, and aristocrat in London. Over the course of day jobs in the city, overnight jobs out in the country, and not infrequent nights at the pub, I learnt about Josef’s life prior to becoming a furniture restorer.
Josef was born in Slovakia, 1970, two years after Warsaw Pact invasion, the son of a bus driver and the middle child of five. At the age of 16, he left his family home, a farm on the rural Hungarian border, to go to school in Bratislava. By 20, having completed his compulsory military service and enjoying a brief time working on set production, Josef moved to London. Here he trained as a chef and worked in a number of commercial restaurants, as well as venturing into small-scale haulage, starting Britain’s first Slovak delivery service. During this time, Josef met Christine, who worked as a cleaner at one of the restaurants. Never one to sit on his laurels, Josef took the money he’d saved from his haulier venture and applied to Royal Holloway, London University, to study Conservation and Restoration.
Josef would graduate and soon begin working with the same company that I met him at 15 years later. Him and Christine would marry, move from her parental home – a flat in a council estate – to a flat in a Peabody development. There they had two children, first a daughter and then a son. Josef is reserved about the details of his domestic life during this period, so what follows is patched together from stories from colleagues and the few admissions Josef will make. Shortly after the birth of their first child Christine’s behaviour became somewhat erratic, often erupting in anger over dissatisfaction with the colour of their wall paint, size of their flat, or other details of their lives. Josef responded by burying himself in work, taking on extra hours and sometimes working late into the evening. The birth of their second child seemed only to accentuate Christine’s anguish, and she was soon taken into police custody in relation to a spree of shoplifting. Around this time it was noticed that Josef was arriving at work with scratches on his face and neck. Though he remained affable, Josef often appeared exhausted, as though he wasn’t sleeping, and the office began to receive calls from an incensed Christine, demanding messages were passed on to him. After a year of very palpable misery, Christine filed for a divorce. Despite Josef’s quiet but staunch Catholicism, he too must have thought their marriage to have sunk deeper than could be salvaged, as he put up no resistance. But the legal proceedings would prove to be as protracted and traumatic for Josef as the deterioration of his marriage itself; though Josef had a mastery of colloquial English, the legal parlance of the correspondence he now found himself awash with was unintelligible to him. Art restoration is not a highly paid industry, and hiring a lawyer was not financially feasible. Christine took what can only be described as a combative approach to the divorce, stating early on that she would argue for full custody of their children and ownership of their flat, and would not be open to negotiation. She took their two children pre-emptively to her parents’ home one day whilst Josef was at work and said he would not see them again. Upon contacting social services, Josef was informed that a number of serious allegations of abuse had been made regarding him, and that the children would stay with their mother until a court decided otherwise. In an especially cutting episode of injustice, he was told he must attend a counselling group for abusive partners if he hoped to be granted access to his children again.
When I met Josef in 2018, it would be a little over a month before Christine would leave with the children, and he had just begun to dabble in ‘flat earth theory’. The subsequent 23 months – the time it took for the divorce proceedings to conclude – were evidently gruelling for Josef. Together we applied for legal aid, but the morass of bureaucracy and waiting lists meant he only received support for the child custody case, and as a result took out substantial loans for legal advice on the divorce and property cases, though even then he couldn’t afford a solicitor from start to finish. Instead, he took his car off the road, cancelled his broadband, and lived off food from the reduced aisle in his local supermarket. Prior to the conclusion of the custody case he had very limited contact with his children, felt victimised by social workers who seemed partisan in Christine’s favour, and though he never said it, was haunted by the thought he might lose his home and family. During this period Josef would spend much of the day watching YouTube videos intently on his phone and begun displaying strange habits – insisting on being referred to as a ‘living man’, never writing his name in within boxes, and pointing out farfetched symbolism in seemingly prosaic buildings. When he wasn’t watching videos he would sit in silence, staring into space. Attempting to break this trance with light chatter would result in the inevitable and rapid redirection of the conversation to one conspiracy theory or another, no matter how innocuous the starting point. He would deliver monologues at considerable length before collapsing back into silence. For all his worldly confidence and unique charm, Josef did begin to appear, in his own words, ‘bonkers’. I heard some iteration of every conspiracy theory known to man from him – carcinogenic 5G radio waves, Bosnian pyramids, implanted tracking chips, animal DNA in vaccines, chemtrails, manufactured weather, the list goes on. His fundamental kindness was unaffected by these ideas, but they themselves strayed into questionable territory at times.
But the storm did pass. I distinctly remember walking out of Kingston County Court on the final day of Josef’s divorce hearing into the spring sunshine, feeling that a chapter had ended in his life and new one was about to begin. He had been given shared care of his children, signed a mutual consent order to buy Christine out of her share of the flat, and they had both agreed to take no more financial proceedings against the other. Josef was wearing a smart blazer and sporting a stylish new haircut. Smiling on the phone to his sister, excitedly sharing the good news in Slovakian, he momentarily looked like himself once more. But something of the trauma and impotency he had experienced over the last few years had lodged itself in him. Rather than dissipating, his interest in conspiracy grew into an obsession. He began to isolate himself from his colleagues, first through a dogged persistence in discussing his theories, and then resentment when others expressed disinterest or opposed his ideas. Meanwhile Josef’s debt continued to bite, and to compound this he found he was unable to renegotiate his mortgage rate from the pre-existing one based on his and Christine’s shared income, which was far higher than he could afford. This was due to the block of flats lacking an ‘External Wall Fire Safety Review (EWS1) certificate’, legislation drafted in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy, which meant banks would not go near them, and existing mortgage’s could not be altered. Unsurprisingly, the luxury block of flats in the same development as Josef’s acquired a certificate within months of the bill passing. But to this day Josef is saddled with his original mortgage rate and paying off his legal debts seem to be a distant hope. The tension in his professional life came to a head when another furniture conservator was given a promotion that Josef believed he had been ear-marked for. He responded by going silent for over a year, not offering a single word and giving only indistinct, mumbled responses when cornered. Initially Josef would confide in me provided there was no one within earshot to witness his sudden fluency, and I tried to listen without expressing doubt or judgement given he had no-one else to talk to. But as his ideas increasingly cast those around us as conspirators I felt a responsibility to put up some resistance. Many at the company were concerned by his attendance of anti-lockdown rallies and refusal to either wear a mask or test for Covid, especially a fellow furniture conservator whose partner was pregnant. The conservator who had accepted the promotion was confused as to why he had been assigned so much blame in Josef’s eyes. And more generally Josef had begun to believe there was a collective effort to denigrate him within the company, and that his previous happy years there were naïve servitude on his part. But after attempting to explain to him that there was no collusion against him, and that he could perhaps listen to some of his co-workers’ concerns and find a compromise, Josef stopped talking to me too. He became totally isolated, signified by his headphones being worn all day, every day, always with a YouTube video playing. His beliefs had become all-consuming, enveloped his entire psyche, and his perception of all of us along with him.
Over the years that Josef shared his beliefs with me, I saw a number of unifying themes emerge from beneath the sprawling conspiratorial ontology Josef built for himself. What follows is my understanding of Josef’s attraction to conspiracy theory, and perhaps alludes to what draws so many others into its thrall.
i) Comfort, then empowerment
To those who feel disenfranchised, cheated, or forgotten by society, conspiracy theory provides a psychologically attractive explanation for their state of affairs. Surprising, perhaps, given the overwhelming negativity of many theories. But it could be in this tremendous negative weight that believers are uplifted. What is X to believe when they uphold all their civic duties – paying tax, abiding by the law, generally living within the confines of society – only for their life to flounder where other’s succeed, and to be suddenly feel abandoned by the society they have hitherto contributed to? Perhaps it is because they lack some aptitude or quality that is necessary to succeed in life, though one must imagine this is not a happy thought for X. Or perhaps they were simply unlucky. Better, maybe, but here personal failure is replaced with an element of chaos; the universe is simply a roll of the dice, and there is little comfort to be found in that. But what if those markers of success were obliterated by something that underlies our society, something that renders our laws, politics, work we do and currency we earn, all illusory. If that were true, X’s failed career, marriage, or other life goal, is no longer so significant. More so, if the entire system was carefully designed to subjugate those who engage with it; the politics and laws merely a distraction; the rewards simple placation; then those who most happily participate in the system are those most convincingly fooled by it. And she who sees through the lies grasps the most fundamental of truths and is thus elevated above those trapped in the artifice of society. Hence the conspiracy theory offers comfort to those who feel let down, or fear that they have let themselves down, meanwhile reassuring them that they are in fact powerful in a manner those seem to have succeeded are not.
ii) And with exoneration of cause, comes exemption from solution
So, X is freed from the thought of personal failure in any regard to their own unhappiness, given that there is an almighty entity preventing their true happiness and offering only an ersatz replica. Consequently, they are also discharged of the responsibility of solving their unhappiness. For no matter how hard they fight, those behind the conspiracy remain just as powerful and unreachable, and the rest of society remain just as blind. Engaging in the conspiracy theory therefore provides an archetypal bad entity that can be fought whilst removing any pressure or expectation of the theorist to win. Whether it is tech-billionaires, global political elites, or an alien master-race, the conspiracy theorist is always positioned in such a way that they can never truly lose their war on the conspirators, only romantically martyr themselves in an act of defiance and rebellion. This may be a more palatable thought than identifying the solutions to the more mundane problems X might be facing, especially if they feel those problems to be insurmountable; large debt, a failed marriage, or political impotency, for example.
iii) Order in place of chaos
The second possible explanation of X’s failure, chance, was dismissed as uncomfortable. And the thought that chance plays a significant part in the occurrences of the universe truly is a discomforting one. It is surely better to believe that hard work pays off, that crime never pays, and that the sun will rise every morning for all eternity than the alternative – that there are no moral principles guiding our human outcomes, that we are no more special than any of the other billions of planets, and that the sun will one day go dark. But this is what the scientific orthodoxy of today tells us. Our universe is constantly expanding such that not only are we not the centre, but there is no centre. Billions of years passed before us and billions will pass afterwards, space-time curves and so parallel lines do eventually meet. And any hardship visited upon us by life is, by its random nature, devoid of meaning. It is quite horrifying really. But what if contemporary science, political upheaval, inflation, warfare and climate change were all carefully planted tricks? Then the universe is not so chaotic after all. And what if they are orchestrated by a highly organised group who have every nation’s government under their control? The universe is then also highly ordered. The omnipotence of the conspirator is always commensurate with a precise, militaristic system in conspiracy theory, whether that be NASA, the W.H.O., or satanic cults. And the belief that there is some form of order, even bad, is then of comfort. And that life’s hardships are ascribable to a material entity, that can therefore be materially vanquished, rather than the result of a cold and empty universe, must be infinitely preferable to X.
iv) Constructing control
So far conspiracy theories have proved attractive in their capacity to ameliorate the self-image of the conspiracy theorist. However, there is a clear tension between sections ii and iii, in that the less responsible one is for the state of the world, the more powerless they are rendered. This is a comforting thought in its alleviation of personal responsibility regarding one’s unhappy circumstances but does not reflect the combative nature of many conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theory is not a passive philosophy but often demands action on the part of the believer, and in doing so suggests they have a degree of control. And yet the conspirator remains invulnerable in their artifice – the Earth is flat, but its perimeter is guarded, atmospheric footage is perfectly doctored, only the initiated will be allowed to travel to space, and every scientist, pilot, government and weatherman is in on it. The conspiracy is impossible to prove, impossible to dismantle, but still the conspiracy theory offers its believer a position of relative power. This can be explained by a comparison between the conspiratorial ontology and realities of scientific and geopolitical practice. The precise movements of contemporary science and politics are near impossible to comprehend to a layperson. Much of it is expressed in a language simply illegible to those outside of a minute group, who themselves are highly trained in that specific field. We can only blindly trust the expert’s theses and shrug our shoulders at the questions that evade them. Yet the movements in these fields have a profound effect upon our day to day lives, whether that be the development of a new vaccine or the departure of a nation from a political-economic union. Some people are genuinely threatened by advancement, for example manual workers whose livelihoods are imperilled by developments in robotics. The conspiracy theory’s version of events therefore represents an improvement to the theorist regarding their understanding and degree of control of science and politics. They reduce the complexity of the world to an infantile simplicity, and in doing so invite participation from laypeople where they are otherwise discouraged. Take, for example, Flat Earth theory’s much derided experiment designed to demonstrate the fact that the Earth is static – if a ball is thrown perfectly straight into the air one observes that it lands at the point from which it was thrown, therefore we are not rotating at 10,000mph beneath it, therefore the Earth does not rotate upon its axis. Disregarding the extreme simplicity of this exercise, it must present an attractive alternative purely on the grounds that its ‘proofs’ can be easily understood, discussed and tested in a manner that real physics cannot. They make sense of an otherwise non-sensical universe in a manner similar to religious allegory. In this respect conspiracy theories deliver on their promise of a degree of control that its believers are otherwise bereft of, and in doing so grants them a voice where they had none. This holds equally true for theories of politics, history, corporate advertising, and so on, as it does for the natural sciences.
v) Faith and the nobility of the underdog
Finally, note the recurrence of psychologically attractive beliefs common to religion in the previous sections. Christianity dissuades jealously of ones’ neighbour’s success, even if ill-gotten or undeserved, and transplants it with a self-assured belief that their own piety rebalances the scales in their own favour (comfort, then empowerment). More so, it promises that one’s hardships are the result of an immortal, intangible evildoer, who can be resisted but not destroyed (and with exoneration of cause, comes exemption from solution). But despite this eternal force of evil, the universe is still highly ordered, with humans eventually assigned a spiritual home in accordance with their mortal actions by an all-powerful judge (order in place of chaos). And although the magnitude of these forces of good and evil, the omniscience of the judge, and our own relative feebleness all suggest we are something like grains of sand in the tow of an ocean’s current, we are nonetheless endowed with the gift of free will. Though the evil is indestructible, we are compelled to combat it through prayer. We are simultaneously powerless and powerful; acted upon by the universe and acting upon universe (constructing control). There are further, more generalised similarities between the two belief systems. Conspiracy theories have a similar plasticity to religious belief that allows them to adapt to the cultures and preferences of a hugely diverse congregation, whilst retaining their core features of psychological alleviation. They are couched in abstracted mythologies, and therefore not constrained by specified premises or details that may ostracise one where they appeal to another. The combination of this plasticity and mythocism mean that different iterations needn’t be considered inconsistent, nor can a piece of evidence against the theory ever be sufficient to disprove it. And where one may have felt alone, they find a community. A community that welcomes those shunned by the mainstream. Given these similarities, it is no surprise that there is a strong showing of religious people among believers in conspiracy theories. And for their part, conspiracy theories gladly meet religion in the middle, for example the flat Earth theory’s adoption of the medieval Christian theory of the crystalline sphere, of a vaulted dome of firmament that encompasses the earth. Other times a more strong-arm approach is taken to winning over religious people, such as the spread of fallacious claims that pork or beef, meats forbidden in certain faiths, are in the Covid-19 vaccine. Religion and conspiracy theory have the same objective – to tame the universe into a more bearable incarnation. In the face of religion’s steady decline in social, moral, and political influence in Europe and America, conspiracy theory presents individuals in need of religious comfort with an edifying answer to the scientific and political developments that have hitherto eroded the relevance of faith; that those developments are false, and more so are maliciously designed to obscure the truth from us.
vi) the formulation of ideology from what is available
The psychological convenience of conspiracy theories has so far been addressed, but with intentional independence of an evaluation of the truth or falsity of those theories. Their resilience in the face of overwhelming evidence has been noted prior, and there are swathes of the internet dedicated to falsifying various conspiracy theories. What is not often acknowledged is the validity of the conspiracy theories’ point of departure from mainstream belief. The world is riddled with injustice, like that suffered by those exploited by banks – locked into a mortgage relating to a building that is not fire-safe, forced to pay tripled service charges for night-watchmen, unable to sell, seemingly put behind a director’s bonus. And this injustice does seem insurmountable in its scale and the depth with which it is entrenched into our society. And it does seem as though the injustice of it all is as clear as day to those who are in a position to change it, but they are also the ones who stand to profit from it, and so the systems of politics, economy, and media all entwine until we are in a chokehold, citizens able to vote and speak freely, but in reality impotent when it comes to instantiating change. After all, how many among us understand what goes on between politicians behind closed doors? Or the stratagems of global banks? And who is in control of the scientific, medical, and technological work that shapes the direction our societies? A handful of amorphous NGOs, shell companies owned by billionaires, secret government laboratories, and perhaps, less menacingly, the odd university professor. And aren’t these the same people who have been known to collate digital footprints to form psychographic profiles, which are bought by political parties, who then pay the media to release personalised advertisements to manipulate our votes? That the stars in the universe may one by one burn out, until in growing darkness roaming black holes consume their lifeless bodies, eventually bleeding out from radiation themselves and dissipating to nothingness, leaving a lightless, frozen infinity of space, is a deeply disturbing thought. Equally, the moral nihilism of such a universe and its implications for life on our planet make for an uncomfortable succession of thoughts. Whilst the manner that conspiracy theories project these concerns on to scientific finding and political events may be easy to ridicule, the fact they do project them rather than face the enormity of the problems they must otherwise rationalise is at least understandable. And the gateway to this act of projection, the conspiracy theory’s starting point of scepticism, is absolutely justifiable, perhaps even to be encouraged. The truth is conspiracy theorists start from a philosophically sound position from which they are successful in their identification of the problems that we collectively face, but are found lacking in their ability to formulate or address these problems. So, they formulate an ideology from what is available to them instead.
I have no expertise regarding the analysis of either social movements such as conspiracy theory or the psychology of individuals who may be more susceptible to them, nor am I informed by any research. Everything written until now could well be applied to itself, insofar that it makes for a convenient but unfounded explanation of events I find distressing. I only have anecdotal evidence, gathered whilst watching the man I hold the deepest respect and affection for be pushed to the brink by an unforgiving economic system, a dehumanising justice system, and an abusive relationship. He found first escapism, and later a twisted salvation, in conspiracy theory where mainstream beliefs and institutions offered none. And although the content of the theories he recites is irredeemably irrational, their function is painfully human in its rationality. Communication with conspiracy theorists on the level of the veracity of their theory is misguided; the theory is not really truth seeking, rather it promises a sense of purpose, understanding, control, community, and ultimately happiness to the theorist.
The Midnight Review 
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