My Role in the Secret Global Conspiracy
What do conspiracy theorists think about the rest of us?
I know firsthand people who believe in conspiracy theories. Many of them are surprisingly nice and functional people in their everyday lives. But they are also something more questionable like Flat Earthers, Qanoners, or Anti-Vaxxers.
Professionally, I am known as someone who does not back down from controversy. When I was an assistant professor just starting out, I argued about department policy with the senior colleagues who would decide my tenure case. Now that I have tenure, I argue about college policy with the administrators who decide on my salary increases. My most popular book accuses my entire intellectual discipline of racism and xenophobia.
However, in my personal life I take my cue from the ancient Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi, who used this parable to describe how a wise person should talk to the confused:
When the monkey trainer was passing out nuts he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” The monkeys were all angry. “All right,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all pleased. With no loss in name or substance, he made use of their joy and anger because he went along with them. So the sage harmonizes people with right and wrong and rests them on Heaven’s wheel. This is called walking two roads. (Source: Ivanhoe and Van Norden, Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, p. 218.)
So when discussing controversial topics in a non-professional context, you mostly see me smiling or shrugging noncommittally. As a result of this non-confrontational attitude, there is a question I’ve never asked but have always wondered about: do conspiracy theorists who know me personally think that I am a part of The Conspiracy? After all, it’s one thing to believe that some faceless person or someone you only see on television is part of The Conspiracy, but what about someone you’ve eaten dinner with?
One simple answer to this question was provided by a non-conspiracy theorist friend, who affectionately teased me, “Oh, yeah. When Donald Trump can’t sleep at night, it’s because he is worried about defeating the Big Four leaders of the Global Conspiracy: Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, George Soros, and you.” Okay, I get it. Any way you cut it, I’m not a very important person, so there is no reason to think I would be involved in any big conspiracies.
But this isn’t a completely satisfactory answer for several reasons. First, I’m a college professor, and professors play a key role in every conspiracy theory. As one headline earnestly explains, “Trump Has Michael Horowitz — Democrats Have College Professors And The Deep State.” We professors are (supposedly) the ones indoctrinating the youth and silencing dissent. (The multiple studies showing that no systematic indoctrination or silencing of alternative voices is going on are just further evidence at how good we are at hiding what we are doing.)
A second feature of conspiracy theories that makes me wonder how conspiracy theorists view me is that conspiracies have to be big. It isn’t just a handful of eggheads in the US who speak in support of (say) anthropogenic global warming or the safety and value of vaccinations. There is a consensus among experts around the world on these topics. But if literally millions of intellectuals and influencers are involved, why not also a college professor like me who has taught and given lectures on four continents?
And, yes, I am merely a small cog in The System, but I am a cog that is connected to and working side by side with much more important cogs. I have friends and colleagues in the federal government and mainstream media, I’ve shared a dais with the CEO of The New York Times and a former Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, and my books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Estonian, Farsi, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. So how is it that, while I was hobnobbing with people who are actually important, no one has ever had one drink too many and spilled the beans to me, or accidentally sent an email to me intended for someone with “higher clearance,” or spoken a little too loudly while talking to another “insider” at a dinner party I attended?
I can think of at least three possible explanations for what conspiracy theorists who know me personally think of me.
(1) I am what Lenin (supposedly) called a “useful idiot.” I am one of the “sheeple” who believes the status quo, and I support The Conspiracy through my teaching and publications while being blissfully oblivious to what is actually going on, right in front of my eyes. Well, maybe, but I have spent my entire career challenging the status quo (“Chinese philosophy has been excluded from the Western curriculum due to systemic racism”) and learning to read texts for hidden layers of meaning (“Zhuangzi’s skillful butcher is an implicit critique of Mengzi’s dialogue with King Xuan of Qi”). If the evidence of The Conspiracy is so clear that random people can be certain of it after Googling one article and watching a couple of Youtube videos, why can’t I see it after 10 years of higher education and a lifetime of carefully assessing opposing viewpoints on multiple perspectives?
So maybe a more plausible way to fit me into The Conspiracy is to believe that (2) I am a low-level but loyal cadre who intentionally disseminates disinformation to deceive the masses. I don’t make any big decisions, but I exchange encrypted texts and emails (they would have to be encrypted, right?) with higher-level cadres who tell me (in at least a general way) what to pretend to believe. Uhm, okay. If you think this, you are sufficiently insulated from actual evidence and sound arguments that nothing anyone can say could change your mind. To be honest, as a philosopher, I have grudging admiration for the coherence of your worldview (even though I know your view fails in lots of other ways).
(3) In fairness, the most likely explanation is the one suggested by the same friend who teased me about being one of “the Big Four of the Global Conspiracy.” People prone to believing in conspiracy theories spend lots of time incorporating many things into their grand theories of the world (like the “intentional” misspellings, factual errors, and nonstandard capitalizations in Trump’s tweets), but they ignore most other phenomena. They can’t see the implication that (for example) their nice granddaughter majoring in biology must, at some point, have been initiated into the cult of experts who (supposedly) lie about COVID and vaccinations. They don’t think about the fact that, if they were right, the mild-mannered English professor walking his dog down their street is hoping to be promoted to the point where he gets some of the adrenochrome. It simply doesn’t occur to them how implausible it is that millions of people around the world are involved in one, focused conspiracy, yet none of them have ever had a change of heart, gotten some hard evidence of that conspiracy, and run to FOX News or Newsmax or OAN or whatever source they believe in. Where is the Daniel Ellsberg or Edward Snowden for the conspiracies they believe in?
I imagine that a conspiracy theorist might reply: “But suppose there is a cabal of highly educated experts running the world from behind the scenes?! What then?!”
My response? You mean the world is run by Philosopher Kings and Queens like in Plato’s Republic? Great! Where do I submit my résumé?
