Conspiracy Theories and Paranoid Reasoning ｜ Guest： Daniel Miller ｜ 7⧸27⧸23
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Summary
In this episode of the new issue of I Am 1776, I chat with Daniel Miller about conspiracies and how we should be thinking about the world around us in terms of conspiracies, and why we need to be concerned about them.
Transcript
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So, the new I Am 1776 issue is out, and it's about conspiracies.
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And I thought that was a really interesting topic because, of course,
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we are in a situation where a lot of people are worried about conspiracy theories,
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The government needs to control speech so that we can make sure that no one
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is interested in these very, very dangerous conspiracy theories.
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And so, I have joining me today, I Am 1776's literary editor.
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He is Daniel Miller, and he's going to be talking to me a little bit about the new issue,
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about the idea of conspiracies, and how we should be thinking about the world around us.
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The first essay in there is from you, and you kind of set the groundwork.
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There's a lot of different conspiracy theories that are kind of described in the issue,
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but you kind of set the framework of kind of what a conspiracy is,
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and how to think about it, and why people are thinking about these more.
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But I guess let's go ahead and start at the beginning for people.
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You know, there's a lot of people who understand that coordination is kind of part of society,
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and explaining how coordination happens is kind of important to understand power,
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the world around us, the kind of political and social system we end up in.
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But then we have this thing called a conspiracy theory,
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and that's where, I guess, if the coordination happens in a place that's unapproved,
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What designates something as a conspiracy theory?
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we've seen now in the last few years especially the use of the term conspiracy theory
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deployed increasingly polemically in order to essentially discredit anything
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that isn't an official narrative, or you could even say isn't an official narrative yet.
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We saw that, for example, with the so-called lab leak hypothesis,
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which was a conspiracy theory in 2020, but now appears to be coming closer to the mainstream consensus.
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We've also seen at the same time actually increasing deployment of conspiracy theories
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And so, you know, I think that the Russiagate hoax that was launched against President Trump,
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what Lee Smith called the plot against the president, is a very good example.
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That was the official story for a number of years until basically the pandemic,
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the so-called pandemic, wiped it off the headlines.
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And then finally, what we're seeing actually is increasingly transparent activity of what could
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only be described as at least conspiratorial-like entities.
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The actual coordination behind staging the Russiagate hoax is one example.
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The kinds of collusions that were happening between, for example, regulatory agencies,
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between drug companies, and between politicians between 2020 and 2023 with the COVID story is another example.
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Also, no matter which way you look at it, it's the conspiracies almost all the way down.
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And therefore, I think what we need to try and do is think about them a little bit more critically,
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because essentially whenever you're dealing with a conspiracy or with the problem of a conspiracy theory,
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conceived as a kind of hypothesis, you obviously do run the risk of a real abandonment fantasy,
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whereby you begin to imagine all kinds of entities that are operating that may or may not have any kind of basis
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And so in order to also avoid that, and also to avoid the definite possibility,
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for example, of even false conspiracies being planted for you by the conspiracies that actually you don't even see,
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we have to try and think about what conspiracies even are,
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and to think about them as actually more or less normal parts of sociopolitical reality, not exceptions.
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And so I think this is what we are trying to do with our latest issue.
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Obviously, we have a lot of people who are skeptical of the ruling powers of the elite, the regime,
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And because there's so much information out there, because there's just this fire hose of kind of information coming at people constantly,
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it's hard to know what to treat, you know, seriously.
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Like you said, we have the idea that there are official narratives that are conspiracy theories like the Russiagate hoax.
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We have people who are kind of gaslighting people who recognize conspiracies in real time,
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like we see happening with many aspects of the pandemic.
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And then there's a possibility that so many of these narratives have been placed in front of us
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because they help to kind of confuse people, to muddy the waters.
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And I think that's a real issue of information coordination for the right or those that oppose the regime,
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kind of however you want to phrase that group of people,
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because they don't control these informational institutions.
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They don't control the apparatus that kind of manufactures our consensus.
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And therefore, they don't know kind of what to trust when different conspiracies get floated, revealed, denied.
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There's no consistent basis of information for them to appeal to.
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Well, I think what you saw last, well, actually a couple of days ago,
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Yuval Harari went on Lex Friedman's podcast, and he was taking an extremely strong anti-conspiratorial line.
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He was saying that basically conspiracy theories don't exist.
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He was saying that in particular with respect to this kind of straw man conception of the conspiracy theory,
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which he himself presented for this purpose, which is the notion of an all-powerful, omnipotent conspiracy,
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which controls the whole world, so on and so forth.
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We need to understand also that because these are normal sociopolitical formations composed out of human actors,
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they obey the same kinds of laws that all other forms of social interaction obey.
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And so therefore, it's not a question of omnipotence.
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It's only a question of coordination and how it's possible to stage coordination
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and where the natural limits to those kinds of enterprises are.
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Gore Vidal actually sort of lost kind of figure in American politics to some extent.
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He was sometimes accused of being a conspiracy theorist.
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The reality of how even very ordinary kinds of operations proceed is conspiratorial.
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Well, you and I in a certain way have engaged in a conspiracy to appear on this podcast together.
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Okay, this is relatively straightforward, but why not much more ambitious and extensive program
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if you're in the kind of position where you're able to coordinate on that level?
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And I think this is what we have seen and are seeing.
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And the reason why we're seeing it is because this is the way that global politics is structured.
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We have these very flexible networks composed out of more or less autonomous agents
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who are able to make deals with each other on a more or less ad hoc basis.
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And this is a milieu which breeds conspiracies.
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So maybe it's important for us to kind of understand conspiracy theory as a magical word,
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something that kind of got hollowed out of meaning and replaced with kind of a particular political
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Because what you're saying is that conspiracies are just kind of a natural part of human social
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They will organize behind the scenes to make things happen, especially when things like
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And so that that that shouldn't be the understanding that that is true about society shouldn't be charged
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Because when people hear conspiracy theory, they see, you know, crazy guy with a tinfoil hat.
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They see, you know, a guy living alone in a shack planning to bomb something like that.
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When they think of conspiracy, that is what is.
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But that's almost an entirely emotional response.
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In reality, conspiracies are just part of life and human social organization.
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And so when we talk about them, we need to understand them as such and not some kind of
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emotionally charged phrase that that kind of denotes that somebody is of the wrong class
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or mentally incapable or has lost their mind, that kind of thing.
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Well, I think that you could say that the very fact that this actually really quite normal
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mode of human speculative inquiry has been stigmatized is itself revealing of something.
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Famously, the term conspiracy theory itself, in its pejorative connotation, was in fact deployed
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by the CIA following the Warren Commission report.
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People were not convinced by the conclusions of the report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
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And so therefore, there was a concerted information management operation precisely to say that anybody
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who was questioning that was a conspiracy theorist.
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Now you're seeing the term employed even against people or ideas that actually are not even
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So the famous example, I think, is Renaud Camus.
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His so-called great replacement conspiracy theory is how it tends to be described.
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Camus himself actually uses the term in a much more speculative and abstract way.
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He talks about, for example, the replacement of natural building materials by PVC and ferroconcrete
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and these kinds of replacement of even more metaphysical elements.
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But for reasons to do with his status, his epistemological or his political epistemological
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status, they simply say he's a conspiracy theorist and leave it at that.
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So what you can say there is that essentially any kind of epistemological structure which is
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not obeying somehow the way in which the regime, however you want to describe it, wants
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to present its own narrative of itself becomes a kind of conspiracy theory.
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And I think this is also a kind of form of projection, actually, because of the nature
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of what the regime, such as it is, actually is, which is now more like a conspiracy than
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Like we are in a situation where we kind of have the way the government is supposed to
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Everyone gets taught the way that it's supposed to function.
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There's supposed to be a formal plan for the government.
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But it's very clear that the vast majority of that has kind of been left by the wayside
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We've gone from if we ever had a very clear chain of power in the United States to a very
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Everything is done by, you know, nameless corporations, by bureaucracies, by NGOs that no one really
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understands who runs and how they're motivated and what their actual end goals are.
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There's very little accountability in any of our institutions.
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Everything is kind of this, you know, unassailable monolithic bureaucracy that you can't pinpoint
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any actual people who are kind of in charge of or culpable, you know, for any kind of mistakes
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And so this means that that conspiracies have to take place, that these things and that can't
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that means people can't help but notice them because almost everything that is actually
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driving our society, almost everything that is actually exercising power in front of us
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I think that this is a phenomenon of informal power.
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It's a phenomenon actually which becomes particularly prominent with the birth of liberal modernity.
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There's a famous quote by Adam Smith where he says,
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it only takes two or more people who are engaged in the same trade to meet together before the conversation
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turns to a conspiracy against the general public.
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So what you can say there is that all of a sudden, actually, you've had this new object
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created at a certain point in time, the general public.
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You have these kinds of forms of organization which are happening simply through social circles.
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And if you fast forward then 200 something years to the kind of situation where in which
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power is highly centralized but informalized within this very specific and particular social
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milieu composed out of politicians, composed out of lobbyists, composed out of people who
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work for the media, all of these people are meeting in very specific social environments
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and they're able to coordinate on that basis and they naturally will do so.
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It would be strange if they weren't doing that.
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So this is what you get when you don't have a formal structure that is able to coalesce
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You get a situation where everybody is actually also maneuvering by themselves against each other
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within this kind of context whereby even the conspiracy itself, let's say, doesn't necessarily
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know who's in and who's out, you know, what cards, who's holding what, so on and so forth.
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And this is, I think, also why we're seeing these kinds of phenomenon of, you know, blackmail
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of these kinds of extreme sort of forms of criminality which are sort of periodically
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surfacing, it's because, it's because the nature of the, of the, of the internal organization
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of these, of these forms of power themselves are leaky in the same way that they're also
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drawing people into this kind of concentration of enterprise.
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I think we're also looking at kind of a denial of human nature, right?
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One of the, one of the aspects, like you said, of liberal modernity is the idea that we're
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going to generate kind of these neutral institutions that we're going to kind of level everything
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that we're going to remove kind of, you know, class interest or the interests of different
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And we're going to kind of homogenize everything into one neutral, objective kind of scientific
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And so because we're trained that none of these organizations would actually ever care about
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specific groups, specific outcomes, specific kind of lobbying organizations or, or, or
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other groups kind of behind the scenes, then we have to believe that they're always acting
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They're always acting in the interests of wider society.
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We're never allowed to recognize that they might be acting on the, on their own behalf or
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And so because we're kind of denying the fact that humans will always work for the interests
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of a particular group and not for kind of the wider public as a whole, everyone's kind
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of gaslit in the scenario where like, well, you, you can't notice that these doctors are
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You can't notice that these politicians are doing something because it benefits them.
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Everyone is always only working for the public good.
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Everyone is only ever, you know, responding to the science, the objective reality determined by
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experts, the idea that they would, you know, work in their own interests or the interests
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of, of others, other groups that could not possibly be real.
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Well, you know, I think it's actually very interesting to consider why under certain circumstances,
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people actually would work for the common good or why not, you know, why actually is it the
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case that even in relatively recent memory, institutions were functioning relatively, um, healthily.
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I think that what you're seeing now in terms of the kinds of rhetoric, which is being deployed
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is being deployed by people who are using these kinds of, uh, these kinds of claims because
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They still have a kind of legacy, um, authority that has obviously drained away a lot in the
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last few years as people are beginning to notice actually the people who are, uh, who are
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presenting themselves as if selfless public servants or anything, but how could we get them back
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Is this a phenomenon actually of globalization to some extent whereby simply put, you know,
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the rewards of the global are just so enormous compared to the possible rewards of the national
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level that everybody who's on the one wants to get to the other, just like they did when,
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you know, the nation state itself was being formed?
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Or is this some sort of, uh, transitional, I don't know, corruption that could be corrected
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through, through some form of, uh, get unlimited grocery delivery with PC express pass meal prep
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delivered snacks, delivered fresh fruit delivered grocery delivery on repeat for just $2 and 50
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Yeah, that's, that's obviously a much larger question.
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Maybe we'll, we'll delve a little bit, uh, deeper into that here in a moment.
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But, uh, I guess first let's look at why, uh, I guess, well, well, let's, let's start with
00:19:15.780
So like you said, so many of these kind of actors were relying on good faith built up on
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institutions that previously did serve the public that did consistently produce, uh, goods
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And now they're more or less ignoring that fact.
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In fact, not only are they, are they ignoring that they are kind of, like you said, leaning
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on that, uh, stockpile, that surplus of credibility in a way that they never did before.
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Why are they so willing to kind of burn that, uh, that stockpile of credibility on what is
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increasingly clear, a, clearly a coordination on their behalf to benefit a certain group
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Well, I think that basically they, they don't really care.
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Although I think that they may believe that they do on some level, there's a complex psychological
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element, which enters the picture here because it's to do with trying to understand how these
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people actually themselves narrate to themselves what they're doing and why.
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And I think it's actually quite difficult to, in a way, somehow untouched by one's own
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You know, you start to actually believe that lies that you tell.
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And I think that you probably do believe if you're, I don't know, Anthony Fauci, for example,
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that somehow on some level, like all of this, everything that you're doing is for the, is
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There's some constraints that mean that, you know, you have to do it like that.
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And actually maybe it is even like that to some extent, because this is also the sort
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Ultimately, it is a kind of gangland, paranoid atmosphere.
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And it's a kind of kill or be killed atmosphere as well.
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So that you can't really actually, you know, turn around and say, wait a minute, guys, like,
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haven't we gone a little bit far on, on, on this policy?
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Because if you do that, immediately what happens is you'll be eliminated by someone who's more
00:21:21.660
And so I think that actually we've also seen this kind of phenomenon play out many times
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It's worth remembering, you know, that the Bolshevik party was originally itself a conspiracy.
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You know, it ended up in a situation where basically the biggest gangster in the party
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And then he was periodically pitting all of the others against each other in order to maintain
00:21:50.300
And this was somehow actually what he had to do, because there wasn't a possibility for
00:21:56.620
So I think there's something like that going on, actually, that, you know, ultimately their
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room for maneuver is drastically constrained by the reality of the maneuvers that they had
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to undertake to get where they were in the first place.
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There's you're, you're trapped in kind of that cycle, no matter where you turn.
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This has always been a part of human coordination, but now we have the Internet and the Internet,
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I think, radically changes the way that people coordinate, the way that they interact with
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kind of power, the way that they're able to observe power and each other.
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And obviously, this changes the way that conspiracies thread, they can be or spread the way they can
00:22:46.800
How has the Internet impacted the way that people look at the conspiracy theories and the way that
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Well, I think that it has been an extremely important factor in essentially rearranging
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the lines of communication between different parts of the world, essentially.
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You saw that, you know, the emails, the sort of email chains that came into existence
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shortly following the outbreak of the Chinese flu in Wuhan.
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You know, you have people all over the world that are coordinating together in order to come
00:23:24.960
And then that's the narrative that they take to their national groups, basically.
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It used to be the case that basically the political power of, well, political power per se was
00:23:41.500
concentrated in national capitals, and this is how it was instrumentalized and deployed.
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Now we have these global networks composed out of all these people linked all over the world,
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and they're actually able to move national governments according to their almost superior
00:23:59.660
So there's something very interesting about that.
00:24:01.340
I think, though, on a more sort of everyday level, if you're considering just kind of everyday
00:24:07.560
conspiracies, I mean, there's a way in which this topic comes close to another issue, which
00:24:13.560
is very interesting also to me, which is to do with cult formations and how groups are able
00:24:20.260
to close themselves off around certain kinds of circuits of information, which are then exchanged
00:24:28.400
between them and how the mindset of individuals in the group become increasingly somehow drawn
00:24:36.560
So the internet is also doing that, and it's forming these kinds of mini conspiracies, organized
00:24:43.660
I mean, the Brown scare that we've had in the last few years, which is also to some extent
00:24:49.040
a phenomenon that came out of the campaign against Trump, but somehow extended beyond that.
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This was a conspiracy theory that was adopted by many different kinds of people who wanted
00:25:01.680
somehow something that they could do with each other in order to make them feel like they
00:25:10.800
had something to do in the world or because it was a handy way for them to do somehow what they
00:25:16.780
wanted to do anyway. So the internet is also breeding these kinds of mini conspiracies.
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And we also saw that with the pandemic, which was, I think, really the kind of most
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spectacular demonstration of the very destructive social and psychological power of the internet
00:25:38.460
that we've seen so far, because, you know, we have still people who are wearing masks in
00:25:44.200
supermarkets based on this kind of vision of invisible contaminants floating around.
00:25:51.220
You know, we're having all these kinds of new conspiracy theories sort of breeding, basically.
00:25:57.520
QAnon, which is the one that obviously the mainstream media likes to focus on, and one could
00:26:03.040
think about why that is in itself. But I mean, it was also interesting in its own right as a kind
00:26:08.880
of media phenomenon, because that was also a conspiracy theory generated somehow by the internet
00:26:14.420
and connecting people on the internet as a kind of massive multiplayer online game.
00:26:23.520
Yeah, that one's interesting, because it's one of those things where I know there were people who
00:26:28.980
really believed in it. I know that did happen. But I am relatively plugged in to kind of normal
00:26:35.900
Trump supporters, I have a lot of very kind of average run of the mill, you know, conservative
00:26:44.340
Republicans in my life. And I never once heard this from a single person, which is not to say that it
00:26:52.120
doesn't exist. But it felt like, again, one of the conspiracies is the need to to outsize the influence
00:27:00.920
of particular conspiracies, just to use them as this punching bag, right? Like, again, I know
00:27:08.260
somewhere people really did believe this stuff. I'm sure that it that it was prominent among some
00:27:13.620
group of people somewhere. But it just never interacted with almost, you know, anybody who
00:27:18.800
actually held this belief. And yet it's like, if you would listen to anyone in the media, it's
00:27:25.700
basically 90% of Trump supporters are completely bought into this theory. And that, you know, if
00:27:32.140
you don't eradicate it, if you don't if you don't snuff it out of its root, it's going to conquer the
00:27:36.080
United States. Well, I mean, as I understand it, there were really two different elements to the
00:27:41.000
QAnon conspiracy theory. One is that the US government is to some extent controlled by these
00:27:48.800
networks of, you know, criminal pedophiles, basically. The other is that there is nonetheless
00:27:56.120
within the government, a secret cell, somehow led by Trump, which is going to eliminate all these
00:28:01.400
people and everything is under control. Trust the plan. So obviously, that part of the theory
00:28:06.660
was not grounded in reality. The other part of the theory, obviously, did have elements that it was
00:28:14.400
drawing on, which, to be honest, I mean, what can you say about them? And we have had, you know,
00:28:18.800
the story of Jeffrey Epstein, in the last few years, remains very confusing, on so many levels.
00:28:28.640
I think that we can have, just, you know, using logic, like a fairly good idea of sort of what was
00:28:35.660
going on there. But I mean, this is also the sort of strangest of our times, in a way, because,
00:28:41.120
you know, that happened, we saw it happened, you know, we saw, we saw, you know, he was suicided in
00:28:49.700
his cell, you know, nothing happened. You know, Ghislaine Maxwell has been convicted of sex trafficking,
00:28:58.760
apparently to nobody, because, you know, none of her clients have been convicted or charged,
00:29:04.400
or even named. The FBI apparently has, you know, all of his files somewhere. We know this,
00:29:15.620
but nothing, nothing happens about it. And so, you know, this is actually the most interesting,
00:29:21.220
I would say, innovation with respect to conspiracy theorizing in recent years is, you know, it used to
00:29:26.940
be the case that, you know, I mean, this is, in fact, indeed, what Yuval Harari claims, you know,
00:29:32.200
you can't keep a secret, therefore, conspiracies are impossible. But we have now learned that actually,
00:29:37.640
they don't even need to keep a secret. Like, it can be completely out in the open. It doesn't even
00:29:43.460
matter. You know, we know anyway. So what? Because actually, there is no, somehow, QAnon to hold any of
00:29:53.520
these people to account. That is the fantasy. Yeah, the more terrifying part is that there is
00:29:59.580
no, there is no white knight. There is no people who will hold these people accountable. There is,
00:30:04.940
there is no accountability mechanism. And they're fine kind of waving these things in front of us,
00:30:09.380
because they can do whatever they want. That's why you get the Time Magazine article, right? It's a
00:30:12.960
victory lap. It's not enough that they created this scenario. They want, they want the curtain call.
00:30:20.440
They want to take the bow. They want to parade it in front of people. And then if anyone notices,
00:30:27.860
you know, the kind of the Michael Anton's celebration paradox, right? You're allowed to
00:30:33.420
notice as long as you're cheering it on. But noticing it while being negative about it,
00:30:37.960
that makes you crazy. That makes you, that makes you dangerous misinformation broker.
00:30:42.340
Well, this is also a very interesting point, because the, let's say, the more sort of paranoid
00:30:49.240
reading on this is they sort of enjoy the fact that you know, and can't do anything about it. So,
00:30:55.800
you know, Michael Hoffman describes this as it's the, you know, revelation of the method. Basically,
00:31:00.720
the way he puts it is, you know, if, you know, if I'm fucking your wife, basically, and you don't know
00:31:11.520
about it, that's bad enough. But if I actually tell you, and then you continue to allow this to
00:31:16.280
happen, this is like actually much worse. It's even more humiliating. And so this is the idea behind
00:31:20.740
the revelation of the method is you, you tell, you tell the people what you're doing, and then they
00:31:25.620
don't do anything about it, and they're even more humiliated as a consequence. I'm not sure, to be
00:31:31.060
honest, whether that's true or not. I think in order to imagine that is the case, you have to think
00:31:36.940
that basically the, I don't know, the leaders of the conspiracy, or whatever you want to call it,
00:31:45.800
are basically sadistic in a certain way. And they sort of, you know, enjoy that very fact in
00:31:51.960
themselves. Or they're, you know, very clear sighted, and they understand the psychology of
00:31:58.400
humiliation, and they're just applying that in this very cool way. I think that, in fact,
00:32:04.880
these people sort of do need to try and convince themselves that they're somehow doing the right
00:32:10.720
thing. I think this is a very important element in all of these, like, even in the Time magazine
00:32:16.380
article, where they talk about fortifying the election. I mean, you read this from the outside,
00:32:20.860
you're just like, what is wrong with these people? Like, why are they doing this? But I think
00:32:25.260
they did genuinely believe that, like, somehow this was necessary, or at least they believed that
00:32:31.940
it was necessary for them to tell themselves this, you know? Yeah, just so you know, you did turn
00:32:37.340
your camera on, which is fine, but it's just lagging the way that it was before. Yeah, it's not like
00:32:44.940
it's a big face reveal. You've got your picture on there. I just wanted to give you a heads up,
00:32:48.820
because it went back to lagging like it did previously. All right, okay, well, I wasn't
00:32:52.460
paying attention to anything, so. Oh, no problem. So one other thing that you kind of talked about
00:33:00.740
in the piece, which I thought was interesting, because it's something that I talk about a lot,
00:33:06.460
is kind of the interest of power in kind of centralizing through kind of by removing kind of
00:33:15.220
intermediate social spheres, kind of any other social forces that would have loyalty, have
00:33:22.600
authority, be able to push back against these people. What role do conspiracies play? Because
00:33:28.640
I think many of us can look at kind of many of the efforts by the government in these different
00:33:35.340
institutions and their attempts to kind of destroy what's kind of left of the family and churches and
00:33:41.180
kind of organic communities and can see in those a conspiratorial element. But I think that is as
00:33:49.600
much power reaching for more power as it is, you know, both overt and kind of unconscious
00:33:57.260
drive to kind of coordinate and remove those competing spheres.
00:34:01.660
Well, I think that this is really something that's inherent in the nature of power, if we understand
00:34:09.680
power in its, you know, in its purest possible form, the certain desire for power, will to power,
00:34:15.240
kind of naked self-interest. And you consider all of the obstacles that are in the way of the pursuit
00:34:21.560
of your naked self-interest. And, you know, the family is one of them, you know, intermediate
00:34:25.600
institutions are also, you know, in a certain sense, in the way, you know, to the extent that you're
00:34:31.160
simply committed to power, you know, you have to get all these obstacles out of your way. And so
00:34:37.500
if you consider a conspiracy is basically composed of people who are pursuing power, then you ultimately
00:34:44.440
end up with the kind of revolutionary party, which is, I would say, probably, maybe not, but maybe like
00:34:52.380
the most radical form of power, because they're going to actually, you know, if necessary, destroy the
00:34:59.260
whole world in order to acquire power. You can see why, from their point of view, both individual
00:35:06.300
and collective, everything has to be liquidated, because otherwise, they can't be free, you know,
00:35:11.840
they can't be free to do what it is that they want to do, which is whatever it is that they want to do.
00:35:18.280
So you have seen in the 20th century, in the Soviet Union, I think, in particular,
00:35:22.920
also in Nazi Germany, of course, with the sort of like Schaltung policy, but the Soviet Union,
00:35:29.500
obviously, it lasted a bit longer. So they had a bit longer to get going. You know, they were very,
00:35:34.040
very determined to liquidate all of these different intermediate institutions, and to create a situation
00:35:40.660
where it was simply atomized individuals, based in the collective power of the party, i.e. the conspiracy.
00:35:48.760
So there was nothing except for the conspiracy in you, and there was nothing you could even do about
00:35:54.300
it. So, you know, your conceptualization of, you know, the total state, obviously, is extremely close
00:36:02.700
to this kind of formulation as well, because in a certain way, like, you know, the conspiracy is itself
00:36:08.960
the total state, you know, the total state is a conspiracy. And you can also see in this respect,
00:36:13.120
that actually the total state has its own internal divisions to some extent. It's like
00:36:18.880
St. Augustine says, in the concept of libido dominandi, they're actually dominated by their
00:36:26.220
desire to dominate. So the way in which power works in this way, purely vertical, imposition of force,
00:36:34.760
extremely unstable, it isn't really able to build anything, because anything that it builds,
00:36:40.840
it could be used against it, basically. So it's reduced to this situation where it's perpetually
00:36:45.300
kind of, like, destroying everything. And it continues, ultimately, until it destroys itself.
00:36:52.860
And so I think that, actually, we can be optimistic in this regard, because it does have a life cycle.
00:37:00.040
Yeah, no, I absolutely agree about that. All right, so we have some questions stacking up from
00:37:04.760
the audience here. Is there anything about conspiracies that we didn't get to that you wanted,
00:37:08.900
any points you wanted to make before we kind of transition over to our questions?
00:37:19.820
All right, excellent. Oh, and is there anything that people should be looking up? Any work you've
00:37:23.720
got coming out, the issue, anything else that they should be checking out from you or IAM1776?
00:37:30.120
Well, I mean, obviously, you should check out our issue. IAM1776 is now, in a way, in itself a kind of
00:37:39.420
conspiracy, because we've transitioned from a for-profit model to a foundation. So you actually
00:37:49.000
have to join us in order to receive a copy of the issue. You can do that from our website.
00:37:53.880
And we have lots of things coming up, lots of events coming up, more and more advanced and
00:38:00.640
spectacular, megalomaniacal designs that we plan on launching on the world. Yeah.
00:38:08.760
Excellent. All right, guys, so make sure that you're checking out the issue. There's Daniel's
00:38:12.940
article and many other great ones from people who have been on the show, like Lafayette Lee. So make
00:38:18.520
sure that you are checking that out. All right, so over to our questions here. Life of Brian for
00:38:24.240
$4.99. ALX Jones-Z style discourse has nothing to do with paranoia, which involves personal
00:38:32.480
persecution fantasies and private visions, not merely alarmism. What do you think about that?
00:38:42.280
I'm not sure if that's a question. I mean, this is a statement.
00:38:53.240
I didn't get that either. I was hoping you, okay, so at least I'm not alone there. I wasn't
00:39:04.940
No problem. Yeah, well, yeah, we'll just say that. Sorry, sorry, Life of Brian. Appreciate the
00:39:10.640
chat there, but I'm not quite sure what that was implying. If you want to drop in chat, you don't
00:39:15.880
need to put another super chat in, but if you want to clarify a little bit there for
00:39:18.700
me, hopefully we can give you your money's worth.
00:39:20.840
I mean, the only thing that I can potentially say about this, I'm sorry to cut you off.
00:39:25.120
Paranoia does not necessarily involve personal persecution fantasies. Paranoia is also possibly
00:39:35.560
a collective phenomenon. It's a structure of thought, ultimately. It's a psychological structure,
00:39:41.120
which can be the structure of an individual or of a society or of an institution. It's possible
00:39:48.720
for an entire country to become paranoid. We have seen examples. We've seen examples very
00:39:55.440
recently, actually, of a kind of global paranoia. So I don't know. There's a famous line, just
00:40:06.820
because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. Right. That's relevant. But
00:40:11.180
yeah, no, I think so. All right. So Cooper Weirdo here for $5. Hey, guys, did you hear about how the
00:40:17.360
government may have found evidence of aliens? I think you should talk about that and absolutely
00:40:22.560
nothing else. Yeah. So what do you think about this? Obviously, very recently, we've had a number
00:40:27.440
of different, you know, kind of Navy pilots and people who otherwise, you know, generals and
00:40:32.480
had made claims about they're running into different, you know, alien aircraft and this
00:40:37.800
kind of thing. Now we have somebody giving testimony in Congress, talk about having found
00:40:42.420
like the biological remains of aliens. Do you think there's anything to this? Do you think
00:40:47.700
this is a big distraction? Is this a conspiracy to create a conspiracy? What's kind of up with this
00:40:53.940
messaging? Well, I think there was a guy on Twitter, I can't remember who, one of the excellent
00:40:59.420
paranoid schizophrenics who populate, pointing out that. So, I mean, now we're supposed to
00:41:08.180
believe that the very same people who have been lying to us for decades about this, this
00:41:12.360
very issue have now suddenly, for no reason, decided to tell us the truth about it. Why
00:41:17.740
would they do that? Yeah, no, I'm of a very similar mindset. It's a very convenient time for
00:41:22.880
the people who have been lying to us about this nonstop to suddenly feel like this is very
00:41:27.140
important information. I mean, I think that the very fact that they want us to talk about
00:41:30.900
this is actually itself suspicious, to be honest. I mean, it's like there's something also important
00:41:35.260
in that. It's like they don't actually have to convince you. Right. They have to make it
00:41:40.200
either so it's impossible for you to think clearly about a subject or they just distract you by
00:41:45.980
making you talk about random bullshit, basically. And I think, you know, this is an example of the
00:41:51.320
latter, essentially. It's it doesn't even matter. At all, whether you're saying it's true or it's
00:41:57.900
false, it's just it's just meaningless garbage, basically. I mean, I sort of, in a way, do believe
00:42:03.740
in aliens, I guess, on some level, but I don't think that has anything to do with anything happening
00:42:09.600
in Congress. Yeah, it feels like it's more that it needs to be injected in the discourse. And this is
00:42:14.340
what creates, again, like that schizophrenic feeling where nobody knows what to trust because
00:42:18.140
it doesn't even matter. They're not even really, like you said, trying to convince you or not.
00:42:22.060
It's just we're just going to throw things in here to move the cycle one more time.
00:42:27.320
It doesn't really matter if it has any kind of substantial weight. You're not even trying to
00:42:32.320
force me into it at this point. Creeper Weirdo here again for two dollars. QAnon equals CIA. That is
00:42:38.940
all. Thank you very much. And then Life of Brian here with maybe a little bit of clarification.
00:42:44.020
Thank you again, sir. Sorry we had a tough time with the first one here.
00:42:46.280
Faucigate and climate change emails show how crude these things can be. Someone gave the order to
00:42:52.340
kill Epstein. People are giving orders. Yeah, I mean, obviously, Life of Brian, you know, so a lot
00:42:58.780
of people, rightly so, look at something like Curtis Yarvin's kind of idea of the cathedral and that
00:43:06.820
there's this decentralized coordination. And they say, well, no, this is ridiculous. There are people
00:43:11.800
giving orders. And I think that the times when he says, oh, there are no groups, there are no people,
00:43:17.360
there is no one guy that, well, there is no one guy. I do believe that. But when he says there are
00:43:22.520
no conspiracies, there is no cabal, it's like, well, no, there obviously are. Like we have,
00:43:27.180
like you said, the emails, we have, you know, the Twitter files. We know that this stuff takes
00:43:31.940
place. It's not that there's no coordination, but it's not that, but it's that there is no one
00:43:37.320
overall unifying. There's no like document being handed down from some group that puts everybody
00:43:43.440
on the same page. Everyone is moving in the same direction. There are coordinations and conspiracies
00:43:48.120
that move in the general direction, but there's not one overall overarching kind of, you know,
00:43:54.340
set of orders handed down. But, but what do you think about that? The, the kind of some level of
00:44:02.580
coordination versus kind of an overall mastermind? Well, I think that if you consider, let's say the
00:44:08.060
mafia, right, which is a real conspiracy, it's a criminal conspiracy. It does exist. The mafia families
00:44:16.900
all over the world in different contexts, you know, you have drug cartels in Mexico, so on and so
00:44:23.840
forth. You do have the boss. He does have lieutenants. He does give them orders. They give
00:44:29.980
orders. People give orders. But the basic nature of the organizational structure is that everybody
00:44:37.400
is incentivized to be a part of it because, you know, they're all making money from the corner boy
00:44:42.260
to the, you know, to the top, top guy in, um, in Merida where all the, where they all live actually.
00:44:52.160
So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, like, I don't even understand to some extent, like, what Yavin is
00:44:59.260
arguing against here, because I think that to some extent, he's also arguing against this sort of
00:45:02.960
straw man fantasy of this guy who sort of operates a switchboard in the center of the earth. Yeah, okay,
00:45:10.660
that doesn't exist. But, you know, every organization does have a chain of command to some extent. And
00:45:16.620
obviously, it's possible to coordinate. And if it wasn't, then it's not really an organization.
00:45:20.100
I guess, I guess the, so here, here I think would be the delineation or, you know, would be the,
00:45:27.180
with a difference here is, uh, is, do you, do you believe that there is a behind the scenes
00:45:33.900
formalization? So we know that in, in front formalization has been destroyed and that that's
00:45:39.500
one of the reasons people feel the conspiracy because, uh, there, you know, there, there is no
00:45:44.340
real formalization of power. We have something that's out there, but it's a fantasy. We know that's not
00:45:48.980
actually how power operates. And so people can feel the, the, uh, kind of the, uh, the conspiracy
00:45:55.680
behind the scenes. But I think what Yarvin is arguing, uh, against is that there is some kind
00:46:00.680
of formalization behind the scenes, that there is a, there's a hard chain of command on which,
00:46:08.400
like, you could hold the entire system accountable, even if it's obfuscated by kind of our current,
00:46:15.040
you know, noble lie about how the regime operates.
00:46:19.420
I think that, you know, if you're, if you're looking for it, then you can see who the most
00:46:23.800
important person in a room is whenever you enter a room. And I think this is more or less transparent.
00:46:29.160
I think that, you know, that also shifts to some extent, you know, people fall from power. I mean,
00:46:37.180
people are also competing amongst themselves for influence. And there is something uncertain about
00:46:43.220
how influence operates on the very highest level, because also it's to do with the influence that
00:46:48.500
someone is presumed to have, you know, which translates into actual power. So I would agree
00:46:54.460
with Yarvin, I believe, I mean, I also could be wrong about this. Like maybe I merely haven't been
00:46:59.820
introduced to this kind of, you know, formalized system. Um, I believe that there is no actual
00:47:06.980
formalized system whereby, you know, like Hillary Clinton has, is like Sigma Delta 507 or whatever.
00:47:14.480
And like, that means something. And I don't know. I mean, this seems obviously highly elaborate and
00:47:19.500
improbable, but I think that it is also clear that, you know, if you're in a patronage network,
00:47:25.300
you know, you have clients, they look to you, you reward them. If they stop rewarding you,
00:47:32.740
you stop doing what they say. And if they continue to do so, then basically you, you, you, you obey
00:47:38.680
them, you know, and it's pretty simple. Sure. All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and
00:47:44.160
wrap that up. I think we got all of your questions there. I want to go ahead and thank Daniel so much
00:47:49.280
for coming by. Of course, make sure to check out the conspiracy issue and everything that's going on
00:47:55.740
over at I am 1776. And if it's your first time here, guys, I want to thank you for coming by the
00:48:01.420
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00:48:05.280
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00:48:09.440
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00:48:15.620
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00:48:20.580
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00:48:34.780
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00:48:40.120
So thank you guys, everybody for coming by. And as always, I will talk to you next time.