The Auron MacIntyre Show - Conspiracy Theories and Paranoid Reasoning ｜ Guest： Daniel Miller ｜ 7⧸27⧸23

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.400 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.100 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.940 So, the new I Am 1776 issue is out, and it's about conspiracies.

00:00:43.280 And I thought that was a really interesting topic because, of course,

00:00:45.920 we are in a situation where a lot of people are worried about conspiracy theories,

00:00:49.560 the dangers of misinformation.

00:00:51.300 Conspiracy theories are everywhere.

00:00:52.940 We have to be concerned.

00:00:53.980 The government needs to control speech so that we can make sure that no one

00:00:57.080 is interested in these very, very dangerous conspiracy theories.

00:01:01.360 And so, I have joining me today, I Am 1776's literary editor.

00:01:06.520 He is Daniel Miller, and he's going to be talking to me a little bit about the new issue,

00:01:10.340 about the idea of conspiracies, and how we should be thinking about the world around us.

00:01:15.280 Daniel, thanks for joining me.

00:01:16.160 Thank you very much, Oren.

00:01:19.340 Absolutely.

00:01:20.060 So, you guys have your new issue out.

00:01:23.800 It's very nice.

00:01:25.020 The first essay in there is from you, and you kind of set the groundwork.

00:01:29.800 There's a lot of different conspiracy theories that are kind of described in the issue,

00:01:34.420 but you kind of set the framework of kind of what a conspiracy is,

00:01:37.760 and how to think about it, and why people are thinking about these more.

00:01:40.720 But I guess let's go ahead and start at the beginning for people.

00:01:44.680 You know, there's a lot of people who understand that coordination is kind of part of society,

00:01:49.480 and explaining how coordination happens is kind of important to understand power,

00:01:54.720 the world around us, the kind of political and social system we end up in.

00:01:59.100 But then we have this thing called a conspiracy theory,

00:02:01.540 and that's where, I guess, if the coordination happens in a place that's unapproved,

00:02:05.960 we don't talk about it.

00:02:07.220 What designates something as a conspiracy theory?

00:02:11.140 Well, I think just to pick up on your intro,

00:02:15.280 we've seen now in the last few years especially the use of the term conspiracy theory

00:02:22.460 deployed increasingly polemically in order to essentially discredit anything

00:02:27.780 that isn't an official narrative, or you could even say isn't an official narrative yet.

00:02:33.700 We saw that, for example, with the so-called lab leak hypothesis,

00:02:38.700 which was a conspiracy theory in 2020, but now appears to be coming closer to the mainstream consensus.

00:02:46.220 We've also seen at the same time actually increasing deployment of conspiracy theories

00:02:51.660 as mainstream narratives.

00:02:53.240 And so, you know, I think that the Russiagate hoax that was launched against President Trump,

00:03:01.300 what Lee Smith called the plot against the president, is a very good example.

00:03:06.160 That was a conspiracy theory.

00:03:07.560 That was the official story for a number of years until basically the pandemic,

00:03:12.580 the so-called pandemic, wiped it off the headlines.

00:03:16.360 And then finally, what we're seeing actually is increasingly transparent activity of what could

00:03:23.180 only be described as at least conspiratorial-like entities.

00:03:28.100 The actual coordination behind staging the Russiagate hoax is one example.

00:03:35.640 The kinds of collusions that were happening between, for example, regulatory agencies,

00:03:41.120 between drug companies, and between politicians between 2020 and 2023 with the COVID story is another example.

00:03:51.020 Also, no matter which way you look at it, it's the conspiracies almost all the way down.

00:03:57.080 And therefore, I think what we need to try and do is think about them a little bit more critically,

00:04:01.040 because essentially whenever you're dealing with a conspiracy or with the problem of a conspiracy theory,

00:04:08.460 conceived as a kind of hypothesis, you obviously do run the risk of a real abandonment fantasy,

00:04:15.100 whereby you begin to imagine all kinds of entities that are operating that may or may not have any kind of basis

00:04:21.620 in sociological or political reality.

00:04:24.600 And so in order to also avoid that, and also to avoid the definite possibility,

00:04:29.600 for example, of even false conspiracies being planted for you by the conspiracies that actually you don't even see,

00:04:36.100 we have to try and think about what conspiracies even are,

00:04:39.000 and to think about them as actually more or less normal parts of sociopolitical reality, not exceptions.

00:04:46.520 And so I think this is what we are trying to do with our latest issue.

00:04:51.740 Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

00:04:53.460 Obviously, we have a lot of people who are skeptical of the ruling powers of the elite, the regime,

00:05:00.220 however kind of you want to label it.

00:05:01.820 And because there's so much information out there, because there's just this fire hose of kind of information coming at people constantly,

00:05:10.860 it's hard to know what to treat, you know, seriously.

00:05:14.920 Like you said, we have the idea that there are official narratives that are conspiracy theories like the Russiagate hoax.

00:05:21.660 We have people who are kind of gaslighting people who recognize conspiracies in real time,

00:05:27.280 like we see happening with many aspects of the pandemic.

00:05:31.000 And then there's a possibility that so many of these narratives have been placed in front of us

00:05:35.840 because they help to kind of confuse people, to muddy the waters.

00:05:41.160 And I think that's a real issue of information coordination for the right or those that oppose the regime,

00:05:46.940 kind of however you want to phrase that group of people,

00:05:50.380 because they don't control these informational institutions.

00:05:55.500 They don't control the apparatus that kind of manufactures our consensus.

00:05:59.340 And therefore, they don't know kind of what to trust when different conspiracies get floated, revealed, denied.

00:06:07.000 There's no consistent basis of information for them to appeal to.

00:06:10.860 Well, I think what you saw last, well, actually a couple of days ago,

00:06:17.160 Yuval Harari went on Lex Friedman's podcast, and he was taking an extremely strong anti-conspiratorial line.

00:06:23.820 He was saying that basically conspiracy theories don't exist.

00:06:27.240 He was saying that in particular with respect to this kind of straw man conception of the conspiracy theory,

00:06:34.440 which he himself presented for this purpose, which is the notion of an all-powerful, omnipotent conspiracy,

00:06:41.020 which controls the whole world, so on and so forth.

00:06:43.960 Now, actually, obviously that isn't plausible.

00:06:46.520 We need to understand also that because these are normal sociopolitical formations composed out of human actors,

00:06:56.100 they obey the same kinds of laws that all other forms of social interaction obey.

00:07:00.500 And so therefore, it's not a question of omnipotence.

00:07:02.860 It's only a question of coordination and how it's possible to stage coordination

00:07:08.800 and where the natural limits to those kinds of enterprises are.

00:07:15.100 Gore Vidal actually sort of lost kind of figure in American politics to some extent.

00:07:21.100 He was sometimes accused of being a conspiracy theorist.

00:07:23.740 He said he was a conspiracy analyst.

00:07:26.540 You could also say business plan analyst.

00:07:29.500 The reality of how even very ordinary kinds of operations proceed is conspiratorial.

00:07:36.180 Well, you and I in a certain way have engaged in a conspiracy to appear on this podcast together.

00:07:42.520 Okay, this is relatively straightforward, but why not much more ambitious and extensive program

00:07:48.780 if you're in the kind of position where you're able to coordinate on that level?

00:07:52.200 And I think this is what we have seen and are seeing.

00:07:55.080 And the reason why we're seeing it is because this is the way that global politics is structured.

00:08:02.140 We have these very flexible networks composed out of more or less autonomous agents

00:08:07.600 who are able to make deals with each other on a more or less ad hoc basis.

00:08:12.000 And this is a milieu which breeds conspiracies.

00:08:14.460 And this is what we're seeing unfold.

00:08:16.820 So maybe it's important for us to kind of understand conspiracy theory as a magical word,

00:08:23.200 something that kind of got hollowed out of meaning and replaced with kind of a particular political

00:08:28.080 charge.

00:08:28.660 Because what you're saying is that conspiracies are just kind of a natural part of human social

00:08:35.580 organization.

00:08:36.040 People will conspire.

00:08:38.220 They will collude.

00:08:39.220 They will organize behind the scenes to make things happen, especially when things like

00:08:44.360 power are available.

00:08:46.720 And so that that that shouldn't be the understanding that that is true about society shouldn't be charged

00:08:53.020 with kind of this negative crackpot energy.

00:08:55.620 Because when people hear conspiracy theory, they see, you know, crazy guy with a tinfoil hat.

00:09:00.660 They see, you know, a guy living alone in a shack planning to bomb something like that.

00:09:05.400 When they think of conspiracy, that is what is.

00:09:08.020 But that's almost an entirely emotional response.

00:09:11.180 In reality, conspiracies are just part of life and human social organization.

00:09:16.220 And so when we talk about them, we need to understand them as such and not some kind of

00:09:19.980 emotionally charged phrase that that kind of denotes that somebody is of the wrong class

00:09:25.540 or mentally incapable or has lost their mind, that kind of thing.

00:09:30.180 Well, I think that you could say that the very fact that this actually really quite normal

00:09:35.940 mode of human speculative inquiry has been stigmatized is itself revealing of something.

00:09:42.620 Famously, the term conspiracy theory itself, in its pejorative connotation, was in fact deployed

00:09:51.840 by the CIA following the Warren Commission report.

00:09:56.660 And we discussed this, I think, in our issue.

00:09:59.480 People were not convinced by the conclusions of the report that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

00:10:07.000 And so therefore, there was a concerted information management operation precisely to say that anybody

00:10:14.500 who was questioning that was a conspiracy theorist.

00:10:17.580 Now you're seeing the term employed even against people or ideas that actually are not even

00:10:24.140 conspiratorial in their structure.

00:10:26.380 So the famous example, I think, is Renaud Camus.

00:10:30.840 His so-called great replacement conspiracy theory is how it tends to be described.

00:10:38.400 Camus himself actually uses the term in a much more speculative and abstract way.

00:10:44.100 He talks about, for example, the replacement of natural building materials by PVC and ferroconcrete

00:10:52.580 and these kinds of replacement of even more metaphysical elements.

00:10:57.900 But for reasons to do with his status, his epistemological or his political epistemological

00:11:04.580 status, they simply say he's a conspiracy theorist and leave it at that.

00:11:10.020 So what you can say there is that essentially any kind of epistemological structure which is

00:11:14.760 not obeying somehow the way in which the regime, however you want to describe it, wants

00:11:20.740 to present its own narrative of itself becomes a kind of conspiracy theory.

00:11:26.740 And I think this is also a kind of form of projection, actually, because of the nature

00:11:29.920 of what the regime, such as it is, actually is, which is now more like a conspiracy than

00:11:36.660 like a formalized political structure.

00:11:41.500 Yeah, I think that's really important, too.

00:11:43.420 So do you think that this is a big part of it?

00:11:45.280 Like we are in a situation where we kind of have the way the government is supposed to

00:11:50.740 work.

00:11:51.080 In theory, there's a there's a constitution.

00:11:54.260 Everyone gets taught the way that it's supposed to function.

00:11:57.500 We elect these people.

00:11:58.500 They pass laws, all of those things.

00:12:00.860 There's supposed to be a formal plan for the government.

00:12:03.940 But it's very clear that the vast majority of that has kind of been left by the wayside

00:12:09.120 by people who are attempting to circumvent it.

00:12:11.340 We've gone from if we ever had a very clear chain of power in the United States to a very

00:12:17.880 obscure chain of power.

00:12:19.060 Everything is done by, you know, nameless corporations, by bureaucracies, by NGOs that no one really

00:12:26.680 understands who runs and how they're motivated and what their actual end goals are.

00:12:31.980 There's very little accountability in any of our institutions.

00:12:37.100 Everything is kind of this, you know, unassailable monolithic bureaucracy that you can't pinpoint

00:12:44.100 any actual people who are kind of in charge of or culpable, you know, for any kind of mistakes

00:12:49.380 or failures.

00:12:50.280 And so this means that that conspiracies have to take place, that these things and that can't

00:12:57.080 that means people can't help but notice them because almost everything that is actually

00:13:01.000 driving our society, almost everything that is actually exercising power in front of us

00:13:04.740 is itself conspiratorially organized.

00:13:08.080 It's not formal.

00:13:09.260 It's not out there for everyone to see.

00:13:12.040 Yeah, I think that's completely correct.

00:13:13.760 I think that this is a phenomenon of informal power.

00:13:17.540 It's a phenomenon actually which becomes particularly prominent with the birth of liberal modernity.

00:13:23.300 There's a famous quote by Adam Smith where he says,

00:13:26.160 it only takes two or more people who are engaged in the same trade to meet together before the conversation

00:13:33.160 turns to a conspiracy against the general public.

00:13:36.100 So what you can say there is that all of a sudden, actually, you've had this new object

00:13:40.540 created at a certain point in time, the general public.

00:13:44.200 You have trades.

00:13:45.660 You have these kinds of forms of organization which are happening simply through social circles.

00:13:51.580 And if you fast forward then 200 something years to the kind of situation where in which

00:13:59.520 power is highly centralized but informalized within this very specific and particular social

00:14:05.960 milieu composed out of politicians, composed out of lobbyists, composed out of people who

00:14:12.540 work for the media, all of these people are meeting in very specific social environments

00:14:17.980 and they're able to coordinate on that basis and they naturally will do so.

00:14:21.980 There's actually nothing strange about it.

00:14:24.860 It would be strange if they weren't doing that.

00:14:27.220 So this is what you get when you don't have a formal structure that is able to coalesce

00:14:34.500 political power into something more objective.

00:14:39.000 You get a situation where everybody is actually also maneuvering by themselves against each other

00:14:43.780 within this kind of context whereby even the conspiracy itself, let's say, doesn't necessarily

00:14:48.720 know who's in and who's out, you know, what cards, who's holding what, so on and so forth.

00:14:55.080 And this is, I think, also why we're seeing these kinds of phenomenon of, you know, blackmail

00:15:00.320 of these kinds of extreme sort of forms of criminality which are sort of periodically

00:15:04.920 surfacing, it's because, it's because the nature of the, of the, of the internal organization

00:15:16.760 of these, of these forms of power themselves are leaky in the same way that they're also

00:15:22.660 drawing people into this kind of concentration of enterprise.

00:15:29.780 I think we're also looking at kind of a denial of human nature, right?

00:15:33.560 One of the, one of the aspects, like you said, of liberal modernity is the idea that we're

00:15:37.380 going to generate kind of these neutral institutions that we're going to kind of level everything

00:15:42.520 that we're going to remove kind of, you know, class interest or the interests of different

00:15:48.500 subgroups.

00:15:49.680 And we're going to kind of homogenize everything into one neutral, objective kind of scientific

00:15:55.980 creation.

00:15:57.580 And so because we're trained that none of these organizations would actually ever care about

00:16:03.400 specific groups, specific outcomes, specific kind of lobbying organizations or, or, or

00:16:09.420 other groups kind of behind the scenes, then we have to believe that they're always acting

00:16:15.000 in our own interests.

00:16:16.300 They're always acting in the interests of wider society.

00:16:18.580 We're never allowed to recognize that they might be acting on the, on their own behalf or

00:16:24.140 the behalf of others behind the scenes.

00:16:26.460 And so because we're kind of denying the fact that humans will always work for the interests

00:16:31.220 of a particular group and not for kind of the wider public as a whole, everyone's kind

00:16:36.920 of gaslit in the scenario where like, well, you, you can't notice that these doctors are

00:16:40.840 doing something because it benefits them.

00:16:43.360 You can't notice that these politicians are doing something because it benefits them.

00:16:46.760 Everyone is always only working for the public good.

00:16:49.480 Everyone is only ever, you know, responding to the science, the objective reality determined by

00:16:55.260 experts, the idea that they would, you know, work in their own interests or the interests

00:16:59.460 of, of others, other groups that could not possibly be real.

00:17:02.940 That must be a crazy conspiracy theory.

00:17:05.520 Well, you know, I think it's actually very interesting to consider why under certain circumstances,

00:17:10.680 people actually would work for the common good or why not, you know, why actually is it the

00:17:16.700 case that even in relatively recent memory, institutions were functioning relatively, um, healthily.

00:17:24.600 Um, obviously that's not the case anymore.

00:17:27.220 I think that what you're seeing now in terms of the kinds of rhetoric, which is being deployed

00:17:31.280 is being deployed by people who are using these kinds of, uh, these kinds of claims because

00:17:36.720 they know that they work.

00:17:37.980 They still have a kind of legacy, um, authority that has obviously drained away a lot in the

00:17:45.060 last few years as people are beginning to notice actually the people who are, uh, who are

00:17:50.600 presenting themselves as if selfless public servants or anything, but how could we get them back

00:17:57.480 to being, um, to being public servants again?

00:18:01.380 Is, is that even possible?

00:18:02.980 Is this a phenomenon actually of globalization to some extent whereby simply put, you know,

00:18:10.660 the rewards of the global are just so enormous compared to the possible rewards of the national

00:18:18.280 level that everybody who's on the one wants to get to the other, just like they did when,

00:18:24.660 you know, the nation state itself was being formed?

00:18:28.360 Or is this some sort of, uh, transitional, I don't know, corruption that could be corrected

00:18:33.360 through, through some form of, uh, get unlimited grocery delivery with PC express pass meal prep

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00:18:54.420 I don't know.

00:18:56.780 Yeah, that's, that's obviously a much larger question.

00:18:59.680 Maybe we'll, we'll delve a little bit, uh, deeper into that here in a moment.

00:19:04.040 Can, can this whole thing get turned around?

00:19:06.340 But, uh, I guess first let's look at why, uh, I guess, well, well, let's, let's start with

00:19:13.800 why they're pushing that credibility.

00:19:15.780 So like you said, so many of these kind of actors were relying on good faith built up on

00:19:21.820 institutions that previously did serve the public that did consistently produce, uh, goods

00:19:28.260 for the larger community.

00:19:29.860 And now they're more or less ignoring that fact.

00:19:33.040 In fact, not only are they, are they ignoring that they are kind of, like you said, leaning

00:19:36.800 on that, uh, stockpile, that surplus of credibility in a way that they never did before.

00:19:42.820 Do they not understand that that will run out? 0.99

00:19:46.100 Are they just inept? 0.99

00:19:47.140 Do they not care? 0.98

00:19:48.500 Why are they so willing to kind of burn that, uh, that stockpile of credibility on what is

00:19:56.520 increasingly clear, a, clearly a coordination on their behalf to benefit a certain group

00:20:01.980 of people?

00:20:03.580 Well, I think that basically they, they don't really care.

00:20:07.240 Although I think that they may believe that they do on some level, there's a complex psychological

00:20:12.220 element, which enters the picture here because it's to do with trying to understand how these

00:20:17.400 people actually themselves narrate to themselves what they're doing and why.

00:20:21.340 And I think it's actually quite difficult to, in a way, somehow untouched by one's own

00:20:29.580 lies, as it were.

00:20:30.960 You know, you start to actually believe that lies that you tell.

00:20:34.240 And I think that you probably do believe if you're, I don't know, Anthony Fauci, for example,

00:20:39.080 that somehow on some level, like all of this, everything that you're doing is for the, is

00:20:44.680 for the best.

00:20:45.440 Like it is better that you do it like this.

00:20:47.880 There's some constraints that mean that, you know, you have to do it like that.

00:20:51.880 And actually maybe it is even like that to some extent, because this is also the sort

00:20:55.540 of situation you get into with conspiracies.

00:20:58.680 Ultimately, it is a kind of gangland, paranoid atmosphere.

00:21:02.480 And it's a kind of kill or be killed atmosphere as well.

00:21:05.820 So that you can't really actually, you know, turn around and say, wait a minute, guys, like,

00:21:11.760 haven't we gone a little bit far on, on, on this policy?

00:21:15.100 Because if you do that, immediately what happens is you'll be eliminated by someone who's more

00:21:19.900 ruthless than you.

00:21:21.660 And so I think that actually we've also seen this kind of phenomenon play out many times 0.94

00:21:25.440 in situations of informal, unsecured power.

00:21:29.800 It's worth remembering, you know, that the Bolshevik party was originally itself a conspiracy.

00:21:34.580 It kind of remained a conspiracy.

00:21:36.380 You know, it ended up in a situation where basically the biggest gangster in the party

00:21:42.420 was the leader.

00:21:43.920 And then he was periodically pitting all of the others against each other in order to maintain

00:21:49.600 his position.

00:21:50.300 And this was somehow actually what he had to do, because there wasn't a possibility for

00:21:54.960 him to do anything else.

00:21:56.620 So I think there's something like that going on, actually, that, you know, ultimately their

00:22:02.120 room for maneuver is drastically constrained by the reality of the maneuvers that they had

00:22:08.800 to undertake to get where they were in the first place.

00:22:11.920 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:22:13.320 There's you're, you're trapped in kind of that cycle, no matter where you turn.

00:22:17.300 So obviously, again, this has always existed.

00:22:21.820 This has always been a part of human coordination, but now we have the Internet and the Internet,

00:22:28.340 I think, radically changes the way that people coordinate, the way that they interact with

00:22:33.980 kind of power, the way that they're able to observe power and each other.

00:22:38.760 And obviously, this changes the way that conspiracies thread, they can be or spread the way they can

00:22:45.120 be coordinated, all of those things.

00:22:46.800 How has the Internet impacted the way that people look at the conspiracy theories and the way that

00:22:52.320 elites have to address them?

00:22:54.760 Well, I think that it has been an extremely important factor in essentially rearranging

00:23:00.820 the lines of communication between different parts of the world, essentially.

00:23:06.440 You saw that, you know, the emails, the sort of email chains that came into existence

00:23:11.420 shortly following the outbreak of the Chinese flu in Wuhan.

00:23:18.180 You know, you have people all over the world that are coordinating together in order to come

00:23:23.340 up with a common narrative.

00:23:24.960 And then that's the narrative that they take to their national groups, basically.

00:23:31.760 So this is a new phenomenon.

00:23:33.240 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.

00:23:47.980 Now we have these global networks composed out of all these people linked all over the world,

00:23:52.240 and they're actually able to move national governments according to their almost superior

00:23:57.980 vertical vantage point.

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

00:24:34.340 into this kind of circuit.

00:24:36.560 So the internet is also doing that, and it's forming these kinds of mini conspiracies, organized

00:24:40.900 around sort of mini conspiracy theories.

00:24:43.660 I mean, the Brown scare that we've had in the last few years, which is also to some extent 1.00

00:24:49.040 a phenomenon that came out of the campaign against Trump, but somehow extended beyond that.

00:24:56.220 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.

00:25:21.480 And we also saw that with the pandemic, which was, I think, really the kind of most

00:25:26.660 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 0.98

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, 0.83

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 0.99

00:31:11.520 about it, that's bad enough. But if I actually tell you, and then you continue to allow this to 0.99

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 0.52

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?

00:37:15.540 No, I'm happy to take 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.

00:38:46.780 Fair enough, yeah.

00:38:48.520 I don't know. Jonesy style?

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

00:38:57.120 sure exactly what that was saying. Okay.

00:39:01.520 Okay. But I don't know.

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.

00:39:24.500 No, no, no, go for it.

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 0.97

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 0.99

00:41:45.980 making you talk about random bullshit, basically. And I think, you know, this is an example of the 0.96

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 0.78

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 0.92

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. 0.99

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 channel. Please make sure that you go ahead and subscribe on YouTube. I've had some people saying

00:48:05.280 they're not getting the episodes. They're not seeing it on their timelines. Remember YouTube

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00:48:15.620 You got to turn on notifications, you know, just because you have a, just because you subscribe to

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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.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - July 27, 2023

Conspiracy Theories and Paranoid Reasoning ｜ Guest： Daniel Miller ｜ 7⧸27⧸23

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