CONSPIRACY THEORY and THE SPIRITS OF THE DEAD

When events occur that disrupt our settled sense of the world, that is difficult for many people. For some, it is an opportunity. The curtains are, briefly, open, because the world was of course never settled, it was always fluid. But that is also why conspiracy theories intensify and proliferate in times of crisis.

The word 'conspiracy' comes from the Latin meaning 'to plot': ie someone has done something to you, whether it was 9/11, the death of Diana, or Covid 19. In this way the anxiety of living in an uncertain world is relieved by blaming it on someone else. So strong is this need, that facts are overlooked. This is shown by the constant refrain of the conspiracist for others to 'look at the evidence', which is exactly what they are not doing. To be concrete, some of the theories proliferating at present include linking Covid 19 with 5G, Bill Gates and deliberate engineering by the Chinese in order to gain economic advantage over the US. Or that the whole thing is a hoax.

There is a theory that Coronavirus escaped from a lab in China. That seems like a possibility from what I have read, but probably not the case. However - and here is the key - if I was a conspiracist I would be insisting that the lab escape was the case, and that it was deliberate. There is little room for doubt in conspiracy theory.

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 Another avenue to look at is 'agency'. I think that conspiracists feel they are acted upon, rather than acting, in their lives. At least, to an extent. I know conspiracists - and I won't mince my words when I say that what they talk in this respect is nonsense, disturbed, bonkers - who are clearly agents in their own lives at quite a deep level, they may be quite long in the tooth, yet when it comes to how they think of the collective, and governments and big business especially, they feel they are acted upon to a degree that is irrational: they are convinced they are being manipulated by powerful people and forces that I can never quite pin down, and usually they have an evangelical desire to 'wake others up', which is in itself revealing. They feel certain they have the hidden truth that the 'sheep' do not see (for myself I find it hard to be certain about anything!) And these people and forces acting on them are BAD GUYS, they make these big simplistic judgements on them that they would never make about people they actually know (and most of us do that with politicians, don't we?) More than that, there may be forces that are alien in origin that are manipulating us.

I don't know what to do when people start to come out with this stuff, because there may well be other ways in which I respect them. The one thing I know I can't do is discuss it with them, because I am up against a need to believe. But for me it is a big limitation in my relationship with them, because I like to think about the world and what is happening in it without someone insisting that Bill Gates - who has given away $30 billion - means harm. Gates may be misguided, but that is a different matter, and I have my own reservations about him in this respect.

The collective noun for lemurs is a conspiracy. (And therein lies a nickname for conspiracists). And 'lemur' is from the Latin meaning 'Spirits of the Dead'. Wow! I think etymological and mythological connections need to be taken seriously. So conspiracy theory is the Spirits of the Dead speaking. Have you seen the Judgement Card in the Mythic Tarot? 

It shows the dead arising, and means old gifts emerging. It points to what I was saying about agency. Whenever our power, our gifts, are suppressed, they come out in wonky ways, often projected in negative form on the world outside. So this is my case. The conspiracists' urging of others to 'wake up' is really a message to themselves to wake up. To claim whatever it is in themselves that they are not claiming.