PT Barnum Was Wrong, A Sucker Isn't Born Every Minute, a Sucker is Born Every Second: On the Conspracy Theory Flim Flam Trail

I was watching France 24 News yesterday and I was intrigued by a report on that network by a journalist whose job it is to monitor social media sites for disinformation and fake news for France 24, an admirable if an often if not generally ineffectual enterprise given the realities of the social and cultural construction of reality and the workings of cognitive dissonance in human beings. Of course, the manipulation of information by "public" and "private" entities is as old as large scale agricultural civilisation themselves, the very civilisations in which writing, a new conmunication form, arose and developed, often taking the form of "sacred" texts. In such societies and cultures monarchs claimed, for instance, to be related to the gods in some way, shape, or form and claimed that their relationship to the gods gave them the divine right to rule and, of course, expropriate the peasants in the process. The courtiers of the monarch often conveyed this religion of divine right to the peasant masses via oral and eventually written forms of communication, and many of the peasants to who such propaganda was conveyed, one assumes--assumes because peasants have only rarely left their thoughts on the subject to posterity in the form of written documents--believed the hype.

Conspiracy theories have taken many forms since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in China, India, and the Near East. The Judaic, Christian, and Muslim religions of the Meditteranean are, for instance, chock full of conspiracy theories about, for example, the end times and conspiracies related to the final apocalypse. The Christian Bible's book of Revelation or the Apocalypse, for example, claims that the Roman Emperor Nero, who it refers to as the Beast, 666, or 616, is a major player in an anti-Christian conspiracy that will ultimately bring about the second coming of the Christian messiah and the restoration of a Christian theocratic utopia. Given, the geographical and cultural impact of Christianity and Islam these conspiracy theories have left their mark on the cultures, high, middle, and low, that arose out of them in the various geographies they dominated culturally and politically. They are still with us today, for instance, in European settler societies like the United States, Canada, and Australia, all the children, in some way, shape, or form, of a Christian culture in which conspiracy theories are central.

Recently, a number of climate and weather conspiracy theories have become prominent in particular countercultures and subcultures in the West and particularly in the United States, Canada, and Australia. In the report I watched on France 24 that I referred to earlier, the journalist debunked the accuracy of a YouTube video--YouTube is one of the central communication platforms in the brave new digital world--which purported to show governmental weather making machines which were devised to create weather havoc across the world and particularly in the United States and Australia. She showed quite clearly that those demagoging for this conspiracy theory used a YouTube video that was totally unrelated to the claim that governments were manipulating the weather for fun, power, and profit. But then factual accuracy has never been at the top of the to do list of demagogues, apologists, and polemicists.

I was and am familiar with the chemtrails conspiracy theory, a theory which claims that aeroplane chemical trails are attempts by governments to manipulate the weather, a theory which would require at least some governments, like that of the US, for example, to be in league with major corporations since chemtrails are left by private airlines as well as American military aerocraft, I was not familiar with the variant of the chemtrails conspiracy theory that was the focus of the report on France 24, a conspiracy theory that suggested that giant electrical towers were and are weather making machines that are causing all sorts of climate havoc across the world, well at least the core nation world, including hurricanes like Hurricane Katrina, the hurricane that devastated the American Louisiana and Mississippi coasts in 2005, and massive rainfalls, like those that led recently to massive flooding in Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria in Australia.

As several scholars have noted, the best propaganda, the best socialisation for conformity, the most effective bullshite, contains at least some truth amidst the fiction or bullshite in it. That is certainly the case here. The "public" sector and the "private" sector have, as social scientists have long known, been trying, with some success, to manipulate the weather for some time as water witching and cloud seeding, which dates back to the 19th century, shows. It is quite a hop, skip, and a jump from technological efforts like that of the Chinese to lower pollution levels in Beijing to the US government making hurricanes to devastate parts of the US to expand their control of the population and enrich the petroleum industry, something the US already does in the form of subsidies to an oil industry that recently made billions in profits making one wonder why further subsidies are needed, to a full blown conspiracy in which governments and their corporate fellow travellers are creating hurricanes, tornados, droughts, droughts in areas that are already arid and which wouldn't have the populations and human made landscapes they do have without government subsidies for things like dams and reservoirs, something one assumes even these negative nabobs of nutty conspiracy theories would see as a positive even if they don't know the role of governments in making the settlement of arid areas in the core nation world possible. 

We shouldn't, of course, be surprised about such hop, skip, and jump flights of delusional fantasy. Self-proclaimed Christians have been hop, skipping, and jumping to their conspiracy laden predictions of the end of the world and the second coming of Christ since at least the first century CE. Nor should we be surprised that the people who believe in a lot of these conspiracy theories and create realities that reflect these conspiracy theories think they are living a movie and that life is like a movie. They think they are good James Bond's--ironically a govenment agent from the deep state--fighting evil incarnate in the form of SMERSH or SPECTRE who now run the govenment. They think, in other words, that life is like a manichean piece of fiction and they are the good guys fighting the totally evil bad guys in a cosmic drama that will determine the fate of the universe. In the end, P.T. Barnum is both right and wrong. Suckers are born constantly, but they are born constantly every second rather than every minute.