I Want to Believe - P2

“All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense” Source: Principia Discordia

Alongside the provision of a narrative, conspiracies are also attractive because they suggest the revelation of a secret. If you believe them, it feels like you've been let in on some great hidden truth. The structure of actual secret societies promises the same thing. Once you join, you move up the ranks and become initiated into the deeper and deeper mysteries of said society. And there's always a higher rank, a deeper level of initiation. A secret, a step away.

Of course when I say 'you' I mean 'they'. It's always 'them' isn't it?

In Umberto Eco's 1988 book, Foucault's Pendulum, three Italian publishers are inspired by the occult conspiracy gibberish they keep being sent to develop a grand, all encompassing conspiracy, they call - The Plan. It's all a joke but, in the story, an actual secret society gets wind of the The Plan and become convinced that the trio have acquired a secret they themselves have lost. The secret society believe they must be part of The Plan, they'd just forgotten how they were connected to it, and the publishers have found some secret, hidden key. Because a real conspiracy starts to believe the pretend conspiracy, the publishers start to wonder if what they made up is, in fact, real. One of them becomes convinced The Plan has given him cancer and another comes to believe he holds the key to the grand secret he knows doesn't actually exist. All the narratives become questionable, including that of the narrator who is telling the book's story.

Their Plan involves, as almost all grand conspiracies do, the Illuminati. The Bavarian Illuminati was an actual secret society in the 18th Century (actually, like P2, a secret society within a secret society). It was outlawed in 1785 and, officially, that was the end of the society.

Their goal, ironically, was an enlightened society, a democracy based on science and reason. The organisation's roots, so it goes, stem (allegedly) from the Knights Templar who were themselves outlawed in the 14th Century. In both cases, the (real) secret societies, once suppressed, went underground, popping up occasionally for who knows what reason but, suffice to say, it's shady and everything's their fault. 

The Illuminati story, as it developed into modern times, has simply become an organisation that secretly organises for power and world domination. What that dominated world might look like is variable. The conspiracy, almost by definition has to be something intangible and unprovable. It's because of its secrecy, its insubstantiality, that the Illuminati becomes like a vessel which allows for anyone to pour into it their own ideological inclinations. To bible bashers the Illuminati are Satanic Occultists, to libertarians they're commies, to the left they're the shadowy financial elites, to the mad they're lizards or Beyonce.

It's all this that makes this narrative potentially dangerous. In a world without 'solid' defining narratives those who feel excluded by the current ideological model that we operate in, can use this story to explain the world. But if they acquire power they can also use it to persuade and then direct the world themselves.

In the 19th Century Anti-Semitism was poured into this grand narrative and a book – The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published in Russia. The Protocols are a manifesto for a diabolical Jewish elite that plans on taking over the world in a variety of sinister and secret ways. The book is a 'proven' fake but a lot of people believed it. One was Adolf Hitler.

A false narrative was created to explain the confusing machinations of the world, a group fitted their already ideological world view into that narrative and created their own occult inspired, society from a story of nationalism and racial superiority with esoteric symbols and shiny boots. This tragically real death cult held itself in opposition to the false one and the horror of the Holocaust followed.

So some conspiracies are real, but, blinded by our own socially acceptable, ideological story, we ignore them. Others are fake, but those that believe in them can make true horror manifest in the world. It's enough to make you want to just make up a secret society that takes the piss out of everything – the mainstream story and the conspiracy theorist's narrative. Well, someone already did that and it didn't turn out so well either.

In 1963 Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley created a false religion, Discordianism, that worshipped the Greek goddess of chaos and discord - Eris - she of golden apple and Trojan War fame. Discordianism became influential amongst the counter culture of the 60s and its creators entertained themselves with generally being merry pranksters and sowing discord and confusion when and where they could. The humour and philosophy of it all appealed to Robert Anton Wilson, who soon joined in with the group. It then began Operation Mindfuck and began publishing fake letters in magazines (Anton Wilson was editor of the letters page at Playboy at the time) and generally got a kick out of fomenting conspiracy theories they knew were fake because they were making them up – as a joke.

In New Orleans around this time, DA Jim Garrison started to investigate the numerous conspiracies that were spilling out of the assassination of JFK, in the hopes of bringing the assumed conspirators to trial. The Discordians saw the opportunity to cause mischief and started to fuck with Garrison and his team, sending fake letters to them and spreading rumours.

Bizarrely though, Kerry Thornley was actually bound to the JFK story and became involved in the conspiracies.

In the army he'd known Lee Harvey Oswald and, after Oswald defected to Russia, wrote a novel based on him, The Idle Warriors. All of this was before the assassination of Kennedy and, as a result, Thornley was called before the Warren Commission, the official inquiry into the Kennedy assassination. When Lee Harvey Oswald returned from Russia he lived in New Orleans and Thornley was there at the same time. He claims to have never met Oswald after knowing him in the military, but did admit to knowing several of the other alleged conspirators in the assassination including David Ferrie and, possibly, E. Howard Hunt, a man so shady that if he didn't exist it would be necessary for us to invent him. Thornley had 'joked' with them about how great it would be if someone shot Kennedy and how you might get away with it if you did it. 

These 'coincidences' brought him to the attention of Jim Garrison, who thought Thornley could've been one of the alternate Oswald's that crop up in the story, and that he was being set up as another potential patsy, had Oswald not worked out. Later this theory started to bore into Thornley's own head and he came to believe that he was actually involved in the assassination, he just didn't know he was. He thought he could have undergone some mind control experiments, related to MK Ultra, which made him not realise any of this. In other words Thornley came to believe what Garrison had suggested, even though he knew Garrison's conspiracy minded head had been fomented, in part, by the made up religion Thornley himself had made up.

Thornley said of his creation of Discordianism and its worship of Eris 'If I knew all of this was going to come true I would have worshipped Venus'

So, not only are some conspiracies real, but are ignored, and some are fake, but change the world, still others are fake and yet can become, in a sense, real. As odd as it all sounds I dare say that this kind of thing happens to all of us, all the time.

Not that it's all necessarily a bad thing. While the more outlandish conspiracies are often believed in by people desperate to blame something, or someone else, for how shit their own life is, they could just as easily be turned around to help fashion something positive and empowering. Seeing conspiracies around every corner can certainly make you paranoid but there's nothing stopping you creating a meaning and a story out of them for yourself. Anton Wilson, partially responsible for popularising the conspiracy in modern culture, went through his own 'chapel perilous' of paranoia but came out the other side with a more optimistic view of what it all could mean. He said “you should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends”

One thing's for sure, if you don't do that 'they' will. 'They' already have. Whoever they are.

Or perhaps it's not worth the risk of that running out of control too. Maybe we should stop searching for meaning where there is none and simply look at what we know is there and appreciate it for what it is. At the conclusion of Foucault's Pendulum, the narrator, Casoubon, hides in a house, waiting for the secret society that is pursuing him for the none existent secret, to come and get him. He decides to stop running, knowing nothing he says will ever persuade his pursuers that there is nothing to find. If there are secret chiefs, with sacred, secret mysteries they're keeping it to themselves. Casoubon looks at a hill, appreciating it for what it is.

“It makes no difference whether I write or not. They will look for other meanings, even in my silence. That's how They are. Blind to revelation. Malkhut is Malkhut, and that's that.

But try telling them. They of little faith.

So I might well stay here, wait, and look at that hill.

It's so beautiful"