Ignored knowledge: knowledge claims that persist in low-prestige social groups but are not taken seriously by others (e.g., folk medicine).
Rejected knowledge: knowledge claims that are explicitly rejected as false from the outset (e.g., UFO abductions).
Suppressed knowledge: claims that are allegedly known to be valid by authoritative institutions but are suppressed because the institutions fear the consequences of public knowledge or have some evil or selfish motive for hiding the truth (e.g., the alien origins of UFOs and suppressed cancer cures).16
Two characteristics of the stigmatized-knowledge domain require particular attention: the special place accorded to suppressed knowledge and the empirical nature of the claims. The suppressed knowledge category tends to absorb the others, because believers assume that when their own ideas about knowledge conflict with some orthodoxy, the forces of orthodoxy will necessarily try to perpetuate error out of self-interest or some other evil motive. The consequence is to attribute all forms of knowledge stigmatization to the machinations of a conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories therefore function both as a part of suppressed knowledge and as a basis for stigmatization. At one level, conspiracy theories are an example of suppressed knowledge, because those who believe in conspiracy theories are convinced that only they know the true manner in which power is held and decisions made. The conspiracy is believed to have used its power to keep the rest of the populace in ignorance. At another level, conspiracy theories explain why all forms of stigmatized-knowledge claims have been marginalized—allegedly the conspiracy has utilized its power to keep the truth from being known. So the distinction between hidden knowledge on the one hand, which is “true,” and orthodoxy on the other, which is “false,” acts to push believers in stigmatized-knowledge claims toward beliefs about plots to suppress the truth, and hence in the direction of conspiracism.
Stigmatized knowledge appears compelling to believers, not only because it possesses the cachet of the suppressed and forbidden, but because of its allegedly empirical basis. Some stigmatized knowledge appears to rest on nonempirical or antiempirical foundations—for example, knowledge claimed to derive from spiritual entities channeled through human intermediaries. To a striking extent, however, stigmatized knowledge rests on asserted empirical foundations: those who make the claims explicitly or by implication challenge others to test their facts against evidence. For example, people who traffic in conspiracy theories do not claim for their beliefs the status of revelation, nor do they ask that their beliefs be taken on faith. Yet the version of empiricism that operates in the domain of stigmatized knowledge has its own peculiar characteristics.
In the first place, stigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth—for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth? Hence stigmatization, instead of making a truth claim appear problematic, is seen to give it credibility, by implying that some malign forces conspired to prevent its becoming known. A presumption of validity therefore attaches to stigmatized claims, which greatly facilitates the flow of such claims through the cultic milieu. As Campbell observed, beliefs in the cultic milieu tend to move and combine freely, so that individuals in the milieu quickly become exposed to previously unfamiliar ideas, which they often appear predisposed to accept. It seems to matter little whether the belief in question concerns the Kennedy assassination, Atlantis, Bigfoot, or UFOs. The belief must be true because it is stigmatized.
At the same time that stigmatization is employed as a virtual guarantee of truth, the literature of stigmatized knowledge enthusiastically mimics mainstream scholarship. It does so by appropriating the apparatus of scholarship in the form of elaborate citations and bibliographies. The most common manifestation of pedantry is a fondness for reciprocal citation, in which authors obligingly cite one another. The result is that the same sources are repeated over and over, which produces a kind of pseudoconfirmation. If a source is cited many times, it must be true. Because the claims made by conspiracy theorists are usually nonfalsifiable, the multiplication of sources may leave the impression of validation without actually putting any propositions to the test of evidence.
This pattern was noted almost thirty-five years ago by Richard Hofstadter in his examination of the paranoid political style. He observed that the more sweeping the claims, the more “‘heroic’ [the] strivings for ‘evidence’ to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.” The result is a literature that, “if not wholly rational, [is] at least intensely rationalistic.” Indeed, conspiracy theorists insist on being judged by the very canons of proof that are used in the world they despise and distrust, the world of academia and the intelligentsia. For all its claims to populism, conspiracy theory yearns to be admitted to the precincts where it imagines the conspirators themselves dwell.17
FACT-FICTION REVERSALS
The commonsense distinction between fact and fiction melts away in the conspiracist world. More than that, the two exchange places, so that in striking ways conspiracists often claim first that what the world at large regards as fact is actually fiction, and second that what seems to be fiction is really fact. The first belief is a direct result of the commitment to stigmatized-knowledge claims, for the acceptance of those claims rests on the belief that authoritative institutions, such as universities, cannot be trusted. They are deemed to be the tools of whatever malevolent forces are in control. Hence the purported knowledge propagated by such institutions is meant to deceive rather than enlighten. The baroque conspiracy theories that are so much a part of the stigmatized-knowledge milieu are presumed to be explanations that expose the misleading—and therefore fictional—character of public knowledge. Because stigmatized-knowledge claims and conspiracism insist on the illusory character of what passes for knowledge in the larger society, the equation of fact with fiction seems relatively straightforward. The belief that fiction is actually fact, however, is less obvious.
Conspiracy literature is replete with instances in which manifestly fictional products, such as films and novels, are asserted to be accurate, factual representations of reality. In some cases, they are deemed to be encoded messages, originally intended for the inner circle of conspirators, that somehow became public. In other cases, truth is believed to have taken fictional form because the author was convinced that a direct representation of reality would be too disturbing and needed to be cloaked in fictional conventions. In still other instances, fictionalization is deemed to be part of the conspirators’ campaign to indoctrinate or prepare a naive public for some momentous future development.
The most common fiction-is-fact assertions deal with films, and especially the science-fiction films that have played to an immense audience in recent decades, such as the Star Wars cycle and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In a 1987 press statement, John Lear, the estranged son of inventor William Lear, claimed not only that the U.S. government had close and continuing contacts with extraterrestrials but that an inner circle of powerful officials had “subtly promoted” the films E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that the public would come to think of extraterrestrials as benevolent “space brothers.” Somewhat similar claims were made by conspiracy writer Milton William Cooper, who said that the films were “thinly disguised” descriptions of contacts that took place in the early 1950s between extraterrestrials and the government. The most sweeping claims of this kind have been made by Michael Mannion, whose “mindshift hypothesis” asserts that the “shadow government,” whose members know about aliens, has been systematically “reeducating” the American public. According to Mannion, this campaign has touched virtually every area of popular culture, from films and television programs to the lyrics of popular songs. Hence every fictional reference to UFOs and their occupants is actually a purposeful representation to serve the ends of the secret elite who deal with the aliens behind the scenes.18
Such views have been met with skepticism by some conspiracists, either because the use of motion pictures in this way would mean that too many people would know the “real truth,” thus making secrecy harder to maintain; or on the grounds that films have as much potential to mislead as to enlighten or indoctrinate. Thus Jon King suggests that the prominence given to the mysterious Area 51 in the 1996 film Independence Day is a “smoke screen,” for the most