America has always believed conspiracy theories, says ‘Under the Eye of Power’ author

In his new book, 'Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy,' Colin Dickey discusses America's founding narrative.

In his new book, “Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy,” Colin Dickey wastes no time getting to the point. “The United States was born in paranoia,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “It has been with this country from the very beginning, shadowing it ever since.”

It’s a sobering reminder that conspiracy theories didn’t start with Pizzagate, QAnon or any of the other dangerous belief systems that have recently taken hold in American society — this has been going on since the 18th century. 

Dickey’s book takes a look at some of the more notable conspiracy theories that have, at one time or another, captured the nation’s imagination, including the Illuminati, Henry Ford’s infamous, anti-Semitic lies and the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s. Underscoring the book is a series of questions: Where do these theories come from, and why do people believe them?

“Under the Eye of Power” is the fifth book from cultural historian Dickey, who has previously written about haunted places in “Ghostland” and mysterious phenomena in “The Unidentified.” Dickey grew up in the Bay Area and lived in Los Angeles from 1999 to 2012, where he was educated at CalArts and USC. He discussed his new book via telephone from Brooklyn where he now lives. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Q: Are conspiracy theories something you’ve been interested in for a long time?

I’ve been researching them for a while, ever since I wrote this essay for The Believer about conspiracy theories involving musical tuning and why concert instruments are tuned the way they are. That seemed like just a wacky, fun story until I got into the weeds and found out that there was actually this kind of darker underbelly to a lot of that. Ever since then, I’ve been aware that even the kookiest and most fun conspiracy theories often have a darker, weirder edge to them. I really wanted to try and understand that, and I’ve been researching that in various forms for the past 10 years.

Q: You make the point in the book that American conspiracy theories are as old as the country itself. Is there a founding U.S. conspiracy theory, one that took hold to a degree that maybe the others didn’t as much?

The most central one that runs through almost all of the U.S. is the Illuminati, which was an actual organization in Bavaria, Germany, for about 10 years in the 1770s. They were stamped out by the Bavarian authorities, and that was the end of them. But after the French Revolution, people started asking questions like, “How did things go so wrong? How did it get so violent? How was there so much bloodshed?” A Scottish Freemason and a French priest independently began asserting that what had happened was the French Revolution was secretly the work of the Illuminati, and that it somehow persisted, and that the hidden hand behind the French Revolution filtered over to the United States to the point by the 1790s that it was infecting American politics. In the election of 1800, which was our first contested presidential election after Washington’s two terms, both sides alleged that the other one was a stooge of the Illuminati.

In terms of a founding narrative, what’s behind that is this idea that at the very beginning of democracy, people were already looking for external ways to describe and explain how things might not go their team’s way. The idea that there’s a secret foreign group that is somehow distorting the will of people has remained a central and recurring conspiracy theory since the country began.

Q: So many of these theories are easily disproved. Why do you think some people insist on believing them? 

What I come to time and time again is that the thing about a conspiracy theory is that it provides a narrative and order to an otherwise chaotic or random world. And even though that order may seem malevolent or nefarious, it nonetheless offers an explanatory mechanism to make sense of things. That is something a lot of people crave, even more so than a benevolent order. They would rather have a nefarious order running things than pure randomness. That just provides a measure of comfort. The guy who first coined the term conspiracy theory, the philosopher Karl Popper, said, “The conspiracy theory of society … comes from abandoning God and then asking, ‘Who is in his place?’” This idea that the Illuminati are the ones who are controlling everything, and have this sort of omnipotent, omniscient plan, and we’re all just sort of pawns, is very much an almost theological replacement for a kind of godless world.

Q: There are active conspiracy theories that keep making the rounds on the Internet. Are there any that you think have the potential to be profoundly damaging to the country?

Q: Do you think it’s inevitable that conspiracy theories are going to play a role in the next election? And if so, what can people do to fight that?

The conclusion that I came to is that part of the thing about democracy is it is a structure by which it is very easy to look up and say that you see that you’ve lost an election, and rather than admit that maybe your candidate wasn’t good, or the policies were bad, it’s perhaps easier for you psychologically to say, “Oh, no, there was a conspiracy and it was stolen from us.” What I find again and again is that people who embrace conspiracy theories aren’t necessarily stupid or wrong or delusional. They are looking for something in the conspiracy theory that satisfies them on an emotional or an existential or an intellectual level. And I think the thing to do, rather than just shout facts at them, is to try and understand what that emotional need is that’s being satisfied, and figure out if there’s a way to address that, and shift them off the conspiratorial thinking rather than go after them adversarially.