Conspiracy Theories

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early-before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let's first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its dis-parate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categorizations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies.

ABSTRACT
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden
wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different
sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a
strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in
Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s
mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding
of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis
Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and
of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of
(un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and
pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse
trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined
allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory
allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are
shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis.
Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our)
understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions,
according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology
of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the
microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis.

لا شك أن بعض الوصايا التي تحملها أحجار جورجيا الإرشادية يتسم بالحكمة والنبل، ومن ثم يستحق الثناء ومحاولة التطبيق، لكن أغلبها في الحقيقة يحمل أفكارًا تستدعي بقوة نظريات المؤامرة بأشكالها المختلفة، لاسيما تلك التي تتعلق بطوفان العولمة وهيمنة رأس المال وبقاء الأصلح ومناهضة الأديان. لا شك أيضًا أن ثمة تفسيرًا جديرًا بالتأمل لهالة الغموض التي أحيط بها النُصب وبُناته، مؤداه أن هذا الغموض لا يعدو أن يكون مجرد نوعٍ من أنواع الترويج السياحي للنُصب ولولاية جورجيا، لكن الأحداث الجارية تقدم سببًا للتوقف وإعادة التفكير في الأمر منذ بدايته.

The Earth isn't flat, but much bigger than we are told. The earth is a part of something much bigger. Therefore, it seems flat, but that's because of the scale. There are many continents, and 33 of them were camouflaged through our classic earth model, by bending them inward through Antarctica. This is where the term 'hollow earth' comes from.

The concept of üst akıl, an all-powerful and sinister agency, has recently been socially and politically influential in the public sphere in Turkey. From the time it was first used in 2014 to today, the concept has served as an enabling device to legitimize a political motive, to delegitimize dissident views, to make an assertion of difference, to safeguard political status and to gain mainstream recognition. In this article, I examine specific conspiracy narratives in Turkey, which are by-products of the üst akıl discourse, and attempt to understand how they, in their own ways, contribute to the formation of a conspiratorial climate and a hegemonic consensus in Turkish mainstream media. Journalists and popular authors creatively allude to üst akıl in a wide range of styles. Analysing the discourse of üst akıl, I demonstrate how the concept has been strategically used by many circles, pro-government and sometimes critical, to endorse a new nationalistic agenda intensified by the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey.

Amen exposes the foundation of all religious myths and conspiracy theories that are based on the existence of a global and Divine Plan for mankind. Amen reveals the truth about the Knights Templar, the Baphomet, Jesus, the Great Mother, the Dragons and the Grail Bloodline.

Introduction to See You On The Other Side podcast, episode 133, 28 February 2017 (interview by Mike Huberty and Allison Jornlin, Madison, Wisconsin).
Online at http://othersidepodcast.com/blog/2017/02/28/133-popobawa-dr-martin-walsh-idea-virus/.

Logics of Propaganda
Part Two. The Conspiratorial Logic of Populist Propaganda
Within the framework of the more general logics of propaganda outlined in Part One, Part Two of this study aims to shed light on the recently growing populist-propaganda front. In contrast to many researchers who speak of a ‘populist wave’ recently spreading almost across the world (from Putin to Trump and back), on the level of discourses we prefer to call this phenomenon ‘populist-propaganda front’. This newly coined term presupposes that the dispersed popular discontents have, to a great extent, already been captured and packaged in a new propaganda regime. Gradually after 2000, the new populist-propaganda package (basic grammar and vocabulary) was produced by Russian media, but Russia does not determine all of its uses; it can be and is used in anti-Russian rhetoric as well. This package – national-sovereignist and conservative in its own terms – does not serve the interests of the local people but is utilized by different local politico-economic actors (oligarchs): it is a circulating resource for state capture. The particular practical logic of this populist propaganda is outlined here on the basis of the empirical study on Anti-Democratic Propaganda in Bulgaria. News Websites and Printed Media: 2013 – 2016.
First, the populist-propaganda logics are based entirely on a conspiratorial grammar. The narrative figure of conspiracy, after a morphological analysis following Vladimir Propp, can be logically represented as a multiple relation with three logical positions: 1. Conspirator (Puppet-master, Villain) – 2. Helpers (Puppets) – 3. Victim (potential Hero). Populist propaganda totalizes this elementary conspiratorial grammar: everything in the (political and economic) world is a conspiracy. The scene of the conspiracy is the globe. Hence the position of the ‘Conspirator’ is translated into a geopolitical position: the usual suspect – the global Villain – is ‘the West’ (or the USA, NATO, Brussels, Soros, capitalism, liberalism, multiculturalism, etc., all of them metonymically substituted on demand).
Second, by totalizing conspiracy, populist propaganda totalizes cynicism: its first message is that everyone is pursuing their own self-interest. Every other normative and political standard (presumably invoked to limit selfish self-interests – human rights, the rule of law, the separation of powers, etc.) is discredited in advance as an ideological smokescreen hiding the conspiracy.
Third, the only legitimate interest is the people’s interest. But here a set of propaganda operations with the meaning of ‘the people’ takes place. 1. Using the Left repertoire of discrediting Western liberal capitalism, propaganda omits the inclusive Left meanings of ‘the people’ and substitutes them with exclusive ‘Right meanings’ (it is strategically targeted at the local majority represented in an ethnically-nationalist holistic mode); 2. The people’s interest and the people’s sovereignty are also strategically substituted by the state’s sovereignty (in geopolitical étatist terms); 3. But the state’s sovereignty understood as the existence of strong and mutually independent institutions is also strategically replaced by the ‘personal sovereignty’ of one strong and charismatic political leader. On the Bulgarian media scene, Putin and Orbán are usually cast in the role of real sovereign leaders countering the conspiracy of the West.
In conclusion, contemporary populist propaganda is racist (excludes on a racial basis), isolationist (excludes international normative regulations and control), and authoritarian (on the internal level, it excludes the institutional separation of powers and blocks civic resistances). It is not only a Russian weapon but also an effective local device for state capture for every oligarch fighting against all forms of public control (internal and external) and utilizing the state as a tool for securing economic advantages.
Keywords: logics, grammar, populist propaganda, conspiracy, state capture.

Il Movimento 5 Stelle rappresenta oggi il fenomeno politico più interessante nello scenario italiano. Tra crisi della rappresentanza e fine dei partiti tradizionali, disintermediazione e pubblici iper-connessi, la creatura di Grillo e Casaleggio si delinea come un vero e proprio dispositivo di potere. Dopo il ventennio videocratico berlusconiano, si tratta della prima forza politica italiana che abbia mai fatto uso massiccio dei nuovi media digitali. In questo libro viene presentata un’analisi estesa dei presupposti teorici e organizzativi del Movimento, con particolare riferimento alla dimensione utopica e al progetto di una democrazia diretta sul web. Studiare l’impianto mediatico che sorregge la politica del movimento permette di riconoscere continuità e cambiamenti rispetto agli strumenti di propaganda e persuasione utilizzati negli ultimi decenni, e di ricostruire l’evoluzione della comunicazione politica nell’era della post-verità. Grillodrome è un dispositivo che trasforma il corpo politico e sociale attraverso la nuova ideologia della comunicazione on-line, imprimendo una tensione viva nello spirito del tempo, che incarna un insieme di problemi, desideri e valori, vizi e virtù della società in rete.

It is often remarked that politicians’ private lives are becoming feature of political communication in many advanced industrial democracies. However, there have so far been no genuinely comparative studies examining the personalised nature of political communication. Intimate Politics provides for the first time a systematic comparative analysis of such developments in Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources it assesses the extent to which the private lives of politicians have become a feature of political communication in each democracy. The book provides a comprehensive account of the shifting boundaries between the public and private and whether any developments are universal or more advanced in some democracies than others, and seeks to explain why this might be. Intimate Politics will be of great value for students and scholars of communication and media studies and political science and is required reading for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of the transformation of mediated politics in advanced industrial democracies.

This presentation of an ongoing practice-as-research project asks to what degree it is possible to distinguish analogue and digital painterly marks. I make paintings, scan them, add marks using digital painting software, print them onto canvas and then add further marks on top. The result is an object containing three kinds of painterly mark: physical paint on the canvas surface; photographic (scanned) facsimiles of painterly marks; and digitally constructed painterly marks. The last two are sometimes enhanced with a transparent medium that retains brushstrokes, rendering 3D the previously flat photographic and digital brushstrokes, drips, smears, and splats. In “faking” analogue painterly marks, I explore the limits of digital painting and paint mediums. This has political ramifications (related to deep-fakery and forgery, for example) but I am more interested in the philosophical and aesthetic possibilities of a hybrid form of photographic, digital and analogue painting.

I have a longstanding interest in the intersection between painterly and photo-mechanical mark-making, but the impetus for this project was an interest in post-truth. The project is called "The Truth in Painting 1993" partly in response to Derrida's book The Truth in Painting (first published, in French, in 1978) and, more generally, the notion that truth is a social construction. My subject matter is taken exclusively from events in 1993, which the viewer could interpret as connected and significant, or as contingent and meaningless. For example, NAFTA and the Maastricht Treaty were signed in 1993, the same year of the first Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Waco Siege. The viewer might contemplate if 1993 was the year that a new economic world order emerged, as well as armed opposition to it. Alternatively, the viewer might treat my choice of subject matter with suspicion, interpreting it in the vein of a conspiracy theory.

“The Truth in Painting 1993” presents a dialectics between these two positions – both through its subject matter, and through its materiality. On one level it asks which marks are “true”, implying that the digital ones are fake (at least when passed off as analogue). This is linked to Derrida’s questions regarding what Cézanne meant by “the truth in painting” when he wrote to the artist Emile Bernard in 1905. What is the truth in painting 1993? On one level, the viewer is drawn to the truth of the marks. On another level, the project investigates the limitations and benefits the digital, the photographic and painting bring to the exploration of truths about historical events. Lastly, it asks whether a combination of these techniques and subjects might reveal a different kind of truth that has nothing to with materiality or subject matter, but is brought into being by an amalgamation of the two.

Masters of the World. On the Origins of Jewish Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories about the Jews endlessly flourish around us. Usually, they have been studied in connection with the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document of the beginning of 20th century. Interpreted as a myth or a paranoid style of thought, denunciation of world Jews conspiracy has been considered as an inve- terate, quite a-historical inclination to misinterpret reality. As a result, little attention has been paid to the origins of the hoax and to his context of appearance. This essay wants to scrutinise the conditions of emergency of the world Jewish conspiracy as a technique to perturb public opinion. It does so in retracing the context of the invention of world conspiracy theory about the Jews in 19th century from a varied complex of hybridization, both cultural and technical. From myth to denunciation, this paper aims to enlighten the transmedia process that produces conspiracy theory, an un- tangled history of mass journalism, plagiarism from fiction to non-fiction products, transmigration of iconographic items as well as textual evidences. Following this approach, the creators of Jews conspiracy theory as well as their modus operandi are debunked and the identity of the author of the «Rabbi’s Speech» at the cemetery of Prague – a forged document and main source of the Protocols – is detected.

Conspiracy theorizing is common in many countries worldwide. It plays a particularly important role in contemporary Russian politics. The substantial part of such “theories” focuses on the sinister plans of foreign enemies, among which the United States and its allies are mentioned most frequently. A wide range of actors, varying from high-standing officials to ordinary people, resort to such conspiracy theorizing. In the 1990s, the authorities and their supporters rarely resorted to this kind of conspiracy theorizing; however, lately it has become an increasingly important element of Russian official discourse in the second half of the 2000s. The Dulles’ Plan (DP) is an existing narrative that discusses how the USA could corrupt the Soviet/Russian society with the help of internal accomplices. It is claimed to be a genuine US official plan that graphically demonstrates American enmity and malignity towards Russia. Despite the fact that this plan’s authenticity has since been called...

Dans un premier temps, nous rappelons le contexte général dans lequel est survenue la crise  de la Covid 19. Nous montrerons, au travers d’une étude serrée de la séquence politique et communicationnelle allant du 3 au 16 mars 2020 (date du premier confinement) que, d’emblée, les mesures et les annonces du gouvernement sont inaudibles et contradictoires, entre in/disjonctions à la continuité et à la discontinuité, au moment même où, justement, les citoyens sont le plus en attente, en demande et en besoin de réponses claires et fortes de la part des pouvoirs publics. Si bien entendu les incertitudes et la méconnaissance du virus (la « science en train de se faire » en fait) sont des leviers importants des atermoiements gouvernementaux, cette situation qui se greffe sur un haut degré de défiance structurelle vis-à-vis des autorités politiques, journalistiques et scientifiques joue comme une « fenêtre d’opportunité » pour l’émergence de divers modes alternatifs de régulation informationnelle et d’intelligibilité sociale et politique de la crise sanitaire que sont les fake news, les théories du complot ou le « populisme médical » (Raoult par exemple). 
Dès lors, nous rappellerons succinctement les définitions des concepts de théories du complot et de fake news avant d’en dresser un panorama en lien avec la crise de la covid-19. Surtout, nous monterons qu’elles ressemblent largement à celles ayant circulées lors des crises sanitaires précédentes, depuis les grippes « russe » et espagnole » jusqu’à la grippe H1N1 en passant par le sida/VIH : « altérisation » de maladie à l’origine de l’épidémie, ondes dangereuses, armes - y compris les vaccins - biochimiques génocidaires, avancement du nouvel ordre mondial, avidité de « Big Pharma », remèdes peu orthodoxes voire franchement « loufoques », etc.
Enfin, nous analyserons, spécifiquement en lien avec la crise de la covid-19 cette fois, les espaces sociaux, les formes, les modalités et les temporalités, essentiellement numériques (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), de transmission et de circulation de ces motifs  argumentatifs et discours performatifs que sont les théories du complot et les fake news.

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Blurb:
In the summer of 1350, as a deadly pandemic tore across Europe, nine people were burnt at the stake in the Hanseatic city of Visby on the island of Gotland. Ostensibly, this was a sadly familiar story: the Black Death was rampant, and a supposed Jewish plot was offered as an explanation. The alleged perpetrators were forced to confess, and were duly executed. But the people who were consigned to the flames in Visby were not Jewish. In fact, there were no Jews on the island to be victimised. Of the nine accused, two were Christian preachers, and the only named individual, Tidericus, was an organista - probably the organ player at the church of St. Olaf in Visby. The outlandish theory was that the plague was a poisoning scheme run by an international conspiracy of Jews, oligarchs and secular administrators.

This book traces the story of the unfortunate Tidericus, and examines the implications of the antisemitic fantasy which led to his death. The positions of the different ethnic groups in Visby is considered against the backdrop of panic and paranoia which pandemics inspire. The interests of the native Old Gutnish-speaking population are compared to the motives of the Low German-speaking mercantile elite who were administering Visby at the time. A context of social unrest, with class divisions bisecting proto-national identities, proved to be a dangerous fuel for a surreal conspiracy theory. A popular willingness to believe in this lurid nightmare proved to be the undoing of Tidericus and his co-accused. The sources which record the affair, namely two pieces of Hanseatic correspondence, are edited and translated into English for the first time in the appendices.

Published by The Viking Society for Northern Research, London, 2020. 119 pp. ISBN 978-0-903521-99-4. £10 (£5 for Viking Society members). Order from sales@gazellebooks.co.uk. State Viking Society membership to qualify for members’ price.

Conspiracy theories (including those related to secret societies) and pseudo-sciences (CT&PS) are as old as the humankind. The abundance of CT&PS surviving in the modern world is astonishing: Wikipedia [Wik16a] mentions 200 categories of conspiracy theories and secret societies, and ca. 150 topics classified as pseudoscience [Wik16b]. The goal of our project is to quantify relationships among these topics, on one hand, and between these topics and other, non-conspiratorial and non-pseudo-scientific, topics, on the other hand. We use title and co-purchasing information from Amazon.com—a new source of cheap and relatively easily collectible research data [RW14]. The dataset consists of 101,000 distinct titles, mostly referring to books and collected in August–December 2016 by starting with a manually selected collection of seed titles and following the links to 4–10 titles that are frequently purchased together. About 9,500 titles in the dataset are related to CT&PS. We manually assigned each CT&PS title to at least one of the 360 categories from the Wikipedia lists [Wik16a, Wik16b]. (We plan to use these tagged titles in the future in machine learning-based classification projects.) We arranged the categories into a network, where two categories are connected if the titles in these categories are frequently purchased together (as reported by Amazon.com). Since Amazon.com shows only the first few related items, our network is sparser than the real latent co-purchase network. The resultant network consists of 267 categories and 99 connected components. 93 categories were not included because there had few or no titles in them. Most components have 4 or fewer categories (e.g., " zang fu–meridian therapy–cupping therapy–moxibustion " or " big government "), but the largest connected component—the giant component—has 152 (57%) categories. We hypothesize that the small isolated components represent distinct CT&PS topics—bags of categories that describe purchase baskets of customers interested in the field. However, the same reasoning cannot be extended to the giant component. We used louvain network community detection algorithm [BGLL08] to partition the giant component into 15 modular communities—sets of nodes that have more connections among them than to the other sets. We hypothesize that each community is yet another form of a distinct CT&PS topic.

The paper is an effort to conceptualize the combined effects of the evolution of populism and the present pandemic. Concepts from Social Psychology and Neuropsychology are used to create an explanatory framework for the development of internet based ideologies, which facilitate the spontaneous formation of self-organizing movements, which in turn lead to acts of stochastic terrorism.

Statistically speaking, American Evangelical Christians are uniquely attracted to apocalyptic conspiracy theories when it comes to the topic of climate change. Since Evangelicals constitute a powerful voting/lobbying/shopping bloc, it is worth asking why this might be the case and what (if anything) can be done about it. To this end, my study considers the relevance of two major cultural tributaries to American Evangelical pop apocalyptic culture. In the first section I consider biblical apocalyptic culture and argue that the characteristic apocalyptic promise to disclose hidden divine plans to a misunderstood but soon-to-be-vindicated elect group naturally entails conspiracy-theory thinking. I argue further that apocalyptic imagination and conspiracy-theory thinking are powerful tools for the definition of identity and community. In the second section I turn my attention to the kind of Evangelical pop apocalyptic culture that helped push climate science denial into the Christian mainstream. I argue that in pop apocalyptic productions like the influential tracts and comics of Jack T. Chick, the image of the elect as the persecuted and powerful bearers of special knowledge found a new lease on life, and continues to fascinate millions with the attractive offer of somebody special to be and somewhere special to belong. I conclude that apocalyptic questions of crisis and conspiracy have a sociological function, as means to the end of defining social identity. Understanding this concrete function of conspiracy-theory thinking in Christian apocalyptic imagination can help in assessing and addressing the troubling phenomenon of Evangelical climate denial.

The 2020 presidential campaign was plagued by charges of voter fraud both before and after the election took place. While past literature finds that electoral losers are most likely to express misgivings about election integrity, little else is known about the characteristics of individuals who exhibit these beliefs or how the beliefs have changed over time. Employing national surveys from 2012, 2016, 2018, and 2020, we examine the levels of pre-election expectations of fraud in the event of an electoral loss over time, as well as the individual-level correlates of beliefs in a range of election-related conspiracy theories prominent in 2020. Our analysis reveals that beliefs in election fraud are common and stable across time, and only occasionally relate to partisanship. Moreover, we find that, even accounting for the influence of partisan motivated reasoning, several psychological orientations––conspiracy thinking, anomie, dark triad personality traits, and denialism––play a unique role in promoting perceptions of voter fraud.

Western esotericism is intimately linked with conspiracy theories. On the one hand, conspiracy theories often focus on alleged “secret societies” such as the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, or the Freemasons, sometimes thought to possess superhuman powers. On the other, contemporary esoteric currents often spin their own conspiratorial narratives involving reductionist science, materialistic medicine, and corrupt repressive politicians, acting in concert to keep the true esoteric knowledge of divine origins and human potential from a population starved of spiritual truth. How might we explain these relationships? This article proposes a model that combines historical, sociological, and psychological factors, arguing that the relationship is intrinsic. Historically, “esotericism” is a product of mnemohistorical processes where “hidden lineages” from ancient times to the present play a crucial role, both for adherents identifying with such secret traditions and opponents attributing unwanted developments to secret cabals; socially, esotericism is organized along the lines of the loosely structured and culturally deviant “cultic milieu”; psychologically and cognitively, the cultic milieu produces selection pressures that favour certain personality traits and cognitive styles associated with increased conspiracism as well as paranormal beliefs and attributions, and produce forms of “motivated reasoning” that make conspiracy theories about “the establishment” – and competing esoteric groups – appealing.

Selon une enquête parue en janvier 2018 et réalisée par l’ifop pour le compte de la Fondation Jean Jaurès et le site internet Conspiracy Watch, un quart des français, et la situation serait encore plus grave pour les 18-24 ans, serait sensible aux théories du complot. Or, ce constat alarmiste largement relayé par la grande presse et les télévisions nécessite toutefois d’être largement nuancé. Travail militant aux orientations méthodologiques sujettes à caution, il conviendra dans un premier temps de déconstruire concrètement le tableau sobre brossé par cette étude afin de véritablement appréhender le conspirationnisme contemporain de manière scientifique à la manière d’un fait social et politique à la fois transversal à l’échiquier politique, l’échelle sociale et à la pyramide des âges
Pour ce faire, comme dans le cadre des phénomènes populistes, deux écueils doivent impérativement être évités. Le premier consiste à éviter une approche trop extensive qui tendrait à voir dans toutes formes de critiques sociales radicales adressées au système néolibéral un aveu plus ou moins manifeste de complotisme. Le second, par symétrie, consisterait à nier l’existence de ce phénomène et à voir dans l’étiquette complotiste le dernier avatar du même système néo-libéral pour disqualifier les critiques  formulées à son endroit. Nous illustrerons ces différents aspects au travers de divers exemples.
Partant de là ; il sera enfin temps d’aborder les véritables enjeux et processus d’adhésion au phénomène conspirationniste contemporain.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of Luc Boltanski’s account of the multifaceted relationship between mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries in modern societies. It is striking that, although this important aspect of Boltanski’s oeuvre has been commented on by several scholars, his principal contributions to this area of investigation have been largely overlooked and received hardly any serious attention by researchers in the humanities and social sciences. This paper is an attempt to fill this noticeable gap in the literature. Thus, rather than covering the entire breadth and depth of Boltanski’s writings, the paper will focus on the valuable insights his work offers into the relationship between mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries. To this end, the analysis is divided into two parts. The first part comprises an overview of Boltanski’s central theoretical contributions to our understanding of mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries. The second part offers some critical reflections on important issues arising from Boltanski’s examination of the relationship between mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries – especially with regard to its limitations and shortcomings.

Crises are associated with search for meaning and security. In recent years, they have also been associated with increased attention to conspiracy theories. Such theories about COVID-19 have been many. We looked at several COVID-specific conspiracy theories and their relation to a number of other measures, including religiosity in a highly educated Norwegian convenience sample (N = 1225). Conspiracy mentality, lack of trust, and religiosity were directly associated with conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19, whereas self-reported stress and negative emotions related to the pandemic had only small, indirect effects. Unlike previous research, we found no effect of gender or age.

Systemic transition in post-communist Eastern Europe resulted in high inflation, rapid economic changes, and increased lack of control in everyday life. Atthe same time, anti-Semitic incidents were reported in this region after 1989. The ideological model of scapegoating (Glick 2002; 2005) might serve asan explanation of anti-Semitic prejudice in post-transition Eastern Europe. The model predicts that the ideology defining Jews as powerful, cunning, and dangerous would gain popularity in times of crises and would lead to greater discrimination against Jews. In two nationwide representative sample studies of anti-Semitism, in Poland (n = 1098) and Ukraine (n = 1000), we applied the ideological model of scapegoating to study various forms of anti-Semitism (conspiracy-based belief in Jewish control and discriminatory intentions toward Jews). In both samples, economic deprivation led to increased discriminatory intentions toward Jews; however, only in the Polish sample was deprivation linked with higher beliefs in Jewish control (scapegoat-defining ideology). In Poland the rise of conspiracy beliefs about Jewish control partially explained the effect of deprivation on discriminatory intentions toward Jews. The implications of these results are discussed.

Dostojewskis Kurzroman Aufzeichnungen aus dem Kellerloch oder eigentlich "dem Untergrund" (Записки из подполья im Original) wurde erstmals 1864 in der Zeitschrift Epocha veröffentlicht. Die Geschichte des namenlosen Mannes im Untergrund gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Im ersten Teil legt der damals 40-jährige Beamte seine Lebensphilosophie in der Gegenwart der Erzählung dar und im zweiten erinnert er sich an eine Reihe von Ereignissen, die sich in der Vergangenheit der Erzählung, fünfzehn Jahre früher, zugetragen haben.

Le " pape noir " est le dernier avatar du " mythe jésuite " ou de l'" anti-jésuitisme " militant. Ce mythe naît au XVIe siècle avec la Compagnie de Jésus elle-même, dont la nouveauté intrigue d'emblée. Rapidement, les jésuites sont soupçonnés d'exercer un pouvoir d'influence occulte, d'agir dans l'ombre. Croyances, légendes, images viennent nourrir le mythe qui prend vite une tournure politique. Au cours du XIXe siècle, se produit une mutation : le mythe verse dans le fantasme du complot. Et c'est dans ce contexte qu'apparaît la figure du pape noir, manière de qualifier le général des jésuites, qui cristalliserait en sa personne un pouvoir absolu. A partir de la seconde partie du XXe siècle, le mythe perd de sa vigueur, bien qu'il soit toujours prompt à être réactivé suivant les besoins. Pourquoi s'intéresser à ce mythe qui eut la peau dure ? Le récit de son évolution permet certes de rappeler les événements auxquels les jésuites ont été mêlés. Il aide surtout à comprendre comment et pourquoi des personnes cultivées comme des gens du peuple ont eu besoin de soupçonner ce groupe de religieux d'être derrière les plus grands complots de l'histoire. Cet ouvrage très documenté retrace la genèse et les étapes de cet interminable procès d'intention.

Der Beitrag rekonstruiert anhand der Interaktionstheorie Erving Goffmans, dass Konspirationen geregelte Routinepraktiken im Alltag darstellen. Kollaborationen und Kollusionen vollziehen sich über koordinierte Interaktionen der Fremd-und Selbsttäuschung und haben eine sozialisierende Funktion. Von ihnen zu unterscheiden sind Verschwörungen im machiavellistischen Sinne, die das reflexive Vertrauen, das Alltagskonspirationen begleitet, strukturell untergraben, obgleich sie mit ähnlichen Techniken der Informationskontrolle arbeiten. Es wird gezeigt, inwiefern die pauschale Annahme, Verschwörungsdenken sei irrational, nicht zutreffend ist. Stattdessen müssen Kontexte und Konstellationen berücksichtigt werden, in denen sich paranoide Subjektpositionen interaktiv herausbilden und ihre eigene ‚Rationalität' entfalten.

Abstract: The QAnon conspiracy theory, which emerged in 2017, has quickly risen to prominence in the United States. A survey of cases of individuals who have allegedly or apparently been radicalized to criminal acts with a nexus to violence by QAnon, including one case that saw a guilty plea on a terrorism charge, makes clear that QAnon represents a public security threat with the potential in the future to become a more impactful domestic terror threat. This is true especially given that conspiracy theories have a track record of propelling terrorist violence elsewhere in the West as well as QAnon’s more recent influence on mainstream political discourse.

This article presents ethnographic insights into everyday lives of conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study with ultra-nationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, I suggest pursuing conspiratorial discourses not solely through their (anti-)truth qualities but first trace them as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. I then explore how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forge agency and political subjectivity for the men involved as well issuing forth socio-political effects such as, vigilantism and paramilitary violence. Through their circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, this article contends, men reconfigure sovereignty and the way the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research urges studies not to focus on epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them, such as fact-checking, which presume that the exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. I rather suggest researchers to attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete sites, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups, and reconfigure the ways state operates alongside the law in similar other settings.