Conspiracies

If you don't know what this image means, I'm not telling.

Everyone on the left is currently deeply concerned about “QAnon.” My friend Xerxes points out that it is a conspiracy theory, and conspiracy theories are not rational.

He is right, but not in the way he thinks. QAnon is apparently in itself a conspiracy theory. But getting agitated about QAnon is also a conspiracy theory, considering QAnon a significant factor. Yet people on the left apparently do. In a recent poll, those on the right listed their chief concern as illegal immigration. Those on the left listed their chief concern as people on the right.

Funny that I only ever hear of QAnon from the left. On the right, nobody is interested. The same was true, a little while ago, of “Pizzagate.” Nothing about it on the right; the left was all over it. Or the “alt-right”: same thing. Entirely a discovery, if not an invention, of the left. Or “anti-vaxxers.” Definitely started on the left, with figures like RFK Jr. Or “white supremacists.” According to the left, everybody but them is a white supremacist. The term is never used on the right. Or "dog whistles." People on the left keep hearing them, but imagining they are for the right. People on the right never hear them.

In other words, “QAnon,” the “alt-right,” and “white supremacy” are conspiracy theories—in that they really exist almost entirely in the imaginations of people afraid of them. The reality is probably in each case a few kids blogging from their basements, and probably being misinterpreted or misquoted at that. You could probably conjure up an infinite number of such conspiracies on any conceivable subject with a little Googling.

Most if not all of leftist politics seems to be based on conspiracy theories. One is the concept of “patriarchy”: that men, throughout the ages, have been conspiring to oppress women. Or the Marxist concepts of “ideology” and “hegemony.” Marxism, very like Gnosticism, holds that most or all of what we think of as reality is actually invented by rich capitalists to maintain their control. Or the idea that “white people” have invented not just the USA, but Western civilization in order to suppress “people of colour.”

The larger a claimed conspiracy, and the longer it is claimed to have continued, the less plausible. Because people are people, and are not good at keeping secrets. Yet with “patriarchy,” “white supremacy,” or Marxist “ideology,” the left has gone as far as possible: conspiracies embracing the entire world since the first written records.

Pettipiece: “Ancient Gnostics believed that the world we perceive is, in fact, a prison constructed by demonic powers to enslave the soul and that only a small spiritual elite are blessed with special knowledge — or gnosis — that enables them to unmask this deception.”

Striking, surely, how closely that describes the claims of the left, since at least Lenin’s “vanguard of the proletariat”; if not to Rousseau and the French “romantic” revolutionaries.

Why do people keep believing in conspiracies? In part, because some conspiracies are real: ask Julius Caesar. Ask Adam Smith, who observed that, if any two members of the same trade got together, the conversation would inevitably turn to possible collusion in restraint of trade.

But more broadly, and for the bigger, less plausible conspiracies, it is because of a loss of belief in God.

People need meaning. We are born with an empty God-sized hole in our hearts. With God, you have meaning. Without God, you have paranoia.

As G.K. Chesterton observed, “people who do not believe in God will believe in anything.”

A Smattering of Leftist Delusions

 

 I cannot be accused of being prejudiced against the left; after all, I am left-handed. Still, my gauchist chum Xerxes let me down this week by writing nothing controversial. 

On the other hand, some of his correspondents made some typically silly port-side comments.

JM suggested that evangelical Christians worshipped Trump as sent from God, because he promised to fight abortion and pursue and anti-LGBT agenda.

Trump is not anti-LGBT. He appointed the first-ever openly gay cabinet member. His use of “YMCA,” redubbed “MAGA,” as his re-election campaign song illustrates an outreach to the LBTQ community; although the song itself, with the new lyrics, seems to have been a spontaneous campaign contribution from the gay community.  Many prominent members of which seem to have supported him. 

It is a persistent leftist myth, or delusion, or item of disinformation, that the religious in general care much of a flip about homosexuality. Abortion matters. The left seems to want to change the subject.

Our correspondent JM also says some odd things about QAnon. I am far from an expert on that group—it seems to get more attention from the left than the right, and I only hear about it from the left. Nor am I curious; life is too short. But she claims that QAnon is directed against the Jews, and accuses them generally of killing and eating babies. That’s a little too improbable for my tastes. It sounds like a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory. 

After all, QAnon is passionately supportive of Trump, aren’t they? And Trump has been the most pro-Israel president since Truman. Trump has a Jewish daughter, a Jewish son-in-law, Jewish grandchildren. 

So I checked the Wikipedia entry. I gather the charge of antisemitism against QAnon is based on no more than the fact that they accuse George Soros of being in part behind most of the things they do not like which include pedophilia. And, as it happens, Soros is Jewish.

By that logic, anyone who did not vote for Bernie Sanders in the primaries might also be called antisemitic.

On the left side of the political spectrum, antisemitism seems to be a growing problem. It seems rare on the right. Indeed, the left is its natural home: resentment of “rich capitalists” easily segues, as in the Nazi case, into resentment of the generally successful Jews.

TW, another commentator, mischaracterizes the philosophy Josh Hawley, and of Pelagius. He writes that, in an article for Christianity Today, “Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.”

Pelagius--17th century Calvinist print, with the original caption, "Accurst Pelagius, with what false pretence Durst thou excuse Man's foul Concupiscence, Or cry down Sin Originall, or that The Love of GOD did Man predestinate."

To begin with, Hawley denounced Pelagianism, not Pelagius. The ad hominem fallacy is entirely TW’s, not Hawley’s. And Pelagius did not teach what TW claims. The idea that salvation came or did not come from believing the right doctrines was, arguably, Martin Luther’s position, but not Pelagius’s. The Pelagian heresy, against which Hawley argues, was the denial of original sin: that humans were innately good, could achieve salvation and an ideal world on their own merits, and did not need divine assistance.

An entirely unrelated issue. And a position that is widespread in the modern USA. 

Especially on the left.