When we dead awaken we shall find that we have never lived, having acted parts in a play that we have never read and never seen, whose plot we don't know, whose existence we can glimpse, but whose beginning and end are beyond our present imagination and conception.
H. Ibsen

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines conspiracy as a planning and acting together secretly, especially for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason; the plan agreed on; the group taking part in such a plan; a combining or working together. (As these things often seem to happen, the previous set of words in the dictionary link to 'conspicuous', the seeming opposite of conspiracy.) 'Conspiracy theory' is not present in the second edition (1959).
'Addict', from the latin meaning 'to devote' or 'to deliver over', also means to apply habitually, to give (oneself) up habitually (with to). 'Addiction' means habitual inclination. The second, more obscure meaning is "among the Romans, a making over of goods to another by sale or legal service; also, an assignment of debtors in service to their creditors." 'Addictive behavior' is not listed. Words that link with 'addition' are in the near vicinity.

The reasons for this are many but in trying to explicate them, one simply becomes enmeshed in another form of conspiracy theorizing: the Enlightment discourse of clarity and objectivity. It is this very discourse that certain theorists, for example, Michel Foucault—and Fredrich Nietzsche before him—have accused of collusion with structures of power and epistemology. (To go further here would require a somewhat different paper than the one I am writing. The area of what is called post-structuralism was brought up to show that even the most innocuous and 'objective' discourses are liable to charges of collusion with hidden [or at the very least, unavailable] powers.)

Government, in general and of whatever kind, might be said to be engaged in 'open conspiracy'. Its lawfulness, from the viewpoint of the general populace at any rate, might vary but it always seems to be the case of the fox making the rules for the henhouse. Vast bureaucratic hierarchies can thus exhibit conspiratorial qualities even in the most otherwise open societies. While this may be an enabling force for the workings of conspiracies, this is not what is traditionally thought of as conspiracy in the grand sense.

Historical linkage is also a problem. Conspiracy seems to be like certain species of unstable chemical molecules which are always attempting to link up with other molecules and so move into a stable order. Similarly, it is very difficult to isolate or confine the workings of any particular conspiracy to any particular brief period of time. At the seeming moment of isolation the bottom drops out and another set of linkages appear. Historical extension beyond period markers seems characteristic of Grand Conspiratorial Theorizing (GraCoT). It is difficult to tell whether the Constrained Conspiratorial Theorizing (CoCoT), e.g., the B.C.C.I and Savings and Loan scandals, are simply building blocks for GraCoT or whether they will be seen as simply and only products of western liberal pragmatic democratic societies. GraCoT invariably involves secret societies which in turn revolve around esoteric concepts which usually involve the development-or passing on-of procedures for the disclosure of hidden dimensions and/or Secrets. For the most part, the 'traditional' Grand Conspiracies are not only not countenanced by the western liberal democracies but are not even really recognized as existing other than as jokes, guys wearing fezes and riding around in tiny cars in memorial day parades. Much more feasible for democratic societies to accept is the Constrained Conspiracy wherein there is a momentary banding together to gain a political or economic advantage. Presumably these are very restricted temporally and the conspirators are revealed eventually through the workings of the democratic (?) media processes. It is not unreasonable to ask about those who are not caught and if that is simply the end of the game and the conspirators go on playing high level monopoly games. To think otherwise is to come dangerously close to Grand Conspiracy thinking in the European mode—but with perhaps a modern, technological twist.

{Conspiracy thinking seems to be more effective when it is retrospective in that a genealogical/historical approach is its prime evidence-gathering procedure (the genealogical approach is also the Foucaultian approach to historical enquiry although a conspiratorial genealogy would initially seem to be directly at odds with Foucault's genealogical approach). Conspiracy thinking involves a valorization of the inaugural event which is continually displaced both in time and space, all displaced moments of which, however, are connected with a univocity of act and intent. Any particular conspiracy seems to evidence just such traits. Each conspiracy theory, considered on its own, seems arboreal, with branches leading into a central trunk, quite unlike the fissiparous, rhyzomatic history that Foucault sees, which is an "unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath" and so "The search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself. What convictions and, far more decisively, what knowledge can resist it?" [p. 146-7, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice.]

In reality, nothing is more Foucaultian than conspiracy theory seen overall. Each theory is a wedge inserted into institutional edifices of thought that have congealed around 'true' evidence and have discarded all other data as without relevance, attempting to reveal the equivalence of all data, in that it comes a certain place, with all that that entails, and not from 'no place' [with all that that entails]. Everything, all histories, all theories, all explanations, become "phantasms created by fear and desire...It is this expanding domain of intangible objects that must be integrated into our thought: we must articulate a philosophy of the phantasm that cannot be reduced to a primordial fact through the intermediary of perception or an image, but that arises between surfaces, where it assumes meaning, and in the reversal that causes every interior to pass to the outside and every exterior to the inside, in the temporal oscillation that always makes it precede and follow itself..." [p. 169, Theatrum Philosophicum, ibid.) The consequences of such genealogical thinking is not a disappearance-and-replacement (revolutionary thinking) but the proliferation of genealogies after the dehiscing of historical facts in a most un-historical age. Conspiracy theory testifies to "the temporal oscillation that always makes it precede and follow itself..." (There is no way of knowing assuredly whether this disappearance is of the order of the Invisible Man and Benjamin's wizened ontotheological dwarf. To worry about whether that is true or not is simply to subscribe to one or another conspiracy, or way of ordering and centering experience; it is to attempt to bring physics into play when only meta-physics will do. Perhaps we need a new sort of -physics.) Invisibility, absence, biodegradibility, sublation, subliming, aufhebung, hysteresis/hysteria all code the torsional excesses of this 'phantasmaphysics' (let's include conspiracies also) in contact with the human body and psyche through "history" so that "phantasms form the impenetrable and incorporeal surface of bodies; and from this process, simultaneously topological and cruel, something is shaped that falsely presents itself as a centered organism and that distributes at its periphery the increasing remoteness of things".
p.170.ibid.}

In general, it seems that conspiracy theory strives for ever greater generality and inclusiveness of data and evidence. The tendency is always to turn data into evidence, a seemingly very contemporary realization that there is no such thing as 'pure' data.

Particularities and abnormalities are only useful insofar as they can point to an alternative, perhaps, explanatory structure. The Catholic church and mainstream science use similar explanatory mechanisms with the exception of a contingent exclusion rule which works to rule out anomalies/abnormalities/breaks in hermeneutic structure. (T.S. Kuhn has explored the idea of paradigm shifts and breaks in science but generally science works through repeatablity and verifiability—religious authority only only slightly less so (that is the function of the rituals.) Science relies on occasional paradigm breaks to keep it moving; religious authority on One Big Break to initiate itself with the promise of one other perhaps.

Conspiracy theory, on the other hand (which is assuredly on the same body) relies extensively on language's ability to 'make strange' even the most banal facts, in conjunction with ta hidden intentionality which is always at one or two removes from being discovered. Conspiracies exhibit what we might call 'institutional poeisis'.
Another aspect that conspiracy theories exhibit is category conflation, especially the more powerful and bizarre. Our earlier categories of 'grand' and 'contingent' soon begin to leak and flow together. 'Powerful' in the world of conspiracy theory means simply that the causative/intentional agent is placed at a farther and farther remove through a series of strategic displacements which take it into unprovable—and so neither disprovable—metaphysical realms, the chain of reasoning which began with the most banal of fact ending with a cosmogonic scenario: Kennedy was assassinated; aliens from outer space are ultimately responsible.

o
It is plausible to say that addiction and conspiracy are two of the most constitutive formations of life in late twentieth century America. ...and that both have to do with problems of identity formation/ dissolution, another fin-de-siécle concern). It should not be surprising therefore when the two are combined such as the C.I.A. becoming drug smugglers during the Viet nam, which now acts to undermine the integrity of African-American communities, which leads to speculations in that community of a white conspiracy of black genocide. (Of course 'addiction' has now been expanded by mental health professionals into the broader concept of 'addictive behaviors'. Thus, just structually, 'addiction' shares with 'conspiracy' a widening gyre of ever greater generality and inclusiveness, [the need to 'expand their markets'], an attempt to expand its explanatory power by converting 'data' into 'evidence'.

'Addiction' as an uncontrollable impulse toward 'substance abuse', the nexus of such impulse being located largely outside the individual, the necessity for repetition (producing a kind of 'product' via an assembly line of 'injections'), dovetails neatly with economic theories of production and consumption. Always attempting to reach a steady plateau, the perfect 'fix' (there being only one, final Fix as any junkie knows), there nevertheless have to be many intermediate fixes thrown into the gap, always different yet always dazzingly and blissfully the same once you get there. Much like that new product line you look forward to every year. Thus any type of 'substance' use has a potential (or from a conspiratorial point of view, an inevitablity) for ab-use or overuse (literally meaning 'to use away from its proper use'. For the addiction the use away from the proper leads inevitably to repetition and overuse. An archaic meaning of abuse is 'to deceive, to impose on', a para-structure in the same vein as conspiracy.) If part of the pre-condition for ab-use is proliferation of substance(s)—and hence repetition—then the productivity of capitalist machinery can be seen as integral to addiction (I would include here both technology as well as the aggrandizing structures—such as advertising—which bring them together in such a powerful mode). For addiction to occur there must be 1) an escalating desire to increase a state of being brought on by, or commensurate with, a concomitant increase in the 'substance' which induces that state. If productive capacity if not great enough to keep this cycle going, the behavior 2) extinguishes itself or 3) finds another 'substance' of which there is 'sufficient' quantity. (of course, from the point of view of the overall system, there can never be sufficient quantity; the system's survival is dependent on lack.) In this scenario mental 'states', such as love, sex. etc., are converted into mental substances which therefore take on the look of restricted economies.

Addiction thus takes on many of the same para-logical characteristics of conspiratorial systems: 1) attempts to convert, or divert, data, or substances, from one system to another by 2) 'flooding' one system with either substances (addiction) or interpretive strategies (conspiracy) 3) actual generative capacities of which (i.e., substances or strategies) is located outside the immediate field of action , that is, the addict does not manufacture his own substance and the conspiracy buff does not manufacture his own conspiracy. It is 'always already' there.

Conspiracy and addiction depend on both over-supply and under-supply. That is, there must be more than enough to supply the need (which has actually created the need) at the same time that no amount of supply (if substance, information) could ever completely fill that need, The only way out of the loop is 1) abstention (not possible for the system as a whole) or 2) collapse of the system (through complete, transparent revelation of all the facts in the conspiracy—structually probably not possible as a once-and-for-all-time event—or the death of the addict. From the point of view of advanced systems of conspiracy/addiction they amount to the same thing.

Containment policies for both addictive behaviors and conspiracy theories—replacement therapy, council to re-direct—are bound to fall into the widening gap created by the two structures of desire and fulfillment. But then, policing actions are necessary for the continuation and expansion of both realms. (The incredible proliferation of conspiracy 'theories', as well as addictive 'behaviors', is a fairly recent phenomena. While there have always been ideas on conspiracies, the atmosphere now seems incredibly receptive. Grand Conspiracy theory has always drawn from a fairly small number of sources.2 Speculations about the Free-Masons, the Rosicrucians etc., seem to always have a pedigree that stretches back to ancient Egypt and jewish/christian disputes in medieval Europe. Now that we have been 'freed' from superstition, it seems that the conspiratorial mind set also has been freed—freed to become simply another category of political analysis, from which grand historical schemas (and conspiracies) have been elided.

In contemporary life, conspiracy theory seems to work both for and against itself. It seems to always be attempting linkages, a very old trait, and at the same time fragmenting itself into various 'sects' along different sociocultural lines (racial, gender, national, class, etc.) which seems to be indicative of mainstream cultural life as a whole (what has been called 'post-modernism' by some).3 'Theories' and 'behaviors' seem to reflect this fragmentation. While there is less recourse in this new conspiratorial universe to ontological explanations, such as manichean or gnostic4 separate universes of 'light' and 'dark' and hence absolute, embodied good and evil, there is still a displacement toward what we might call the para-ontological. Rather than a divided realm on earth there is a displacement off-planet to alien species5 actively manipulating human affairs. This may prove to be even more enduring than the onto-theological conceits of yesteryear since the alien hypothesis is mapped over this older strata and also attempts to use scientific terminology.

Conspiracy theories seem to undermine conceptual work while at the same time valorizing analysis (or what would pass as such). This seems to reflect the idea that conspiracy theorizing seems to be composed of both modernist and anti-modernist elements, or progressive and archaic, simultaneously. Contemporaneously this means a certain disjunction between technology and culture: the embrace of new technology combined with an almost tribal, mythological approach to culture. The most recent, and negative, example of such is Nazi Germany.6

The additive (addictive) nature of conspiracy—the need to continually incorporate— and the forced-to-conspire nature of addiction find their roots, contemporaneously and in their connection of one to the other, in the repetitive nature of mechanical production and the systems of exchange that such engenders. However, that is to leave out the psychosocial component of susceptibility (veering dangerously close here to an immunoconspiratorial stance which we will merely leave dangling from the pharmaceutical) which we must now inject. That is simply to say that we must move briefly into the realm of social hypnosis, trance and sleep. We have have not stopped breathing together (con-spire) nor have we stopped taking drugs (or any objects in the potlatch for that manner); however, we must now consider what it is to sleep together.

In some respects, conspiracy resembles a society-wide dissociative state, a split brought about by trauma that increases the potential for hypnotic, trance-like states.

The conspiratorial 'drive' can be seen as both a result of, as well as an attempt to counter authoritarian, punitive social structures by devising 'alternate realities' for psychosocial history. Through conspiracy thinking it can be seen that the boundaries that all social structures of control seem to surround themselves with (the equivalent of ego boundary) are not as rigid as we have been raised to believe, that there are facts which cannot be sufficiently controlled and that the 'social trance' that all societies seem to induce has a brief moment of wakefulness during which things can be seen as 'otherwise'. The elaboration of the conspiracy itself is of course simply another trance state, its genealogy an attempt to simply make us change beds, not an injunction to keep our eyes perpetually open, assuming such a thing were even possible. (In some conspiracies the reticular activating system, the neural mechanism diffusely distributed in the core of the neural axis with radiations to the cortex and responsible for wakefulness and attention, has been incorporated into conspiracy schemes.7 The only thing perpetually 'awake' is the machine and we see in that fact perhaps a fundamental point of trauma for a biological species, i.e., the needs of organisms as opposed to the maintenance of machines. However, media machinery increase the possiblities for conspiratorial thinking, especially in alliance with computer technology. The data gathered by such machines is far in excess of the possibilities of adequate, singular interpretation. It is in its spillover from computer banks and subsequent re-representation through technical media that we have entered a golden age of conspiracy theorizing.)

It is thus not surprising that a mainstay of a certain arm of conspiracy thinking has to do with hypnotic suggestibility, aided with technological 'implants' (as the interiorized manifestations, prostheses as the external), as a form of social domination and control. Not surprising in that it is seeing its own, as well as societies' mechanisms of control but through a filter which prohibits full recognition from taking place (or at least actualizing that recognition, a much more problematic concept. Having a new thought is not exactly the same as 'becoming' that new thought. For example, I may recognize that I am ill but that recognization does not make me well):

It is characteristic that most observations of such social hypnosis use the word "hypnosis" as if it were clearly defined and understood, that is, without any attempt to define or explain it. It often appears like a sudden emergence of subliminal knowledge that afterwards resubmerges again.

This actually seems to correspond to a very paradoxical quality of the term hypnosis. On the one hand, it has an intense emotional significance—with its uncanny, scary, as well as fascinating aspects—which suggests that unconsciously we know quite well what it means. On the other hand, it has a very blurred intellectual or theoretical meaning; there is no generally agreed-upon definition of hypnosis, and there are only scattered elements of theory, nothing like an overall consistent explanation. This indicates that there are commonly shared, strong resistances in our culture against a conscious understanding of hypnosis and of what it stands for. "Let us recall," Freud wrote. "that hypnosis has something positively uncanny about it; but the characteristics of uncanniness suggests something old and familar that has undergone repression." in The Social Trance: Psychological Obstacles in History, Joe Berghold, The Journal of Psychohistory 19(2), fall 19918

While conspiracy, trance, and addiction might seem to be moving on different tracks, they all embody themes of dissociation, repetition, domination, trauma, systemic overload and reverberation. Increasingly, technical media can be seen as augmentations of these themes and not as clarifications. Amplification and explosive interiority are the signposts to the future along with the contrary attempts to 'turn the volume down' (literally and data-wise) and keep our insides (literally-biomedically speaking-and psychologically) in place. Both are doomed to failure in a 'tech-no-future'. Of necessity, accompanying these technical/mechanical spills and explosions will be increases in their socio-cultural equivalents: the 'need' for events and substances (conspiracy and addiction) which create their own need (advertising and the productive machinery of repetition and re-presentation.)

footnotes

1 A recent panel discussion on one of the television talk shows is indicative. The panel was on satanism and child abuse and included the alleged victim and her lawyer as well as an academic sociologist with an expertise in cult activity who had been called in by the police to evaluate the reports. His findings against the possiblity of a conspiracy did not sit well with either victim or lawyer, both of whom accused the academic of 'probably' being involved in a cover-up.

2 For many of the more bizzare currents in conspiracy theory, there are several valuable sources, especially concerning the linkage to occultist and esoteric traditions. The most recent is Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races and UFOs from inside the earth by Walter Kafton-Minkel. As its title implies, it is a look at 'undergroundness' as a recurrent motif in mythological formations and, taking up the bulk of the book, a survey of much more contemporary manifestations of such notions as the hollow earth theoru, the Shaver Mystery, Mt. Shasta, Agharti, a survey of fictions about the underground, the Nazi connection and a host of other Masters-From-the-Underground stories: "Three assumptions were implicit in the concept of hidden group of ruling Masters: first, that the universe exists for a purpose, to fulfill a pre-determined plan in which human spiritual development is the key; second, that culture, religion, and civilization did not evolve, as secular historians would have it, within the last few thousand years, but were rather the degenerate and half-remembered scraps of wisdom given the human race by a higher power before recorded history began, and third, that only a minority of mortals were prepared to accept the Masters' teachings, or even that the Masters exist; thus the Masters must work for the advancement of humanity in extreme secrecy. We could not find them, but they were constantly watching us from their hidden sanctuaries." p. 111. Kafton-Minkel gives a balanced and even loving look at many of these theories, explaining that "The subterranean worlds we are about to explore are sometimes revealing, sometimes entertaining, and sometimes completely ludicrous, but if you are like me—a person who likes to be lifted from his chair by his imagination—they can show us how our desires to shape the universe and our own natures into a compact, comprehensible form can lead us to believe strange things, and hint at everything humanity still does not know about nature and about itself. The hollow-earth theory in all its glory describes great powers and conspiracies moving behind a false picture of a round, solid, neutral planet." p. 7.
Much more comprehensive, and less enjoyable, are the two books by James Webb entitled The Occult Establishment and The Occult Underground. At over 500 pages each they are fairly exhaustive in their treatment of the subject.

3 It should be noted that there do not have to be actual conspiracies for conspiracy thinking to have an effect (although as we noted earlier, the realm of fact-finding in conspiracies becomes a very ambiguous one): "[Secret] societies were often blamed for instigating the French Revolution; and the atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe was similar, in many respects, to that of the McCarthy era in the United States during the 1950s. People saw, or imagined they saw, conspiracies everywhere. Witch hunts abounded. Every public disturbance, every minor disruption, every untoward occurence was attributed to 'subversive activity'—to the highly organized clandestine organizations working insidiously behind the scenes, eroding the fabric of established instituions, perpetuating all manner of devious sabotage. This mentality engendered measures of extreme repression. And the repression, often directd at a fictitious threat, in turn engendered real opponents, real groups of subversive conspirators—who would form themselves in accordance with the fictitious blueprints. Even as figments of the imagination, secret societies fostered a pervasive paranoia in the upper echelons of government; and this paranoia frequently accomplished more than any secret society itself could possibly have done. There is no question that the myth of the secret society, if not the secret society itself, played a major role in nineteenth-century European history." Holy Blood, Holy Grail. M. Baigent, R. Leigh, H. Lincoln. 9. 153.

4 One of the more recent, relatively speaking, examples of gnosticism were the Cathari or Albigensians (so named for the French town of Albi, one of their centers; it is not known how the name Cathar came to be) who were condemned by an eccesiastical council in 1165 and later several thousand were killed. The motto of the Catholic church in regard to the heresy was "God recognizes his own". The U.S. Marines later put it on a t-shirt as "kill them all and let God separate them out.":"...the Cathars subscribed to a doctrine of reincarnation and to a recognition of the feminine principle in religion. Indeed, the preachers and teachers of Cathar congregations were of both sexes. At the same time the Carthars rejected the orthodox Catholic Church and denied the validity of all clerical hierarchies, all official and ordained intercessors between man and God. At the core of this position lay an important Cathar tenet—the repudiation of "faith," at least as the Church insisted on it. In the place of "faith" accepted at second hand, the Cathars insisted on direct and personal knowledge, a religious or mystical experience apprehended at first hand. This experience has been call gnosis, from the Greek word for knowledge, and for the Cathars it precedence over all creeds and dogma.... For the Cathars men were the swords that spirits fought with, and no one saw the hands. For the Cathars a perpetual war was being waged throughout the whole of creation between two irreconciliable principles—light and darkness, spirit and matter, good and evil....The Cathars...proclaimed the existence not one god, but of two with more or less comparable status. One of these gods—the 'good' one—was entirely disincarnate, a being or principle of pure spirit, unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the god of love. But love was deemed wholly incompatible with power; and material manifestation was a manifestation of power. Therefore, for the Cathars, material creation—the world itself— was intrinsically evil. p. 52-53. ibid.

5 The following is a letter in the winter 1991 issue of the magazine MONDO 2000:
Dear Editor:
In Mondo issue 2, I alerted your readers to the bloodsucking aliens' Master plan to take over the world from their plush caverns in the U.S. deserts and make us into spacehip-building slaves by 1994, in cahoots with U.S. and Soviet government officials who will escape to Mars just before the world ends in 1999, as described in the previously Top Secret Majestic 12 government documents (and by Nostradamus, who also predicted 1999 as tyhe end of the world).
I'm afraid the Grays' (Another term for one of the purported alien species, of which there are either several or hundreds. TB.) plan is proceeding right on schedule. The PR-savvy little bastards are now using the media to ease us into accepting them, or perhaps to terrify us into total submission. ABC is planning an alien comedy show this fall. Whitley Streiber's scary new novel, Billy, about alien contact is just out. And the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency's heretofore secret $50 million/year UFO Working Group has just gone public, using New York Times reporter Howard Blum, author of Out There (Simon & Schuster). The DIA, said Blum on CNN, is showing people documents of Air Force bases saying that the aliens created Jesus Christ and other wild stories. Hey, I'm NOT making this up—read the book! There won't BE be any year 2000 to MONDOize if the Grays have their way.
Am I being used too? Probably. I recently woke up at 4AM to find my body tingling all over (I felt I was being irradiated by poerful radar signals coming from the north), with powerful high-speed images flashing through my head like I was being downloaded in a computer transmission. This was NOT an "aided" experience!
Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein is playing his assigned role, createing the threat of world war. The real purpose, one can assuem, is to justify the hundreds of billions (disguised as costs for the MIdeast War and SDI research) for constructing space vehicles to take the chosen to Mars and justify total control of U.S. and Soviet citizens as our economies plunge toward recession. Another handy source of funds is the $500 billion we have to pay for the phony S&L bailout engineered by none other than George Bush's son Neil.
In another apparent government-leaked attempt to build public hysteria and space program acceptance, the August 28 Sun reports that a meteor is heading for Earth guided by UFO invaders and capable of hitting in November 1990 with the force of 200atomic bombs. The only hope is )you guessed it) a Star Wars-style laser weapon.
Of course, the aliens don't want us ato know the whole truth yet. On August 22, just as the Magellan spacecraft started sending pictures remarkabley like the Earth from Venus, the spacecraft started spinning wildly, sending trsansmissions in every direction in space.
Sure, I'm paranoid. But am I paranoid enough? Is this letter really just disincormation telepathically projected on my mind by Trilateral MJ-12 scannate psyops or are UFOs a secret plot by virtual reality-depraved psychocybernaut cultists? (Note: virtual reality technology is based on research at Wright Patterson AFB, where the crased aliens and their spaceships were taken in 1947. You figure it out.)
Xandor Korzybski
Although the letter seems like the ravings of someone forced to wait too long in supermarket checkout lines, In fact there is a very developed conspiracy literature touching on every point in the letter—and much more that the writer left out.

6 See Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. J Herf, for an examination of such factors constituting Nazi Germany. Anti-semitic conspiracy theorizing played a large part in the Nazi Mythology. At the same time National Socialism was in the forefront in its exploration and utilization of modern technology. Herf gives a very lucid account of these contradictory seemingly tendencies. See Horkheimer and Adorno, especially in Dialectics of Enlightment, for further explorations of such contradictions. It is interesting the degree to which Germany figures into conspiracy theorizing both contemporaneously and historically. See Germanic Mythology and the Fate of Europe, Ralph Metzner, ReVision v. 13 #1 for a brief and facile view of German mythologies and the current attempt to breath some life back into them. For a much fuller, near comprehensive look at the figures and ideas (although not really the mythologies as such) which constitute 'Germanicity' see The Aesthetic State: A quest in Modern German Thought, by Joseph Chytry. For anyone interested in the interplay of aesthetics and politics, this is an invaluable encyclopedic book. The domain of aestheics is not entirely foreign to considerations of conspiracy theorizing. Early on, Chytry examines the connections between 'magical thought' and the 're-enchantment of the world' through various persons and movements such as the pansophists, the Rosicrucian Society, Ficino, occultist John Dee and other partisans of what became subterranean artistic-magical approaches to man and nature. Many of these themes, Chytry maintains, went on to influence "the rise of German dialectical thought through such Swabian heirs as Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling, and in the twentieth century their ideas remain discernible in the works of such otherwise disparate figures as Ernest Bloch and Martin Heidegger". p. lxv. Although Chytry mostly follows mainstream German intellectual currents he does give indications of sidestreams which contribute to conspiratorial thinking.
Of course much current political conspiracy thorizing centers around covert intelligence agencies such as the C.I.A., N.S.A., etc. The modern covert national intelligence agencies are largely a result of World War II—and German intelligence gathering operations when domestic agencies were reformed by Allen Dulles after the war.
Another very interesting attempt to link Germanicity with American culture is by Lawrence Rickels, in The Case of California, via the subterranean territory of psychoanalysis in its relationship to technology, group processes and mourning and death cults (which we know is not unrelated to conspiracy thinking— see Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath, Carlo Ginzberg, p. 300: "At the root of the image of [medieval] conspiracy was a very ancient theme reworked in new terms: the hostility of the recently deceased person—the marginal being par excellence—for the society of the living."): "The philosopheme 'Germany' has triggered rounds of association to which (as with the phenomena of mourning according to Freud) 'other obscurities can be traced back'. But in the meantime the assocication of 'psychoanalysis', 'the body', 'the media', and 'adolescence' shares its Central European origins with the other philosopheme—'California'—which has superceded the manifest sense or destiny of the unconscious, the body, the media, the teenager. If postmodernity is postmarked (like the repressed according to Freud) 'made in Germany', then California is its address and tech-no-future." p. 11.
Although it would be too simplistic to say that German thinkers (Schoenberg, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Daimler, Jung, Hitler, Werrner von Braun, Nietzsce, Wagner, Marx, and on and on) 'invented' the twentieth century, to say that their role is a large one is undoubtedly and understatement. And along with this invention have come transformed modes of conspiracy, not its eradication. See also The Germans, The Jews and Kant, Jacques Derrida

7 See Matrix II, Valdamar Valerian, for some of the most far out extrapolations on the theme of implants, control, hypnosis under the aegis of the 'alien' hypothesis. For a much more academically respectable view of wakefulness/sleep, societal dissociative states, etc. see The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes.

8 The reader should also consult Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders and Hypnosis by Eugene L. Bliss, M.D. 1986, Oxford University Press, for a summary of the history of hypnosis and the points of contact with dissociative states.