Some of us still remember Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. He was the Minister of Information for Saddam Hussein during the second Gulf War, who during his famed and absurdist press conferences kept up his glowingly optimistic accounts as the allied forces rolled in and over the troops of his master. He became the proverbial denier of evidence in the face of adversity. Currently we are dealing with at least as much of the exact opposite: the neglect of positive news for the purpose of declaring an ever more definitive state of emergency. But that is not what brought al-Sahhaf to my mind. That had more to do with the concept of denial. It was a common observation in those days that the guy was insane. Is it legitimate to ask ourselves rather whether it was him who kept us sane?
Why did we not believe him? Did we have a nifty window in the back that miraculously opened towards Bagdad? Did we have a cool yet dependable cousin in the area, who would call in every other day to give us his eyewitness report? Had we reached a parallel dimension, where an objective news channel was suddenly available to the whole world? No. We had no direct access to any of the facts and circumstances. We had no senses on the ground. We did not believe him because we trusted other sources. We attributed more authority to these. How we come to credit individuals and institutions with authority is not an easy question to answer. Some of it is surely visceral, and some of it harkens back to infancy. Some of it has to do with our formal education and some, indeed, with those institutions themselves. Transparent institutions, approachable institutions, and institutions that behave in a manner that is both logically and constitutionally coherent earn their badge of dependability as a matter of course. At least, that is what I always imagined when, talking to people who had grown up under a whimsical and arbitrary regime, I was confronted with the insistent surmise of the invisible hand of a willful conspiracy.
What disturbed me most in those days probably was the supposition of powerful malevolence, which came across as somewhat naive. But - to be frank - it probably felt disruptive to my need for trust, too. How do you even live in a world like that? How would you want to? In the world of the conspiracy, it seems, nothing ever is what it seems to be. And as the conspiracy has inexorably moved towards the center of our attention over the past five years or so, we can definitely say the same about the conspiracies themselves as well. Are they really what they used to be?
Was it just the Russian bots, or rather the willingness of certain social media platforms to profit from the disruption caused by extreme stories to drive anger-driven engagement? In any event, the forces that had unleashed the Arab Spring so recently, all of a sudden seemed not quite as liberating anymore. Not to the institutions, anyway. But what has happened to the ontology of the conspiracy in the process is worth noting. Whereas formerly, the definition would have required the lack of documentary or sensory proof, the massive flux of web-transmitted imagery and soundbites - and the insistent warnings about the endless modes of manipulation and falsification by people of authority - has upturned this entire logic for us. We have been told to distrust our senses. Or if anything, to trust them, the authorities.
Even to ask the simplest question can promptly earn you the title of conspiracy theorist today. Any matter-of-fact observation can do as much. Or even a careful argument, if it is not in perfect conformity with the official statements of the authorities. Yet, our own senses tell us otherwise. We see emergency approvals, mandatory prescriptions, non-disclosure agreements, legal waivers, the suppression of alternative treatments, the smearing and censorship of independent experts. We see illogical measures, followed by equally illogical reversals, we see the consistent refusal to learn from experiential facts. We see the doctoring of data: any death by C is claimed for the party, any death by V is cut out of today's Stalin's selfie. We see exhortations from the Swiss mountains copy/pasted in bills from Australia to the Netherlands. Gaslighting is a powerful tool, it seems. Because none of this exists. The droves of people with the exact same perception don't exist. We are the victims of our senses. I need to earn the trust of the authorities. They must be right. To live in a world where they did know better yet chose to unleash harm upon me: Devil take me! I'd rather deny I was ever betrayed.
Why am I lighting a candle for the conspiracy theorists today? The cultural climate had started to bother me for some time, already. We have been constantly urged to choose sides over individual choices. Thou shalt be vegan. Thou shalt reject oil. Thou shalt reject money-making yet revere the billionaires. Hallowed be the trans. Thou shalt reject the anti-Christ, the Donald. Thou shalt reject the Orban, too. And thou shalt protest against ethnic injustice - unless the injustice is perpetrated by the oppressed. And then thou shalt not have seen and remain silent. And thou shalt accept 'settled science', lest we need to call you a 'denier'. Because denialism is not a sin against the facts, it is a crime against hypothesis. It is a crime against morals.
Can't I live in a world where all these options are open? As well as their contraries? Where did this worship of conformity come from, all of a sudden? Wasn't open society good because we are constantly allowed to learn from differing viewpoints? Because we are challenged to check our assumptions whenever someone claims to have found a single, uniform solution? Does diversity of opinion not represent a safeguard against the development of totalitarian answers? Does the presence of disagreement not embody the freedom we hold ourselves?
That's why I am burning a candle for the conspiracy theorists today. Because it was they who guarded facts, not fiction, this time. It was they who honored observation while the rest of us were prostrate in the face of authority. It was they who upheld dissent in a rapidly conforming world. Because it was they who stood between us and a totalitarian state. I am eternally thankful.