Conspiracy theories make sense of a topsy-turvy world — but undermine democracy

While the speed and reach of these theories is new thanks to social media, we have been here before. Indeed, the United States has a long history of conspiratorial thinking — from obsessions with the Masons and the Illuminati in the 19th century to the recent tea party movement and the birtherism supported by Trump. But conspiratorial thinking runs much deeper than just a few scattered moments in American political history. In fact, conspiracy theories have long existed as a way for individuals to understand momentous and unsettling change happening around them. Mostly finding followers among those on the losing side of this change, they are also frequently embraced by politicians who may not even believe them but use the theories to their political advantage anyhow.

Enter the French connection. Some of the earliest conspiracy theories in America, which held that the Illuminati and Masons were seeking to subvert established governments and Christianity everywhere, were rooted in France and the work of a little-known ex-Jesuit emigre, Augustin Barruel.

Born in 1741 to a noble family in France, Barruel became a Jesuit priest and subsequently worked as a teacher until the Jesuits were expelled from France in 1764. An exile, he traveled around Europe as a tutor until returning to France in 1773. Fleeing France for the safer shores of England in 1792, Barruel became a well-known opponent of the new Enlightenment philosophy quickly taking over Europe. In England, he composed a largely forgotten four-volume work that, in its account of the French Revolution, would inaugurate the modern understanding of political conspiracy: “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism.” Published in 1797, the first volume was initially reviewed favorably in many English journals and translated into English the following year.

Barruel saw the French Revolution as the culmination of a long-standing, insidious conspiracy orchestrated by “Voltaire, Rousseau, and other philosophers, who plotted — with the Freemasons and the German Illuminati — to destroy the monarchy and Catholicism in France,” historian Amos Hofman has argued. For this reason, Hofman sees Barruel’s work as “the first systematic attempt to discuss the role of conspiracy in a revolution.”

Barruel was trying to explain all of the events of the Revolution — a sprawling, complex event that overthrew the French monarchy, sidelined the church and proclaimed “liberty, equality and fraternity” for all — though a single theory wrought of intrigue and machination. He focused on “human agency” as the singular cause of the revolution.

He alleged three conspiracies at work in the unfolding events: a “conspiracy of impiety” against the church, a “conspiracy of rebellion” against existing institutions and the aristocracy, and a “conspiracy of anarchy” against society itself. Combined as one, these three conspiracies, in Barruel’s mind, posed an existential threat to Christendom and civilization itself.

Edmund Burke wrote of being “instructed and delighted” by the first volume, while commentators in England, Germany and America were inspired to attempt to uncover similar plots in their own countries, where revolutionary rumblings were ever present. It appealed to observers like Burke who were looking for grounds to oppose the French Revolution and shore up support for the Church and traditional European monarchies.

Readers across Europe also ate it up — until they didn’t.

As the scope of Barruel’s view became clear in subsequent volumes, readers soured on this outlandish and conspiratorial account. Even archconservative and enemy of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre called Barruel’s theory “foolish” and “false,” too outlandish to be believed.

But what explains this human propensity to fervently believe patently ridiculous fantasies about the world? We are driven to make sense of the world and protect our place within it. In times of great upheaval, access to “truth” foreclosed to others has offered a sense of agency, and a way to discredit the opposition. Imagine the intoxication of being an elect who knows how the world truly works. The conspiracy promises the chance to be at home in a world where you increasingly feel disconnected, and to make sense of a world that seems increasingly senseless.

In our own time of unprecedented globalization, rapid deindustrialization and quickly changing social mores — all of this has created an intense sense of dislocation for much of our country, an observation that has not escaped astute commentary from the right or the left.

While the “paranoid style” in the various conspiracy theories of QAnon are nothing new, they certainly bode ill for democracy. While we often disagree on the details, our fragile democratic republic is predicated on fundamental shared beliefs concerning freedom, justice and equality, as well as common agreement on a political process that requires the rule of law, thoughtful deliberation and due regard for reason and evidence. Democracy takes hard work, and conspiracy theories offer an easy and comforting escape from that work, with potentially disastrous results.