Comfort in Conspiracy

Look, I get it. I'm from the X-Files generation. I found the series at a perfect age: the cusp of adolescence, when you start to question the Narrative, and X-Files provided something different from  the honest utopian idealism of Star Trek or Doctor Who's unfocused Bohemian wanderings through funhouse political allegory and theatrical grotesqueries of the British id. The X-Files was set in the shadows of here and now, dragging us with its protagonists into the cruel and hidden aspects of everything American society and its educational system had taught me to unquestioningly venerate - what restless, dissatisfied teenager wouldn't find themselves bewitched? There was vindication in Mulder and Scully revealing ulterior motives of the military, the government, corporations, and (especially in the earlier days) law enforcement - the adults really were lying!

I didn't know it at the time, but I was living through the start of a conspiracy mania - driven to some degree by the popularity of my new-found favorite (non-Simpsons) TV series, but also through real-world events. The Cold War had ended, and previously hidden things were starting to come to light. The day before the X-Files episode aired where Dana Scully (missing for some time following a government conspiracy-arranged alien abduction) returned to the series, Bill Clinton signed an executive order declassifying records going all the way back to the second world war - part of a larger effort taking place across the decade to let the American public know about some of the things done in their name. Among these were acknowledgement of ethically dubious human experimentation by the military and the CIA - would evidence of, even collaboration with, extraterrestrial beings be that much more of a stretch?

Not everything went with the "government/intelligence/military secrets" direction, of course, and even The X-Files itself also pulled from urban legend, regional myth, and odd local news stories, attaching them to any number of conspiracies, from huge corporations to churches and cults to an evil Parent-Teacher Association. Most conspiracy depictions at this time were still of the "government within a government" political thriller variety - often providing the opportunity to include an equally secret, but good theoretically less evil organization, particularly in the period's iteration of the "spy" genre. Games were no different - in 2001 I got to experience the original Max Payne's nigh-incomprehensible web of organized crime, pharmaceutical corporate chicanery, and Norse mythology, immediately followed by Metal Gear Solid's... well, Metal Gear-ness. Had I been more involved in contemporary gaming prior to that point, I probably would have seen more titles (I'm sure Tom Clancy inspired quite a few), but it was a hell of a run of consecutive conspiratorial plotlines, ultimately priming me for the tongue-in-cheek (or was it?!) meta-conspiracies of Thomas Pynchon and the Illuminatus! trilogy a few years later.

The conspiracy theory's lineage is as long and complex as anything the term brings to mind, but we've been fascinated by secret plots and organizations for as long as we've been telling stories. Up to the mid-twentieth century, these were lagely  groups outside the law, tight groups of gangsters, spies, and assassins. (And, unfortunately, usually incredibly racist about whatever out-group was popular to hate at the time... most frequently, like today, Jews.) If they were part of the system, they had wormed their way inside and were destroying society for nefarious ends. The concept of the system itself having conspiratorial elements naturally blew up during the Cold War, when even the least news-conscious people had some awareness of clandestine operations taking place around the world. Counterculture, then, was a rebellion against not only the open and visible aspects of conformist American society, but also the secret things being done to ostensibly preserve that society. After all, COINTELPRO was real. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a very public disaster. The Vietnam was was essentially an extension of the CIA's activities in the country going back decades. While not the most fearsome example. Richard Nixon's incompetent secret team (the "Plumbers") not only had a name that would fit into any spy movie parody, but at one point even put up an office sign like Batman villains! With a government just as concerned with spying on its own citizens as it was with international affairs, if you weren't scared (as they saying went) you weren't paying attention.

To simplify greatly, things got more complicated after that: the counterculture scattered across the political spectrum, the Cold War shifted from the immediate visibility of Vietnam back into Spy vs. Spy shenanigans in Latin America and the Middle East and huge, possibly imaginary power extension projects like the Strategic Defense Initiative, and we started to see nascent stages of the current right-wing media ecosphere and the kinds of conspiracy theories that gain unimaginable traction today. In the 90s, we might have joked about the "Black Helicopter" crowd (even if it provided material for media like The X-Files), but within a decade we had national politicians talking about Operation Jade Helm and FEMA forcing people into camps. Pizzagate led to QAnon led to obsession with the "Deep State" led to our current President ranting about the "enemy within." Imagined conspiracy theory has, ironically, become a part of our shared reality, an inescapable element of our media and political lives. So what, exactly, does that get anybody?

To call back to the plots of nefarious Outsiders, there's always the motivation of fear as a method of control - not to mention the tendency for accusations to be veiled confessions. It seems fitting that so many real-life conspiracy theories are simply "what if the government did to white people what they've done to people of color?" You name it: forced relocation, medical experiments, seizure of property, even open targeting by a hostile armed constabulary. No one called it the "Deep State" when the FBI was entrapping young Muslim men or conducting surveillance or jamming people onto "No Fly" lists. Fascism requires an Enemy, after all, and uses the threat of infiltration as a way to stamp on all kinds of resistance. We shouldn't ignore the profit motive, either - even aside from open grifters like Alex Jones, playing into these fears gets eyeballs or, to use a more modern vernacular, "generates clicks." Media in a capitalist system requires attention, and sensationalist panic has always been a way to get it. Social media and the "hot take" industry may have accelerated the process and speed by which disinformation spreads, but it's only continuing a long tradition of tabloids and self-distributed propaganda.

We keep buying it, though, and even when we don't believe it ourselves, we love fictional depictions of it. Moreover, I think we find a certain comfort from the concept of conspiracy: they provide order and logic to a world that might otherwise be chaotic and unpredictable. It helps our worldview to believe that a small group of global elites run global affairs rather than face the horror that no one is in charge. The existence of a rational, comprehensible conspiracy fits nearly into moral absolutism - evil is out there, but it has names and can be stopped. (I'd argue that this could just as easily be applied to the forces of capitalism , but that would require acknowledging that we are all part of the system leading to our own suffering and demise, but that's too horrifying a concept for many people to take directly.) In fiction, it gives us the thrill of the mystery as the conspiracy is uncovered and a righteous thrill as it's destroyed... or the catharsis of horror when it's too powerful to stop, or, hewing close to class consciousness again, so vital to the functioning of our society that stopping them would be far worse than allowing them to have their way... plus the existential dread that it's simply too big to understand or unravel: one of the satirical devices used by both Pynchon and the Illuminatus! authors to to keep adding more and more levels to conspiracy theories until one questions the motives of reality itself. (This may or may not be a conclusion requiring significant drug use.)

As in so many other things, games offer a distillation of media, a tiny condensed world for us to explore and experience - in this case, unmasking and (potentially) undoing conspiracies. And this can take all the forms that other media can : to go back to my two examples from 2001, through acts of extreme violaence and steadfast refusal to die, Max Payne destroys the conspiracy behind the death of his family, has flooded the streets of New York with incredibly dangerous drugs, and may or may not have been trying to bring about Ragnarök. Solid Snake, on the other hand, learns that he's simply one custom-manufactured component in a massive and terrible machine (a "metal gear," if you will), with no choice but to perform the role prepared for him. The comfort of triumph in the one ending, and of catharsis in the other... we can see ourselves and our lives in either role... after all, we've been living as these characters the entire time we've been playing the games. Life is complex, and it takes many, many facets of reflection to capture and dissect its elements. Given the agency they provide us (even if it's sometimes very little), games offer a unique perspective for viewing these things, but they're not the only ways. There's a place for those meta-conspiracy novels, there's a place for The X-Files, for the Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for all the stories about the stories we've been told keep us in line, to keep us docile, to keep us from questioning.

But questioning, as all these narratives tell us, is what we need to do - particularly when the answers we've given are too easy. It's easier to believe that Osama bin Laden attacked the US because he "hated freedom" than the fact that he was a real human being and political actor with real and tangible goals. It's easier to accept that there's a Deep State plot responsible for accusations of criminal activity from politicians you like than it is to accept that you've been supporting a criminal. And, backwards as it may seem, it's easier to accept that there's an elite cadre of lizard men manipulating world affairs from their moon base via elaborate networks of human(oid) agents spread throughout society than it is to face the whirling chaos of the unknown and unknowable. It's easy, so easy... and it all paints a route that leads, winding but inevitably, into the abattoir.

- B

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