“Discordian writer and prankster Robert Anton Wilson celebrated conspiracy theories as decentralized power incarnate. ‘Conspiracy is just another name for coalition,’ he has a character say in
The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles. According to Wilson, any sufficiently imaginative group of people can make a fiction real. Another statement of his sounds more ominous, read in the light of how we usually think about conspiracy theory: ‘Reality is what you can get away with.’ When historian Richard Hofstadter diagnosed what he called ‘
the paranoid style in American politics,’ he was quick to point out that it predated the ‘extreme right-wingers’ of his time by several hundred years. ...”
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