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Reviewed by: The Stigmatization of Conspiracy Theories since the 1950s: "A Plot to Make Us Look Foolish" by Katharina Thalmann Todor Hristov (bio) the stigmatization of conspiracy theories since the 1950s: "a plot to make us look foolish" Katharina Thalmann Routledge https: //www. taylorfrancis. com/books/mono/10. 4324/9780429020353/stigmatization-conspiracy-theory-since-1950s-katharina-thalmann 226 pages; Print, 49. 95 Conspiracy theories are more than theories of conspiracies. They are a problem. In a brilliant study published in 2019, Katharina Thalmann gives a detailed account of how they became one. The study weaves together two strands: the stigmatization of conspiracy theories in the postwar social sciences, and the development of conspiracy culture between the 1950s and the 1980s (reflected in the crystals of three formative events: the Red Scare, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the Watergate scandal). Conspiracy theories became a problem in the wake of the fear of a communist plot to conquer the United States. Communists, however, had no outward markers; they were hiding behind normal faces and to defend society, a coalition of administrations, institutions, corporations, and ordinary citizens taught the Americans how to recognize the threat. Herbert Arthur Philbrick, for example, an FBI informant whose career as an anti-communist celebrity Thalmann describes in detail, asked the readers of his autobiography to look for the following indications: communists were aggressive, controlling, unscrupulous, distrustful, they disbelieved that the government was a servant of the people, they seethed with ressentiment and were unable to resist criticizing the flaws of capitalism; more importantly, they tended to act as if they had something to conceal. However, it was particularly the speech style that gave them away, because communists invariably used Marxist jargon (described by Philbrick in a special appendix), in contrast to liberals, who nobly "struggled along with the native vocabulary. " The anti-communist coalition trained Americans to see the symptoms of abnormality beneath the surface of everyday life. In that sense, the Red Scare brought about a regime of visibility closer to a clinical gaze than to critical interpretation. End Page 5 At the same time, this search for communist conspirators was problematized by a group of philosophers and sociologists more or less closely associated with critical theory. They linked the fear of a communist plot to other irrational beliefs, such as secondary superstitions or out-group stereotypes, and described it as a defense mechanism. The mechanism seemed comparable to paranoia, as it inverted frustration into aggression and projected it onto a virtual, stereotyped other. Fears of conspiracy, however, defended against frustration at the cost of treating faces as masks. Yet if one does not take the others at face value, then one attributes to the others masked intentions and becomes unable to understand them; then one is doomed to loneliness, becomes a stranger at home, and one's sense of belonging recedes into longing, into a longing to belong. Conspiracy theories cannot satisfy that longing; they can only relieve it by imagining a hidden social order organized around an antagonism between "us" and "them. " Indeed, if the world is traversed by a frontline, and one takes a side, then one is no longer lost, but belongs to an imaginary army and can define oneself through the distance from the enemy. At the same time, social landscapes turn into imaginary battlefields, and ordinary life seems possible only at the cost of an endless war. Such a defense mechanism is irrational because it tries to make sense of the social world but makes it instead even less comprehensible. That irrationality, however, does not amount to insanity; it is rather an autoimmune disease of rationality, common sense that has run amok, and in that sense it is not paranoia, but merely paranoid. This conceptualization of irrational fears of conspiracy in critical theory brought about a conspiracy theory culture mirroring the conspiracism of the period: "In the same way that the anti-communist conspiracy theories of the Red Scare warned of the invasion of communist conspirators and traitors, intellectuals feared the invasion of conspiracy theories and helped to delegitimize them further, " Thalmann writes. The wide circulation of the concept of a paranoid defense mechanism led to its detachment. . .
Todor Hristov (Fri,) studied this question.