Are Conspiracy Narratives Sustained by Popular Culture?

Warning: the following blog post may contain minor spoilers about Le Porteur d’histoire, Dune, and Slumdog Millionaire

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Alexis Michalik’s Le Porteur d’histoire, an award-winning play that skillfully intertwines multiple historical narratives. Although the dialogues and performances were fantastic — and Michalik has an undeniable gift for tying together seemingly unrelated plot-lines — I did emerge from the theatre somewhat reeling from the barrage of dates and names, not helped by the fact that just three actors played all the roles over a period spanning over 1000 years.

Serendipitously, I also happened to be reading Frank Herbert’s Dune at the time, and I was immediately struck by the similarities of a specific plot arc in both stories: in one scene in Le Porteur d’histoire, the members of an obscure, all-female sect (the Lysistrata) visit a former pope (Sixtus II) promising to help the church establish Christianity in the Roman Empire, as the first crucial step in the rise of democracy in the West (for the connection between Christianity and democracy, which may seem tenuous, see Joseph Heinrich’s book “The WEIRDest People in the World” and Tom Holland's "Dominion").

It seemed to me that the Lysistrata had more than a passing similarity to Dune’s Bene Gesserit — also a shadowy, all-female, semi-religious cult working behind the scenes over millennia, pulling the levers of power, ostensibly to further the human race, but also to entrench its own influence.

On reflection, I realised that maybe it wasn’t that serendipitous after all; arguably, the very concept of serendipity is mostly just a failure to recognise the natural frequency of coincidences in everyday life and the fact that we routinely ignore or fail to notice numerous non-serendipitous coincidences. Also, it is natural to notice patterns or similarities between unrelated works of literature. The idea of secret groups working behind the scenes to direct society is a common theme in literature and popular culture; think of the Illuminati in Da Vinci code, The Templars in Assassin's Creed, the Cigarette Smoking Man in the X-Files, Hydra in the Marvel Universe…

The “secret society” is a narrative device that allows writers to spin complex webs of intrigue with unexpected plot twists and to keep the suspense alive through their members’ hidden motives. Often, their members are blessed with a near-superhuman capacity to plan ahead; they seem to be playing 12-dimensional chess, while even the Pope (in Le Porteur d’histoire) and the Emperor (in Dune) are mere figureheads, guided by an invisible hand.

I am generally perfectly happy to suspend disbelief for the purposes of enjoying a film or book — and although the real-world influence of violence in movies and video games, for example, has been debunked — my visit to the theatre did get me thinking about how people take their cues from fiction. Take Ufology: although the correlation probably runs both ways, it is likely that the depiction of UFOs in comic books and films like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds is directly correlated with the rise in the number of UFO sightings (as well as explaining why so many reported sightings are of the familiar disc-shaped spacecraft favoured by early Hollywood films).

While belief in the extraordinary origin of UFOs is mostly harmless, I have long believed that popular culture also has an impact on how people view other concepts, such as luck (i.e. as not just luck as naturalistic phenomena but as a quality or force in the universe). Of course, this perception of luck has its roots in mythology — where the human protagonists are literally being manipulated like puppets by the gods — but there are more recent examples from popular culture, like Francis Veber’s La Chèvre, where the hapless Pierre Richard is irresistibly dragged into disaster after disaster by some invisible force; or Slumdog Millionaire, where Jamal is able to answer the questions on Who Wants to be a Millionaire thanks to an improbable series of fortunate coincidences.

It is my assertion that a belief in coincidences and luck as more than just chance occurrences but as the manifestation of some greater force or destiny can have a profound impact on societal beliefs and behaviours. In the same way that religious cultures promote supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, a belief in “luck” may cause people to interpret chance events in their lives as signs or messages, which will in turn influence their decision-making, risk-taking (not always for ill, granted), and even their interpretation of everyday incidents.

When popular culture uncritically employs familiar motifs of secret societies plotting to control humanity, it can also have real-world consequences — like with the rise of QAnon in the USA. Individuals who already harbour conspiratorial beliefs may find such narratives validating, using them as "evidence" to support their unfounded views.

Moreover, the ubiquity of the secret society plot device is potentially even more sinister insofar as it helps anchor existing harmful stereotypes; audiences might unconsciously map these fictional narratives onto real-world groups that have been historically maligned with similar accusations, activating and reinforcing existing prejudices. For example, many historical conspiracy theories going back hundreds of years have depicted Jews as manipulating political, financial, and social systems for malevolent purposes. I can’t help but think that the enduring popularity of this narrative mechanism — combined with historical religious antagonism — goes some way to explaining the persistence of such anti-Semitic tropes.