S1E54 - Shane Burley on Conspiracy Theories

Episode Summary

Brooke and Casandra talk with Why We Fight author, Shane Burley about conspiracy theories, false consciousness amongst the right, how mythos get built to influence how people think, and how the root of a lot of conspiracy theories is anti-semitism.

Guest Info

Shane Burley can be found on Twitter @Shane_Burley1, on Instagram @ShaneBurley, on Mastodon @Shane_Burley, and on Patreon at www.patreon.com/ShaneBurley

Host Info

Casandra rocks. Brooke can be found at Strangers helping up keep our finances intact and on Twitter @ogemakweBrooke

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Next Episode

This Year in the Apocalypse on 12/30/22 and every two weeks there after.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Shane Burley on Conspiracy Theories

Brooke 00:18 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcasts for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, one of your hosts today, along with Casandra. Today we have the honor of talking with the author, researcher, and journalist Shane Burley. We're going to discuss conspiracy theories or whatever rabbit holes that topic takes us into. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle for one of the other podcasts on the network. Here it goes.

Brooke 01:29 And we're back. Shane, thanks for joining us today to talk about conspiracy theories. Would you tell us a little bit about yourself, including sharing your pronouns?

Shane Burley 01:36 Sure. Thanks so much for having me on. My name is Shane Burley, my pronouns are he/him or they/them. I research the far right amongst other things. I've written a few books on it, Why We Fight from back in 2021 and Fascism Today from 2017. And most recently edited this big anti fascism anthology called an No Pasaran: Anti Fascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis. And right now I am working on a book with my co-author Ben Lorber for Melville House books, on anti semitism.

Brooke 02:06 Nice, thank you. Yeah, the one you wrote back in 2017 - Casandra has a copy of that book. And when I realized that my beliefs align with anarchism, I was like, I should learn about what this is. And, you know, learn more about fascism, too. And I was like, Casandra, do you have a good, like, primer book on this for me? And she just went to the bookshelf and pulled that one out. It was yours! Handed it over.

Shane Burley 02:33 Oh, awesome. That's what I was hoping for, when we wrote it because there wasn't a lot that was good and straightforward at the time, at least from our side.

Casandra 02:40 Spreading the good news about anti-fascism.

Brooke 02:46 That was, it was a good piece for, for getting started and learning there. So thank you for writing that. And for your continued work.

Shane Burley 02:53 Yeah, thanks so much for saying that, it's really kind.

Brooke 02:56 So we wanted to talk today about conspiracy theories, and I'm just gonna start with a real basic question just to make sure we're all kind of on the same page as we're having this conversation, of what is a conspiracy theory?

Shane Burley 03:08 And conspiracy theory is a theory about a conspiracy that is not true. More appropriately, it's one that could not be true. So I think it's distinguishing from actual conspiracies because there are conspiracies in the world. So, you know, a good comparison about this would be the killing of JFK. There's conspiracy theories that range from three people did it to 10,000 people did it. But no matter what one person had to engage in some kind of collaboration, so some kind of conspiracy is possible, which is separate from conspiracy theory. So I think we separate it from like the various kind of quote unquote "conspiracies" that lots of organizations and governments engage in just in day to day work, versus ones that basically come up against the basic laws of physics and how we understand the world to work, and specifically divert our understanding of how complex issues work by sort-of putting an element of fantasy into them.

Brooke 04:03 So that kind of answers one of the questions that I've been pondering, maybe we can talk about it more? Casandra has been wondering about, you know, why conspiracy theories have become so mainstream. And my sort of corollary thought was, it seems like they're so appealing to people, you know? Those two things are kind of tied together - the mainstreaming and the fact that they seem to really appeal to people for some reason.

Casandra 04:28 Not even just mainstream, as in the rest of society mainstream, but mainstream on the Left.

Shane Burley 04:37 I was interviewing a friend, Brendan O'Connor, who wrote a book, Blood Red Lines, about anti-immigrant kind of nativism and border politics. And he made a comment that I thought a lot about which was that he's kind of unsure about where the line between conspiracy theories and quote unquote, "false consciousness" lies. What's the difference between conspiracy theory, and what's the differencce between misunderstanding sources of oppression and how systems work, which is a common thing?

Shane Burley 05:06 I think one of the realities about a conspiracy theory is that it is an attempt to liberate oneself; it is actually an attempt to do that. It's an attempt to explain people in power and explain your own disempowerment. And so in situations in which lots of instability or feelings of loss of status - whatever they are, real and imagined - when those things start to sort of percolate, conspiracy theories are the easier answer. They don't require a ton of political education they don't depend on a lot of shared reality, even. And our society depends really heavily both on false consciousness and conspiracy theories. Depending on how you put those lines.

Shane Burley 05:48 Take the entire Republican Party: [it] has built a mythos on working class people, specifically, not elites, right? That's the language used. And their policy is entirely based around basically inculcating the rich and the people who own capital. So how do you explain both of those things? It has to be institutionalized false consciousness, which in itself engages a certain amount of conspiracy theories. How can you understand empowering the rich and empowering the working class at the same time? Those things don't comiserate. Except millions and of millions of people assume that they can. And so I think there's an institutionalization of that kind of thinking. Conspirarcy theories, the wild ones, actually aren't that far afield from that, you know? Because if you think about the way that things - just basic [things], like taxes and social services - versus the kind of benefits of the