You, like me, may have wondered why Americans, in particular, are so susceptible to conspiracy theories and the paranoid thinking that accompanies them. The more traditional explanation for such phenomena is that of the social grouping suffering from a much expanded size in terms of vast population growth. Very big cities and populous nations are thought to be prone to these manifestations on the mere basis of communities overwhelmed by their own numbers. More recently, however, I think that a closer fit for the American mass psychosis experience is due to something else and/or something more. The peculiar doubt that many Americans feel about their governments and institutions may be rooted in something more directly causal. Conspiracy America: Suspicious minds.
Why America Loves Conspiracy Theories?
Elvis Presley sang the song Suspicious Minds and this driving pop song captures some of the flavour inherent in the American proclivity for a deep suspicion for someone or something very close to the heart.
Being ‘caught in a trap,’ also, tells it as it is, in terms of the cyclical nature of this phenomena. The United States of America is the quintessential Capital of capitalism. The land of the free is rather the land of free enterprise, where very little is free. Selling stuff is actually what is celebrated in America. Citizens and denizens are being sold to 24/7 via every medium available. Modern American business professes to detest regulation and government red tape. Americans are taught to sell themselves, in the spirit of putting themselves forward with verve and passion, from their earliest schooldays. Hollywood shows the global audience an America built on individualism rising above circumstance. Popular culture sells a message about opportunity and beating the odds.
Selling The Soul of America
The truth is Americans are being sold stuff from the moment they can see and hear until the moment they drop dead. Advertising is a celebrated industry in America and marketing is almost a religious custom for the greater majority. If you were to identify a dominant cultural marker within Americans it would be the ability to sell ideas, products, and services. It is second nature to this vibrant collection of folk across all walks of life. There are a bunch of positives to this shared proclivity. Capitalism and the free market economy are built on buying and selling stuff. Therefore, it pays to push your wheel barrow and spruik your wares. Americans even sell the concept of being American through the various channels of the entertainment sector. Hollywood movies convey a casual, ‘can do’ confidence emanating from the American story in its many manifestations. Pitching an idea or concept is a very American thing to do. This sales culture has been exported all over the world. Silicon Valley and its high tech Tsunami have been built on selling these gadgets and their tricks to the world. Microsoft, Apple, and Google are three of the largest corporations globally with masses of money and power earned on the back of the saleability of their products.
There are downsides to this 24/7 sales onslaught, however, with the American psyche penetrated continuously by sales pitch after sales pitch. Listening to American talking heads they rarely take a breath. The sales and marketing departments, within American corporations, are huge with very big budgets to achieve their giant revenue targets. Marketing-speak, whilst not always telling downright lies, does exaggerate and bend the truth. Advertising and marketing are emotive. They use sound and vision to illicit emotional responses from viewers.
Feeling sells much more than hard facts. I posit that a culture exposed to relentless selling on every level across the full gamut of life loses trust in the messaging. They begin to shoot the messenger and to doubt the veracity of what they are being told. Belief in conspiracy theories becomes a way of resisting, if not quite fighting back. Conspiracy America: Suspicious minds.
Big Pharma Mental Health Conspiracy
A powerful illustration is the marketing of drugs for mental health by the pharmaceutical industry in America. This is a trillion dollar business, which spends tens of billions of dollars on marketing and advertising. If Americans are being bamboozled by this level of sustained messaging across all parts of the health sector, what chance do they have of resisting. They see emotive ads on TV and on the internet. They hear these ads on the radio. Their doctors are pitching these drugs as good for their mental health. The scientists have been bought off via academic endowments at universities and institutions. The publishers of the scientific journals are dependent upon big pharma for advertising revenue and sponsorship. Plus, there is a massive sales rep cohort out there selling to medicos and pharmacies. The messaging has been that people with mental illness have a brain chemical imbalance and that antidepressants work by fixing this. This is, actually, not true, as there are no definitive studies proving this. However, the spend is so big that most ordinary people now believe this. In a sales driven culture, the people absorb the sales-speak and believe it. Not many people question stuff unless they have direct experience to the contrary. Ordinary folk just go about their working lives not really examining such claims. The messaging rolls over them 24/7 in the background like wallpaper. Corporate America knows that if you spend enough money on top quality advertising and marketing, with the right stake holders in your corner, your messaging will hit home. The result is that one in every ten Americans are taking drugs for a mental health condition. The scientific studies, the peer reviewed research into the effectiveness of SSRI antidepressants reveal that they are no more efficacious as the placebos they are tested against. The massive sales and marketing machine delivers sales’ revenue in the hundreds of billions of dollars despite the absence of any real evidence of their effectiveness. These are big lies perpetuated upon the American psyche.
“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
- Plato
Distrust emerges in reaction to the constant stream of half-truths, exaggerations, and lies foisted upon the public via advertising. If you are always being told that you need things that you don’t – you naturally become suspicious. Suspicious minds, as Elvis told us, are not good for relationships. The relationships between Americans and their institutions are not good. Their governments have let them down through not providing the necessary protections and regulation against profligate distortions of the truth pushed by business. Fox News is the perfect example, where a news network has been allowed to peddle propaganda rather than report the news. Where are the standards in America? The continuum of Rupert Murdoch has travelled from a newspaper publisher, who used to publish the news in print, to a media mogul, who entertains a right wing audience for the advertising revenue generated, with no care for the facts or truth involved in matters presented. If there are no standards, greatness can never be achieved in any field of endeavour.
America, as a concept, was invented by a bunch of Jewish eastern European emigres. This is interesting when you consider the amount of latent antisemitism in the U.S. These chaps created Hollywood and there they put together the stories that became a flickering mirror for Americans to see themselves in. Movies and movie stars told America who they were and what was important to them. Family was stressed as a pillar of American culture because this was what was important to these Jewish emigres whose families had fled from the pogroms in Russia and eastern Europe. The vibrancy of America was portrayed in productions and stories imbued with the journey of the migrant to a new land of hope and opportunity. The outsider was celebrated in film and brought to life by Hollywood stars like Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Danny Kaye, and Edward G Robinson. Think of the many much loved Hollywood icons such as Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney, to name but a few. Hollywood was created in response to the early antisemitic control of the fledgling moving picture industry by Thomas Edison and his ilk, where early films celebrated the Ku Klux Klan and Protestant white America. Truth has always been a rare commodity in America, controlled by the dominant force in the room.
Putting spin on things is as American as apple pie.
“Apples came to America via the Pilgrims. Apples date back thousands of years across Europe and Asia, where the tree likely originated. By the 1600s, England had more than 70 varieties of apples, and some of these seeds were brought over on the Mayflower. The first apple seeds were planted in the Massachusetts colony in 1625, and cultivation quickly became widespread, with over 14,000 varieties by the end of the 1800s. Though few of these varieties are still grown today, America remains one of the world’s largest apple producers.”
The whole American Revolution has been spun as a genuine uprising of the people, when it was no such thing. Enslaved Americans and indentured servants were not freed via this revolution, rather it was the propertied class of colonials dispensing with their British masters because of issues over taxation. It was a War of Independence fought over such matters and a very fine victory just the same, thanks to the assistance of the French. Foundation myths are always exaggerated distortions of the truth, with inconvenient things left out.
The idea of the free market is very big in America and yet the American nation was built on tariffs. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries protection was rife. Agriculture in the U.S remains heavily protected via subsidies, as does the armaments industry. There never has been a free market anywhere, it is a bit like the unicorn – a fictitious beast, much loved as a concept, but never witnessed in reality. The free market is another symbolic trope close to the sentimental conception of American life. Conspiracy America: Suspicious minds distrust the distorted conception of who they are that they have been continually sold.
The world we live in is based on institutions formed out of histories that do not measure up in terms of truth and veracity. This reality is not confined to America, of course, it is the same everywhere. The loudest voices in the room control the version of history we are told and sold. Governments and banks tell the people that they live in a free economy, when in reality the game is rigged in favour of sections of our populations. Banks are always too big to fail and bankers are continually bailed out and never prosecuted despite their greed and incompetence. White collar crimes are rarely criminally prosecuted, whilst blue collar crimes are always severely punished via the judicial system. Trump incites a riotous coup at the Capital and remains free of charges. Meanwhile, those who followed his direction are prosecuted and jailed. These judicial inconsistencies fuel the fermenting of conspiracy theories and paranoid thinking. Belief in aliens and UFOs hidden away in government storage facilities bespeak of a deep distrust and fantastical imaginations. America is a country grown up on stories about religion. The Christian canon is full of fantastical tales about miracles and other unscientific stuff. A belief in God, heaven and hell is not rooted in reality. Evangelical Christianity is sold like many other commodities in America. America leads the globe in the commodification of sex via pornography and advertising, more generally. Wherever there are strong sensations and feelings within human nature is ripe for selling. How do we bottle this? Is the question on every marketer’s lips.
We live in an age of staring at screens. The average American spends 10 hours a day looking at things on screens. Our brains are being pumped full of pixels and bites representing images and sounds. These pictures and words are selling stuff 24/7. The pushing of wheelbarrows and spruiking of wares on steroids. The average American is exposed to between 4, 000- 10, 000 ads every day. The vast majority of stuff being spruiked is unnecessary to the lives of the recipient. Our consciousnesses are wading through vast mud plains of shit. How does that not twist minds over time? Conspiracy America: Suspicious minds seeking some touchstone of truth in a morass of lies and deflections.
“Evil is whatever distracts.”
- Franz Kafka
Robert Sudha Hamilton
©House Therapy