Why Tinfoil Hats are so American - or why life is always greener from the Grassy Knoll ...

Here is a link to a fascinating essay by Richard Hofstadter entitled, "Paranoid style in American politics." It was published in Harper's in 1964. I can remember studying this interesting aspect of American culture during my studies at Roger Williams University (minored in American Studies). Conspiracy theories, of course, are all over the world and are often shortcuts to providing relief from anxiety when we cannot understand or control our circumstances. While true conspiracies do exist - what makes the difference between the real ones and the wild ones? Richard Hofstadter - a major influence in the whole area of serious study of American culture - tackles the subject forty two years ago and this essay alone had a big impact not only in the commentary of American culture, but on the American culture itself.

What I find interesting now, forty years after this essay, is how there is no divide between left wing and right wing when it comes to indulging in the conspiracy theories as a style. That may be why it can be said that it's such an integral part of the American culture. I have an ancestor, Catherine Chapin. Her father's statue is called "The Puritan" (yes, my friends - some of us actually are descended from the puritans, but they would be spinning to know that I am aligned with the Anglicans, but never mind!) and stands in Springfield, Massachusetts. But Catherine's sister-in-law was Mary Bliss, who was tried and acquitted for being a witch (read about her here: http://www.massmoments.org/moment.cfm?mid=142). After her husband, (Nathaniel Bliss) died, Catherine married Thomas Gilbert, the widower of Lydia Gilbert who was executed for being a witch. And of course, we know that there were no witches. But the impact on American culture - even by those who would never think that they were engaged in the same sort of conspiracy thinking as these early Americans - is significant.

I confess it is somewhat amusing to hear about the Puritans during this Episcopal Crisis. One can only wonder: which ones?

So keep your tinfoil hat and get read to read. It makes for interesting reading, which ever side you might find yourself on right now. Click on the headline above. Here is a excerpt:

The Double Sufferer

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

† Richard Hofstadter, DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His book, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. This essay is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.