‘It happens again and again’: why Americans are obsessed with secret societies
US congressional hearings can be dry affairs but not of late. First there was Robert Kennedy Jr, purveyor of disinformation about vaccines and much else, testifying about big tech censorship. Then David Grusch,a former intelligence officer, claiming that the government knows more than it admits about UFOs: “Non-human biologics had been recovered at crash sites.”
The fact that both captured the public imagination is not so surprising. In a new book, Under the Eye of Power, cultural historian Colin Dickey argues that our hunger for conspiracy theories is less fringe and more mainstream than we like to admit. Fearmongering about secret groups pulling levers of power behind the scenes, “conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law”, is older than America itself.
From the 1692 Salem witch trials to the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organised by the French), from the satanic panic to the Illuminati and QAnon, it has been tempting to dismiss conspiracy theories as an aberration, resonating with a small and marginal segment of the population. But Dickey, 45, came to understand them as hardwired into how many people process democracy.
He says via Zoom from a booklined room in Brooklyn, New York: “When I was a child I was taught that the Salem witch trials and McCarthy hearings – which I think were taught primarily because Arthur Miller’s The Crucible yokes these two instances together – were the outliers, the standouts in American history when things just got out of hand but we’re mostly very sane and rational, the rest of the justice system works and you don’t have to worry too much.
“But what I found is that those in fact aren’t outliers. I began to see a pattern emerge whereby there’s almost a template for fears of secret societies, of this invisible, undetectable group that is nonetheless doing terrible things behind the scenes.
“It happens again and again; the names change. Sometimes it’s the Catholics, sometimes it’s the Jews, sometimes it’s the satanists, sometimes it’s the socialists or the anarchists. But it recurs with enough frequency that I began to see it as something that gets deployed almost on cue when certain moments arise in American history.”
An early example was Freemasonry, the leading fraternal organisation of the 18th century with members including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, James Otis and Paul Revere. What began as a teacher of moral, intellectual and spiritual values came to be regarded with hostility and suspicion.
Dickey explains: “Freemasonry went from being a positive social philanthropic fraternal organisation that people like Ben Franklin and Washington were proud to be associated with to increasingly being seen as this parallel shadow government