The United States of Paranoia (42 page)

In June 2008, some Web surfers came across a curious site called Notes to Mary. It featured several threatening letters from one high school student to another, and it was, they quickly concluded, an alternate reality game. Word spread through the Internet hubs where ARG fans congregate, and the players set to work deciphering the puzzle. The site’s owner “began interacting with players,” an observer recalled at the Web forum MetaFilter, “sending them strange messages and several series of numbers that appeared to be some sort of code.”
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After a while, a log-in link appeared at the Notes to Mary site. The players worked hard to figure out the password, and finally they seemed to solve the puzzle. They eagerly logged in, and there they found the object of their quest.

It was a video of the eighties pop star Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” In 2008, this was the Internet equivalent of a joy buzzer.

There had never been a game. The man behind the site “just thought it would be funny to put up some creepy notes and see what sort of attention they got,” the MetaFilter writer explained. When people decided it was an ARG, “he decided to play along. The numerical ‘codes’ he sent out? Random numbers and dates plucked out of the air.”

He provided the noise; the players perceived the pattern. They imagined a labyrinth as elaborate as bin Laden’s legendary fortress in Tora Bora. They found an empty cave.

EPILOGUE
THE MONSTER AT THE END OF THIS BOOK

We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good will to everything that hurts or pleases us.

—David Hume
1

A
s soon as Mark Phillips heard that the World Trade Center was on fire, he ran to the roof of his Brooklyn home. He didn’t know what had set the building ablaze. He just knew, as a journalist, that he needed to photograph what was happening. He took his first picture right after the second plane crashed, and within half an hour the Associated Press was distributing his images to the world.

It wasn’t till later that week that he learned what people were seeing in that first photo. “Mark,” his agent told him on the phone, “you have a face in your picture.”

Phillips took another look, and there it was. “The image I saw was distinct,” he later recalled. “Eyes, nose, mouth, horns. It was an image from a nightmare, leering at us, triumphant in its evil as it hung onto Tower 2 of the World Trade Center.”
2
There, in the contours of the smoke, he found the face of Satan.

Search online and you’ll see still more 9/11 pictures where people perceive the shapes of demons. Some of the photos are fakes, but not all. And if some of them require you to squint pretty intently to see the spirits allegedly encoded within them, there are others, like the photo Phillips took, where the face isn’t hard to see.

© 2001, Mark D. Phillips, markdphillips.com

There’s no shortage of theories about what the faces mean. “An act of hatred and violence is a thrill ride for a demon,” one website suggests. “Demons knew what was going to happen in New York and they gathered there to jump in at the point of the impact, like a human jumping onto a moving train to have a thrill.”
3
The Christian conspiracist Texe Marrs identifies the imagery with the Enemy Outside: “Just as the Arab terrorists led by the Devil left their own trail of evidence, wanting the world to know their names of infamy, so, too, does the Devil, as proven in this photograph, cackle out loud and boast,
‘I did it—and I’m proud of what I did!
’”
4
Another writer, on the other hand, sees the Enemy Above at work: “Don’t these photos of Satan at the world [
sic
] Trade Center catastrophe tell us that the current seat of Satan’s power is the World Trade Center? Don’t these photos depict Satan being awakened from his hiding place in the World Trade Center? For it is the international bankers who operate from Fed, the CFR and the World Trade Center who create first, second and third world debt.”
5

Some even see the face as a signal from a Benevolent Conspiracy, or at least from a benevolent power. One website calls the image “a much needed edict from Allah—a final ruling from the highest authority possible which decrees once and for all that the use of terrorism is never permitted in Islam.”
6

Then there’s the explanation I prefer. The faces are the result of
apophenia
, the process of projecting patterns onto data. More specifically, they are
pareidolia
, in which those patterns are perceived as meaningful shapes or sounds. It is pareidolia that allows us to see a man in the moon, to hear a Satanic incantation when “Stairway to Heaven” is played backward, or to conjure the image of your subconscious choice while taking a Rorschach test. Indeed, pareidolia makes the whole world a Rorschach test. The Web is filled with delightful pareidolia-themed photo sets, where unexpected forms appear in mountains, pasta, fire, clocks, clouds.

The apparitions in the pictures range from an octopus to an angel, but we are especially prone to seeing faces. That sink’s knobs and spigot look like two eyes and a nose. That house’s windows and door look like two eyes and a mouth. That cloud of smoke billowing from an unimaginably evil attack looks like the author of evil himself.

Spotting such images is an act of creativity, though it’s a kind of creativity that is often invisible to the creator. It’s easy to believe the face is really
there
in the photo rather than in the interaction between the photo and the observer. Remember what Robert Anton Wilson said about Nesta Webster: “She was so modest that she didn’t recognize herself as the artist creating all that.”

Many people do understand that they’re the artists in the situation. Some even transform their experiences of pareidolia into artworks that others can enjoy. The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí called this the
critical-paranoiac method
. At a lecture in Connecticut in 1934, he illustrated the idea with a slide: a postcard photo of tribesmen in front of a hut. He then showed the same image on its side, and pareidolia did its work: With some priming from the painter, the audience could see an image of a human head.

Salvador Dalí, unknown, c. 1931

More examples followed, including a vulture that Freud had perceived in Leonardo da Vinci’s
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne
.
7
“These more or less accidental ideas Mr. Dali is concentrating upon in his own work,”
The Hartford Courant
reported the next day, “but instead of allowing them to be accidental, he is trying to cultivate them.”
8

In a conspiracy context, the ironic approach entails a similar sort of cultivation. A group of scholars learned this in 2010, when they played a game they called
The Paranoid Style
. The historian Rob MacDougall, who organized the exercise, reported afterward that he started it with “a little briefing on pareidolia and apophenia.” Then, after asking each player to pick a well-known historical figure, he

told them we were looking for evidence of the secret conspiracy of vampires that has pulled the strings behind the world for hundreds of years. So we went through what we knew about each of our historical figures and found “evidence” of each one’s role for or against the Great Vampire Conspiracy. . . . If anything, they were
too
willing to indulge me: we very quickly spun out a goofy little chronicle of the vampire-vs-electricizer war behind the world, but we probably didn’t work at it long enough to get to the real kick of autohistoric apophenia, when the evidence starts to line up all too well with the fantasy you have just concocted, and you skate right up to the edge of believing. It’s a powerful and uncanny feeling, and if it serves as good inoculation against pseudohistorical thinking, it also colors your relationship with “real” history ever after.
9

Tim Powers, whose novels often attribute historical events to supernatural conspiracies, encounters something similar when he researches his books. You reach a point, he has said, where you need to start “resisting paranoia” because “your research genuinely does seem to support whatever goofy theory you’ve come up with.”
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As Paul Krassner put it after his Manson satire seemed to come to life around him, “Had I accidentally stumbled into a real conspiracy when I thought I was merely making one up?”
11

Human beings have a knack not just for finding patterns in chaos but for constructing stories to make sense of events, especially events that scare us. I can hardly condemn that habit. I just devoted an entire book, after all, to the patterns I think I’ve glimpsed in American history.
12
But when building a narrative you can fall into a trap, one where a combination of confirmation bias and serendipity blinds you to the ways your enticing story might fail to describe the world.

A conspiracy story is especially enticing because it imagines an intelligence behind the pattern. It doesn’t just see a shape in the smoke; it sees a
face
in the smoke. It draws on one of the most basic human characteristics, something the science writer Michael Shermer calls
agenticity
—a “tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.”
13
Sometimes the story a conspiracy theorist tells is correct. At other times he mistakes a chicken joint for a sterilization scheme, an unusual sect for a body-snatching cult, a Mooninite for a terror plot.

The conspiracy theorist will always be with us, because he will always be us. We will never stop finding patterns. We will never stop spinning stories. We will always be capable of jumping to conclusions, particularly when we’re dealing with other nations, factions, subcultures, or layers of the social hierarchy. And conspiracies, unlike many of the monsters that haunt our folklore, actually exist, so we won’t always be wrong to fear them. As long as our species survives, so will paranoia.

Yet we can limit the damage that paranoia does. We can try to empathize with people who seem alien. We can be aware of the cultural myths that shape our fears. And we can be open to evidence that might undermine the patterns we think we see in the world. We should be skeptical, yes, of people who might be conspiring against us. But we should also be skeptical—deeply, deeply skeptical—of our fearful, fallible selves.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
t took a vast conspiracy to write this book. As I worked on it and on the earlier articles that fed into it, many people were generous with their thoughts and their time. I’d like to thank everyone who answered my questions, whether that involved replying to a couple of e-mails or sitting down for a multihour conversation: Rasul Al-Ikhlas, Craig Baldwin, Bob Banner, Joel Best, Sophy Burnham, Gary Chartier, Amy Cooter, Robert Eringer, Rita Fellers, Leslie Fish, Bob Fletcher, Erich Goode, Anthony Hilder, Afrika Islam, Steve Jackson, Philip Jenkins, Jay Kinney, Paul Krassner, Michael Moor (not Moore!), Christina Pearson, Dino Pedrone, Arie Perliger, Sharon Presley, E. L. Quarantelli, Brian Redman, Lewis Shiner, R. U. Sirius, Ivan Stang, Jeannette Sutton, Mike Vanderboegh, Malcolm Wiley, and Peter Lamborn Wilson.

Many other people passed along leads, helped dig up documents, offered useful advice, or otherwise lent a hand. Thank you to Bryan Alexander, Ceredwyn Alexander, Antero Alli, Sandy Asirvatham, Radley Balko, Greg Beato, Chris Bray, Tim Cavanaugh, Robert Churchill, Dan Clore, Dave Cushing, Soren Dayton, Eric Dixon, Jared Farmer, Thomas Fleming, Charles Paul Freund, the late Mary Frohman, David J. Halperin, Henry Hardy, Gene Healy, Mollie Hemingway, Robert Higgs, Mike Holmes, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Tom Jackson, Ben James, Lene Johansen, Bill Kauffman, Steve Kaye, Bruce Kodish, Psyche Lamplighter, Martin Levinson, Jim Lippard, Monica Lopossay, Rob MacDougall, Dave Mandl, Paul Mavrides, Daniel McCarthy, Don Meinshausen, Victor Morton, Michael C. Moynihan, Mark Murrell, Debbie Nathan, Ted Pappas, Jeffrey Pasley, Rick Perlstein, Mark Phillips, Virginia Postrel, Will Potter, Des Preston, Stacia Proefrock, Eric Rabkin, Dave Rahbari, Karen Rockney, Gabriel Rossman, Thaddeus Russell, Joel Schlosberg, George H. Smith, Randy Smith, Sam Smith, Thomas Ruys Smith, Seth Soffer, Clare Spark, Lester Spence, Lucy Steigerwald, Clark Stooksbury, Luis Vasquez, Timothy Virkkala, Dave Weigel, Cosmo Wenman, Shawn Wilbur, the late Robert Anton Wilson, and Oberon Zell. Thanks in particular to everyone who gave me feedback on all or part of the manuscript: George Baca, Amy Cooter, Brian Doherty, Jeet Heer, Jay Kinney, Rona Kobell, Ed Krayewski, Charles Pearson, and Amy Sturgis.

It would have been a lot harder to write this book without the assistance of the Baltimore County Public Library’s interlibrary loan department: Jennifer Baugher, Deb Brothers, Helen Hughes, Timberly Johnson, and Joan Lattanzi. I also spent valuable time at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library, where Julie Herreda, Kate Hutchens, and the rest of the staff were extremely helpful. So were the employees of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. And a warm thank-you to Mars De Ritis and Jim Dwyer for their hospitality while I was in Michigan doing archival research at Labadie.

Matt Welch, my editor at
Reason
, didn’t just let me work out some of my thoughts in his publication’s pages; he let me take time off work to write the book, and he let me draw on the magazine’s resources in countless ways. My thanks to him and to everyone else at
Reason
who assisted in one way or another, including Mike Alissi, Ronald Bailey, Barbara Burch, Brian Doherty, Jim Epstein, Matthew Feeney, Nick Gillespie, Ed Krayewski, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Chris Mitchell, Ray Ng, David Nott, Mike Riggs, Damon Root, Scott Shackford, Peter Suderman, Jacob Sullum, Mary Toledo, J. D. Tuccille, and, not least, the interns who transcribed several of my interviews: Julie Ershadi, Melanie Kruvelis, John K. Ross, Nick Sibilla, and Calvin Thompson.

My agent, David Kuhn, and his staff were instrumental not just in getting a publisher interested in my book proposal but in shaping the proposal itself. Billy Kingsland in particular was full of good ideas, and the book is much better for his and David’s work. My editor at HarperCollins, Barry Harbaugh, has been an inexhaustible source both of enthusiasm for the project and of suggestions that have improved it. Thanks also to Lynn Anderson for her copyediting, to Nancy Wolff for creating the index, to Michael Correy for designing the book’s interior, and to Jarrod Taylor for designing the cover.

Finally, I’d like to thank my family for all their patience and love: my parents, David and Marjorie Walker; my brother, Andrew Walker; my wife, Rona Kobell; and our children, Maya and Lila Walker. I owe more to them than to anyone else. Except, of course, the Order of the Illumin— Ah, but I am not supposed to speak of that.