Gee, one of the (increasingly rare) good reads from Slate - an account of the American conspiracy belief in the Illuminati - and how remarkably similar it is to modern conspiracy belief.
Morse unspooled a bizarre conspiracy theory alleging that a shadowy
cabal of villains called the “Illuminati,” an offshoot of the
Freemasons, were aiming to destroy everything that Americans held dear.
This group of philosopher zealots, according to Morse, had “secretly
extended its branches through a great part of Europe, and even into
America.” Their goal was to abolish Christianity, private property, and
nearly every foundation of good order around the world. According to
Morse, they opposed marriage, encouraged people to explore all kinds of
“sensual pleasures,” and proposed a “promiscuous intercourse among the
sexes.” Just a few masks short of a Stanley Kubrick film, Morse’s story of the Illuminati played upon the darkest nightmares of the nation’s many devout Christians.
Morse told his congregation that the Illuminati hoped to infect the
people of America through a kind of cultural warfare. They were
spreading their doctrines by worming their way in among “reading and
debating societies, the reviewers, journalists or editors of newspapers
and other periodical publications, the booksellers and post-masters” and
infiltrating all “literary, civil and religious institutions.” The most
prominent Illuminatus named by Morse was Thomas Paine, whose radical
pamphlet The Age of Reason (published in installments in 1794, 1795, and 1807) had caused a political stir in the United States.
If
the Illuminati were beginning to corrupt the United States, according
to Morse, they had gone much further already in Europe. The evil
society’s greatest triumph to date, Morse wrote, was its recent work to
hatch the French Revolution and disguise it as a mild, moderate event
following the model of the American Revolution. With France’s increasing
radicalism, anticlericalism, and disorder, it seemed obvious to Morse
that the French Jacobins, the political faction that seized control of
the nation in 1792, were simply Illuminati by another name.
Morse
got most of this story from a book written by a Scottish academic named
John Robison, who in turn took many of his ideas from the abbé de
Barruel, a French priest. Robison’s book provided rich source material
for Morse’s imagination. It was full of dramatic details, such as an
account of the Illuminati possessing “tea for procuring abortion” as
well as a mysterious “composition which blinds or kills when spurted in
the face.” The Illuminati, according to Robison, defended suicide and
discouraged patriotism and property owning. Claiming to worship human
reason above all else, they practiced a blinkered ethics in which the
means always justified the ends, as long as those ends were the growing
power of the organization.
That is extraordinarily similar to the types of conspiracy mongering the modern American Right (and their nutty Australian acolytes) believe now. Indeed, towards the end of the article it notes:
The names and characters change over time, but the basic template has
remained remarkably durable over the centuries: A small, yet nearly
omnipotent, group of amoral globalist elites secretly directs world
events. This paranoid vision has persevered in large part because it
helps their believers to make sense of a rapidly changing world. The
faceless structural forces remaking our present—such as globalization,
accelerating inequality, deindustrialization, racial justice movements,
and cultural fragmentation—require explanation.
The article explains, by the way, that the reason the Illuminati conspiracy took off so well was that it was seen as an explanation as to why the French Revolution had gone off the rails.
But it just seems a significant chunk of Americans have always, for odd reason, been especially prone to paranoid conspiracy beliefs.
