Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence. . .”

― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Conspiracy theories dwell in complexity, a complexity of thought and passion. The thinking has what Foucault calls “the marvellous logic of the mad,” and the “madness of passion,” as each brother in The Brothers Karamazov reveals, preempts observing anything clearly. Transparency is occluded. We see through clouded minds, not the spiritual and divine that is beclouded but everyday words and events. We see within what Keats called “the moods of one’s mind,” and today we are captured within the moods of one mind, Donald J. Trump’s.

The first six months of Donald J. Trump’s second presidency sharpens the focus on this dark state of affairs, though the descent into irrationalism, the collapse of rational and empirical methodologies into a war of opinions, wasn’t initiated by Trump, although he cleverly exploits this collapse. You can just say something isn’t true or say the opposite is true, play to the audience, confound and blitz and leave clear refutation to your opponents. The sad truth is that nothing said or produced is now clear, by which I mean, accepted as clear by all. Whatever contesting evidence put forward can be rejected as fake, falsely concocted by those dark conspiracies of power: The New World Order (NWO), The Committee of 300, also known as the Olympians or the hidden hand, The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and now, the Deep State.

Transparent clarity is mystified by paranoia and conspiracy, brilliantly revealed in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49., written in 1966, two years after the country wondered whether the Gulf of Tonkin North........

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