If you lived anywhere near Kilburn half a decade ago, you might have noticed the messages one of our neighbours kept spray-painting over our walls and bridges. They’d appear overnight across a fairly wide swathe of north-west London, always in an immediately recognisable loopy handwriting, and the content was always recognisably loopy too. This person was trying to communicate something, but it was hard to tell exactly what. The messages said things like ‘STAND UP TO BLACK MASSES’ and ‘MERCY FROM DR HACK’ and ‘TAKE MERCY UNTO ME TAKE IT OUT OF IT’.

Every few days for about a year, I would come across another one of these messages, and try to piece together exactly what the author was trying to tell me. There was something going on in the world, something bad. It had to do with hospitals and doctors, in particular the sinister Dr Hack, but also with Satanic rituals, and sometimes other bits and pieces from the news would be strewn in there, all mushed together into the general frantic senselessness. I found it strangely compelling. I wanted to know more about this reality. But the author was keeping their cards close to their chest, and I couldn’t exactly ask. All I had to work with was this cryptic novel being released sentence by sentence in underpasses at night.

Even the most devoted cultist is, in some sense, having fun

Even the most devoted cultist is, in some sense, having fun

Some conspiracy theories are more interesting than others. The most boring kind is also the most popular. Somewhere, there’s a sinister cabal of elites, some shadowy ‘They’, who keep themselves alive by eating babies’ adrenal glands, and are secretly plotting to wipe out the rest of the world’s population. What’s strange about this theory – aside from the baby-eating – is that these elites keep mysteriously failing to follow through on their plans. Despite the pandemic and the vaccine and 5G and everything else, the world’s population is still stubbornly here.

On a day-to-day level, what ‘They’ actually seem to be doing is putting on a highly elaborate play for you. Fake political divisions, fake mass shootings, fake terrorist attacks, sometimes fake wars. The most basic form of conspiracism is to insist that everything you see through the media and its system of images, from the Moon landings to 9/11, is in some sense not real. The point of all this fakery is to distract you, so you don’t notice what ‘They’ are planning. In practice, believing in this kind of theory tends to involve obsessively following the news every second of the day, but constantly announcing that you don’t think any of it means anything. This is a generally sad and pointless way to spend your life,........

© The Spectator