Oil conspiracies
This might be the best blog post ever.
It starts with a great quote.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
–Richard Hofstadter
( Hofstadter is the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics)
I’ve heard of that title before but never read the essay. It is a great read. I’ve been trying to come up with something like this for 20 years:
One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.
The post applies Hofstadter’s ideas to the tendency to blame oil companies or other, more obscure actors for high oil prices. He argues that instead of some conspiracy to make money, there is actually less and less oil readily available.
I will add a seventh element of my own. Oil conspiracy theorists can only think in terms of the social world, not the natural world. In this regard they are cornucopians. Therefore, agency must come from the social world. Someone is responsible for what is happening, not something. It is simply not possible that the world is really nearing a peak in oil production. Someone is only making it appear so.