Everywhere You Look: On the Conspiracy of Experience and the Demands of Philosophy

The title of Adam McKay’s allegory for global warming and media satire, Don’t Look Up, is, in the end, quite literal in terms of its title. As a comet hurdles towards an extinction level impact with the earth, the President of the USA, who earlier scrapped plans to destroy the comet with the hope to instead mine its precious minerals, rallies her supporters to simply not look up, to ignore the sight of a comet heading towards the planet.

Without judging the merits of this particular bit of satire, it is worth noting what might drive such a joke. Recent years have been filled with politicians proposing ignorance as a solution to pressing problems. The state of Florida, geographically threatened by rising sea levels and increased hurricane activity, has banned the words “climate change” and “global warming” from Department of Environmental Protection reports. During the ongoing Covid pandemic, then-President Trump repeatedly proposed a simple solution to the rising case count, just “stop testing.” Beyond current issues, the imperative “Don’t look up” has a long history in politics. Most notably, the US has often refused to look back and confront its own history of genocide and slavery, a perspective that is increasingly encoded in laws against “Critical Race Theory.”

There is, however, a flipside to this combination bit of satire and reality, or reality as satire, and that is that the idea that if one was to simply look up, in the case of the film, or look at the evidence, in the examples above, then one would be convinced of truth. This is its own kind of dogma of empiricism; one that posits that empiricism is enough to counter dogma: the idea that the facts speak for themselves and that all one has to do is look up to see what is coming. While this might work when it comes to a comets several kilometers wide, it is less certain when it comes to the fundamental and important matters of science and history that are less easy to discern. After all, various conspiracy theorists often implore their followers to “do their own research,” in other words, to look up and see with their own eyes the world around them. This is enough to suggest that truth is less than immediate.

We often think of conspiracy theories as resting on arcane knowledge, elaborate myths about secret powers, and resting on knowledge which is more semiotic than empirical. Everything is a sign that needs to be decoded. This overlooks the extent to which conspiracy theories often rest on the immediacy of experience as their unstated foundation. This can be seen in one of the oddest conspiracy theories that has taken off in recent years, that of flat earth theory. While it would seem odd to see the flat earth return in the age of globalization and satellite communication, Marcus Gilroy-Ware has argued in After the Fact: The Truth of Fake News that flat earth theory can be understood as expressing the core of many conspiracy theories in that it opposes the immediate truth that everyone knows—that the world seems flat, that the sun rises and sets—against what the elites want us to think. As Gilroy-Ware writes, “While the flat Earth theory may seem to be a physical claim about one of the celestial bodies in our solar system, the refusal of a round Earth is more of gesture related to the type of knowledge the Earth being round is, and the provenance of that knowledge.” It is the knowledge of what is immediately apparent against what elites, from teachers to the media, want us to think. The appeal to immediate experience underlies many of the most baroque conspiracy theories. Many of the early claims that COVID was a hoax came from small towns and rural communities which were mostly spared the first wave of cases in early 2020. People simply supported what they immediately saw and understood against what they were told to believe by authorities such as the media and government. In a similar manner, opposition to the reality of climate change and the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene is often predicated on such immediate facts of experience such as the persistence cold days in the winter and the apparently untouched nature that is seemingly all around us. Experience tells us that things are not as bad as we are told. The same could be said for the current opposition to the various forms of anti-racist education that are lumped together under critical race theory. Many white Americans do not perceive racism as a fact in American society, what Charles Mills calls their own particular “epistemology of ignorance” almost guarantees that they will not see it. People who are not effected by racism, whether it be that of individual acts or the more structural aspects, do not see it and thus conclude that since it does not happen to them it must not exist. Any attempt to insist otherwise, to argue that racism continues to be a structural condition of US society, seems as strange and out of touch with experience as the insistence that the Earth rotates around the sun despite the visible fact of the sun rising each day.

Contrary to the popular conception which posits a conspiracy theory as an argument based on a dubious authority that contradicts experience, it is perhaps more accurate to argue that it is an argument predicated on experience that contradicts experience that it perceives to be dubious. Its basis is not a denial of immediate experience, but an affirmation of immediate experience in its partial and limited nature as the only basis to knowledge. Official knowledge: that of scientists, the government, and media, is presented as that which is suspect because it demands that one denies what is immediately apparent. Which is not to say that such conspiracies are entirely based on immediate knowledge, as something that spontaneously emerges from day to day life. Flat earth theory, those who deny the reality of the ongoing pandemic, or believe that CRT is an attempt to destroy America, would not arrive at their conclusions without help from the various forms of media, from YouTube channels and social media influencers to television networks, that disseminate such ideas. It is not a matter of media or the immediate, but the mediation of the immediate. Rather than think in terms of a rigid divide between experience and authority, thinking for oneself and believing what one is told, it is worth noting that both knowledge and conspiracies, truth and ideology, are themselves made up of a combination of authority and experience, of things we have been told and things we have seen for ourselves.

Conspiracy theories do not simply tell us “don’t look up,” to ignore our experience, but are often predicated on the limited and partial nature of that experience. A limited and partial basis that is reinforced by interests and politics and media. Thus, the opposition to this bias cannot simply be a matter of “looking up”; of seeing what is self-evident and immediately visible to the senses. It is often a matter of recognizing the way in which our immediate experience is partial, inadequate, and faulty. That everywhere we look we do so through our own eyes and ears, through our own partial perspective. It is this limited perspective which must be overcome in order for us to understand the world. It is not a matter of looking up or not looking up, but of overcoming the limitation that everywhere we look we do so from our own perspective. Overcoming that is one of the most important reasons for studying philosophy that I can think of at this moment.

Jason Read

Jason Read is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) and The Politics of Transindividuality (Brill 2015/Haymarket 2016), and The Production of Subjectivity: Between Marxism and Philosophy (Brill 2022/Haymarket 2023). His blog is unemployednegativity.com.