Indeed, we believe that there are at least two broad contexts or conditions of contemporary life that make the paranoid style and conspiracy theories an eminently reasonable tendency of thought for social actors to embrace. The first derives from the fact that the cold-war era itself was defined throughout by a massive project of paranoid social thought and action that reached into every dimension of mainstream culture, politics, and policy. Furthermore, client states and most regions were shaped by the interventions, subversions, and intimidations pursued in the interests of a global conspirational politics of the superpowers. The legacies and structuring residues of that era make the persistence, and even increasing intensity, of its signature paranoid style now more than plausible, but indeed, an expectable response to certain social facts. That is, the effects of decades of paranoid policies of statecraft and governing habits of thought define a present reality for social actors in some places and situations that is far from extremist, or distortingly fundamentalist, but is quite reasonable and commonsensical. […]
The other important and perhaps more subtle way to take not of the present paranoid style as a kind of pervasive cold-war legacy is to indicate the extent to which highly influential frameworks of social theory have this potential within their conceptual rhetorics. Frameworks that have at their core notions of game, self-interested motivation, fields of contest and struggle, and generally a valuation of cynical reason as the most reliable posture from which to interpret human action are ones in which the reality of conspiratorial activity is well within reach of their common sense. The most influential forms of strategic thought during the post-World War II period, such as game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma have the paranoid style close to their surface, but a paranoid potential is at least legible in some of the most prominent brands of contemporary social theory as well.*
Finally, one might say that all elite politics – high-level power games in any institution – to some degree share the same intellectual capital with the language of strategic policy and prominent social theories. But as working models for action, these elite models in use inspire even more paranoia and conspiratorial thinking by the very subcultural atmospheres and assumptions of elites. The mere conceptual language, then, of the transaction of interest in a field of politics makes paranoia reasonable and legitimate, as long as it is restrained, and distinguishable from its exotic, excessive other – the extremist or fundamentalist paranoia of the kind [Richard] Hofstadter skewers, given free rein by a panicked sense of clear and present danger to a valued or privileged way of life. […]
The second broad context that defines a contemporary paranoid style within reason arises from the much discussed crisis of representation […] keenly experienced over the past decade, and not only in academic life but in many other realms of professional middle-class activity. We have held that this problem of the felt inadequacy of metanarratives and conceptual frames to explain the world as it has historically emerged and is currently changing is generated not so much by the radicalized intellectual fashion of the critique of knowledge of recent years as by the rapidity and extent of actual changes themselves – by the social and ethnographic facts of the world if only they could be apprehended by large theories and concepts in which one still had faith.
In his book Metahistory (1973), Hayden White spoke a similar moment in European historiography, at the end of the nineteenth century, as an ironic mode – a time of saturation of descriptions, diagnoses, and analyses of social change, either among literati or as experienced in everyday life – in which there were a number of equally comprehensive and plausible, yet apparently mutually exclusive, conceptions of the same events, Now, there remains a healthy respect for facts and evidence, but accompanied also by a high tolerance for speculative associations among them – an impulse to figure out systems, now of global scale, with strategic facts missing that might otherwise permit confident choices among competing conceptions.
The specifically postmodern version a contemporary crisis of representation as the opportunity for the proliferation of the paranoid mode of social thought of social thought is expressed in John McClure’s study of the novels of Don DeLillo, whose work has most evoked a contemporary atmosphere of institutions and systems sustained by powerful, invisible conspiracies. McClure connects the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories to the contemporary predicament of the romance genre in a time when the exotic places – the “dark places of the world,” as Conrad called them – on which the latter has depended have been overtaken by global capitalism. […]
So in this version of the crisis of representation the plausibility of the paranoid style is not so much in its reasonableness, but rather in its revitalization of the romantic, the ability to tell an appealing, wondrous story found in the real.
Either version, then, of this condition of the inadequacy of established genres and forms of narrative in the face of watershed changes such as the full globalization of capital in its own changing forms creates the space for a kind of paranoid reasoning that can be entertained as plausible.
– Introduction, in Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (1999), pp. 2-5