(2020-05-31) Sloan The Conspiracy Museum

Robin Sloan: The Conspiracy Museum. REMARKS AS PREPARED BY WILLIAM K. SING, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN CONSPIRACY, FOR DELIVERY ON TUESDAY APRIL 16, 2041

Here’s a paradox:

• 1. No conspiracy-theory believer has ever been “talked out of” believing their chosen theory.
• 2. All conspiracy-theory believers, at some point, stop believing their chosen theory.

By what process, then, do the beliefs of conspiracy-theory believers change?

It’s boredom.

Boredom is the control rod of conspiracy, and maybe of democracy, too.

President Johnson’s post-Pyongyang global order runs, essentially, on conspiracy theory.

That’s not what the president calls it, of course. You know this administration’s foreign policy as Global Kayfabe. You might, additionally, know that the term is taken from professional wrestling.

Kayfabe: the presentation of staged events as real, with the understanding that the audience is in on it. Kayfabe: the eager suspension, on all sides, of disbelief.

This is an art museum. That’s important. Not a history museum, and not, as the Post has suggested, the Smithsonian’s second zoo.

This might be the deepest, widest folkway of them all. I’ll quote my colleague Helena Hwang, who calls conspiracy theories “the third great American art form, alongside jazz and superhero comics.”

As a historian, I believe in rigor and, yes, even truth.

[DRAMATICALLY] But.

As a historian, I also follow in the footsteps of Thomas Kuhn, the 20th-century historian of science who observed that new paradigms arrive not, as scientists would like us to believe—and would like to believe themselves—through vigorous argumentation.

The evolution of conspiracy theories isn’t so different. If anything, it’s faster!

By what process, then, do the beliefs of conspiracy-theory believers change?

A decade ago, I expected a war.

Great-power conflict has returned, but with … a calmness. Why? How?

I believe that this museum possesses the unlikely answer.

You know this administration’s foreign policy as Global Kayfabe.

The secretary of state will tell you his boss deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for this innovation in international relations, in which conflicts are staged loudly but bloodlessly

They both rely on the same eager suspension of disbelief

These are the stories that become cover for pogrom and genocide. They are serious, and the museum behind me takes them seriously. There are rooms inside that are painful to navigate; they feel like being inside the folds of a diseased mind. I don’t recommend them to everyone.

One of the great thrills of professional wrestling is something called the “heel turn.” In wrestling terms, a “face” is a hero, while a “heel” is a villain.

When a face becomes a heel—or, the opposite

The world is transformed

There are, I must inform you, a lot of aliens in the building behind me. [GESTURE BEHIND SELF] The Hall of Ancient Astronauts is my favorite part of the museum

In this kind of storytelling, there’s a beautiful syncretism

All right. I’ll abandon my kayfabe. There is no Smithsonian Museum of American Conspiracy behind me. No light-bending mesh. No two-story meme mosaic. It’s just the empty lot where FBI headquarters used to stand. We knocked that building down, but our opponents stopped us before we could lay a new foundation. Those opponents said this museum’s contents would be too vile.