Gonzaga Debate Institute 2011 Mercury Conspiracy Theory
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AT: ParanoiaThe mainstream’s attempts at silencing conspiracy theories construct an “Other” between those in power and those who question power Goshorn, Professor of American politics and cultural history, 2000 (Keith, Professor of American politics and cultural history, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames Of Containment: On Critical Paranoia And Anti-Conspiracy Discourse,” 2000, Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.3r_goshorn.html, JSkoog) 12. The idea that misguided souls are being duped by conspiracy theories issues from a long history of upper class leaders and elitist intellectuals who have always feared that "...the masses are still captive to ignorance and superstition," whereas those who had the means to lead and control society occupied the seat of logic and rationality. Yet when the lower classes have expressed suspicions of ruling class conspiracies to manipulate and dominate them, such narratives typically have been publicly ridiculed as mere paranoid fantasies in order to diminish their credibility. One of the most influential American academic theorists of propaganda, Harold Lasswell, could thus use this belief as the justification for the necessary "...development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda" which was "...the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery, or other possible control techniques."[7] And finally, as most of the recent writers discussed here are beginning to acknowledge, not only is it inaccurate to say that all those who "believe in" conspiracy theories are simply paranoid, but also to persecute those Others for believing in the wrong set of truth-claims resonates with a long series of earlier religious campaigns against heresies and ideological campaigns driven by a characteristically American counter-subversive impulse. Such persecution further re-enacts a familiar ritual of masculinist logic attempting to "feminize" its opponents.
(Keith, Professor of American politics and cultural history, “Strategies of Deterrence and Frames Of Containment: On Critical Paranoia And Anti-Conspiracy Discourse,” 2000, Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.3r_goshorn.html, JSkoog) Each year new evidence has appeared (helpless though it may be alone) which suggests that, at least since the late 1940's, there has been every reason to retain a hermeneutics of political suspicion and a healthy paranoia within reason regarding all official versions, and to remain open-minded toward nearly any alternative thesis of political cover-up, no matter how implausible it may at first appear. Such an attitude has been more than justified while observing an accelerating curve where deeds, programs, and policies, at first emphatically denied and officially disproven by numerous experts, subsequently take less and less time to arrive from the realm of the conspiratorial absurd, to the plausible, to the possible, to the probable, to the positively confirmable. Sometimes this process arrives through declassified or "liberated" documents from the deep archives of the official version, or occasionally by voluntary or forced admissions by representatives of government or corporate power which have reversed the status of what was long held at bay in the realm of "irresponsible" conspiracy theory into confirmable elements of the continually revised historical record. Needless to say, these developments have not alleviated the illusions of a mainstream consensus culture, nor have they yet altered the empty spectacle of electoral politics, but they have at least rekindled a semblance of popular, at times almost non-partisan opposition against the polyarchal rule of business as usual. Researching these dimensions of the relevant historical phenomena, especially the ever more complex problems of proof and evidence, is a far more valuable enterprise for academic researchers to pursue than the continual flogging of the easy target of popular conspiratorial delusions and paranoid suspicions.
Abduction NarrativesAlien abduction narratives are representative of the disruption in the global system Dean , Professor of Political Theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges ‘97 (Jodi, John Hopkins University Press “The Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction” Project MUSE, June 21, 2011, BLG) Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the "theft of enjoyment" can help us understand not just the thematization of passivity in the alien abduction narrative but also the way the program as a whole disrupts the fantasy of global citizenship.65 In his analysis of nationalism, Zizek suggests that we impute to the other an "excessive enjoyment," always suspecting the other of attempting to steal ours. He writes: "What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack ('castration') is original."66 In abduction, the alien takes away our agency, and the sense of security and certainty upon which our agency was predicated. This theft of agency is manifest not just in the power of the alien to paralyze us and abduct us at will but also in its technological superiority and pernicious breeding project. Because of its expertise, it takes away our pride in technological achievement. Because of its genetic investigations, it abducts our children, our ability to determine, or at least influence, our future. Zizek's formulation reminds us that the abduction narrative functions to conceal the fact that our agency was an illusion, just like our security and certainty. The technology has been controlling us, developing, spreading, replicating with its own momentum, a momentum no one of us can comprehend. We might have thought that our genes are all we have, but since we can't really be said to own or possess them (they constitute us, or so we are told), their theft by aliens marks our contradictory and ambiguous relationship to our own bio-chemistry. Alien Abductions narrate the experience of strangeness. Dean , Professor of Political Theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges ‘97 (Jodi, John Hopkins University Press “The Familiarity of Strangeness: Aliens, Citizens, and Abduction” Project MUSE, June 21, 2011, BLG) Despite or perhaps because of the excesses of privatization, the pervasive sense of the millennial US is that nothing is "ours," nothing is safe, secure, protected. Violence, abuse, poverty, and neglect disrupt familiar images of home. Some respond with vigorous interest in "Home Improvement" or Martha Stewart's complicated domestic projects, both explicit in their stress on the need to build and repair homes. Technology promised to save us time, to give us access to information. Like Hopkins' abductees, many of us today are missing time. Since what happens happens now, by the time we have assessed now it is then. We have too much data, but not enough to make any decisions because we are uncertain about the contexts and networks into which we might integrate this information. Our neighbors are aliens. Assimilation has been discredited as an ideal and multiculturalism hasn't become much more than a marketing strategy. Peaceful coexistence demands mental changes, accommodation, tolerance. Better to forget the neighbors, go inside, and enjoy cyber-citizenship on the World Wide Web. What happens to me alone, isolated, vulnerable is of global significance. Alien abduction narrates the predominant experience of the familiarity of strangeness in the techno-global information age. Unlike metaphors of colonization that presuppose borders to be penetrated and resources to be exploited, abduction operates with an understanding of the world, of reality, as amorphous and permeable. Colonization, moreover, brings with it the possibility of anti-colonial struggle, or resistance and independence. Abduction tells us there is nothing we can do. Colonial notions connote history. Abduction warps space and time. Whereas colonization implies an ongoing process with systemic limitations, abduction involves the sense that things are happening behind our backs, things have been done to us that we don't remember and probably couldn't bear if we did. To fight colonization, we take control. We don't fight abduction; we simply try to recover our memories, all the while aware that they could be false, that in our very recovery we participate in an alien plan. 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