His Mini Austin had been designed especially for him. One evening, the car was involved in a swerve. The driver, seriously damaged, was taken to hospital. The news goes around the world, distorted, remodeled. Paul McCartney, the machine that produced the Beatles’ melodies, is he dead?
The year is 1966. The famous Beatles’ car was indeed involved in an accident. Only, it’s not Paul McCartney who’s in it. Whatever. Paul died at the wheel, we repeat. So how can we explain that the Beatles, the group that rightly claims to be more popular than Jesus Christ, continue to live without him? Because the decision was made to find a double for him. The surviving Beatles, helped by the British secret services, would have replaced him with a certain Billy Shears. This one seems well chosen since, since this incredible story, this substitute has given humanity many of the best-known melodies.
This rant about Paul McCartney’s supposed death has been widely studied. This is one of the longest-lived conspiracy theories. The day McCartney is really dead, we bet that there will be people who will claim that he is not, that he is hiding, just to rest, to take a breath. After all, doesn’t Elvis Presley live, as has been said a hundred times, on an island, not far from Marilyn Monroe or a few other idols whose disappearance we cannot accept?
Such myths take all kinds of forms in society, as long as they are animated by minds inclined to avoid a painful realization for themselves. Whether for McCartney in 1966 or for the pandemic we have just gone through, the modus operandi remains almost always the same: the reason appears at most decorative in these stories. It is never logical reasoning that determines the conclusion, but the conclusion that determines which path the reasoning should take.
The other day, at a Sherbrooke merchant’s, I listened with one ear to two friends discussing who maintained, both of them, by mutually reinforcing their whims, that no astronaut had ever put the feet on the Moon, that it was all a television studio setup. They had found purposes for this idea. So much so that it could only be true, they judged, in a complete logical inversion.
At the height of the QAnon movement, conspiracists were convinced that child trafficking, led by child sex offenders, existed in tunnels under Central Park, in the heart of New York, without anyone ever realizing it. In the same spirit, a pizzeria in Washington, Comet Ping Pong, according to them hosted activities of the same type, under the alleged direction of Hillary Clinton. Some poor guy, moved by this false news, arrived on site with a real assault weapon to free young hostages who had never existed. Which will not be enough to convince another pseudo-vigilante to open fire in the same place, in the name of the same madness.
Drifts, the radio series by Olivier Bernard, aka the Pharmachien, exposes the discourse of some of the rantings of conspiracy theorists within the medical world. Here is the absurd logic of Guylaine Lanctôt, removed from the College of Physicians for her comments, who tells you, in a long series of sophisms threaded one after the other, that HIV was created in the laboratory, that AIDS does not come from there. How many people, like singer Bernard Lachance, believed her at the risk of their lives?
If the forest catches fire, it is a state conspiracy, Brian Paré believed. He admitted before the Court to having lit a number of fires himself. For him, climate change is a fabrication of “our governments” and elites in “a conspiracy of the new world order”. If climate change is fabricated, as he believes, he still seemed to have resolved to create it, to the point of helping to suffocate a good part of Quebec in smoke last spring. Understand who can use such convoluted logic.
On Brian Paré’s Facebook page, we see, among other things, a helicopter pouring liquid fire onto large areas of forests. “This is happening in Canada,” he writes, without questioning what he is seeing. It offers a series of videos from the Chinese network TikTok, as if it were a source whose intentions were clear and pure as rock. Brian Paré also claims to admire Steeve “the artist” Charland, because he “always speaks the truth”. Charland is known to be one of the happy heads of the Farfadaas, a conspiracy group to which we owe, among other things, the blocking of the Louis-Hippolyte-La-Fontaine tunnel during the pandemic.
After attracting such confabulators to him during the pandemic, the leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, admits that he can’t take it anymore. He has just asked “those who would like us to only talk about the pandemic” to leave the small drifting ship of which he is steering as best he can.
What does the rise in conspiracy theory contribute to in recent years, if not to cement the neoliberal order in which we live? A lot of people have shitty lives. But while many minds are troubled by all kinds of fantasies, far from the boundaries of reality, very real human miseries persist.
Perhaps conspiracy theories serve, in this context, as psychological defense mechanisms. Which would also explain, at least in part, why, faced with the failure of our leaders to resolve the housing crisis, some only find themselves repeating that it is the fault of immigrants and falling in love with the vague theory of the great replacement. .