Written 16 June 2010, now slightly edited with slight additions:
Today as I approached my local supermarket to buy groceries, I saw a parked pickup truck with a number of bumper stickers on it, alleging conspiracies by the Illuminati, Wall Street (alleged also to have financed Lenin and Trotsky), 9-11-01 as an inside job, et al, with an assortment of other bumper stickers quoting left and right sources. And this thinking is hardly atypical, esp. among the uneducated and self-educated. By the appearance of things I assume this crackpot had to be white, but Washington is full of black people who think just like this. Large segments of the population are oriented towards occult explanations for social developments they don't understand and refuse to investigate otherwise.
Esoterism = fascism. Paranoia = gullibility. Unrestrained conspiracy-mongering = negation of critical thinking. Cynicism = credulity. The fascicization of American culture accelerates.
Links:
Cynicism & Conformity by Max Horkheimer
Georg Lukács on Irrationalism and Nazism: The Unity of Cynicism and Credulity
What Is Cynical Reason? Peter Sloterdijk Explains
Cynicism as a Form of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek
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