Thread by @YUKOWAS

Through the lenses of cultural history, the Great Seal of the United States may be interpreted as a permanent reminder of that noble fiction, that vision- ary and—compared with the hotchpotch of the real word—somewhat surreal aspiration. It represents the pursuit of happiness

and the striving for perfection on a global scale, based on universal values and human rights, as a commit- ting legacy of the Enlightenment. At the same time, it could be perceived as an echo of the dialectics of enlightened politics.

This way, it becomes an icono- graphic memento of the negative structural affinities, the ideological analogies and reciprocal imaginary homologies between conspiratorial master plans and the idea of worldwide “good governance” under the aegis of a superpower,

using military force to destroy conspiracies from the inside and outside.
From an analytic stance, this means perhaps that the problem we are confronted with today is neither the existence of conspiracy theories nor the widespread belief in dark powers

but the “mass production of hate” by exorcising the other. Inter- cultural exchange and migration are certainly producing different kinds of problems, which are also the result of economic disparities and social inequal- ity worldwide.

The perception and reinterpretation of these problems in terms of ethnicity and cultural irreconcilability lead the argumentation astray. The dangerous political mythology of the twenty-first century is the theory of an inescapable “clash of civilizations,”

which can be won only with preemptive strikes and the systematic symbolic degradation of invented enemies.

The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers

Jakob Tanner