- 2 On the controversy between the archeologists, Netflix and Hancock see for example: https://www.then (...)
1In the Timaeus, Plato (2008) tells of a legendary island located beyond the Pillars of Hercules, “bigger than both Asia and Libya combined” (24e), an actual continent in which “a great and remarkable dynasty had arisen” (25a). A flourishing and prosperous land that disappeared “in the course of a single, terrible day and night” (25d) because of “appalling earthquakes and floods” (25c). The island “sank beneath the sea and vanished. That is why the sea there cannot now be navigated or explored; the mud left behind as it settled lies a little below the surface and gets in the way” (25d). This is the first record in Western culture of the myth of Atlantis. A long-lived myth, surprisingly from fifth-century Athens reaches today’s techno-scientific world. It is featured in a controversial and successful TV docuseries produced by Netflix: The Ancient Apocalypse by Graham Hancock2.
2The author is a British journalist who has written numerous bestsellers (e.g., Hancock 1995), many of which argue for the existence of an ancient civilization, highly evolved from a technical standpoint, which then disappeared in the last ice age (about 12,000 years ago), and perhaps now lies buried at the bottom of the sea, just like Atlantis. Although no artifacts are traceable to this lost civilization, according to Hancock, the world would be littered with traces that remove all doubt, and several alleged mysteries that archaeology cannot answer would be solved if the evidence of the actions of our sapient ancestors were accepted. These evolved ancestors would have passed on advanced architectural and astronomical skills through which it would have been possible to build some complex sites, such as the pyramid of Cholua in Mexico or the Maltese temple of Ggantja. This is an imaginative reconstruction unsupported by empirical evidence and rejected by the scientific community3.
3In Hancock’s view, the reasons for this rejection lie in the fact that accepting its inconvenient truths would impose a paradigm shift, intolerable to scholarly credibility (according to the standard reconstruction, the tremendous human technical development happened after, not before, the last ice age (see, e.g., Barker 2009). In other words, there would be a conspiracy by academic archaeologists to keep the journalist’s sensational findings hidden for fear of losing prestige and power.
- 4 On conspiracy theories from a rhetorical point of view, see Danblon, Nicolas 2010, Donckier de Donc (...)
4In the Netflix documentary, this version is given voice through eight episodes in which the author is also the narrator. In what follows, we will treat his speeches as a textual corpus to be analyzed through a rhetorical perspective4. Although a docuseries persuades not only through words but also through images, music, and editing, we will dwell exclusively on the linguistic component. However, discourse analysis will interact with a philosophical reading of some general aspects of conspiracy theories. We will begin with a theoretical paragraph where we interpret the phenomenon as a form of superstition and compare it with magical thinking. Then, we will focus on rhetorical analysis, analyzing our case study through the lens of the three technical proofs of Aristotelian rhetoric: éthos, pathos, and logos. We will show that a profound ambivalence marks the conspiracy perspective: it captures decisive knots of the contemporary world but gives a partial and rambling reading of it.
- 5 For a more detailed discussion of superstition and magic, see Mazzeo 2020 and 2023.
- 6 On conspiracy theories as systems, see also Nicolas 2010.
5Let us begin with a definition, perhaps a debatable one. The world of conspiracy is a world of superstition. We do not intend to argue for an identity between the two concepts. There are forms of superstition that cannot be ascribed to conspiracy theories, such as the belief that black cats bring bad luck. Instead, we hypothesize that to understand conspiracy theories better, it is helpful to conceive of them as a superstitious type of worldview (Weltanschauung), that is, as a hermetic system of beliefs, compact and isolated6.
6Superstition acts as a defense against what Ernesto de Martino (1948) calls “crisis of presence”, namely, the loss of reference points and consequent practical paralysis that, in some instances, can affect an animal lacking specialized instincts (Gehlen 1940) such as homo sapiens. Magism, too, is a cultural-historical form through which humans defend themselves from the presence in crisis: the magical ritual has the practical function of re-establishing an order that has somehow been violated and restoring balance with natural and supernatural forces. The human being belonging to the magical world comes into crisis, for example, when faced with death, illness, or birth. In that context, the ritual serves to contain that crisis and calm the community, and thus, the deceased can travel peacefully to the afterlife, and the sick can heal. Superstition is similar to magic because both, as we shall see, serve this function of containment.
7And yet, their fundamental differences compel us to keep the two phenomena distinct, more like distant cousins than Siamese twins. Marcel Mauss (1927) reminds us that magic is a practical art. It resolves issues, settles conflicts, and soothes the environmentless animal’s existential anguish. In contrast, superstition is not a set of codified practices but a body of beliefs that acts as a shield against reality. It provides some explanations, contradictory and implausible, to facts. It thus deludes those who believe in it into thinking that they control events, or at least it limits the weight of contingencies. It, therefore, seems to be a way to curb the sense of powerlessness (Virno 2021) that often afflicts the human animal.
8From this perspective, conspiracy can be regarded as superstitious thinking: it provides explanations and thus serves a consolatory function. More specifically, contemporary conspiracy theories help to stem the massive flow of stimuli typical of the mundane condition, amplified by technological development (info-stress, inattention as the average mode of attention), which produces a combinatorial explosion of possibilities about the “how” of life and its “why”. Conspiracy contributes to reducing this combinatorial explosion. It is the impotent thinking that protects by explaining what would not need an explanation (the role of contrails left in the sky by airplanes) and does not reflect on what instead organizes our lives (for instance, on the meaning and logic of the neoliberal cosmos: De Carolis 2017).
9The second difference between words wrongly often employed as synonyms (“superstition” and “magic”) consists in the fact, as De Martino again reminds us, that magical thinking does not merely signal the crisis of human presence because it is a form of political organization of redemption. The shaman is not the thermometer of the vital fragility of the Tungusi grappling with the Siberian climate; he is the one who temporarily brings that collective world out of crisis. He defeats enemy shamans with fights conducted in a trance-like state, predicts the end of the storm, and discovers hidden causes of death present in the village. The actual powerless conspiracy theorist, on the contrary, does not actively fight the crisis of presence but accepts it. He takes for granted the absence of reference points typical of our highly technological time (Anders 1980, Virno 1999), does not question its historical origins, nor does anything to end it. The conspiracy theorist is in a paradoxical condition: on the one hand, he happily swims in the crisis as if it were his natural environment. On the other, he is filled with frustration, anger, and resentment (see below § 4); he feels like he is drowning. And so, in this sea of powerlessness, he clings to something to float and identifies an alleged culprit (the archaeologist, the politician, the bank of the day) to whom he can lay the most diverse blame. In this way, he prevents himself and others from focusing on the typical difficulties of the historical era to which archaeologists, politicians, or banks belong.
10The world of superstition, resplendent in the age of the most advanced technology, paradoxically resembles a world that is not post- but pre-magical. To clarify the point, drawing an analogy with the phenomenon of olonism, which is typical of magical civilizations, may be helpful. The name is derived from “olon”, a Tungus term used to refer to a specific psychic condition, which occurs following a “shock brought about by a particular exciting content” (De Martino 1948: 73, our transl.), but which also occurs in the face of strong emotion. It is characterized by “the establishment of an indiscriminate coinonia” (ibid.: 74, our transl.), that is, by a fusion with the surrounding reality and a loss of individual boundaries. Its is a trance state in which the “presence tends to remain polarized in a certain content, fails to go beyond it, and therefore disappears and abdicates as presence” (ibid.: 73, our transl.). In olonism, there is a robust imitative drive: the one affected by it becomes a kind of echo of the surrounding reality: for example, he replicates the rustling of leaves or the movements of his neighbor. It is a painful condition that greatly frightens tribe members of low-tech populations. We said this is a pre-magic phenomenon because, according to anthropologists, magic is an institution that arises precisely to end the collapse of presence. The shaman intervenes with a public and collective ritual to end the emergency. The olonism alone, without magical redemption, is the simple fragility of the individual whose presence echoes the surroundings without the horizon of an alternative organization of the public sphere.
- 7 About this point see, for example, Brizianelli, Armano, 2017 (the French word “spectacle” correspon (...)
11In our view, the definition of olonism seems to be the ante litteram identikit of today’s superstition. The conspiracy theorist suffers from a sort of third-millennium olon: indeed, he lives a condition of fragility of presence due to a productive world punctuated by constant technological shocks. In the case of the populations studied by anthropologists, the sense of reality was lost, and an echo of a perceptual and sense-motor nature took over. In contrast, in the contemporary world, the echo is informational-communicative. Reality becomes blurred and gives way to the echo chambers of social media-related info stress: the news (“airplane contrails are secret tools to control the weather”), or supposedly so, becomes an echo of one news, in turn, an echo of another, in an endlessly self-confirming field of experience. In this world so rich in information that it is difficult to distinguish between signal and noise (De Carolis 2004), Graham Hancock is ideally at home, so much so that he published his documentary with accompanying scandal on precisely one of the most representative platforms of the contemporary society of the “spectacle” (Debord 1967-1992)7.
12In Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that éthos, the technical proof based on the speaker’s credibility, is “the most authoritative form of persuasion” (Rhet., 1356 a2-13). Hancock seems to have read the treatise with profit, as he insists heavily on constructing his character as a reliable figure precisely because he is inconvenient. The docuseries opens with an introduction of the narrator, with several excerpts from interviews given by Hancock in previous television shows or podcasts. He represents himself as opposed to the scientific community, which is guilty of seeing him with smoke in the eyes for his unorthodox research:
- [Interviewer] How would you describe yourself?
- [Hancock] [chuckles] How would I describe myself?
[Footage from a past television interview]
- [Interviewer] You’ve been described as a pseudo-archaeologist.
- [Hancock] I have.
- [Interviewer] Someone who cherry-picks your data. Your books are read by millions but dismissed by academics.
[Footage from another past television interview]
- [Interviewer] Did you know you were picking a fight with academia? Because a lot of people don’t want to hear this.
[Footage from another past interview, the interviewer is Joe Rogan, a famous podcaster who often spreads conspiracy theories]
- [Joe Rogan] You have been at the front of the line for decades and you exposed me to a lot of these controversial ideas that have now been substantiated.
[Back to Hancock, who answers the initial question]
- Well, I’m Graham Hancock. I don’t claim to be an archaeologist or a scientist. I am a journalist and the subject that I’m investigating is human prehistory. My suspicion is humans are a species with amnesia. We have forgotten something incredibly important in our own past. And I think that that incredibly important forgotten thing is a lost, advanced civilization of the Ice Age. I’ve spent decades searching for proof of this lost civilization at sites around the globe. Now my aim is to piece together these clues […] to show you evidence that challenges the traditional view of human history. […] Ancient structures built with surprising sophistication […] revealing the fingerprints of an advanced prehistoric civilization. […] The possibility of civilization emerging earlier than we think gets much stronger […]. Of course, this idea is upsetting to the so-called experts who insist that the only humans who existed during the Ice Age were simple hunter-gatherers. That automatically makes me enemy number one to archaeologists.
[Footage from another past television interview]
- [Interviewer] Why not say, “We don’t know. This is a spectacular mystery, and leave it at that”?
- [Hancock] It’s my job to offer an alternative point of view. Perhaps there’s been a forgotten episode in human history. But perhaps the extremely defensive, arrogant and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility.
[Back to Hancock again]
I’m trying to overthrow… the paradigm of history (Hancock 2022: Episode 1, from minute 00:15).
13This kind of strategy, which we can call the éthos of the outsider, is typical of conspiracy speeches (Danblon 2010, Zagarella, Annoni 2019, Donckier de Donceel 2022). The speaker represents himself as an outsider, and in doing so, he pits himself against the conspirators: eager to spread shocking knowledge, he is hindered by those who instead have an interest in keeping the community in the dark to preserve a position of privilege. He is an anti-system hero, a victim of the establishment he bravely challenges. In this case, the establishment is the official science, and using the term “mainstream”, which Hancock often employs to qualify academic archaeologists, for example, in the text cited above, does not seem coincidental. Opposed to the conformist mainstream, the presenter becomes the bearer of an underground truth, of an alternative thought that pays dearly with undeserved marginality.
- 8 Hancock accuses archaeologists of not accepting his theory partly because they are not sufficiently (...)
14In other words, to produce persuasion through éthos relies heavily on artifactual polarization, a clash of factions. On one side, a credited and powerful force, on the other, a lonely and marginalized fighter (Angenot 1982). Not surprising then is the warlike lexicon to which the speaker resorts, speaking of himself in terms of the “enemy number one to archaeologists”, nor is the use of dialectical weapons such as mockery, ridicule, and insult/defamation albeit veiled against the opponent8. The ongoing battle is the Enlightenment conflict between truth and obscurantism, between the noble desire to know and partisan interests. Indeed, the scholarly community would be fierce precisely because Hancock’s work undermines the foundations of the discipline and, in so doing, launches an untenable attack on the credibility of scholars, who cannot accept a new paradigm because they would then see their rents fall:
[Hancock] Why is archaeology so opposed to the notion of earlier humans? Changing a paradigm is no easy business. When a particular mindset has become the preoccupation of a group of scholars in a particular field, they are so reluctant to let go of it, they become existentially attached to it, and an attack on the paradigm becomes an attack on them, and they vigorously defend it (Hancock 2022: Episode 3, from minute 14:47).
15The opposition between the speaker and the dominant institution is, in short, one of the argumentative moves most insisted on, to the point that the introduction of several episodes (1, 2, 3, 4) takes it up like a mantra. In its most reckless version, this éthos of the outsider goes so far as to construct the figure of a moral hero who carries out his mission with a quasi-religious bent. In episode six, Hancock stands near an archaeological site in Louisiana, Serpent Mound. He would like to enter to film it up close, but he needs permission: the management has decided to ban him to avoid colluding with a narrative that contradicts what scholars have ascertained. The opportunity is too great not to cry “censorship”, and our presenter does not let it pass: “What more effective way for archaeologists to censor and restrain and crush opposing views than to deny access to archaeological sites?” (Hancock 2022: Episode 6, from 18:06)
16Let us now ask: is really a character such as Hancock and, more generally, a conspiracy theorist, an outsider? Is he indeed external to what he says he wants to fight? We guess that, in fact, he is not an outsider enough. As we have seen, the conspiracy theorist does not refer to an alternative ideological horizon to that of the culture he fights. Our speaker battles in the name of truth and science. He flaunts Enlightenment-like stances, such as claiming freedom of expression. His proposal consists of an equal and opposite version of the official one; he would like to replace credited truths not only in the name of (alleged) facts but also in the name of the values of the world where he lives. Paradoxically, the critique of the establishment reconfirms the authority of the established order: those in leadership positions are not up to the task, it would be time for a replacement, a turnover, but not for the reorganization of the establishment as such. After all, Hancock would like his rambling theses to replace those of the accredited archaeologists, the COVID-19 denier would like to make sanitary decisions, and the follower of QAnon wants the most radical Republicans in power.
- 9 Of course, Debord’s diagnosis is politically engaged, which, in our view, does not make it any less (...)
17Regardless of the problems of the arguments themselves - which we will focus on in the next paragraph - we want to highlight another aspect of these seemingly gloomy discourses. Beyond appearances, it is an unexpectedly optimistic way of reasoning. Moved by an understandable dissatisfaction and discomfort typical of the present time, the conspiracist blames it on some local conspiracy, that is, on the treachery of individuals or groups in power. It is optimistic to believe that someone’s evil intentions are behind the problems that agitate the present world and not to question the institutional framework that organizes the world in which we live. It is optimistic because it envisions an all-too-simple solution consisting of replacing the people in the command posts with better-intentioned ones. With a metaphor: the ship is fine, but those who steer it are incompetent. A more competent and well-intentioned captain will lead the crew to port. Although this is not the place to delve into this question, it seems more promising to link contemporary hardships not so much to the wickedness of supposed masters of the world, but to the changes that characterized the past decades and determined the new world order. In this regard, Guy Debord’s diagnosis has not lost its relevance. In a 1992 text (Debord 1967-1992), the philosopher and filmmaker pointed out that the new post-Cold War institutional landscape is characterized by the triumph of the mercantile economy and by an essentially technological and anonymous governance. A mode of production (Marx, Engels 1845) that has now become widespread throughout the world and has been referred to by various terms. Choose whichever you prefer: globalization, neoliberal capitalism, postmodernism, entertainment society. The substance does not change. In such a scenario, turning on the conspiracy of the powerful men on duty seems to us something akin to looking at the finger when someone points to the moon9.
18Hancock’s discourse is marked by specific recurring strategies that seriality brings out with clarity, techniques employed recursively, giving each episode the same structure. A repetitive pattern at once reassuring and hypnotic, lending itself to caging the listener patiently, without impetuosity. First, we note all the continuous and unwarranted shifts from the conditional to the indicative. It is such a frequent move that indicating a precise textual place makes no sense. The same applies to counterfactual and/or hypothetical expressions introduced by phrases such as “what if” and “as if”. An alternative hypothesis is suggested without arguing for it, it is dropped and allowed to settle. Then, there are times when proper logical fallacies support that hypothesis. For example, the fallacy named “complex question”: this is the case with “is it just coincidence?” which insinuates the absence of chance, but also more articulate questions. The fourth episode is devoted to the underwater rock formation of Bimini, Bahamas, considered to be of natural origin by the scientific community, while the speaker would like to pass it off as artificial:
[Hancock] If this formation was simply the product of natural tidal forces, as geologists insisted when it was first discovered, why would the shorter section of the road lie at an angle to the main one? Wouldn’t they be parallel? And why don’t we see other such formations nearby? (Hancock 2022: Episode 4, from minute 09:58)
19From the same episode, we can take the example of another fallacy in a sequence in which the journalist is engaged in a discussion with one of his associates. After a dive to watch the Bimini rock formation, Hancock talks with a marine biologist called Michael Haley, who is helping him in the submarine exploration:
- [Hancock] It’s very hard for me to see how nature could have made it.
- [Haley] I’ve never seen beach rock fracture in that way. Have you?
- [Hancock] Me neither. And it speaks to me loudly of human workmanship.
- [Haley] Looks like it very well could be a man-made structure.
- [Hancock] If I’m right, it must have been made at a time when this part of the Bahamas was above water (Hancock 2022: Episode 4, from minute 11:16)
20Since he finds no arguments to support the claim that the rock is of natural origin, he concludes that it was man-made. This is the argumentum ad ignorantiam, by which he argues the truth of a proposition from the fact that the (presumed) falsehood of its negation has not been established.
21However, the most interesting aspects of Hancock’s discourse do not lie in fallacies, but in two other argumentative resources worth dwelling on. First, on the use, explicitly claimed on several occasions, of “folk stories, legends, myths” as “important evidence” (Hancock 2022: Episode 2, from minute 01:25) of an alternative version to the one we have been accustomed to believe. In all the episodes, there is a moment when the argument draws on tales from various mythologies (Egyptian, Greek, pre-Columbian, Zoroastrian, and biblical accounts). The story of the Flood, Atlantis, and the myth of Prometheus would all demonstrate the existence of an evolved civilization well before the time set by archaeologists. The procedure is as fascinating as it is crass: the naivety with which mythology is claimed as historical evidence is astonishing, with a confusion of domains so methodologically untenable that it alone casts doubt on the integrity of the entire documentary. A rambling version of history that stands on unreliable stories.
22And yet, it is precisely this naivety that is particularly instructive as it is revealing. The conspiracy theorist, an apparent critic of the world in which he lives, seems to glimpse the mythological aspect of our present precisely because he produces a mythological alternative. To what are we referring? To the commonsense slogans that ours is the “best of all possible worlds” to which “there is no alternative”. The idea is that ours is the era of the “end of history” (Jameson 1991), in which change of the status quo is not only impossible but even unthinkable. That this mythology is to be rejected is somehow present to the conspiracy theorist, yet he contrasts it with an equally mythological superstitious narrative. At the end of the fourth episode, Hancock establishes a parallel between the present time and the time of Atlantis’ disappearance:
[Hancock] It wasn’t just because of a cataclysm. It was because the arrogance, the hubris, the pride that had grown up within Atlantis. This is why Atlantis was destroyed. Because it had fallen out of harmony with the universe. And I think that our civilization today is in a very similar predicament. We have fallen out of harmony with the universe. Our conceit at our own achievements, our willingness to impose our power around the world on other less powerful peoples. All these things in mythological terms would suggest that our civilization is in a very great danger (Hancock 2022: Episode 4, from minute 27:28).
23The risks characteristic of the current model of development (“our civilization”) are present to the speaker, who nevertheless does not attribute them to a structural factor (what we called “mode of production”) but, in full conspiracy style, to negative moral qualities (“arrogance, hubris, pride”) that we should amend with greater self-awareness. The burden is on the shoulders of inadequate individuals instead of the productive structure that organizes life on earth.
24The second point worth addressing is the ambiguous terms in which Hancock speaks of his research. On the one hand, intending to legitimize the work he has accomplished, he continually describes human prehistory as an enigma with a problematic solution, a “mystery,” something “inexplicable.” Words of this tenor, however, are coupled with expressions of the opposite sign, whereby the answers provided by the speaker would be “unmistakable,” “obvious,” “clear.” The discourse moves skillfully between unspeakable secret and palisade, a game in which one thing is valid but also its contrary, with sovereign indifference to the law of non-contradiction.
25In this respect, conspiratorial superstition has something in common with the magical thinking from which we started. Both use a logic that Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1949) calls “participatory.” According to this modality, the essence is “bipresence” (ibid.: 5, our transl.) both in spatial terms (the sorcerer can be “in place F at T o’clock” and simultaneously “in place G at T o’clock”, 9, our transl.) and in temporal terms since “to be two things successively is the same as to say that they are simultaneous” (40, our transl.). These are not, per se, prelogical or delusional modes of thought. For example, they are necessary to understand more complex rational phenomena, such as mathematical problems related to the infinity of number series (Matte Blanco 1975). It is a pre-individual logic in which the principle of pars pro toto applies (Lévy-Bruhl 1949: 90). It is a participatory logic because it embodies the political principle of participation: what affects you also involves me (bipresence); the future of the species is also its present (and vice versa: bitemporality). This logic of ambivalence (Mazzeo 2009) is one of the engines of ethical-political transformation. Superstition ambivalently stages the ambivalent logic as such. It is ambivalent because it oscillates between conspiratorial closure and possible openness to redemption proper to magical thinking. More: superstition is an ambivalent expression of the constitutive ambivalence of the human animal, of the logic that animates political participation. For this reason, it is particularly obscene or, for those who adhere to it, so attractive. Superstitious dress is as obscene as an overly tight shirt and all transparency: it gives a glimpse of the body underneath, the participatory politicity of our lives, which the solitary, heroic conspirator can only awkwardly imitate.
- 10 We prefer the French word to the English “resentment”, which has a slightly different meaning. On r (...)
26In The Ancient Apocalypse, pathos is not the most relevant persuasive strategy; logos and éthos occupy the scene. However, the use of techniques to arouse emotions is not absent: the narrative is constructed in such a way as to give the documentary a mysterious aura, not least through the skillful use of rarefied music. Hancock’s constant allusions produce an atmosphere of suspicion, an emotional tone not far from that typical of crime or thriller series, though more muffled. However, the affections most often associated (Danblon 2010) with conspiracy, i.e., ressentiment10 and indignation, are not major players. The speaker’s tone is quiet and calm, his elegant British accent ill-suited to inflame tempers. It is hard to imagine a viewer feeling ressentiment, a passion instead attributable to the presenter’s enemies, forced to suffer the “wrath of mainstream academia” (Hancock 2022: Episode 4, minute 24:40) or to note with mild displeasure that “many archaeologists hate me” (Episode 2, minute 00:23). These are statements in the face of which it is more likely to assume indignation at the unfair treatment received by the protagonist, a blameless victim (Giglioli 2014).
27An icy detachment, a continuous suspension, generally characterizes the documentary. Hancock does not get angry or go on a rampage but persuades with the calm, cool force of (alleged) truth. We are accustomed to attributing to the supporters of conspiracy theories sad and strong passions, fits of anger, and fits of rage. And yet the absence of this emotional force allows, perhaps, a typical trait of conspiracy superstition in general to come into focus. Beyond the smoky blanket of shouted and resentful indignation often lies an ill-concealed helplessness, a resigned “disposition to inaction” (Danblon 2009). The idea that unhappiness is due to one or more conspiracies is deeply consolatory (as well as optimistic): there is someone to blame, an enemy to blame. At the same time, however, it manifests an absence of grip on reality, a mocking distance. Hancock’s cold, detached discursive posture reveals the detachment from the world that his words try to stem, providing a superstitious shield of ad hoc assumptions and outlandish tales. It is an effective shield, but up to a point: the woes of an ancient civilization cannot stop the cracks in the ground that today seem to be collapsing underfoot.
28In conclusion, let us briefly summarize the theoretical stances advocated in our philosophical-rhetorical analysis. We believe that conspiracy theories should be conceived as a type of superstition, which we contrast with magic. Whereas magic is a practical institution aimed at overcoming crises (death, illness), superstition is a block of beliefs with which one deludes into, believing he can contrast the crisis, even if he does nothing to fight it. The function of conspiracy-superstition is consolatory: it provides an explanation of the origin of our problems and one (or more) culprits to blame. Even though they may seem catastrophic, conspiracy theorists are actually optimistic because they believe that certain groups of individuals have the power to determine the planet’s fate for better or worse. On the contrary, we argued in the article that the contemporary crisis that conspiracy theories try to answer does not depend on someone’s evil intentions but on today’s institutional framework and development model. An anonymous and global order, without masters, which Debord had called the society of the spectacle.
29In Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse, we find the characteristics just listed. In addition to them, we have highlighted some rhetorical properties of Hancock’s speeches, analyzed in the light of the technical proofs of Aristotelian rhetoric. From the standpoint of éthos, the author presents himself as an outsider enemy of the establishment. From the perspective of logos, his discourse is full of fallacies and references to mythology, used as historical evidence. All of this shows evident confusion between domains. Unusually, Hancock’s discourse does not rely heavily on pathos and instead of showing the customary ressentiment denotes icy detachment. As if he did not need to appeal to emotions, but could persuade only by the force of his speeches and character.
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