Conspiracy theorists — 9/11 deniers, moon-landing paranoiacs, Cassandras of the New World Order — are the holy fools of our age. Things are not what they seem, they preach to us daily from their street corners and Web sites, and try as we might to ignore them, we can't help but soak up their toxic paranoia and narcissism in our best sellers and blockbusters. Pop culture has always had plots and conspiracies, of course — the first blockbuster was the white-supremacist epic Birth of a Nation, whose major theme was the secret agenda behind Southern Reconstruction. Back then conspiracy theory was a shocking device; today it's a marketing tool. This month Angels and Demons will be released, the latest installment of the conspiracy-themed global franchise spawned by Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. While Da Vinci starred Opus Dei, a Catholic organization whose secret, unstated mission is to suppress the knowledge that Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene, Angels and Demons takes on the Illuminati, a secular secret society that supposedly exists to impose Enlightenment on the world against its will. As far as Brown and his readers are concerned, it doesn't matter what purpose any given secret society serves — religion or atheism, the church or its opposite — just so long as there's a conspiracy. The hunger that Brown's books feed is not a hatred of one group or another but the fantasy that someone, whoever it may be, is running the show from behind the scenes. The rumor circulating about his next book, putatively titled The Solomon Key, is that it's about the Freemasons. Maybe Mel Gibson will get lucky and Brown will then move on to the Jews.

Brown's most bankable decision — and one mimicked by a string of best-selling imitators like and Steve Berry — was to avoid the mistake of overcomplication, making paranoid delusions of hidden power, which are usually esoteric and elaborate, simple enough that anyone with a grade-six education could understand them. The old adage that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people needs a caveat: Wide audiences can desire more difficulty, more confusion, more stripping away of the expected and apparent, but only for a while. The appeal of a show like Lost, at least at the beginning, was the feeling that nothing is ever what it seems. What is this island? Who are "the Others"? Why is Michael shooting Ana Lucia and Libby and then himself in the arm? The sensation of assumptions collapsing drove the show. Now Lost has collapsed under its own endless collapsing, its record-low ratings a symptom of intellectual exhaustion.

The paradox here is that while our appetite for bite-sized conspiracies in pop culture has never been stronger, our rejection of conspiracies in reality has never been more thorough. The Anti-Defamation League reported recently that the number of people who believe that the Jews control Hollywood is at a record low, down to 22 percent from nearly 50 percent in 1964. Spike Lee may say that one of the levees in New Orleans was blown up by the government to intentionally flood the Ninth Ward, but nobody pays attention to it. When the pope decided to rehabilitate members of the Society of Saint Pius X, he no doubt regarded the matter as a minor doctrinal question of little interest to anyone but theologians or historians of schism. Then the shitstorm landed. Bishop Richard Williamson, the most insane of the bunch, has a gift for boiling down conspiracy theories to their most basic: "The Jews created the Holocaust." The Twin Towers, he says, "were professionally demolished by a series of demolition charges from the top to the bottom of the towers." Who does he think he is: some Oscar-winning French starlet?

Any profession of belief in a conspiracy has become, automatically, a sign of dangerous delusion. Napoleon said that you should never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence, and the one positive legacy of the Bush years is that no one can sensibly believe in a "vast right-wing conspiracy" anymore. When they wheeled away Dick Cheney after Obama's inauguration, he was a Strangelovian symbol of all that is cruel and vicious, but who could say he ran the world? Who could still believe that Bush was capable enough to conspire? He could barely speak in complete sentences. The world is falling apart around us, and we are repulsed and attracted in equal measure by the idea of secret workings behind the collapse: We crave having someone to blame but recognize that our craving is fantastic. So we cower in conspiratorial delusions that we know cannot be true. If only there were a conspiracy, pop culture screams, if only there were a secret mechanism holding everything together. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality," T. S. Eliot wrote. The reality we can't bear to look at, however, isn't hidden groups of powerful men controlling everything but the more terrifying truth that there are no hidden groups of powerful men controlling everything. It's our deepest form of escapism to imagine a world in which we are powerless, because it excuses our selfishness. The real nightmare is that no one is to blame for the state of the world but ourselves.

Barack Obama has called for a new era of personal responsibility, seeking with the mighty arsenal of his celebrity to alter the mass dream we have fashioned for ourselves. From the beginning, his wife told anyone who would listen that her husband couldn't solve the country's or the world's problems, which is a hell of a way to run a presidential campaign. But the fad for conspiracy hasn't waned since he returned an aura of intelligent control to the White House. Which just goes to prove him right: No one can rid us of our lazy, self-indulgent fantasies, not even the most admired and powerful man in the world. Fixing ourselves, for once, has to be on us.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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