Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 585, The Allseeing Eye, Part 2.

We left off last week with a discussion of conspiracy, conspiracy, and the difference between the two.

And because it's going to be very important for us this week, I want to take a moment to return to

under the eye of power

and the way it frames conspiracy as central to the history of the United States, because we'll

see, I think, that this analysis applies in many ways to Japan as well. Indeed, that's kind of

the point of this whole miniseries. For a quick reminder, because it's been a week since we've talked about this, unless you are one of the folks who binges a whole miniseries a whole miniseries. For a quick reminder, because it's been a week since we've talked about this,

unless you are one of the folks who binges a whole miniseries once it's done, in which case I'm

very sorry about all of the super long ones for the last few months. Conspiracism is,

according to author Colin Dickie, more or less fundamental to the history of American democracy.

Conspiracism, in in this rendering is basically the belief that the world is comprehensible as a

sort of invisible battle between unseen forces manipulating events to their own ends.

To borrow the words of the political scientist Carl Popper, it is a mindset that emerges

when you discard conventional notions of a world controlled by a god or the gods, and then put

something else, the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the lizard people, the world trade organization,

whatever, in their place. Often wrapped up in this mindset is a concept that the world is divided into this dualistic

battle between these controlling forces which represent absolute evil and the forces of good

which oppose them, and that that battle is foretold or understood in these symbolic ways that allow

the careful observer, in other words the conspiracist, to ferret out the nature of this battle

and the nefarious plot by picking up on the ways in which the leaders of the evil side

subtly betray their own intent.

In America, we tend to associate that worldview with two specific moments in American history, the Salem Witch Trials in the 1690s, and the McCarthy era or the second Red Scare of the 1950s.

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