Kilgore Trout Died For Our Sins
Kurt Vonnegut's good friend knew the cure for conspiracy theories
There’s always been bullshit masquerading as truth. There’s always been people willing to distort truth for their own personal gain. And there’s always been people pushing conspiracy theories, with the number one theory always being that a cabal controls many aspects of society.
It’s nothing new.
But it seems nowadays, it’s been taken to exponential heights and mind-numbing lengths.
Take the school shooting in May, 2022 that occurred in Uvalde, Texas. Hours after the shooting was over, the cranks on right-wing message boards were lighting up.
“I’m sorry but I have to say it,” one poster wrote on a far-right message board. “We have to have another false flag shooting, killing small children.”
And another person posted, “Those directing false flags know the emotional response from the Buffalo shooting is wearing down for the sheep. So they did another one in Uvalde, Texas to reinforce the response. Don’t be fooled. False Flag season is here.”
Or take the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, when Alex Jones, with his InfoWars broadcast, continued to pound the idea that Sandy Hook was all staged, that nobody died, and that it was all done as a pretense for the government to take away the guns of citizens.
It’s not just Alex Jones or a couple of posters on message boards saying that. Today, one-fifth of Americans, along with some prominent politicians, believe all major mass shootings are staged.
The biggest bullshit right now going around is something that the former Attorney General of the U.S., William Barr, has precisely called “bullshit”: the idea, propagated by Donald Trump and his minions, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It’s a conspiracy theory of mammoth proportions, one believed by 65 percent of Republican voters.
How does this blurring of the lines of reality happen?
Like I said, the promoting of conspiracy theories is nothing new. As long as humans have walked the earth, disinformation has been around.
Sometimes the disinformation is benign, in someone just getting facts wrong, while other times it’s a malicious attempt to counter facts to further one person or a group’s agenda, an agenda aimed to enrich the perpetrators of the falsehood, allow them to rise to or consolidate power, or elevate the falsehood in order to sway as many people as possible. Often all three of these factors are at play at the same time.
It’s not hard for lies to spread, and as they do it can threaten the very existence of democracy. Conspiracy theories fueled both the American Revolution and Civil War, and have continued to plague the U.S. over its history.
Phillip Roth identified this conspiracy strain and the American tendency to get a wee bit crazy as “the indigenous American berserk,” as he called it in his book American Pastoral.
America today is a land suffering under enormous wealth inequality—which is the problem that lies at the root of America’s ills—and it has a system that exists of, for, and by the plutocracy.
Yet at the same time, it’s a place where many people can’t comprehend this because of their inability to differentiate truth from fiction, due to the propagation of conspiracy theories—these lead them to believe it’s their fellow citizens who are the bane of their existence.
A large percentage of the population is angry and frustrated at how wrong things have gone, but because they’ve been radicalized by disinformation, they can’t see the forest for the trees. We’ve been to this rodeo before, though: it’s not the first time people have been duped by disinformation, nor will it be the last.
Take anti-Semitic conspiracies, in which Jews have been blamed for many of the world’s ills. These conspiracy ideas have been around since the birth of Christianity.
During the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of causing the Black Death by poisoning wells, and of ritually consuming the blood of Christians.
In 1543, Martin Luther, famed for challenging the Catholic Church with his Ninety-Five Theses, wrote a pamphlet, “On the Jews and Their Lies,” in which he emphatically stated, “I shall give you my sincere advice. First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.”
Then there’s the document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is still cited by many conspiracy theorists as proof that a cabal of Jewish bankers maintain control of the world.
It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and propagated internationally in the early part of the 20th century.
According to the claims made by its publishers, the Protocols are the minutes of a late 19th century meeting where Jewish leaders discussed their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of non-Jews, and by controlling the press and the worlds’ economies.
Because it was first published in Russia, it led to claims that Jewish bankers were behind the Russian Revolution and that Russian Bolshevism was a Jewish phenomenon.
Despite being exposed as fraudulent by The Times of London in 1921, Henry Ford printed 500,000 copies and distributed it throughout the U.S. in the 1920s, and Adolf Hitler, as a major proponent, had it studied, as though factual, in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power in 1933.
It is still widely available today in numerous languages, in print and online, and continues to be presented by its proponents as genuine.
In contemporary times, the anti-Semitic belief that Jews control the world shows up every time George Soros, who is Jewish and seen as the boogeyman to every right-wing conspiracy theorist, gets blamed for the world’s ills.
The ugliness of anti-Semitism riveted by conspiracy beliefs also showed up as the rallying cry “Jews will not replace us!,” shouted out by white supremacists who converged on Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.
After World War II, the conspiracy movement expanded its list of targets to include communists. The Cold War had begun and the Soviet Union and the threat of a communist takeover of the U.S. was now a primary concern.
Seizing on the moment, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed the government was overrun by communists. In 1950, in a fiery speech on the Senate floor, McCarthy stated he had a list of “members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring” who were in the State Department.
McCarthy continued his scorched earth policy for a few years, and in the process, destroyed the lives and careers of numerous people.
He finally pushed it too far when he accused President Dwight Eisenhower as being part of the communist conspiracy. The Senate at last had enough and censured him in 1954; fully disgraced, he died in 1957 at the age of 48 of liver cancer.
But McCarthy’s death wasn’t the end of the anti-communist paranoia in the U.S. The year after McCarthy died, in 1958, two men, Robert Welch and Fred Koch (Koch was the father of Charles and David Koch of Koch Brothers fame; Fred Koch also successfully started Koch Industries by building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler), began the John Birch Society.
The John Birch Society is a far right-wing organization devoted to anti-communism and racism. Fred Koch accused President John F. Kennedy of being a communist (as McCarthy had done of Eisenhower), and also once said that “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to takeover America.”
A couple of years later, in 1964, the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published in Harper’s Magazine.
Hofstadter wrote the essay after Barry Goldwater gained the Republican presidential nomination; to Hofstadter, Goldwater represented a particular style of conspiracy theory, that, as Hofstadter noted in his essay, had been around a long time in one iteration or another.
After surveying the varieties of paranoid conspiracy thinking throughout American history, in which it was believed the country was under attack at one time or another from varied sources, including international bankers (code word for Jews), Catholics and the Pope, Masons, the Illuminati, Mormons, Jesuits, and the nation of Austria, Hofstadter brought his essay up to date by stating that the contemporary conspiratorial minded were primarily situated on the far-right of the political spectrum.
Hofstadter wrote in his essay that:
“The modern right wing feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.”
Hofstadter wrote this in 1964, but it would be just as relevant if it was written at this precise moment in time, because while the names have changed, the paranoid conspiracy ideas remain the same.
And now, in the age of social media, the proliferation of conspiracy ideas has reached epidemic proportions. Social media has given credence to all kinds of bizarre ideas, from Pizzagate to QAnon to a stolen election and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. And all of these ideas are believed by tens of millions of people.
We are truly witnessing a real-life theater of the absurd.
In service to absurdity, let me show you the solution, in the person of Kilgore Trout.
In case you don’t him, Trout was a a failed science fiction writer, even though he was a prolific author of 117 novels and 2000 short stories; his writings primarily were used only as filler material in pornographic magazines.
Sadly, Trout died destitute, never recognized for his brilliance.
One of his short stories is the remedy for all the conspiracy theorists out there. This story, The Protocol of the Elders of Tralfamadore, first appeared in the porno magazine Blackgarterbelt.
In The Protocol of the Elders of Tralfamadore, Kilgore Trout locates the planet Tralfamadore as the planet nearest to a meeting place of ancient multi-dimensional beings who attempted to control all aspects of Tralfamadorian life, including social affairs and politics.
But unlike humans, the Tralfamadorians were not affected by these all-controlling beings, due to the fact that Tralfamadorians had too much of a sense of humor to believe anyone could control all aspects of a society.
Trout hit the nail on the head. In this story, Kilgore Trout told us that it’s silly to think anyone can control our lives. The only one who can control our lives, Trout is saying, is ourselves.
Kilgore Trout was also telling us that there is only one kind of enemy boogeyman: ourselves. We are our own boogeyman. When we live in fear, we die in fear—and we also, through fear contagion, spread it to all the world.
Now, in reality, Kilgore Trout was the fictional creation of his real-life alter-ego, a man you may have heard of—Kurt Vonnegut. Trout appeared in many of Vonnegut’s novels, and it was Vonnegut who wrote the Trout biography.
Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most brilliant writers to walk the earth. He took a look at everyday life and translated it into a language of whimsy and farcical fancy. At the same time he cut to the core of the human experience and conveyed an all-knowing sense of how we got ourselves into the big fat mess we’re in.
And Kilgore Trout was one of Vonnegut’s literary vehicles for looking at the absurdity of the world we live in.
Vonnegut, who died in 2007 at the age of 84, would tell us to choose peace and deny the forces of hatred. He once said, “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
That’s pretty much the story of what’s going on with the proliferation of conspiracy theories promulgated by the far-right. It’s as if a high school class, which even in the best of circumstances suffers from arrested development, lords over everything.
The antidote is what Kilgore Trout told us. There is nobody that can take your power away. You are in control of your own destiny.
When you live by this credo, you gain mastery of your life. You then live free of all dogmas, along with all conspiracy notions.
The parallel notion to this is that there is no outside entity that can make your life miserable—only you can do that.
And the inverse to this is: there is someone who can make your life as beautiful as you want it to be—that person is you.
Kilgore Trout, and his good friend Kurt Vonnegut, would concur.