How Sci-Fi Inspired Conspiracy Theory
In 1950, a U.S. Army psyops officer named Paul Linebarger used a pseudonym to publish a science-fiction story titled “Scanners Live in Vain” in a pulp magazine. It was about a man named Martel who works for the “deep state” in the far future as a mysterious “scanner,” or starship pilot, and whose mind is manipulated by evil bureaucrats. After a new technology called a “cranching wire” restores his true senses, he recognizes that his bosses within the government order a hit on anyone who challenges their control of space travel and the economy. Martel ultimately joins an insurrectionary movement aimed at overthrowing the regime.
If this narrative sounds like a QAnon conspiracy theory, there’s a good reason for that: Today’s dystopian political rhetoric has its roots in mid-century sci-fi. Martel’s struggle against secretive, malevolent authorities echoes in the Pizzagate shooter’s fantasy about a cabal of politically powerful pedophiles; we can also see its inspiration in Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s anti-Semitic Facebook rant about space lasers beamed at the Earth, and the Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone’s intimation that Bill Gates “played some role in the creation” of COVID-19.
Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn’t just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction—and, to him, no genre engaged people’s imagination better than science fiction.
[David A. Graham: There is no American ‘deep state’]
I pored over Linebarger’s personal papers at the Hoover Institution propaganda collection while researching my forthcoming book, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Boxes of his studies on the politics of China and Southeast Asia are filed alongside his fiction manuscripts and unpublished musings on psychology. Here, I realized, was an origin story for modern conspiracy politics, which blur the line between sci-fi plots and American patriotism—they came from a psywar operative. Put another way, an agent of what some would now call the “deep state” had devised the far-out stories that politicians like Greene use to condemn it. Perhaps, if she and others knew this, they might not be so eager to blame space lasers and vaccine microchips for what ails our nation.
Under the pen name Cordwainer Smith, Linebarger wrote many stories about the Instrumentality, a totalitarian intergalactic empire that is toppled by rebels like Martel. Linebarger’s fiction won a cult following and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo, two of the most prestigious awards for science-fiction writing.
Still, Linebarger’s most significant book was undoubtedly a classified U.S. Army guide, titled simply Psychological Warfare and published under his real name. To undertake a successful influence campaign, he advised, imagine you’re inventing a character for the person you’re targeting with propaganda. Envision this subject, whom he named “Propaganda Man,” then “make up the prewar life” for him, including his “likes,” “prejudices,” and favorite “kind of gossip.” Once this Propaganda Man felt three-dimensional, as though drawn from a good story, the goal was to design a psychological operation designed to engage Propaganda Man and transmit the message that “he is your friend, you are his friend,” and “the only enemy is the enemy Leader (or generals, or emperor, or capitalists, or ‘They’).”
Previous approaches to this branch of warfare, he wrote, had relied merely on censoring the news and distributing stodgy propaganda full of “strong-faced men building dams and teaching better chicken-raising.” It would be better, Linebarger suggested, if American propaganda was as entertaining as a Laurel and Hardy movie—giving audience members a good time while teaching them that America was their ally. The character of Martel clearly resembles a Propaganda Man; the cranching wire might be the antenna on his radio, tuning in to agitprop vehicles like Voice of America that inspire him to resist his despotic overlords.
Linebarger’s military guide was foundational for the United States’ unique approach to propaganda, which has long borrowed techniques from pop culture to promote the nation’s interests. One of the early-20th-century masterminds of U.S. propaganda was a public-relations pioneer named Edward Bernays, who began his career marketing cigarettes in the 1920s and ended it helping the CIA spread misinformation about the leftist Guatemalan government in the ’50s. His idea, which shaped Linebarger’s own thinking, was that propaganda was like advertising in a popular magazine: It should push one simple message, in a persuasive and seductive style. This makes an instructive contrast with what the Rand Corporation has called Russia’s Soviet-derived “firehose of falsehood” strategy, whereby operatives inundate the media with lies and chaotic, contradictory stories to undermine the public’s faith in all information sources. If Russia’s motto is, in effect, “Believe nothing,” America’s has been “Believe us.” At the height of the Cold War, Linebarger was inventing a way to make people believe in America—using techniques borrowed from fantastical storytelling.
Linebarger’s father was a diplomat who worked closely with the Chinese-nationalist leader Sun Yat-Sen, who became the younger Linebarger’s godfather. Paul Linebarger himself spent a great deal of his childhood traveling in China, learning Mandarin and studying Sun’s political vision. As an adult, Linebarger made it his mission to topple the Communist regime and restore the republic that Sun had built. Although he did not accomplish this in fact, he could, as Cordwainer Smith, depict such a struggle in fiction—the Instrumentality can be read as a surreal version of China’s government under Mao Zedong. One way to understand Linebarger’s fiction is as psyops aimed partly at a Chinese Propaganda Man who might be induced to rise up against his Communist overlords.
Literary critics have pointed out references, in Linebarger’s stories, to Chinese classics such as Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms—which makes sense in light of Linebarger’s instruction that propaganda should imitate pop culture. He wanted his stories to be engaging for people who grew up with the adventures of Sun Wukong (also known as Monkey King, the hero of Journey to the West), as well as for those who grew up with Superman. Using the power of myth, he insinuated that liberation could come from the Christian West. In the story “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” for example, cyborg insurrectionists use legends about the Catholic martyr Joan of Arc to persuade human-animal hybrid “underpeople” to join their fight against the rulers of the Instrumentality.
Modern conspiracy influencers have taken up Linebarger’s mantle. As the NBC reporter Ben Collins told the WNYC show On the Media in 2020, the far right in particular is “very good at storytelling. It’s world building, that’s what it is really.” World building is a term that speculative-fiction authors commonly use to describe the project of creating a fantasy realm so fully realized and all-enveloping that audiences willingly suspend their disbelief.
World building in speculative fiction and game design “is political, always,” the author and critic Laurie Penny writes. Those who imaginatively inhabit fictional worlds become intensely invested in them—which helps explain how fan debates over video games morphed into the right-wing attack pile-on known as Gamergate in 2014. But influencers on the left, too, have used fantasy fictions to advance their political cause. The creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, famously described his strong heroine as “propaganda” for liberated women. In early issues of the comic, he even included historical sketches of real-life female scientists, explorers, and political leaders, to drive home his message that women were the equals of men.
A more recent example of world building for an ideological purpose would be the Left Behind series, by the Christian writer Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, a minister who established the prominent right-wing think tank the Council for National Policy. They found a winning formula in combining end-time fantasy—the Rapture, in evangelical teaching—with political conflicts drawn from recent history. Their best-selling books, which have sold more than 65 million copies and spawned a film franchise, helped popularize a brand of apocalyptic millenarian belief found among some MAGA extremists.
When Linebarger died, he left a large corpus of unpublished monographs and intelligence reports written under his own name. Most of his books for the public were science fiction, written as Cordwainer Smith (he also wrote literary fiction and thrillers, under other pseudonyms). What united these disparate interests was the mind of a person who knew that the tools of fantastical storytelling could be very effective in persuading people to build a new reality.
[Brian Klaas: In MAGA world, everything happens for a reason]
In Psychological Warfare, Linebarger instructed intelligence officers to combat America’s adversaries and woo new allies with propaganda that felt like science fiction. “It is the purpose that makes it propaganda,” he wrote, “and not the truthfulness or untruthfulness of it.” Of course, Linebarger was very clear about his purpose: to win people to the American way. But the world-building power of sci-fi storytelling that he championed can be adapted for very different purposes, as a weapon of mass disinformation.
I spoke with one of Linebarger’s intellectual heirs, a former psyops instructor for the Army, who told me that he and his colleagues worry a lot about psychological warfare’s “second- or third-order effects,” consequences that can be completely unintended. One such consequence is the ubiquity of conspiracy thinking, through which all of reality is converted into fiction—rather than Believe us, people will believe anything.
Linebarger could hardly have envisioned the Twilight Zone–esque tales that the Trump attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell spun about election fraud in 2020. But even bad science fiction can make very fine propaganda.