Hiding in Plain Sight

Thirty-three years after it was first released, The X-Files is being rebooted, but the original series is surprisingly relevant again. One of the things that made The X-Files both fascinating and frustrating (and that led some viewers to abandon it in the show’s fourth season, at the very moment when a number of the best episodes were airing) was something I didn’t fully appreciate at the time (even though, ironically, everything I’m about to explain was there in my article “Us vs. Them”). Once the mythology of the alien invasion had been firmly established across the first three seasons of the show, X-Files creator Chris Carter and his writers pulled the rug out from under the audience in a series of episodes that claimed that some or most or even all sightings of UFOs and aliens were an elaborate hoax designed to keep the public distracted from the real conspiracy: a conspiracy within the federal government against the American people.

Special Agent Fox Mulder is thrown for a loop: Everything that he has come to believe now seems to be a lie. Or is it? In the episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man,” the chief promoter of the “Roswell hoax,” concocted in large part to draw the American people together so that they would be ready to face the threat of communism, is himself befuddled when, on the very day that Mikhail Gorbachev resigns and the Cold War seems to have been won, an actual alien spacecraft crash-lands in Virginia. Except ... it’s the Cigarette Smoking Man himself who, in an account of his exploits that he sells as a piece of fiction to a pornographic magazine, tells us that the story he had concocted suddenly came true. And it came true — conveniently — at the very moment when the American people were about to need another enemy against which to unite.

Such elaborate stories within stories suffer from the same defect as straightforward conspiracy theories: They depend on complete secrecy on the part of everyone involved. But they point in a direction that has come to characterize the age in which we are living: If politicians and pundits and government officials and PR hacks and social-media influencers and Alt Right shitposters and Russian bots spin out a sufficient number of competing narratives — not just in response to the narratives of their opponents but also in response to their own narratives from the day or the week or the month before — could the sound and the fury prevent us from recognizing the truth that is right before our eyes?

Trust no one, Agent Mulder used to say. But when no one is trustworthy, when nothing is believable, people will believe all manner of unbelievable things rather than believe nothing. Because, as Agent Mulder also admitted, I want to believe.

In the midst of the cacophony of competing narratives, it no longer matters if someone “says the quiet part out loud.” Broadcast what you’re planning to do (or are already doing), whether intentionally or because your brain is addled or because you simply can no longer keep all the lies you’ve told straight, and all you have to do is say the opposite tomorrow. Or maybe even just 30 seconds later. Those who recognize that the truth has slipped through may shout “Aha!” but their shouts will be drowned out by those — on every side — who have come to view “truth” as merely a means to an end. There are many reasons why the enemy of your enemy may not be your friend, but perhaps the most important reason today for those who still care about the truth is that the enemy of your enemy may share the same disregard for the truth as your enemy does. If so, as soon as it becomes convenient, he will abandon the truth that you thought you had in common for a more tactically effective lie.

When the measure by which we weigh truth against untruth is which of the two will, at this particular moment, do the most damage to our opponents, then we no longer care about truth in itself. And when we no longer care about truth in itself, then corruption, self-dealing, defamation, calumny, and — yes — even outright conspiracies can all emerge from the darkness and shadows, no longer afraid of being seen, in the clear light of day, for what, in truth, they are.