Sunday 11.07.2021 8:00pm

The age of information has radically diminished the rate of simple mistakes and muddleheadedness. Today’s wrong thinking knows itself for what it is, and takes delight in the rhetoric that blooms around error; it should be understood as a sort of delirium, a perversity in excess that is afforded somewhere near the threshold between the blunt force trauma inflicted by sheer informational quantity and the evanescent quality of that fleeting consciousness of the world as it really is - and, to be sure, that is not a bad thing. The perversity that attaches to the excess of thinking badly for the sake of thinking badly is the veritable return path via sensibility to the world of the picturesque. For this reason, I have lately become preoccupied with what we can call the theology of permutations. It seems essential that we must exhaust every wrong road before we turn at last to the tedium of what is merely right. That combination of strict and loose thinking grouped together as ‘conspiracy theory’ seems to have perfected a form for wrong thinking in the present which comes as naturally as poetry once crossed the threshold from iambic pentameter to free verse. At the core of conspiracy theory is the desire for a pleasure that is located elsewhere than in any satisfaction that might be derived from the verification of its predicted outcomes. Conspiracy speculation perfects the science of prediction beyond the necessity of indexing it to actual outcomes - as a mode of prophecy, it describes the present by invoking the wildest imaginary events that are yet to come. The excitement of conspiracy thinking is formal and not content dependent - content, the who, what, how and why of the exercise becomes in itself a sort of formal placeholder, a set of syllabic sounds organised rhythmically at the edge of its vortex. Take the facts of the relative success of the England football team in the Euro 2020 tournament and the swirling allegations surrounding it: the easy group stage; the mutually assured elimination of likely rivals; the even easier path through the knock out stages; the biased refereeing; the number of home games; England’s well spaced fixture schedule; the failure of VAR; and above all, that semi final penalty. The sports pages of the European press collectively wonders aloud, cui bono?The conspiratorial hypotheses arrive thick and fast, and are elaborated around two central assumptions, either England was being rewarded for services rendered or it was part down payment on some lockdown-exiting deal: it was a reward for the English FA’s opposition to the European Super league coup; it was sugar coating on the post Brexit trade deal with the EU; it was part payment for the UK’s participation in the EU’s pro-Ukraine/Anti-Russian strategic manoeuvring (see the strange battleship episode off Crimea a few weeks before the tournament); it was to do with vaccination supply, or Ukrainian labour and/or wheat; it was a sweetener or accelerant, mood music or distraction, correlated to the neo-Entente Cordiale that presages the Great Reset subsequent to the Cornish G7 festival of Covid. This is how conspiracy theory, as another inflationary component, feeds into flagged up, designated, important events. It’s all part of the spectacle - belonging to that which is cryptically summoned only to be summarily dismissed out of hand. Semi-official denials of conspiracy theory serve a dual function: it is acknowledged that the event is indeed significant, but the precise strategic location of the significance is known only by those who deny such speculations. Even so, if England’s footballing success really is a payment for something off-stage, perhaps it is for something that has yet to happen, perhaps for something terrible, for something that is about to be revealed, something shocking, something that cannot be recovered from - Something is burnt in so as to remain in his memory: only that which never stops hurting remains in his memory. Perhaps this football tournament marks the moment before the end, the final collapse, which would mean it is not even a payment to England but a payment extracted from England, and someone or something, is about to collect: Ne ego si iterum eodem modo vicero, sine ullo milite Epirum revertar.