Paranoid Finance

money, finance, and wealth—and the ductile notion of "value"— stand as recurring concerns in conspiratorial, millennialist discourse. Money often features as the ultimate driver of the evil forces that control society. Banks and bankers are granted dubious genealogies and monstrous inclinations, with varieties of antisemitism and populism feeding narratives of true value and false value. Salvation, in turn, is frequently understood in terms of emancipation from economic servitude, access to magic currencies, and reform of the foundations of value. Elements of esotericism feature sometimes in redemptive techniques conducive to alleged financial liberty.

Examples of this abound throughout history and across the world. Today, one perhaps feels compelled to approach the subject matter with reference to the particular blend of conspiracy cultures originated from the tradition of "improvisational millennialism" in the United States (Barkun 2003). The QAnon syndrome—a multifaceted assemblage of conspiracy theories, political movements, and spiritual cults—offers a case in point, due in part to its endemic political relevance and global reach. Mike Rothschild (2021) aptly documents the centrality of the financial element in this syndrome. The enemy is often portrayed in the guise of a global financial elite, an image loaded with recurring antisemitic tropes, such as the global power of the Rothschild banking family or George Soros, and representations of moral cruelty—such as satanic ritual abuse of children—heavily reminiscent of blood libel and other antisemitic myths.

Deliverance from such evil—a combination of popular uprising, secret war, and astute anticipation—also contains components of financial fantasy, involving most distinctively the promise of a magic currency. Rothschild (2021, 55–66) refers to the relevance of the NESARA/GESARA fantasy to the establishment of QAnon and other "great awakening" and "new world order" narratives. NESARA (National Economic Security and Reformation Act) and its international counterpart GESARA ("G" for "global") refer to an alleged secret US bill passed under gag order in 2000 by the US Congress and due to be enacted when propitious conditions are met, ending all debts, wars, and corrupt governments and, most importantly, restoring the global gold standard (a so-called global currency reset). Adverse forces (including the ones involved in the orchestration of the 9/11 attacks in the United States) are said to have delayed this process, with a series of heroic leaders (e.g., Donald Trump) working covertly against them. Besides the immediate financial arbitrage opportunities that the implementation of the reform shall grant (e.g., purchasing Iraqi dinar, which will be immensely revalued after the reform), NESARA/GESARA narratives proclaim the cosmic properties of gold, the restoration of the true value of things, and the liberation of the self.

While these narratives should certainly be critically explored as conspiracy theories, their analyses would greatly benefit from consideration of the theological, mystical, and spiritual cosmologies that inform the categories of economic imagination in general. An anthropological perspective can help excavate the elements of magical thinking that feed vernacular conceptions of value creation today and the distinctive hopes, anxieties, and hostilities they inspire. And this, as Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (1999, 2000) argue, applies not only to contemporary witchcraft and arcane investment schemes but also to venture capital, asset management, and ordinary practice within the financial mainstream. Also of relevance is a historical viewpoint that examines the intellectual genealogies of economic thought from the perspective of its theological unconscious, with religious—Western Christian—language governing the medieval metaphors of value that form the kernel of modern economics. Giacomo Todeschini (2021), for example, shows how adverse representations of Jews and Judaism cemented metaphors of economic health and disease that gained decisive currency in mainstream economic thinking.

So what is the challenge such an approach presents? Could it be that contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse on money, finance, and wealth is in fact but a clumsy variant of the delirious potential that established concepts of money, finance, and wealth—and above all of value—already carry? Are not notions of magic currency—capable of restoring true value—already at work in ordinary financial imagination? Is paranoid finance inherent in the language of capital? The intuition formulated by Gilles Deleuze and F...