For years, progressive intellectuals, activists and cultural figures have argued that political imagination has weakened, leaving societies poorly equipped to confront the exhaustion of neoliberalism and ecological collapse. The response has been a call for new forms of utopian thinking and storytelling. Oliver Marchart has described this development as an “imaginative turn” across the humanities, social sciences and avant-garde art, while writers such as Amitav Ghosh and Donna Haraway have advocated new narrative forms capable of imagining different relationships between humans, nature and other species. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future has become a prominent example of literature being used to explore alternative political and ecological futures.
But the latest issue of Merkur, the German journal, examines an apparent contradiction: while utopian political imagination is said to be blocked, conspiracy theories, fabricated disinformation and right-wing visions of the past display an extraordinary imaginative force. The essay argues that these phenomena should not be treated as unrelated. Instead, conspiracy theory can be understood as a distorted reincarnation of utopian imagination: it uses many of the same mechanisms of storytelling and collective world-building, but directs them towards the exposure of hidden enemies rather than the creation of an alternative society.
The argument reaches back to Theodor W. Adorno’s 1964 discussion with Ernst Bloch, in which Adorno observed that the fulfilment of utopia had become merely “a repetition of the same old ‘today’”. Fredric Jameson made a related argument in his 1988 essay “Cognitive Mapping”, describing the inability of left-wing politics to formulate a convincing “vision of the future” as a “utopian problem”. Yet Jameson also examined conspiracy theories, describing conspiracy as “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age”: a distorted attempt to represent the complex system of late capitalism.
The distinction, the Merkur essay argues, is crucial. Social criticism attempts to explain complex interactions among political, economic and legal structures. Conspiracy theories instead restore human intentionality by attributing complex outcomes to deliberate actions by identifiable groups of malicious individuals. They therefore simplify contingency and complexity into a coherent story. Their attraction cannot be explained solely by their failure as social analysis, because conspiracy theories also operate as an aesthetic practice. They make the world dramatic and intelligible, creating alternative realities that can appear more coherent and emotionally satisfying than ordinary experience.
Their narrative structure frequently resembles fiction. Conspiracy theories use familiar conventions of storytelling: protagonists and antagonists, hidden motives, interconnected events and an ultimate conflict between good and evil. They can maintain contradictions provided those contradictions fit the larger narrative. The result is a form of credibility based not on factual accuracy but on narrative coherence and the avoidance of cognitive dissonance.
The essay traces this relationship through examples drawn directly from literature. The reptilian conspiracy theory, for instance, draws on a story by Robert E. Howard published in Weird Tales in 1929. The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory has been linked to Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel Le Camp des Saints; Steve Bannon invoked its English title, The Camp of the Saints, when discussing migration in Europe in 2016. The “White Genocide” conspiracy theory in the United States has drawn on William Luther Pierce’s 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, which terrorism analysts Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware have identified as having exerted an unusually powerful influence on violent right-wing extremism in the country.
The most developed case is Jacob Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman”, who published two books before becoming internationally known for his participation in the storming of the US Capitol. His 2018 self-published novel Will & Power, written under the pseudonym Loan Wolf, presents imagination and language as forces capable of creating reality. Set partly in a “crystal sky city”, the book describes an esoteric practice through which creative powers can supposedly manifest physical events. Yet the anticipated utopian world remains largely undeveloped. Instead, imaginative power becomes a means of identifying an evil force behind everyday reality, from processed food and air pollution to airport body scanners and mobile phones.
His 2020 book One Mind At A Time. A Deep State Illusion shifts from fictional narrative to purported fact while retaining the same first-person perspective and transformative ambitions. It promises to “end the Deep State forever and usher in a new era of peace, evolution, prosperity, abundance & love”. But the proposed new era occupies only the final seven pages and offers little substantive vision of collective social organisation. The “Dark Lord” becomes the “Deep State”, while 5G, JFK, 9/11, Pizzagate, secret Nazi technologies, UFOs and mind control are incorporated into what Michael Butter describes as a mega-conspiracy theory in which everything is connected.
The argument becomes more consequential when individual belief becomes collective political action. Chansley joined QAnon demonstrations from 2020 onwards, turning an individual conviction about the reality-changing power of imagination into a shared movement. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of “fabulation”, the essay describes how collective narratives can simultaneously create communities and establish their boundaries. In QAnon, belief in the Deep State creates a collective identity whose members reinforce one another’s belief through shared experiences, online activity, meetings and demonstrations.
That process reached its most consequential expression on January 6, 2021, when Chansley and other QAnon followers stormed the Capitol. The essay argues that a collectively fabricated narrative had become political action. It then points to the subsequent reinterpretation of the Capitol attack among significant sections of the Republican electorate and Republican-aligned media, including Trump’s pardon of about 1,500 people who participated in the storming, among them Chansley. The essay’s central concern is that an imagined reality can become institutionally recognised reality.
The result, according to the Merkur analysis, is not simply that conspiracy theory has replaced utopia. It is that conspiracy theory demonstrates the very capacity for collective imagination that utopian politics seeks to recover, while directing that capacity towards closure rather than possibility. Instead of imagining a structurally different society, conspiracy theories reproduce the existing world with its actors and institutions supposedly “unmasked” as part of a hidden plot.
The essay therefore warns that the demand for renewed political imagination cannot be separated from the realities of political conflict and collective organisation. The problem is not whether imagination possesses political power. The QAnon example demonstrates that it does. The decisive issue is what that power produces: an opening towards another social order, or a collectively fabricated reality in which the imagined future is reduced to enemies, confrontation and destruction.
