Illustration: Stanley Chow
Open your eyes, sheeple! Dark forces are at work behind the scenes. No, not the Illuminati or the Templars—I mean the hacks employing secret societies in their work. Dan Brown's newest book, Inferno, has the Consortium. Both Jay Z and Drake name-check the Illuminati. The Templars show up yet again in October's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. We're deploying secret societies far too casually—they've turned into paint-by-numbers supervillains, with a dash of X-Files and a pinch of Alex Jones. But what bothers me more than laziness is the fact that it leaches power from actual conspiracy theories, our most vital and powerful form of modern-day folk art. Don't believe me? Search YouTube for "Illuminati" and marvel at the rich tapestry of crazy cooked up by shut-ins who believe that an 18th-century Bavarian social club steers modern-day politics. Look, you can make great art about secret societies, but only if you make it about the paranoia itself—like Eco did with Foucault's Pendulum, or Philip K. Dick did with ... well, with everything. People who record rants about how the pyramid on the dollar proves that the Trilateral Commission controls Major League Baseball are a national treasure. National Treasure is not a national treasure.
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