nephilim/neaderthal
Inside the ‘Tartarian Empire,’ the QAnon of Architecture
On YouTube videos and Reddit boards, adherents of a bizarre conspiracy theory argue that everything you know about the history of architecture is wrong.
ByZach Mortice
April 27, 2021 at 9:41 AM PDT
The Tartaria storyline is not directly related to the adrenochrome-harvesting Satanic-pedophile cabal that lies at the heart of QAnon, the unfounded conspiracy theory that crashed into the real world in 2020. But it shares some of what Peter Ditto, a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who specializes in conspiracy theories, calls QAnon’s “cafeteria quality:” There’s no overarching narrative or single authorial voice interpreting events. It’s just a gusher of outlandish speculation; adherents can pick and choose which elements they want to sign on to.
The overall premise is an alternative history. A vast, technologically advanced “Tartarian” empire, emanating from north-central Asia or thereabouts, either influenced or built vast cities and infrastructure all over the world. (Tartaria, or Tartary, though never a coherent empire, was indeed a general term for north-central Asia.) Either via a sudden cataclysm or a steady antagonistic decline — and perhaps as recently as 100 years ago — Tartaria fell. Its great buildings were buried, and its history was erased. After this “great reset,” the few surviving examples of Tartarian architecture were falsely recast as the work of contemporary builders who could never have executed buildings of such grace and beauty, and subjected them to clumsy alterations…
Holding back a flood of conspiracies
Though the Tartarian Empire seemed to wink into existence in the past few years, the themes its believers explore are familiar ones. Conspiracy theories are a way to channel restive populism in the face of rapid social and demographic change, Ditto says, and there’s plenty of that going around. They are also a way to gather up amorphous fears and put them in a specific place, to make them more manageable. Ditto calls this “over-intentionalization.
“If your fate is controlled by impersonal, systemic forces, it doesn’t offer you much control over your own destiny,” he says. “But if you can localize it to a small group of people whose motives you understand — they are out to get you — then it at least offers some hope that you can overcome their malevolent intentions.”
Belief in conspiracy theories can also be driven by loneliness, isolation and economic hardship, which made a pandemic a fertile Petri dish, and helped QAnon’s believers storm the Capitol by force and through the ballot box. The social atomization forced on us by Covid-19 is a hyperbolic retelling of the Tower of Babel (which has a special place in Tartarian lore) and its attendant anxiety at fracturing and divided cultures. The great reset that erased that tower — and the fabulous, fictional empire that built it — continues to reverberate, splintering us into ever-stranger factions.
And Ditto says it does seem like reality is getting harder to decipher. The internet has made it easier to disseminate misinformation while eroding faith in the media hierarchies that once filtered it out. Polarization and a lack of trust in government and institutions creates a feedback loop, where leaders can’t solve problems because their political bases are too narrow, and the resulting failures engender more distrust. It’s not a new cycle — despite a spike in media attention, there’s not much evidence that conspiratorial thinking is more common now than in years past — but technology can make these currents of collective delusion more powerful, and harder to ignore.
The basic human desires for community, stories (the more outrageous the better) and the need to feel like a protagonist in a wider struggle are what pulls us from moments of real social, economic and cultural dislocation into fabricated histories. Buildings and cities are made to grow old, to outlast people, and to be a testament to these cultural histories. They’re a yardstick for a culture’s ability to endure. When they’re not given the chance to do this, the contradiction can break something loose, and send people scavenging for cultural memory that feels ancient enough to anchor them in an uncertain now.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-04-27/inside-architecture-s-wildest-conspiracy-theory