While neither are as ancient as the proverbial hills, both emerged in pre-modern and early modern times and have thrived in the modern era with disastrous consequences. Both related socio-political carcinogens have found ready audiences as, in the case of the charlatan reflects people’s dreams and fantasies back to them and, as in the case of the conspiracist, offer simple but plausible explanations to people at times of crises. Objective evidence and genuine fee enquiry are the enemies of both. The practitioners of both are partners in the architecture of post-truth and it is the task of democrats and democratic theorists to expose and correct the falsehoods that they have helped to embed in public and private conversation.
Our story begins in Venice in November 1589 in Venice with the election by its senate of a new official alchemist – Marco Bragadino or to give him his reputed real name Mamugna from Cyprus. At the time, Venice was in the grip of a fiscal crisis – its trade with the east was being undercut by new long-distance shipping from Portugal and Spain to Asia and the Americas. This Mediterranean superpower had been in slow decline for three generations and, in their desperation for a much needed miracle, the grandees of the old city on the lagoon, turned to Mamugna who had spent years developing a carefully crafted reputational hubris for cracking the age-old secret of turning base metal into gold.[1]
Ensconced in a lavish palazzo on the island of Giudecca at city expense, he cultivated an air of mystique while flaunting what appeared to be stratospheric levels of wealth. He threw balls of such opulence and spent money with such largesse that no one dared enquire into the sources of his wealth. In breathtaking public spectacles, he showed open mouthed Venetian patricians how he could heat a small amount of base metal add to it an amount of a secret substance and, with a flash and a bang, fashion it into a small nugget of gold. He partied with the young daughters of Venice’s nobility who desperately hoped to marry them off to Mamugna. Doors were opened to him; praise was showered on him and palaces were offered to him at the complete whim of a people who bought so fervently into the dream that he championed so ably and eloquently to them that eventually belief in the dream and belief in the charlatan became so intertwined that the two virtually became one and the same.[2]
Although Mamugna’s story ends under the executioner’s sword, the business model that he operated and the willingness of his adherents to buy into the uber scam continues to replicate itself as a perpetual morality tale. Only now, new technologies make possible schemes that are digital, viral, scalable and potentially.global in scope.[3] From the pyramid style Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) schemes so beloved of the wellness sector to the crypto-currency models associated with dubious regimes and the darker corners of the Web, the charlatan’s profession has truly been globalised.
Our story begins in Venice in November 1589 in Venice with the election by its senate of a new official alchemist – Marco Bragadino or to give him his reputed real name Mamugna from Cyprus. At the time, Venice was in the grip of a fiscal crisis – its trade with the east was being undercut by new long-distance shipping from Portugal and Spain to Asia and the Americas. This Mediterranean superpower had been in slow decline for three generations and, in their desperation for a much needed miracle, the grandees of the old city on the lagoon, turned to Mamugna who had spent years developing a carefully crafted reputational hubris for cracking the age-old secret of turning base metal into gold.[1]
Ensconced in a lavish palazzo on the island of Giudecca at city expense, he cultivated an air of mystique while flaunting what appeared to be stratospheric levels of wealth. He threw balls of such opulence and spent money with such largesse that no one dared enquire into the sources of his wealth. In breathtaking public spectacles, he showed open mouthed Venetian patricians how he could heat a small amount of base metal add to it an amount of a secret substance and, with a flash and a bang, fashion it into a small nugget of gold. He partied with the young daughters of Venice’s nobility who desperately hoped to marry them off to Mamugna. Doors were opened to him; praise was showered on him and palaces were offered to him at the complete whim of a people who bought so fervently into the dream that he championed so ably and eloquently to them that eventually belief in the dream and belief in the charlatan became so intertwined that the two virtually became one and the same.[2]
Although Mamugna’s story ends under the executioner’s sword, the business model that he operated and the willingness of his adherents to buy into the uber scam continues to replicate itself as a perpetual morality tale. Only now, new technologies make possible schemes that are digital, viral, scalable and potentially.global in scope.[3] From the pyramid style Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) schemes so beloved of the wellness sector to the crypto-currency models associated with dubious regimes and the darker corners of the Web, the charlatan’s profession has truly been globalised.
The ongoing parable of the charlatan of our time is of course the rise of Donald Trump to the pinnacle of political power by reflecting back to the American people their hopes for the restoration of the Lost American Dream through the chimera of Making America Great Again; by appealing to the American id of easy riches and the recovery of manufacturing jobs through the alchemy and simple solutions of tariffs. Just as he mesmerised the bankers and financiers who lent him the money to build so many of his vanity projects by projecting a fake but psychically overpowering image of genius and get-up-and-go brashness; so he (twice) swept American voters into buying into a sunny uplands fantasy of everlasting prosperity and American greatness, built a prospectus as false and mendacious as any of whatever business plan he submitted to those who he so serially deceived. With the descent in 2025 of an occupying force of charlatans on Washington to take control of the governing apparatus of the world’s only (for now) superpower, an understanding charlatanism has never been more critical.
Brexit: It was the Charlatans Wot Won it.
Rather than the full blown of a Little Britain (or really English) nationalist project to Take Back Control of UK laws and borders from the bureaucratic behemoth of Brussels, Naim and Torro instead frame Brexit as “a movement led and organised by a constellation of outright charlatans aiming to manipulate public opinion for their own gain”.[4]
First off, the block was the outgoing Mayor of London and Tory MP Boris Johnson, who had launched his journalistic career on a series of article written as Brussels bureau chief for the Telegraph in the 1990s which seemed to stretch journalistic ethics beyond any threshold of integrity. In story after story, Johnson excoriated EU bureaucrats for decisions they had not actually made. Among the most notorious were that the EU wanted to impose a single standardised condom size; that it would ban recycling of teabags and would forbid children from blowing up rubber balloons.[5] No matter that these stories lacked any factual base, they imprinted in the British public consciousness the idea of the EU as a mindless, rulemaking, dictatorial (with a small “d”) machine which defied the very essence of common sense.
So much so that when Nigel Farage - for whom withdrawal from the EU was a lifetime’s work - began to campaign for a referendum to achieve his objective, he was able to exploit this populist image of the EU to make even more preposterous claims such as that Brussels was seeking to snuff out British independence. In true political entrepreneurial style, Farage’s UKIP party began to peel away Conservative Party voters. This led to the then PM David Cameron’s panic decision to hold a binary referendum on EU membership in 2016 to staunch the flow of Tory desertions and to finally call time on the persistent Eurosceptic troublemakers in his party. The untruths told by both Vote Leave for whom Boris Johnson had fatefully declared and Leave EU headed up by Farage assumed dangerously hyperbolic proportions including the notorious £350m a week promise for NHS funding in lieu of contributions to the EU on the side of the red Vote Leave battle bus; that 75m Turks were set to be eligible to come to the UK in the event of a fictitious Turkish entry into the EU and the Breaking Point poster portraying a phalanx of Middle Eastern refugees on the borders of the EU which drew particular distaste due to the racist overtones of the image.
Farage strode around appealing to the id and wounded ego (but neve superego) of the ‘left behind’ Empire nostalgists and plain ignorant by reflecting back to them a certain romanticised image of British nationhood through his campaign garb of a tweed jacket, tan corduroy trousers, check shirt and knitted red tie and downing one pint of warm beer after another; swelling them with the dream of Britain recovering its muscle power once liberated from the straightjacket of “barmy Brussels bureaucrats. To those experts who tried to put across to the electorate the perils of severing itself from its largest trading partner came the Know Nothing moment of the campaign; the then justice secretary Michael Gove, when asked by a BBC interviewer to name a single economic expert who supported Brexit, simply replied “the British people have had enough of experts”.[6]
The magical thinking and breezy optimism that are the hallmarks of the charlatan’s trade were articulated by prominent Brexiteer Liam Fox who as Trade Secretary in January 2017 promised that a post Brexit trade deal with the EU would be “easiest in human history.” The image of a Global Britain able to negotiate favourable trade deals with other trading powers most notably the US freed from the constraints of EU membership rested on similar fantasy on stilts. But powered by such wings and prayers, Nigel Farage and the assorted other Bad Boys of Brexit achieved their “Independence Day” on 24th June 2016. A tortuous withdrawal process followed largely due to the manoeuvrings of Boris Johnson who having helped to sink Theresa May’s Withdrawal Bill became PM and negotiated a Hard or Full English Brexit in the form of a cumbersome trade and cooperation agreement that 77% of British exporting firms say is impeding their ability to do business with the continent. Contrary to Leave’s vision of prosperity Britain has been since departure in January 2020 has been the worst performing of the world’s advanced industrial economies shrinking an average of 0.4% between 2019 and 2024.
Why are some people susceptible to the charms of the charlatan? Most of us have an innate BS detector that instantly sorts the “too good to be true” or outlandish promise. The problem arises when a message really resonates with the recipient’s dreams or innate desires, fantastical though they appear. Such emotions are grounded in the kinds of beliefs that you just don’t doubt. For due to the way people are wired, when you hear dreams reflected back to you, you will react instantaneously, within 200 milliseconds, at the gut level. [7] At times of societal stress, during times of economic depression and associated immiseration, such visceral reactions can assume a contagion effect.
And don’t charlatans understand this psychological wiring. They know the power of dreams, or more accurately our innermost, undigested, and unprocessed primeval desires, over us. They speak to us in the language of these emotions knowing how reluctant human beings can be to critically examine inner most beliefs and of the reinforcing effects of peer pressure on these beliefs. It is not easy to question the received wisdom of those we look up to but critical thinking and that ability to put that bit of distance between your dreams and who you are are vital life skills in our protection against the lure of the charlatan’s false promises.
Conspiracism and Psychological Wiring
An understanding of neural wiring and imaging is also important in the recognition and counteraction of the charlatans’ pernicious twin – conspiracism. This task assumes existential importance when looking at the intrinsic role of conspiracism in the rise of the Nazis. For they used the same mental processes to convince themselves of the rectitude of their beliefs as the conspiracists of the 21st century. The only difference and the eternal lesson from history to be drawn is that Nazi conspiracism undergirded the most horrific crime in human history – the Shoah/Holocaust.
In his explanation of the role of scapegoating of the Jewish people in Nazi conspiracist propaganda and especially their supposed culpability in the German military’s defeat in World War I, Professor Laurence Rees draws upon the work of the social psychologist Professor Karen Douglas and the evolutionary psychology Professor Robin Dunbar. Professor Douglas believes that most conspiracists are ‘looking for someone to blame’, the idea that ‘there are these people pulling the strings behind the scenes’ helps deal with their ‘feelings of powerlessness and disillusionment.' Research suggests that ‘people sometimes believe conspiracy theories about other groups as a way of protecting or enhancing their own group.’ Professor Douglas points out that people ‘who are especially narcissistic about groups they belong to tend to be more likely to believe conspiracy theories about other groups.’ Prof Rees argues that since the ‘narcissism’ of the German High Command could not admit to ‘the best soldiers in the world’ losing the war, it had to be someone else’s fault. That ‘someone’ else had to be the Jews. After a claim from the Prussian Minister of War that Jews were dodging front-line combat, a census was organised to establish exactly how many Jews were serving in the armed forces. However, the results of the count were never made public – almost certainly because the findings showed that Jews were not evading military service at all[8]. But never let lack of evidence get in the way of a good conspiracist story.
Prof Rees posits a link between conspiracism and the evolution of language. Prof Dunbar believes that language may have evolved to enable human beings to gossip. As our ape ancestors used grooming to bring about and sustain social connections, so human beings evolved language to bond by discussing topics such as who is dating whom, who is cheating on their partner and what the real story is behind the leader’s recent actions. With this insight as a starting point, it is possible for one to see conspiracism as the ultimate gossip – secrets others try to hide. Thus, it is plausible that humanity has developed an evolutionary tendency towards attraction towards conspiracism [9] (as well as a tendency to filter out evidence that contradicts whatever tales it tells).
One of the most consequential uses of conspiracism was the ‘stab in the back’ myth as to the German loss of World War in terms of its later cataclysmic legacy. To explain the defeat after all the optimism engendered by Germany’s successful spring 1918 offensive, German military chiefs withheld information from the public about disastrous reverses suffered later that year and continued to pump out optimistic lies. While this ruse was designed to calm the domestic mood and to protect the reputation of the German commanders, it meant that the coming of the armistice in November 1918 was met with widespread shock and banishment as actual fighting was still taking place far from the centres of German power.[10]
Yet, despite their defeat when the German soldiers returned home, they were not looked upon as part of a humiliated army. On 10 December 1918, the new Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, told troops parading at the Brandenburg Gate, ‘No enemy has overcome you’ and that ‘Only when the preponderance of our opponents in men and material grew heavier did we give up the struggle’; Ebert peddled this falsehood to avert the prospect of revolution in Germany but in doing so he fuelled the more pernicious lie voiced by Ludwig Beck and others – that the army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by enemies behind the lines in Germany. It was a conspiracist lie adopted the following year by none other than Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburgh as another way of deflecting responsibility and deserved blame for the disastrous course the war had taken.[11]
For in a public meeting in 1919, Von Hindeburgh asserted that he had ‘wanted forceful and cheerful cooperation’ from German political parties during the war but instead ‘encountered failure and weakness.' He quoted approvingly the words of an ‘English general’ who had allegedly said, ‘the German army was stabbed in the back.’ Consequently, he claimed, the army could not be blamed for what had happened.’[12]
As Professor Doughlas points out, psychological research bears out that ‘It’s very difficult once someone holds a belief very strongly to change those beliefs.’ Furthermore:
Brexit: It was the Charlatans Wot Won it.
Rather than the full blown of a Little Britain (or really English) nationalist project to Take Back Control of UK laws and borders from the bureaucratic behemoth of Brussels, Naim and Torro instead frame Brexit as “a movement led and organised by a constellation of outright charlatans aiming to manipulate public opinion for their own gain”.[4]
First off, the block was the outgoing Mayor of London and Tory MP Boris Johnson, who had launched his journalistic career on a series of article written as Brussels bureau chief for the Telegraph in the 1990s which seemed to stretch journalistic ethics beyond any threshold of integrity. In story after story, Johnson excoriated EU bureaucrats for decisions they had not actually made. Among the most notorious were that the EU wanted to impose a single standardised condom size; that it would ban recycling of teabags and would forbid children from blowing up rubber balloons.[5] No matter that these stories lacked any factual base, they imprinted in the British public consciousness the idea of the EU as a mindless, rulemaking, dictatorial (with a small “d”) machine which defied the very essence of common sense.
So much so that when Nigel Farage - for whom withdrawal from the EU was a lifetime’s work - began to campaign for a referendum to achieve his objective, he was able to exploit this populist image of the EU to make even more preposterous claims such as that Brussels was seeking to snuff out British independence. In true political entrepreneurial style, Farage’s UKIP party began to peel away Conservative Party voters. This led to the then PM David Cameron’s panic decision to hold a binary referendum on EU membership in 2016 to staunch the flow of Tory desertions and to finally call time on the persistent Eurosceptic troublemakers in his party. The untruths told by both Vote Leave for whom Boris Johnson had fatefully declared and Leave EU headed up by Farage assumed dangerously hyperbolic proportions including the notorious £350m a week promise for NHS funding in lieu of contributions to the EU on the side of the red Vote Leave battle bus; that 75m Turks were set to be eligible to come to the UK in the event of a fictitious Turkish entry into the EU and the Breaking Point poster portraying a phalanx of Middle Eastern refugees on the borders of the EU which drew particular distaste due to the racist overtones of the image.
Farage strode around appealing to the id and wounded ego (but neve superego) of the ‘left behind’ Empire nostalgists and plain ignorant by reflecting back to them a certain romanticised image of British nationhood through his campaign garb of a tweed jacket, tan corduroy trousers, check shirt and knitted red tie and downing one pint of warm beer after another; swelling them with the dream of Britain recovering its muscle power once liberated from the straightjacket of “barmy Brussels bureaucrats. To those experts who tried to put across to the electorate the perils of severing itself from its largest trading partner came the Know Nothing moment of the campaign; the then justice secretary Michael Gove, when asked by a BBC interviewer to name a single economic expert who supported Brexit, simply replied “the British people have had enough of experts”.[6]
The magical thinking and breezy optimism that are the hallmarks of the charlatan’s trade were articulated by prominent Brexiteer Liam Fox who as Trade Secretary in January 2017 promised that a post Brexit trade deal with the EU would be “easiest in human history.” The image of a Global Britain able to negotiate favourable trade deals with other trading powers most notably the US freed from the constraints of EU membership rested on similar fantasy on stilts. But powered by such wings and prayers, Nigel Farage and the assorted other Bad Boys of Brexit achieved their “Independence Day” on 24th June 2016. A tortuous withdrawal process followed largely due to the manoeuvrings of Boris Johnson who having helped to sink Theresa May’s Withdrawal Bill became PM and negotiated a Hard or Full English Brexit in the form of a cumbersome trade and cooperation agreement that 77% of British exporting firms say is impeding their ability to do business with the continent. Contrary to Leave’s vision of prosperity Britain has been since departure in January 2020 has been the worst performing of the world’s advanced industrial economies shrinking an average of 0.4% between 2019 and 2024.
Why are some people susceptible to the charms of the charlatan? Most of us have an innate BS detector that instantly sorts the “too good to be true” or outlandish promise. The problem arises when a message really resonates with the recipient’s dreams or innate desires, fantastical though they appear. Such emotions are grounded in the kinds of beliefs that you just don’t doubt. For due to the way people are wired, when you hear dreams reflected back to you, you will react instantaneously, within 200 milliseconds, at the gut level. [7] At times of societal stress, during times of economic depression and associated immiseration, such visceral reactions can assume a contagion effect.
And don’t charlatans understand this psychological wiring. They know the power of dreams, or more accurately our innermost, undigested, and unprocessed primeval desires, over us. They speak to us in the language of these emotions knowing how reluctant human beings can be to critically examine inner most beliefs and of the reinforcing effects of peer pressure on these beliefs. It is not easy to question the received wisdom of those we look up to but critical thinking and that ability to put that bit of distance between your dreams and who you are are vital life skills in our protection against the lure of the charlatan’s false promises.
Conspiracism and Psychological Wiring
An understanding of neural wiring and imaging is also important in the recognition and counteraction of the charlatans’ pernicious twin – conspiracism. This task assumes existential importance when looking at the intrinsic role of conspiracism in the rise of the Nazis. For they used the same mental processes to convince themselves of the rectitude of their beliefs as the conspiracists of the 21st century. The only difference and the eternal lesson from history to be drawn is that Nazi conspiracism undergirded the most horrific crime in human history – the Shoah/Holocaust.
In his explanation of the role of scapegoating of the Jewish people in Nazi conspiracist propaganda and especially their supposed culpability in the German military’s defeat in World War I, Professor Laurence Rees draws upon the work of the social psychologist Professor Karen Douglas and the evolutionary psychology Professor Robin Dunbar. Professor Douglas believes that most conspiracists are ‘looking for someone to blame’, the idea that ‘there are these people pulling the strings behind the scenes’ helps deal with their ‘feelings of powerlessness and disillusionment.' Research suggests that ‘people sometimes believe conspiracy theories about other groups as a way of protecting or enhancing their own group.’ Professor Douglas points out that people ‘who are especially narcissistic about groups they belong to tend to be more likely to believe conspiracy theories about other groups.’ Prof Rees argues that since the ‘narcissism’ of the German High Command could not admit to ‘the best soldiers in the world’ losing the war, it had to be someone else’s fault. That ‘someone’ else had to be the Jews. After a claim from the Prussian Minister of War that Jews were dodging front-line combat, a census was organised to establish exactly how many Jews were serving in the armed forces. However, the results of the count were never made public – almost certainly because the findings showed that Jews were not evading military service at all[8]. But never let lack of evidence get in the way of a good conspiracist story.
Prof Rees posits a link between conspiracism and the evolution of language. Prof Dunbar believes that language may have evolved to enable human beings to gossip. As our ape ancestors used grooming to bring about and sustain social connections, so human beings evolved language to bond by discussing topics such as who is dating whom, who is cheating on their partner and what the real story is behind the leader’s recent actions. With this insight as a starting point, it is possible for one to see conspiracism as the ultimate gossip – secrets others try to hide. Thus, it is plausible that humanity has developed an evolutionary tendency towards attraction towards conspiracism [9] (as well as a tendency to filter out evidence that contradicts whatever tales it tells).
One of the most consequential uses of conspiracism was the ‘stab in the back’ myth as to the German loss of World War in terms of its later cataclysmic legacy. To explain the defeat after all the optimism engendered by Germany’s successful spring 1918 offensive, German military chiefs withheld information from the public about disastrous reverses suffered later that year and continued to pump out optimistic lies. While this ruse was designed to calm the domestic mood and to protect the reputation of the German commanders, it meant that the coming of the armistice in November 1918 was met with widespread shock and banishment as actual fighting was still taking place far from the centres of German power.[10]
Yet, despite their defeat when the German soldiers returned home, they were not looked upon as part of a humiliated army. On 10 December 1918, the new Chancellor, Friedrich Ebert, told troops parading at the Brandenburg Gate, ‘No enemy has overcome you’ and that ‘Only when the preponderance of our opponents in men and material grew heavier did we give up the struggle’; Ebert peddled this falsehood to avert the prospect of revolution in Germany but in doing so he fuelled the more pernicious lie voiced by Ludwig Beck and others – that the army had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by enemies behind the lines in Germany. It was a conspiracist lie adopted the following year by none other than Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburgh as another way of deflecting responsibility and deserved blame for the disastrous course the war had taken.[11]
For in a public meeting in 1919, Von Hindeburgh asserted that he had ‘wanted forceful and cheerful cooperation’ from German political parties during the war but instead ‘encountered failure and weakness.' He quoted approvingly the words of an ‘English general’ who had allegedly said, ‘the German army was stabbed in the back.’ Consequently, he claimed, the army could not be blamed for what had happened.’[12]
As Professor Doughlas points out, psychological research bears out that ‘It’s very difficult once someone holds a belief very strongly to change those beliefs.’ Furthermore:
if someone believes one conspiracy theory, they are more likely to believe in or look for others. People can go down the rabbit hole, and you can get a bit lost.
The damage that Von Hindeburgh’s words in terms of damage to the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic cannot be overestimated. For millions of nationalistic Germans these words from the all- conquering Hero of Tannenberg could only be gospel truth, not the lie that it really was. It provided a ready-made target on the back of democratic politicians who had the ultimately fruitless task of making the new Republic succeed. Worse still was the adoption of and weaponising of the ‘stab in the back’ calumny by an embittered front-line Corporal and unsuccessful artist – one Adolf Hitler
So, beware of the false prophet. But also, beware of the susceptibility of even the most enquiring minds to their wares.
References
[1] Moises Naim and Quico Toro, The Oldest Trick, The New World 23 October – 5 November 2025 Issue 457 pp.19-21
[2] Ibid, p.20
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid, p.20
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p.21
[8] Laurence Rees (2025) The Nazi Mind. 12 Warnings from History. London: Penguin p.19
[9] Ibid
[10]Ibid, p.25
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[1] Moises Naim and Quico Toro, The Oldest Trick, The New World 23 October – 5 November 2025 Issue 457 pp.19-21
[2] Ibid, p.20
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid, p.20
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p.21
[8] Laurence Rees (2025) The Nazi Mind. 12 Warnings from History. London: Penguin p.19
[9] Ibid
[10]Ibid, p.25
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
