Paranoid Finance

Do your own research! Type “NESARA GESARA” and see what you learn. Or try “OPPT UCC” instead. You will access ideals of sovereignty, emancipation, life, money, and wealth; tutorials on the codes and procedures that are needed in order to subvert the dominant order and lead to financial salvation; and lessons on the spiritual menaces and economic enmities that justify this newly found path. Mixtures of millennialism, esotericism, conspiratorialism, populism, antisemitism, libertarianism, and nationalism can indeed be observed in a number of contemporary movements of economic redemption. These can sometimes find expression in troubling ways: in a cult, perhaps, or in violence,as in the case of “sovereign citizen” extremism. Other times, they translate into innocuous pastimes, mundane skepticism, or dodgy investment schemes. Documenting these practices furthers understanding of the financial element that is at work in the culture of contemporary conspiratorial, millennialist discourse. But it also opens up a promising lead for the anthropology of finance, as it exposes the delirious potentials of ordinary concepts of money, finance, wealth, and value. The case of “OPPT” (One People’s Public Trust) provides a testbed for a critical inquiry into the demons inherent in financial imagination.

Fabian Muniesa, a professor at the École des Mines de Paris (Université PSL) and researcher at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, is the author of The Provoked Economy: Economic Reality and the Performative Turn (Routledge, 2014). His cultural approach to economic reality includes recent research on financial valuation and business education. He is currently working on finance and paranoia.