Underworld
The idea that there is a secret network below us that allows arbitrary access across our cities is an enduring fantasy. In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the turtles can traverse the sewers to any point that involves a manhole, a drainage pipe, or a grate of any type on the street, the sidewalk, or a building’s cellar. In the movie Batman Returns, the Penguin sets up his lair in an abandoned zoo’s sunken Antarctic habitat, with its large drainage pipes; from there, he and his henchmen are able to rise up at will from below absolutely anywhere, including a formal ball in a fancy building.
When I was a student at Columbia University, I seized quickly on stories of semi-secret underground tunnels connecting buildings. With other students—nearly all men—who were similarly inspired, I found and explored several of these tunnels. It felt right that there should be these connections, and comforting that they were secret; there was an esoteric nervous system underneath a campus that felt devoid of common experiences and whose administration seemed hostile to students. It was possible to find this system, and even to make use of it. Down there, it was truer than it was up top, where deans spied on student groups and forbade students to read reports commissioned by the university. The timelessness and geography of the tunnels made light of the political vagaries of the moment.
And this concept has appeal in other forms, forms which are not corporeal but social. Just as the sewers of TMNT and tunnels of Columbia are a physical layer that overlays — or underlies — the city, a conspiracy can be an administrative layer that overlays an entire society. This takes dramatic form in movies like L.A. Confidential and David Fincher’s The Game, in which a secret cabal is found to be pulling the puppet strings at every turn. And it takes more exaggerated, more symbolic form in horror movies such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
All of these fictional networks play into the human desire to see coherence in the world around us, to perceive intent and design. Just as tribes around the world and throughout history have created myths that make sense of the patterns of the moon and the pains of discord and loss, we create modern myths that digest the hopeless jumble of voices and activity around us, and produce explanations that we can spout while taking a smoke break at a party. The unsophisticated among us pick up just any old pattern, no matter how flimsy: the Illuminati, Comet Ping-Pong. The sophisticated couch our myths in more elegant dress.
But in all cases, the mark of a myth is that it produces a sense of purpose and clarity in its adherents. A good myth is soothing. I love to believe that if we simply got the right person into office — someone pure and true — they could access those secret tunnels, and unlock the ability to go anywhere, and do anything. This lets those who rant about “one weird trick” solutions to policy problems feel they are doing something; their advocacy could unlock the solution, and we are only a subtle shift of perspective away from accessing every building at once, making the police do the right thing, and receiving the coherent world that is our birthright.
These myths appear, on the surface, to undermine the established order of power. But actually, they reinforce it, by presenting both problems and solutions as just comprehensive systems of control in competition with each other. Who needs to, say, start a local mutual aid group, or organize locally around policy needs, when everyone knows the real power is in, say, secret chat rooms, and the real work is to wake everyone up to the wool the powerful have pulled over our eyes? We have become so educated in the battle between these comprehensive systems that we can no longer appreciate self-rule and bottom-up decision making, even in organizations that champion progressive ways of thinking about political participation. Everyone is Seeing Like a State, in the phrasing of James C. Scott’s book of the same name, even those who vow to smash the state.
