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''A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America'' is a 2003 non-fiction book written by Michael Barkun, professor emeritus of political science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Its publisher, the University of California Press, and scholarly critics describe the book as the most comprehensive and authoritative examination of contemporary American conspiracism to date by a leading expert on the subject. ==Overview== Along with the Internet playing a key role in introducing individuals to beliefs once consigned to the outermost fringe of American political and religious life, Barkun points to the convergence of two phenomena that influences contemporary American conspiracism: * The rise of "improvisational millennialism" — a belief in an imminent destruction of the world and the creation of a new world as a result of the triumph of good over evil, which is independent from any single religious or secular tradition (e.g., Christian premillennial dispensationalism, etc.) and indiscriminately syncretizes ideas from different traditions (e.g., Western esotericism, Eastern religions, New Age movement, fringe science, radical politics, etc.). * The popularity of "stigmatized knowledge" — claims to the truth that the claimants regard as verified (e.g., climate change denial, location hypotheses of Atlantis, astrology, alchemy, folk medicine, alien abduction, extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, suppressed cancer cures, etc.), despite the marginalization of those claims by the authoritative institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error (e.g., academia, scientific community, etc.). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「A Culture of Conspiracy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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