“What Matters is the System!” The Disappearance of God and the Rise of Conspiracy Theorizing

Abstract

In music and worldview, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Not only has Sean Lennon followed his father John in seeking pop music fame, but the son of the Beatles’ founder appears also to have inherited his father’s penchant for hatching conspiracy theories. According to Albert Goldman, John Lennon revealed this facet of his personality in the early 1970s, during the televised appeal hearings for James Earl Ray. Asked by a family friend “What’s the real story behind the murder of Martin Luther King?” Lennon exploded, “Who the hell cares . . . ? What matters is the system!” To Lennon, Goldman continues, James Earl Ray was “a guy who was framed. The Ray hearings fascinated Lennon. . . . ‘Look at him,’ Lennon would yell. ‘It’s obvious! He doesn’t have to ask for a glass of water or take a leak. He’s drugged!’”¹

[John Lennon] was a countercultural revolutionary, and the government takes that kind of shit really seriously historically. He was dangerous to the government. If he had said, “Bomb the White House tomorrow,” there would have been ten thousand people who would have done it. These pacifist revolutionaries are historically killed by the government, and anybody who thinks that Mark Chapman was just some crazy guy who killed my dad for his personal interests is insane, I think, or very naïve, or hasn’t thought about it clearly. It was in the best interests of the United States to have my dad killed, definitely. And, you know, that worked against them, to be honest, because once he died his powers grew. So, I mean, fuck them. They didn’t get what they wanted.

—Sean Lennon, The New Yorker, April 20, 1998