when you see conspiracies everywhere you turn
Why is it that so many people feel the need to latch on to any and every conspiracy, constantly chanting about sinister government plots and accusing any skeptic or bystander who doesn’t see any real flaws in an official explanation of an incident conspiracy theorists find so compelling, of being an establishment plant, put there with the sole goal of hampering the theorists’ groundbreaking investigation? Sure, I understand why really big conspiracy theories, like the New World Orders imagined by David Icke and hoaxed by Leo Taxil, exist. They provide certainty that all our problems can be traced back to one organization and if we just take its members out of power, everything will be just fine again. Despite being nefarious in nature, these shadow governments are a major improvement on aimless, greedy politicians sniping at each other without getting anything of real substance done, you know, the kind of governance with which we’re so often faced today. But some of the small stuff which some people will unquestioningly buy with an unholy zeal often takes me by surprise…
Take this week’s big story of a supposed missile launch off the Pacific Coast filmed by a local news station’s helicopter, and quickly dispelled as contrails from a jet, probably a flight from Honolulu to Phoenix. But not to all the dozens of engineers with several centuries of experience, who’ve personally seen every launch of every rocket ever built in human history and can tell you it was a missile with absolute certainty, who showed up in the comments of every blog covering the incident. According to them, every fuzzy lens flare is the afterburner or the exhaust plume from a rocket, and because the military didn’t instantly say that it was just a jet, proceeding to name the flight and all the passengers on board, the jet explanation must be just a last minute cover story and they were really launching space planes or conducting a secret test of some anti-ICBM laser. You see, it just can’t be a blurry clip from a local news chopper and wild speculation by news anchors and the internet’s self-appointed hordes of engineering and ballistics experts. It has to be some malevolent government action and anyone who refuses to acknowledge that is either a sheep, or “spreading establishment propaganda.”
And if you think that this kind of affinity for conspiracies is just a harmless obsession that will only waste your time and some cash for Marrs and Icke potboilers, think again. Another interesting story this week was about a composer and trust fund baby who was misled into handing as much as $20 million to a techie claiming to moonlight for the CIA and spending his client’s money on protecting the composer from a massive Opus Dei conspiracy to bring down the U.S. government, using his client as a pawn in their schemes. No, not one word of that was made up or exaggerated. This is exactly what happened. While most people would just scoff and walk away from a computer repair shop ran by a guy who tells whacky stories and tries to charge you millions of dollars to protect you from a New World Order plot, this gullible fool forked over obscene amounts of cash in his beliefs that such foolish conspiracies really can happen outside a Dan Brown novel, or a foaming-at-the- mouth post on Prison Planet or Above Top Secret. This is where irrational obsessions with everything said by conspiracy mongers could eventually lead you, and why your first instinct shouldn’t be to shout about Illuminati plots, but to think critically and stop assuming that everything is a part of some nefarious plan.
Remember that professional conspiracy theorists want your money first and foremost. They need you to buy a book, or sign up for a mailing list, or spread the word across the web so more people will buy their wares. It’s in their direct financial interest to make sure there’s another conspiracy, and that old theories won’t die so they can revisit them, or hijack them to move the plot along in their newest book. And at some point, it’s much more likely that some random writer is pulling stuff out of his or her read end to make rent instead of actually being privy to super-mega-hyper-secret evidence that the whole world is actually ran by aliens, just like it’s far more likely that not every streak or cloud in the sky captured by a traffic chopper is evidence of secret war games in progress just off one of the most populated areas of the Pacific coastline.
