It’s a conspiracy!

The Illuminati, New World Order, aliens, mind-control beams, ZOG, the anti-christ and fiendish, fucking flouridators – they’re all out there, and they all want to destroy our way of life.

Yeah, right.

Fact is, one or two of them are out there in one sense or another. (If you can’t figure out which ones, start using your fucking brain when you read.) Backroom deals and murky alliances happen all the time, and there are certainly lodges with staggering amounts of influence. Media and political spin does control the public mind to some extent. The problem is that this is all part of reality – it’s all as mundane as vomit. It’s also complicated, which makes it all too much to take in for the enfeebled celebrity-junky mind.

This is where conspiracy theory comes in – not as mind-blowing insight, but as a fucking cop-out.

There are three things common to all conspiracy theory: an element of the fantastic, simplification of reality and projection of blame.

The fantastic element is the hook; it’s what pulls you in; fascination. It’s clearly horse-shit, but you accept it anyway because you want it to be true, and once you’re in and gathering “proof”, it becomes the barrier towards mundane reality; what they just don’t see.

For any of it to make any sense, of course, you need to “connect the dots”, which is easily done by ignoring context and complexity in favour of dopey, shortsighted pattern recognition. It doesn’t matter what you use to link things together, as long as it stands out once you’ve seen it; as long as it sounds right. In this, it has a lot in common with pseudo-science – it bases itself in fact, but makes all kinds of idiot presumptions by ignoring most other facts as well as logical reasoning. It’s a fun and easy exercise – it’s just that some of us are bright enough not to actually believe in every crackpot hypothesis we may come up with.

Finally, there’s the psychological addiction – the projection of blame. If it’s all their fault, it’s not your fault, is it? If the Illuminati are controlling the world, then it’s not our fault that the world has gone to shit. We’re not to blame! If this sounds hauntingly familiar, I refer you to some very widespread religions which use very similar lines of reason. It’s very effective and it turns your neurons to mouldy snot.

The main problem with conspiracy theory – apart from the effect it has on people who actually believe in it – is that it masks the somber reality. People in power do atrocious things every day, and conspiracy theory is one of the things that lets the fuckers get away with it. It muddles the water so that it gets harder to see what the real “conspiracies” are.

In short: accept it, fuckheads – we’re all to blame. Let’s move on and focus on bringing down the bastards who really are trying to brand and control us.