I have a theory about conspiracy theories, and you’re all in on it.
How is it that I never saw the connections before? The whole thing was staring me right in the face all along.
The thing is, I wish we could believe in conspiracy theories. I really do. Because that would mean we would have to believe in conspirators, too. Groups of smart, crafty, diligent people, with vast resources and indomitable will, working, conspiring, together, effectively, to accomplish lofty goals. If we could do that secretively and with evil intent, imagine what we could achieve if we pooled our resources openly.
And, yet… Have you seen people? Have you met anyone? If you pull the curtain back to get a good look at the machinations of the people ‘pulling the strings’, what you’ll find are… people. In fact, you’ll see yourself, too. Your family and friends. People you went to school with.
Okay, so, I’m not a historian. But, from what I can tell from my cursory review of the entire Holocene epoch, people are kind of a wreck. And, it seems fairly clear that the most influential organizing idea that we have heretofore conceived is capitalism. Yes, religion moves us, too. But, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, while there may be individual exceptions, as a group we’re far more driven by the material than by the philosophical and spiritual. In fact, I think we can probably admit that our spiritual concerns are mostly products of, and reactions to, our material concerns.
The truth is that capitalism isn’t actually an idea at all. It’s the product of human emotion.
And the reason why we’re essentially resigned to it being the only viable economic foundation is because we are essentially resigned to our nature as nervous pack animals scrabbling together enough resources to get ourselves, our offspring, and our pack through another winter.
Ask yourself, have you ever been involved in anything, anything at all, in which human emotional frailty, incompetence, interpersonal drama and/or just plain old life didn’t essentially run the show? Conspiring together? Well, hmm, let me see.
The only successful global scale conspiracies are the ones in which we all openly participate. We’re much better at denial than secrets. And the proof of that is in our embrace of grand conspiracy theories. We prefer to believe that our struggles are orchestrated by secretive and powerful others, and to deny the plain and obvious truth: we’re a scared, confused, overwhelmed mess of humanity. We want to believe that we’re being duped because it’s easier than taking responsibility as co-conspirators.
Because, if there is a grand conspiracy, it is one that we perpetrate against ourselves. The one where we deny our collective humanity. The one that pits the individual against the collective. The one that conflates the material and the spiritual. The one that says there is a way to get out of this alive.
There isn’t.
We see you. The game is up. Time to come into the light and come clean.
