Portents

As I was casting about for a topic for my weekly post, a brief scamper down an Internet rabbit hole led me to a thread on persistent conspiracy theories. You know the kind--mostly benign though ludicrous assertions that the earth is flat, lizard eyed aliens are among us or we never went to the moon. There are dozens of these that circulate and behind them possessed individuals who will brook no evidence in contradiction of their beliefs. I am happy to leave them to it, remembering Mark Twain's apocryphal caution that one should "never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience".

There is another class of conspiracists, however, who are far more concerning. They are almost always certain of dark, evil plans and actions fomented by a mysterious 'they' who are the cause of all that is wrong in the world. Resentment and hatred is kindled in the hearts of those who harbor such views, but beneath the surface lies something far more sinister. Whether the conspiracy takes the form of The Great Replacement, denial of the Holocaust, or belief in armies of Antifa terrorists, murderous immigrants, transsexuals, socialists and satanists, the underlying thesis is the same. Fear of the other, the stranger, and almost always those who are striving to free themselves from oppression and prejudice.

For any authoritarian regime to succeed, for the powerful to remain in power there must be boogeymen, someone or typically groups whose racial characteristics, ancestry, or lifestyle offends the sensibilities of the righteous. The qualifying criteria may differ from place to place and age to age, but what remains consistent is the identity of these threats to our way of life; they are not like us. It is of course an intentional distraction to keep the foolish stirred up, and to justify the ongoing erosion of laws and rights sundered in the name of protection, democracy and in the present day, the American way.

The digression I wandered into in the course of my online wandering led me to thinking about what causes conspiracy thinking. Clearly the instigation is often in the interest of cynical and self serving political unrest. But why are so many caught up believing and even amplifying these nightmarish theories? Without denying the great harm caused by those who foment conspiracies or dwelling on the particulars of any one currently circulating, my thoughts turned instead to history and the nature of human behavior to look for the seeds and the patterns that dwell in us all.

I have already mentioned one such ancestral artifact, fear of the stranger and coupled with that the belief that the unknown always poses a threat. This belief, whether at the surface or deeply buried in our collective psyche seems to lurk within our DNA, a flight or fright response that served us well as we emerged from the primordial mud. But it is also coupled with a particular form of magical thinking, a belief that endows otherwise commonplace events and coincidences with mysterious portents.

Bear with me. I am suggesting that the same instincts that lead us into believing luck is something we can manifest, that we can read our stars, that palm readers and psychics are prophets, is akin to conspiracy thinking. The universe is capricious, bad things happen, sometimes good, and generally we cannot attribute this to a particular cause, much less to our own actions. Instead we look for signs and portents to interpret, to give meaning to what might otherwise be nothing more or less than random and transient confluence. History, of course, is something we only interpret looking backwards. It is a sport in which we are all Monday morning Quarterbacks. But history too informs our thinking that the past is inevitably prelude to the present and through that lens we endow mystery where it does not exist.

The very real flaw in almost all conspiracy theories is the same. It requires a suspension of disbelief, an acceptance of the idea that massive numbers of people can be pledged to silence, to keep secret from us what is plain to the cognoscenti of conspiracy. Every child knows that secrets never persist, especially where hundreds, thousands or more are pledged to keep them. Human nature itself argues against such a view.

More often than not real harm, prejudice, xenophobia, and malicious intent go without a mask, are hidden in plan sight. We do not need to invent mystery, construct convoluted explanations, or create mythologies to explain malign forces at work in our world, they are visible if we will only look. Conspiracies are a tool to avert our gaze from what is obvious, and to pit us against one another so that our vision is clouded by errant emotions, our fear and doubt fueled by suspicion, and our humanity submerged beneath a misguided instinct for self preservation. The fault, as Shakespeare duly noted, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.