Oh
man. The conspiracy theories are starting to fly again. In response, I
give you the words of Alan Moore:
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.”
–Alan Moore, “The Mindscape of Alan Moore” (2003)
I am a big believer in incompetence ultimately triumphing over any well-orchestrated secret plan. Over time, stuff goes wrong and things come out. If anything, the age of the internet has proven that there are no secrets. There is always a whistle-blower, always an anonymous tip that makes it impossible to hide anything for very long. This is not to say that conspiracies don't happen. It is just that incompetence and dysfunction are often better explanations than any grand unified theory of whatever. I've seen all sorts of badly photoshopped images trying to link the Boston / Sandy Hook / 911 etc. to a government cover up, when the reality (botched foreign policy over time leading to radicalization) is more complex and harder to actually fix.
I generally find conspiracy theories to be far too simplistic and neatly tied together i.e. made up. Real conspiracies, more often than not, look nothing like the theories surrounding them. We're at a point where any given major event (good or bad) evokes a set of conspiracy theories without a lot of critical thought going into [i] whether said theory makes any sense, and [ii] whether the conspiracy theory actually detracts from a very real underlying problem. For example it is a lot easier to claim that climate change is a conspiracy and much harder to deal with the reality that we may have irreparably fucked our ecosystem.
Which is all really just a longer-winded and less articulate version of Alan Moore's quote.
(cobbled together from a longish Facebook thread)
