OK, I’ll say it right now: I’m a sucker for conspiracy theories. There’s a sense of wonder and amazement at the idea, whether you believe it or not, that great things are afoot right beneath our senses, carried out by unscrupulous people moved by reasons that may vary from the completely inscrutable to simple plain greed. It also makes yourself feel a lot better – I mean, no matter how evil and lazy you are, and how you cheat your taxes and don’t recycle and throw used batteries in regular thrash and park in the handicap spot sideways so you take two spaces, at least you’re not one of those evil fucking bastards that are responsible for downright destroying our world, perpetuating poverty and world hunger. It’s all their fault, really. But, even more, there’s a sense of fulfillment – the idea of finally completing the large puzzle whose pieces are spread in websites and news stories and books all over the world, like a massive ARG with no real reward, but no real end either.
It’s too bad, then, that the people who perpetuate these conspiracy theories are so adamant in their ideas that everyone thinks they are complete and utter bullshit.
Allow me to enlighten you as to how I believe conspiracies come into life. They start with a smarter-than-average guy. Let’s call him ‘Bob’, because I’m lame with names. ‘Bob’ (yes, the apostrophes are part of his name) starts to look into something – say, the moon landing. ‘Bob’ thinks, ‘Hey, isn’t it strange that the soviets were in the lead during the entire space race thing – first to launch a satellite into orbit, first living being into outer space, first human into outer space – then suddenly the Americans jump to the lead?’. Then he thinks, ‘It looks like John Kennedy said in the beginning of the sixties that they’d put a man in the moon by the end of the decade. Isn’t it a coincidence that it happened in 1969 – thevery last year of the decade?’ Then ‘Bob’ starts to wonder how feasible it would be for NASA to fake the whole thing, and decides that the answer is ‘very’. Done – ‘Bob’ has created a conspiracy theory.
Let’s draw our attention to the world ‘theory’. It’s a word that means, ‘we think this is true because all evidence points to it, so unless we find proof of the opposite we must think this is true’. It does not mean ‘this is true so shut up stupid’. ‘Bob’ is smarter than average, as I said, so he knows this.
‘Bob’ starts to spread his new theory amongst other people. They find it interesting, and start to try to find other facts to corroborate it. If they do, they add to the original theory, to make it stronger. Not all of these facts have been double-checked, and many would fall to earth if they were challenged, but no one checks these facts when they first read about it so the theory keeps growing stronger. Then, some people can’t bother to look for actual fact, so they just start making stuff up. First it’s just small stuff, rewriting the real facts to make them look harder to refute. Then they start outright changing facts, or combining different things into one. Finally, some idiot comes along and says that the whole thing was directed by Stanley Kubrick. Done – the theory is now considered ridiculous, because this line makes no sense (why would anyone hire a movie director to shoot something that had to look like it hadn’t been directed at all?) and it’s obviously just trying to validate the story by drawing a celebrity’s name. Then, in the same way that, before, the less believable facts looked hard to refute because some of them were so solid, the one completely ridiculous fact makes the whole thing sound stupid.
Then, one day, ‘Bob’ is at a party, and mentions his awesome theory, and everyone laughs at him and he doesn’t get laid, even though his idea was solid. This is a mean world afterwards.
The whole problem with this is that there are conspiracies – maybe not alien lizardfolk controlling masonry to destroy mankind through cabbage patch dolls, but you would need to be extremely gullible to believe that governments always say the truth. If there is a government that’s never lied, then surely it’s just never had the need to. But no one wants to believe in this, because the people who are trying to spread this stories believe adamantly that not only they are real, but they are so real that anyone who doesn’t see that must have been fooled by the media conglomerates (which, in turn, are probably controlled by the alien lizardfolk I mentioned earlier). Forgetting the meaning of theory, they just aggregate more and more facts that corroborate their idea while ignoring ones that would prove it to be wrong – like those people defending that 9/11 was actually ordered by the government and the airplanes were actually missiles, who keeping quoting this guy who said that the airplane kind of look like a missile in the footage, even though the guy keeps saying that he was wrong and he’s sorry and for fuck’s sake he can’t get a job again because everyone else can see it’s not a fucking missile.
(And of course, they even reject the probability that they are only slightly right. I mean, suppose that the US government brainwashed people to blow up the airplanes hoping that some big terrorist cell would claim responsibility, because they needed to go to war or needed people to be patriotic or the Minister of Things that Never Really Happened woke up bored one morning or whatever. Could be, right, Mr. Conspiracist? I mean, it all boils down to the same thing, right? No – I said they were missiles and they are missiles. Stop listening to the lizardfolk! Sigh.)
This leads to some interesting situations. I’ve heard from several people that the Katrina hurricane was set up by the US government to kill black people. Curiously, though, all these people were American. They say, ‘The US government is evil! They kill their own people!’ I hear, ‘The US is so badass, thousands of people can’t have died in a random meteorological catastrophe! It must have been the badass evil government!’ Never mind how they imagine the government has some sort of hurricane-summoning machine to summon them forth to do their bidding. Obviously they are also trying to systematically eradicate all trailer camps.
“But boss, after all the work we went through to create 9/11, why do we have to turn up the hurricane machine? Couldn’t we just bomb the place and blame it on a terrorist attack? We’d have the fear going all up again, we could arrest Michael Moore and-“
“SHUT UP THE HURRICANE MACHINE IS COOL”
But what I really wanted to talk about was the Xbox 360. They have a defect that causes a general protection fault (dubbed the ‘red rings of death’, due to the similar PC error ‘blue screen of death’) that causes the console to stop working. The company’s PR went publicly to apologize for this inexcusable error, and Microsoft will replace for free any malfunctioning machines, for an estimated loss of one million dollars. That, of course, are coming straight from their advertising budget! Microsoft needed to make a strong statement that they are no longer the company from the 90’s that watched as their consumers cried at their system’s manifold errors, and that they are willing to help costumers if shit happens – what better way to do that than to program the shit into the console in the first place then act all surprised and apologetic and generous when it goes free?
And you know what? Stanley Kubric helped them do it, I’m sure.
by André “The Random One” Colabelli