Start a conversation about politics, religion or even the general state of reality and at some point a conspiracy theory will pop-up; vaccines, GMO’s, NSA, chemtrails, reptilians—heck, even movie concepts like The Matrix can fixate a mind into a point of no return. Undoubtedly Big Pharma, the FIAT Stock Exchange network, large corporations or even cryptocurrency exchanges try to control the strings one way or another because of their position. Here is the thing though; nobody truly controls anything. Many try to control the world one way or another but it never goes exactly as planned.
If we interview the biggest world influencers, even dictators, they would sincerely say that they only dreamt of a better world. Sure, everyone likes to run things once in awhile, but overall they would prefer to make people happy by setting those around them free. At some point though, things always go the wrong way. Further actions to correct calamities often deteriorate a situation, spiraling into more unpleasantries. The end image will eventually reach us, the unsuspecting viewer, but we would have already lost the grander perspective of things—and this is how conspiracies are born.
All the aforementioned “big guys” at some point or another desired profit. No surprise here since we all do what we do because of capital—whether that is financial, intellectual or social. However, interests and market valuations disperse pretty rapidly in our dynamic market. For example, Big Pharma companies compete with each other, often to death. In an attempt to gain an edge over the other they often produce hasty results or push medical products that are not properly tested for the general public. In other words the market forces them to continually run on a Beta version rather than anything “official”. Thing is, the general public don’t see it this way. Desperate for an explanation, the masses will tie the outcomes to elaborate conspiracy theories, thus justifying their biggest worries.
This is why massively over-generalised end-time scenarios like “population control”, “illuminati” and “new world order” are so popular. Keep in mind that very few humans accept responsibility for their actions. We would rather blame our shortcomings or ignorance to something vague, existing somehwere “out there”. Most religions emerged by investing on this basic weak spot in our perception. Conspiracies are a convenient scapegoat narrative. If some of them eventually turn out to be falling along our narrative, it is nothing but a statistical variation. Perhaps the most interesting fact about conspiracy theories is the way they tend to go viral within specific groups of people, remembering the ones that somewhat happened while avoiding the ones that were completely off. Truth is never black and white but rather innumerable shades of gray. This goes against the very core of conspiracy theories that depend on polar opposites in order to sell—and dogmatism is exactly what tends to be propagated one way or another inside their circles.
For example, there is a massive anti-chemo movement claiming that chemotherapy for cancer treatment is not only useless but lethal. So far we don’t know much about the workings of cancer. We do have evidence that chemo is the best chance a cancer patient can have for prolonging their life for most cases of cancer. When some chemotherapy treatments don’t work, desperate patients seek alternatives and the opposing market, the “naturalists”, are there to sell them just about anything and claim any potential lucky "survival statistics". The post-hoc narrative along with the inability to properly evaluate survival rates creates a conspiracy fairy tale that most people are ready to accept because supericially it makes sense. Indeed there are thousands who swear that they got cured because of alternative medical treatments. Thing is, we never hear the opinion of those who are dead.
Narratives provide a simple story that is understandable, easy to digest and can be easily propagated from mouth to mouth. The evidence most conspiracy theories provide are pedantic on the level of “Politician X was dining with businessman Y”. That’s all the evidence the average folk needs and really can have access to. A vague correlation for a frustrated citizen is often more than enough.
If we wish to break it down even more, most conspiracies are really based on a “paranoid boyfriend” mentality. For example, an insecure boyfriend catches his girlfriend chatting with a random guy. He calls her a whore because of a vague correlation without having further evidence. Conspiracy theorists tend to do the same and even worse when it comes to corporate businesses or governments. The worst part? We get our information from those whom we accuse of defrauding us which doesn't make much sense in believing it. Sure, some conspiracy theories do play out along the lines of our overgeneralised narrative but those are not really conspiracies to begin with. It was not such a big secret for example that NSA was eavesdropping. More or less that could be deducted when they made it clear about "fighting terrorism" or even from simple observations what network administrators do in most companies. Same applies to politicians defrauding the system as revealed from wikileaks. They are politicians. It’s their job to defraud people. No surprise there either for those who understand a thing or two about politics. Most conspiracies are nothing more but the end result of something gone terribly bad from incompetent bureaucratic governments. One would have thought that libertarians and anarchists would be immune to conspiracy theories since they acknowledge how tragic the governmental structures are. I mean, come on. How a useless entity such as "the government" can really orchestrate so massively elabrate plans when they can barely run anything on a smaller scale?
What becomes evident in detailed investigations such as in the case of the housing market collapse or even in war declarations is that nobody really knows what is going on. Often one harsh decision leads to another without the parties involved even realizing how things unfolded they way they did. A great example of this is WW1. A simple incident that everybody expected to end in a couple of months became one of the biggest bloodsheds in human history. Post-hoc we came to give our own narrative about how all events played-out as described from those who won the war—supposedly even controlling our lives today. In the Housing Market Crash, people ended up accusing the big banks and the guys of Wall Street that shorted toxic investments through credit default swaps. Nobody dared to think the obvious explanation—irresponsible masses purchased things with money they didn’t have and ended up paying even more for their irresponsibility. We are raised to believe that we are helpless little babies that need to be taken by the hand. If something goes wrong is the fault of the corporation, the banker, the government, the parent—never us. A 40-second dialogue from the movie Margin Call between two investment bankers answers to those who still insist about this pedantic excuse.
Deep inside, we suspect that the world is not governed by anyone. We seek control because we are teleological beings bound by cause and effect. We are desperate to know the aetiology of things; why are we here, who made us and where we are going. Throughout the ages we created elaborate stories to explain our sufferings. Stories became religions, political narratives, history, myths. Today most people don’t even read basic historical or scientific books thus much of reality manifests through movies or tv-series. We have become more elaborate with our narrative but we still lie to ourselves much the same. I can’t count the amount of times I have seen on the trending page of Steemit themes from popular series, video games or fiction books. We rarely realise how much trash we absorb and how through our cognitive biases we falsely construct our reality. It becomes a giant circle of paranoia and the only thing we have is our own reassurance.
The greatest conspiracy is our own existence. We are at the center of it all; reaffirming illusions to nourish our deepest insecurities. Although chaos and randomness define us, we refuse to accept them as the de-facto state of the world. Sure, reality is sometimes too much to digest but this is not an excuse for running away from it. The scariest part of our world is not that some people are in control. This line of reasoning is rather a comforting narrative. The raw truth is that nobody is in charge.
