Living in a Tinfoil Haberdashery

(Credit to playwright Ernest Hemmings.)

Whether you're talking 'bout President Obama is spreading Ebola, Secretary Hillary deliberately caused Benghazi, or the thought that Earth is, actually, as flat as the ass of pancake, conspiracy theories seem to reproduce like a rabbit-mouse hybrid in heat.

I grew up amongst many of them through the 90's and early 2000's. From apples laced with razor blades to HIV-infected needles in the parks and playgrounds of the neighborhood, or on the handles of the local gas station pump.

Others were less well-known, such as the Native-American ghosts that haunted our high school campus and killed the science teacher on back-to-school night. Or the mysterious oil-derricks hidden between Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa in a locked-down facility that, purportedly, housed a testing ground for experimental weaponry and post-apocalyptic machinery.

Indeed, I've actually tread those very lines myself as a teenager, searching for the Truth and shit to do on a Saturday night when you're more or less a social leper.

So, you can see I, for one, have a love of conspiracy theories.

I don't actually believe them. In fact, many of them are not just crazy but offensive, dangerous, and potentially the cause of so much misery for so many people. But the theory itself and the people who believe in it -- the belief in something so patently absurd, the ability to suspend so many different parts of logic and rationality in favor of an entirely star-shaped echo-chamber filled to the brim with the cast-off zeitgeist of a frothing, roiling philosophy that's existed for as long as our ancestors could look up at the sky and play connect the dots. What can I say? I love me some genuine crazy.

For instance, if you're a regular traveler, I highly recommend the Denver International Airport. Which, coincidentally, just happens to be Hell itself. Oh, and it also hosts Neo-Nazis, the NWO, Reptoids, and the Illuminati. Of course, this is all aside from the terrible design flaws of the airport itself that require calves of steel to reach a connecting gate for your flight!

But I digress... There's a wonderful book entitled, "The Skeptics Guide to Conspiracies" that is deliciously full of popular conspiracy theories, their history, as well as some 4th-wall breaking notes in the margins. If you're looking for a starting point for your conspiracy-theory busting, hunting, and questioning, then I suggest starting there.

This would be followed quickly by moving on to Snopes and RationalWiki! Two of the internet's foremost compendiums of pseudoscience from crackpots to crank thoughts, all thoroughly debunked for your pleasure. A simple search for, say, "Christianity" brings up a fully-sourced and succinct treatise on the religion from its roots to the rather... interesting fruit the religion has borne.

Once you've established a solid foundation, then you can finally jump into the REAL interesting part -- the mind of a conspiracy theorist. Why does someone believe this kind of crap? Whether it's the same motives that inspired the world's religions or a distinct lack education and intelligence matters little because, ultimately, people will believe anything.

But the people themselves, the conspiracy theorist is another subject altogether. A fascinating blend of fear, paranoia, ignorance, distrust, and stubbornness make for a positively ripe consumer of tinfoil hats and shuttered window-shades.

The conspiracy theorist is the person who believes anything so long as it's nothing people already believe. 10 people say "up" and they'll be the one looking down at their feet with a vaguely disturbed look on their face. They accept the banality of evil, its cunning, its guile, while simultaneously accepting that stupidity of most the human population and, yet, fail to see the contradiction inherent within.

The conspiracy theorist is, foremost, a true believer pretending to be a skeptic. They are, themselves, a contradiction. They are the zealot, the fanatic, the devout crusader cloaked in a facade of rationality and logic that scarcely survives even a cursory glance. In fact, most conspiracy theorists can't stand being questioned, as they see this as only further proof of their righteousness, that they and only they (or a select few others) have found The Truth! They will become positively rabid in the space of a few seconds when faced with even a scintilla of resistance to their insanity. Potentially even violent.

And therein lies the curiosity. Someone so calm on the surface. Yet, beneath is a frenzied movement of thought and emotion so uncontrolled that, like the movement of Earth's crust, they can't hold back the pressure of their own repressed psyche.

What's really strange is how prevalent conspiracy theorists have since become, on both the Left and the Right in this country. You can find them saying Hillary Clinton rigged the 2016 Democratic primary utilizing a form of math incomprehensible to civilization to prove that Bernie Sanders should've won. And you can find them calling Obama a Kenyan, Muslim, Socialist who wants to take all their guns to invade Texas. Or something like that.

So, while my normal response is to ask deep, probing questions and then laugh in a conspiracy theorist's face until the simple shame of their idiocy gets them to leave me alone, we now have to deal with them as a common occurrence in public discourse. It's a problem both annoying and hilarious.

But, more than that, it's scary. It's scary when so many people can actually be convinced or convince themselves to believe in pure, utter, and complete nonsense.

So it goes.