The Real Conspiracy

Boy there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there. It seems like nowadays people will pick up any half-baked idea and turn it into a conspiracy. That’s how it seems. But that’s what they want you to think. In fact, these conspiracy theories are being developed and seeded by a secret network of powerful forces.

I know what you’re thinking: That sounds like a conspiracy theory. Exactly. You see the brilliance of it. If you’re the kind of person who buys into conspiracy theories, you’re lost to the 5G and Bill Gates insanity. But if you’re not, you’re ignorant to the real conspiracy, which is to spread conspiracy theories.

Like all effective conspiracies, it has a public part and a secret part. The public part is what we see: the media, including the social media platforms. Good people work for the public part and don’t even realize they’re part of the conspiracy. For that reason, we tend to let the public part off the hook, even when we see them engaged in bad behavior—like spreading conspiracy theories. The problem seems to be confined to a few bad apples. But over time, you might notice the bad apples don’t seem to go away. You’d expect someone with a cart full of apples to want to remove the bad ones. Instead, the bad apples keep getting rewarded. It takes a real firestorm to remove a bad apple, it seems, and even then, most of the time, the replacement is another bad apple.

Because bad apples are the point of the public part. They’re its most essential feature. It’s the good apples who are superfluous. You look at the public part and see mostly good apples, but what they do is largely irrelevant—which you can tell from how they get replaced more often and more easily. They exist for only one reason: because otherwise you’d be able to see that the whole cart is full of bad apples.

Behind this is the secret part. This is a network of the rich and powerful who want to stay that way—or, more realistically, become more so. They’ve collected vast amounts of wealth and influence via family connections and lobbying, but it’s become a tough sell to convince people they need more trickle-down economics and fewer public services when working-class and middle-class incomes have been stuck in a ditch since 1980. For the network, the nightmare is an intelligent, well-educated, reasonable society. That would be the end of them.

So they need new lies. And after test-marketing a few candidates, they came up with a winner: all of them. Anything that sows discord, that makes people confused, ignorant, or angry at someone else. The more conspiracy theories, the better, because the more enemies people have, the smaller the target on the real conspiracy.

I used to get mad at people who believed in conspiracy theories. My thinking was: It’s 2020, you have the internet, learn how to do critical thinking. But that was on the assumption that conspiracy theories were randomly burped into existence, like viruses—as opposed to bio-weapons expertly engineered in a lab somewhere, like other viruses. Now I have a darker view of conspiracy theories and where they come from. They come from the conspiracy. They have a purpose.