A Conspiracy Theory

I will start with a confession: I have a tendency to create elaborate worst-case-scenarios in my head. It happens when I need to confront a problem or a decision. This automatic response causes me to freeze instead of tackle the problem, and had often caused me to delay or avoid necessary actions.

But I am not the only one who creates those elaborate scenarios. Most conspiracy theories are created by people who decide to ignore Occam's Razor principle, and create unnecessarily complicated, scary and often silly scenarios in order to explain world events. As a result, we end with theories such as "JFK was killed by the FBI", or "The Mossad was responsible for 9/11", as well as a fairly recent one about how "The CIA and Israel were responsible for Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami". If you think that any of these theories were invented by me, you can google each and every one of them.

All these theories are wonderfully complex and make a lot of sense. Every detail in them can be explained and every linkage made in these theories has a purpose, in order to achieve the goal of creating an alternate reality. But what happens If the conspiracy theorist gets some of his facts wrong? He will often ignore it, or blame the media for bias or participating in the cover up. Does this kind of behavior reminds you of anything?

And then there are "predictions", on how a certain small group is working to achieve world domination or control over politicians/resources/us, and the cunning ways it's going to use. In the olden times, we would call them prophecies, but now we call them scenarios. And they are usually worst case scenarios, in which most of them we end up being ruled by either corporate or communism, and under the open eye of some kind of a high tech version of the Orwellian Big Brother. Also in many of these scenarios we end up dead or even worse: having to eat American fast food, every day for the rest of our lives.

The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that however improbable they are, they will always find someone to believe in them. To make things worse, they tend to spread and perpetuate themselves, often being updated over the years. The prime example for that is the The Protocols of the Elderz Of Zion, which even though was disproved and condemned on numerous occasions, is still in print and considered non-fiction by many. It was first printed more than a 100 years ago. It's almost impossible to stop them, regardless of the use of logic or actual facts. Conspiracies uses our sense that the world is intricate and we cannot possibly understand what makes it tick and moves it.

But the truth is usually simpler, in very much the same way that evolution is much simpler than creation. The truth will comply with every fact you already know and those that you will discover in the future. The truth is consistent. Conspiracy theories are none of these: they are usually complex, they will ignore facts or distort them, which makes them inconsistent. I rather find out the truth, even if it's disappointingly boring or simple, because only this way you can understand how the world works. Inventing our own theories about is at best silly and at worst dangerous.

So what's my conspiracy theory? Most conspiracy theories are made up by people who are either have no life, or prefer blaming others for their own failures. I belong to the first group.