andygates

While deconstructing a piece of shoddy journalism for some local frothy pagans last night, I got to musing on conspiracies and why it is that people are so keen to believe this stuff.  Turns out I'm not the only one: studies, as they say, were done.  People like to assign a big cause to a big event and a little cause to a little event.  This means that 9/11, which scared the hell out of a whole nation and wrecked a skyline, cannot just have been two dozen angry nutters.  Diana's driver can't just have screwed up.  The causes are too small to fit into a satisfying assumption that big begets big and small begets small.

The flipside of this a priori belief is that the little guy cannot affect big things, and of course that's a big problem when trying to persuade people en masse to change their behaviour. 

Bruce Sterling nailed this in Heavy Weather.  People, he reasoned, ain't going to change, and the big systems - governments, economies and the like - have too much inertia to change.  Kyoto's a good example: If you can get a mere framework in place inside fifteen years, you're doing well, never mind implementation.  In Heavy Weather the ecological disaster was undeniable but there was no way to act - people wouldn't change and institutions couldn't - so a conspiracy was created which attempted to halt the destruction by physically destroying the damaging infrastructure. 

I find the irony that the same monkey-headed belief mechanisms that concoct conspiracy theories could be responsible for a situation which requires a genuine global conspiracy to be deeply pleasing in its symmetry.

I also tend to agree with the need for an officially nonexistent transnational series of massive structure hits, but that's just me.  Eschatology and ego mean that I am a big cause, dammit. :)