'That's just a conspiracy theory'

Years ago I made fun of "conspiracy theorists" in a therapy session. My therapist (old, old-school, hard-ass, based) said "When I see people telling me not to pay attention to 'conspiracies,' that's where I know I need to look."

This is the same therapist who told me that the quality a person needs to have to get past childhood abuse is "the ability to tolerate and understand that everything they thought they knew was wrong."

Experience proved him correct. Almost everything I thought I knew about the world most of my life was wrong. My view of the sexes, politics, empathy, economics—all of it (I was a leftist) was wrong.

And then I realized that I was resisting considering "conspiracy theories" for the same reason I formerly never listened to anyone but leftists: fear. Emotional investment in my view that the world made sense the way I needed it to.

It is only emotional investment (no thinking is taking place) that makes people try to punish us for considering "kooky conspiracies." The facts of the world demonstrate that our governments and media do lie, they do perform false flags.

Yes. I will entertain "conspiracy theories" about lots of things. That doesn't mean I will be convinced by them (though I will be convinced by some of them).

The motivation

In trying to understand the motivation of people who want to shut down talk about “conspiracy theories,” the reader will have to decide to what degree I’m succeeding in understanding the minds of others, and how much I’m projecting.

To the extent that other people are like me, I believe it is fear that prompts us to shut down “kooky” ideas in others. It’s one thing to think an idea is silly; it is another to be angry that someone is saying it. Why did I get angry at what I considered to be conspiracy theories? What motivated me to want to be seen to “burn” purveyors of these theories?

For me it was fear that the world was much more dangerous or unknowable than I wanted to believe. Purveyors of conspiracy theories were destabilizing what I wanted to think about the world. Now, I’m a neurotic, and more fearful than the average person, but this is broadly true of many today who call themselves liberals or leftists. I suspect this fear orientation to the world is responsible for the emotionally extreme reaction many leftists have to what they call conspiracy theories.

While I’m no longer a leftist, I am still highly neurotic. It’s a strange place to be in the 21st century. My disposition (fearful, anxious) is the same one that made me vulnerable to leftist brainwashing. I try to keep myself from easily falling for the conclusions fear suggests by reminding myself of my neuroticism and refusing to settle on the first answer fear wants me to choose. But I don’t really have any idea if I’m succeeding. Maybe I’m falling for the fears on the opposite side of the political coin now.

Then and now

As a young man I put too much stock in my “identity” as a gay man, as a leftist, as a “savior” and a righter of wrongs. In those days, I was convinced that I was a member of a small, persecuted minority. How hard it was to be a gay man and a Democrat! Why, people might even suggest homosexuality was not an inborn, innate characteristic. How would I cope with the trauma of that?

What I did not realize then was that my political stance was much closer to the mainstream, and to what the mainstream would become. I didn’t have it nearly so hard as I thought I did. Magnifying what should have been minor qualities (being gay, for example) into major qualities blinded me to how coddled leftist identitarians really were, even in the 1990s.

Today I look back and laugh, shaking my head. I thought I was an iconoclast, speaking up bravely. How brave is it to write articles and have public arguments while wrapped in the arms of political and social group that had already beatified any “marginalized” people?

Here’s a spot where I can’t separate my perception from reality: It feels more dangerous to say the things I believe today than it felt to be a leftist activist in my youth. Being a former leftist turned conservative (especially as a gay person) feels much more lonely and precarious than I felt when I was young.

Readers who have gone from left to right–how does it seem to you?

They say that age brings wisdom and clarity, and I think that’s true, but it can also bring confusion. There are some things I’ve changed my mind about, and that I believe I understand more truthfully than I was capable of doing in youth. But there are just as many things that I’m more confused and less confident about than I would have been 20 years ago.

This is because I (and you) have seen levels of evil that we had not experienced personally before the past five years or so. I’ve seen that the government and its institutions are capable of consciously lying about a “pandemic” in order to suspend the Constitution. There’s no need for a long list of these items, but it is a long list; “Covid” is just the most extreme and salient example.

This changed me, and it changed millions of people. It reset our rules of thumb, our measuring sticks, for what could be true and false about the world we thought existed. After this I cannot write off “conspiracy theories” the way I used to. I cannot be sure that “they’d never do that.”

The loss of illusory certainty is difficult for us. It provokes fear and anxiety. More, it shows us how limited our certainty and knowledge really is. Take the recent crashing of a ship into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Maryland. Many are sorting themselves into “sides” immediately regarding the cause. Remember, none of us know the cause, and we have no good reason to believe that any official spokesperson making a statement within a day of the incident truly knows either.

We live in a world in which our governments or their companion entities are willing to and capable of destroying ideas or physical infrastructure to achieve power goals. But we also live in a world in which ships are complicated machines that can have wiring problems and find themselves pulled along by dangerous water currents.

Was it an accident? Was it sabotage? I don’t know. But I do know that commentators who are calling people “stupid” and “gullible” for entertaining that sabotage may have caused the crash have no good reason to do so. They assume a priori that it is extreme and unreasonable to hypothesize anything but a true accident, and then leap to calling those of us who will entertain an alternate theory “ridiculous.”

Such commentators are not doing so because they are wiser or have greater access to the truth. They are doing so because it causes them existential fear to ponder that it may be just as reasonable to suspect a false flag as a frayed wire.

Twenty years ago, I would have been one of those commentators. I believed the U.S. government was basically sane and stable, and beset by bad apples, not endemic dry-rot. Today I believe the political system is (probably irretrievably) corrupt and evil to a degree I would not have entertained decades ago.

Knocking on the door of 50 years old, I’ve ended up simultaneously more and less certain about countless things. It’s unclear whether I’ve gotten any closer to the truth.

What about you?

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