Conspiracy theories

The most chilling thing about modern times, to me, is the proliferation of the conspiracy theory.
These alternative versions of reality seem to follow directly on the heels of every event of the
day and grow more absurd with every incidence. They cluster about real events like fantastic,
cancerous growths, obscuring the plain fabric of history itself. Despite being addressed and
disproven, one by one, they are repeated so often, and in ever evolving entanglement, that
they become prominent for repetition alone and ultimately fashion a mythology, though poor
and confused, that threatens to replace fact with fancy, comprehension with paranoia. In this
new world, nothing is as it seems; everything is a ruse, a plot, a trick cooked up by some
shadowy and sinister presence behind the scenes. An elite few – call them wizards, if you will –
are conspiring to control the common folk through the use of illusions so that they, the few, the
anonymous, can carry out their wicked plans, whatever those might be – for no one, you see,
can ever say. They are all things at once, whatever fits at the moment, even if the same thing
didn’t fit in the moment just previous. Whatever is most perfectly counter-intuitive, most
perfectly contradictory to both common conceptions of reality and to logic itself – this will be
the contorted substance of the myth and will, by its very idiocy, defy unraveling through the
use of traditional tools such as logic and common sense. The theories morph over and over –
again, like cancers – eluding the scalpel of truth by a redundancy of lies, until the disease has
become so thick that it has obscured the core beyond recognition. History itself is in vain, as our
new focus is not on the plain course of events in the world but on fantasy and falsehood.