I know that I should probably be adding my voice to the chorus of Very Concerned People being Very Concerned about the popularity of conspiracy theories, but somehow I’m just not that worried—not least, perhaps, because I went through a period of being very into them myself, through the late Nineties and into the early Noughts, and I seem to have emerged from that with a critical and cynical eye for events which I deem to be notably more sane and thought-through than that of the average think-piece thort-lord.
(Of course, one might be tempted to impute a connection between the periodicity of my engagement with conspiracy theories and its correlation with a pattern of substance consumption know for producing a paranoid mindset. If so, one might also want to consider the prevalence of prescriptions for pharmacological-grade amphetamines in the Western nations right now.)
Anyway, point being: it’s really easy to be a conspiracy theorist when the world seems so keen to provide you with fresh data-points for your own wall of crazy, and to invite you to get busy with the red string. Here’s exhibit A for this week: Mike Lynch, a venture capitalist who managed to get out from under a £7bn fraud case just a few months ago, goes missing after the sinking of his yacht—which, in a detail so piquant that you’d have your writer’s license taken away from you if you tried it in fiction, was called The Bayesian, because of course it was; what other level of self-satisfied smugness could possibly foreshadow this sort of supposedly accidental death?—on the very same day that his co-defendant in said fraud trial is killed by a hit-and-run motorist while jogging on a country lane somewhere in the English countryside.
I mean, sure—I know this is probably just one of those uncanny occurrences that the universe likes to throw at us, just like I know at a rational and logical level that Robert Maxwell probably just slipped drunkenly into the waves from the deck of his own yacht and drowned, and just like I know that Jeffrey Epstein (who, completely incidentally, was married to Maxwell’s daughter) most likely committed suicide in prison rather than face his sex-trafficking trial.
Perhaps it’s the sheer prevalence of these monsters that encourages the heart to draw red lines on the wall when the head declines to do so? The hidden-in-plain-sight existence of preexisting connections that encourages the theorising of unseen ones?
Conspiracy theory is a rationalistic response to a world which is anything but rational, and it’s driven by a sense of injustices committed with impunity.
This is not to excuse conspiracy theory, or the terrible things people are sometimes driven to do by believing in it. It is rather an attempt to explain why it might be so appealing—on the basis that, if one really wants to deal with a problem, it’s best to know what’s actually causing it.
The twenty-something me that spent a lot of the winter 0f 2001-2 asking very open-ended questions about the US government would likely be astonished to know that he has matured into the sort of person who would note publicly how grateful he was for a productive meeting with his accountant.
Nonetheless, it was good to get some advice this morning regarding my unexpected (mis)adventures with Ghost and Stripe, and to discover that things are a lot less messy than I had initially assume the might have been.
The connection between these two anecdotes is left as an exercise for the reader. Feel free to use string of another colour, if red is not available.
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