Theories about Conspiracies

Issue 243

New York City, 2023

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Our earliest ancestors must have been restless. Most people today do live restless, frenetic lives, forever searching, seeking, striving, so why would the past be different? When I picture the disgruntled, shivering group of humans that gathered around the first campfires, it seems that we’re similar in our temperaments and desires and worries, as much as we prefer to believe otherwise. I picture them as hungry. Frightened by distant sounds. Surrounded by the unknown. And in those late hours, amid the grunts, barks, and inchoate struggles toward language, I believe that I can imagine the very first lie—one that persists into our time.

A generous interpretation makes this first lie about comfort. It is the voice of solace, a vocalized warm blanket before warm blankets were easy to acquire, when one early human tells another early human that they know, that they understand, that they have it all figured out—the food, they explain, is in a particular spot; the danger, they warn, is in a different spot; just listen to my voice and follow my instructions and it will all be okay. A calming, soothing lie, the lie that explains to those a little younger, or to those who are a little more frightened, that the darkness isn’t really so dark.

A less generous interpretation makes this first lie about control. The words slip into a desire for authority, into a way of manipulating the fears of the group, with the secret knowledge, the authority to protect, possessed by a single person. My sense is that these words—cocksure, bold, dangerous—come from our first ignoble profession, the con artist, the person who tells you what you want to hear, who raises their status just a bit, and offers cryptic truths about the unknown.

Regardless of the interpretation, these lies are timeless, they provided comfort in the chilly and dark cave thousands of years ago—asserting that someone possessed control—and they still provide comfort today. There’s a source, a father-figure, who will make everything feel better because they know the secret, they’ve sorted the spots that are dangerous and the spots that are safe into a clear, coherent story, so listen, listen closely and follow the instructions.

In a more complex world, the lies become more complex, too, but the principle remains the same: now, as goes our most comforting stories, there’s a cabal of financiers, or politicians, there’s a meeting of the wealthy and connected and powerful where assets are divided and decisions are made. Listen to me, yes, listen to me: there’s somebody, a particular person— I can describe this person’s appearance and give you the name—who determines the outcomes, and I will explain to you the story of the person’s ruthlessness, the way in which your life is controlled. We’re marionettes, unable to see the puppet master who pulls the strings, but I’m here now, ready to reveal all those invisible wires.

Because we both know that the economy shrunk when a specific person at a specific moment made that decision; because we both know that the political system is corrupt as a consequence of one politician, an identifiable person, who made that decision; because we both know that all the mistakes, errors, faults, injustices, the scarcity and hunger and war, have an author, who is just over there, just around the corner, in the shadows—and I will reveal the name if you listen.

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For so many people who feel shut out, cheated, maligned, there’s comfort in such clear solutions. Not knowing who is in charge, who pulls the strings, is what’s ghastly. But once you identify the source there’s a person who you can finally blame. Whether you’re fortunate or not, whether you’re wealthy or not, you’ve got problems, living on this peculiar spinning rock in an immense and mostly dark universe. Knowing that there’s a villain in the shadows who kindles the fires—in politics, business, culture—is preferable to the vertiginous alternative, the most frightening possibility, that nobody is, in fact, in charge, that outside the cave it is vast and dark and unknowable.

Feeling alone from womb to tomb is the scariest conclusion of all, it prompts flashbacks to those earliest campfires—and how much better it is to believe that somebody, up there, secretive, shifty, omniscient, controls the money and government and has ordered the system. When you’re confused, a bad answer remains preferable to a lack of an answer, so we’re still beholden to the lies that comfort our sense of dislocation in the world, that point to the latest news, the hidden information, the unknown connections—and there’s always someone eager to offer what we demand.

Our capacity to discern a disturbance in the leaves and remember that, last time, there was a crispy, slithering sound just before we saw a snake is one of our greatest skills—we’re pattern seeking primates, large language models from the savanna, shaping our understanding of the world based on countless inputs and associations; if you want to step out of the ocean and onto land, if you want to build shelter and tools and control the environment, pattern seeking is useful, it is a requirement, really, when you want to survive tens of thousands of years, although it does unfortunately also mean that whenever the wind blows and the crispy sounds of leaves stirs just beyond your vision, you’ll glance over, reflexively, wary, uncertain, looking for the next conclusion.

Not discovering the pattern is what’s intolerable. So, with our spine still driving our decisions, we would much rather find a pattern in our politics and in our economic system and in the chaos that surrounds our lives than confront the notion that nearly everything on the planet is emergent. Believing that a villain is underneath the pain, suffering, confusion, discomfort, and unfairness in our world is, so often, so much easier, it is how we calm our cries: there’s an evil figure in the shadows, high up in the mountains, directing our life, which is so much better than the conclusion that we’re alone.

Yet that reality doesn’t have to be so bleak, really, it doesn’t have to mean that there’s nothing to do, that we’re powerless against the trials and failures that accompany every life. It can mean, perhaps, that we shouldn’t look for answers in the distance, in the unknowable darkness, but that we should move, instead, closer to those right next to us around the campfire.