Conspiracies and Cover-Ups
The Government Tells Lies, Earth Is Hollow, the Men in Black Are Here—and Guess Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?
Conspiracy proponent and radio host Alex Jones has said, “No one is safe, do you understand that? Pure evil is running wild everywhere at the highest levels.” Jones’s interests encompass the Twin Towers disaster (perpetrated by U.S. agents), the assassination of JFK (pulled off by the military-industrial complex), secret banking cartels (gripping the reins of a shadow world government), and more. Like numerous other conspiracy theorists, Jones accepts the existence of many conspiracies—some related to another, others not.
The mindset suggests constant, and probably exhausting, vigilance. How, and why, do people comes to believe that invisible forces are conspiring against them? “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” a 2011 paper by University of Kent psychologists Michael Wood, Karen Douglas, and Robbie Sutton, suggests that a preoccupation with conspiracies develops in layers, and that after the first foundational assumption (This was perpetrated by them), the mind is ready to add subsequent layers, even if some layers contradict earlier ones. What the researchers term the “cabalistic paradigm” is endlessly self-adjusting; once fixed in place, it adapts to suit itself. Once locked in place, conspiracies become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”
Tell Me a Story
Why is the mind ready to add those additional layers? Because we love narratives. We don’t want unadorned facts, or even unadorned balderdash—we want a story. We need a story. We are story-loving and story-telling creatures by nature. And what is a story but a sort of explanation? We long to believe that inexplicable things happen for reasons. Stories engage us, and bring the satisfactions of resolution. Conspiracy theories are, at their cores, intellectual and emotional muddles; the various parts don’t really piece together. The components are bits of outrage, flecks of fear, chunks of confusion. But embedded into narratives, the untidy flotsam acquires the illusion of coherent structure, and encourages the forced, much-desired logic of this caused that because of the other—never mind that “this,” “that,” and “the other” might be plain absurdities or fancies that, in a sensible environment, would remain unrelated and unconnected.
On the other hand, conspiracies do happen, and no one will argue that our government tells us everything. We have no need to know certain things; other facts are dangerous for us to know, too complicated for us to make sense of, or so sensitive that to reveal them to the citizenry is tantamount to revealing them to the nation’s enemies.
UFO-related conspiracy theories are elaborate and many. Enough of them exist to fuel the dissertations of whole nations of academics involved in the study of psychology, sociology, and anthropology. UFOs are, by definition, unidentified; is that ambiguity sufficient to assume they are sinister, as well? For some, the answer must be “yes.” Theories linked to conjecture about UFO-related schemes devised and carried out by “invisible” powers are part of what some call dark side theories. The 1947 incident at Roswell has encouraged a particularly robust —and dark—conspiracy mindset. Has Washington told us everything about Roswell? It is impossible to say, but the fact that early official responses were weak and contradictory has encouraged people to feel that much of the truth about Roswell was covered up, and that government’s role in the affair was purposely obfuscated.
However, garbled early responses from officials may be just that, and indicative of lazy thinking and poor internal communication rather than part of a purposeful attempt to conceal or mislead. Then there is the possibility that Washington lied about Roswell in 1947 and continues to lie about it nearly seventy years later. Because conspiracy theories flourish on a presumed lack of honesty, they are predicated on voids, negatives. Sophisticated observers can analyze and, possibly, refute untrue things commonly accepted as facts. But purposeful misinformation, and a lack of information, are meaningfully examined only with difficulty, and may require knowledge and
resources that are unavailable to most people, even in the Internet age.