Misery Loves Company

First off, let me say quite simply. Fuck Windows. Had quite a bit of this written, then it goes and updates itself causing me to lose it all. However, that's only a minor annoyance. On with the blog!

I have a secret. There is a trick to being able to write this blog. It's fairly simple but, I'm not going to tell you what it is.

Up on deck today I'm going to talk about that favorite pasttime of people without jobs, brains, common sense, or those who are just crazy. Yep, I'm talking about Mudkips. Ha, no. Actually we're going to have a talk about conspiracy theories and the reasons people come up with and believe in them. The easiest way I know how to do this is to tackle them one at a time and do what I can to crack the nutjob ideas surrounding these events.



Let's start with that good old classic. The JFK Assassination. Really I don't know why it's talked about so much. It's almost a non-event anymore but, for those of you who've never stuck your head out of a hole in the ground, let me sum up the typical theory. Aliens in league with the CIA, the Mafia, and Hannibal Lector decide to try and take over the world via complex mind control devices connected to televisions. Unable to accomplish this, they just arrange to have Kennedy killed. The fact is, it was in all honesty a single individual that killed the man, but that just 'cannot be'. Here's why.

Since the early days of mankind the biggest, strongest, brightest and best of us have generally been those who've established dominance over the rest of the people in their tribes. This has gone on so long, it's become ingrained into our psychology that a pauper cannot kill a king. This was true when a pauper was simple, uneducated, half starved, and worked every waking hour while the king learned combat and tactics, fucked the chambermaid, ate well and generally did whatever the hell he wanted. In that situation? Yes, it's most likely the pauper would be dispatched most handily. Now though, something has come along which has leveled the playing field in the game of Who-Can-Kill-Whom. The gun. You don't need much training with it to kill someone and hell, people kill others accidentally all the time. (For clarification, not blaming the gun, just making a point.)

Give that same tired, haggard, hungry beggar a gun, and suddenly he is able to kill the king. He now has the power to not only take a life, but to alter the political structure of the world should he so choose. Don't believe me? Ask Gavrilo Princip. He, if no one else, shows proof that a pauper can kill a king now.

So why the sudden shift in perception, the need to create this grand idea that it takes a massive movement of people to assassinate a President? It's comforting. Yes, I know that sounds unusual, even possibly wrong, but allow me to explain. What this grand design does is allows us to mask chaos for machination. This could not have been the work of a single individual. There is no way that one lone nut was able to kill a person in a position of power like a President, right? It's far easier for us to swallow the delusion that instills order than to face the fact that we forever stand on the knife edge of things that are beyond control. If we can assign order, assign a design to something tragic, we're able to believe that everything has purpose, that there is order in our world, even if it is simply delusional.

How about that ever popular circulating story about Area 51. That's where the Kennedy killing aliens are holed up, and the reason we have microwaves and flat screen TV's, right? Oh, it also holds the secret of writing this blog, somewhere in one of the back rooms behind armed guards and heavy vault doors.

Here we have the insubstantiation effect as I like to call it. Not only is what is there denied, but it's very existence is denied. With many questions on one side and no response of any kind on the other, what we get is people's imaginations running away with them. Because the answer is always 'no comment' no matter what is asked, how, when, why, or by whom, people tend to assume that their guesses are correct. What they fail to recognize is that you could ask anything and still receive the same response. It's in to this void that people start attributing all sorts of possibilities. They're looking into a black hole and letting logic and reason go. Our basest fear is that of the unknown, after all. To be quite frank though, the base located on Groom Lake is little more than a testing ground for new technologies. Why on earth would anyone want to keep their latest toys a secret? Well, so that they have an advantage over the other toy makers. Hell, ask Coca-Cola how the secrecy thing is working out for them.

Here's a more recent one. Vaccinations are going to turn your kids into mindless zombies! Those zombies are then going to turn and help out the Kennedy killing aliens by finally installing those mind control devices into your alien tech designed flat screen television. I kid. But there is the whole 'vaccinations are just a way for Big Pharma to give your kids autism while making assloads of cash'. Patently ridiculous.

This is what happens when you give people good advice. They automatically stop trusting you. The question becomes "What are you getting out of this?" In my case? I'm getting to get shit off of my chest, while at the same time hopefully improving the way people think around me.

So what's the psychology involved with this? In this case, the 80's. People believed companies were going to take over the world and governments would fall by the wayside. I'll grant you, there are a lot of unsavory companies out there, like Enron, but the majority of them are after one thing. Making money. Were they able to, I'm sure they'd love to give away everything for free but commerce simply doesn't work like that and never has. Altruism has a fine point of declination.

I'll make this simple. The more people involved in anything, anything at all, the less and less likely it is to remain a secret. There's an old quote that I cannot remember who the source was at the moment but: "Three men may keep a secret if two of them are dead." That's how the world works. Conspiracies consisting of hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of people simply cannot work. The secret would slip. This is why I'm certain the secret of my writing is safe. I'm the only one who knows it. Eventually you have to stop and think rationally. Remember Occam's Razor. Which makes more sense? Half the world is out to get you, or you stubbed your toe because you weren't paying attention?