the timboucher experience

John and I had a good little chat tonight about how conspiracy theories come pretty close to basically just being religions. The best way to explain that idea, I think is to think about satellites and about bugs (ie, listening devices). If you think about classical notions of god, you think of mainly omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence. God knows all, sees all and hears all. Much like Santa Claus, who has been checking to see if we’ve been naughty or nice. So, going back to satellites, they always say how “the government” has satellites which are so accurate that they can take a photo of a dime laying on the sidewalk in front of your house. In other words, they can see everything. The government can also theoretically tap your phones, or put bugs in your walls to eavesdrop on your conversations. They can track your purchasing patterns and travel itineraries and gather information on you. Actually, so far none of this really even qualifies as “conspiracy theory” - it’s more like a rundown of the PATRIOT ACT. But anyway, I think it illustrates the point pretty well, that the government - though a nebulous nefarious bureaucracy rather than a dude on a throne in the sky - essentially acts as a stand-in for that kind of Old Testament fire-and-brimstone kind of concept of the divine. The kind of god you’re basically just supposed to feed with fear and obedience and nothing else.

Or aliens. I mean, that one’s even more of an obvious parallel maybe. Weird beings from the sky, some of whom are nice and some of whom are nasty. People getting weird revelations from them. I mean, it’s all exactly the same shit. The only thing that’s different is where the person’s dial rests on the normalwhacky scale. I don’t want to have to go into archetypes, but you could just think of it maybe as certain people have patterns of thought which are either inborn or culturally inherited. They used to be filled by God, and now they are filled by earthly stand-ins. And there are also those lucky few who are getting the old “double penetration” from God AND conspiracy theories. (That must be why those people are so goddamned wired and tense all the time.)

Anyway, myself I do like to dabble in conspiracy theories. But I also like to dabble in religions. So maybe I’m living proof. I don’t know. I pretty much take both of them with the same level of maybe-yes, maybe-no kind of attitude, though. It’s interesting to consider if the people who are really “pre-disposed” to conspiracy would have just been really pious in other time periods, really afraid of either god or the devil, or the church, or the local fish merchant, or who knows.

UPDATE!

I really like this comment left by the owner of Fantastic Planet. I feel like it’s something I should have had the wherewithal to write, but hey, thats why we have other people:

i think one of the biggest similarities between the two is that both innately train the practitioner to look for connexions between apparently unconnected events. this can certainly shed light on things when done effectively (i.e. Kabbalah as it’s meant to be), but can also lead to giant leaps of odd speculation wherein just because a bunch of cultures feature serpents in their art, that means there *must* be giant shapeshifting serpents who rule the world (David Icke, anyone?).

i tend to think that religion and conspiracy theory are more right-brained activities.

I also like your spelling of “connexions.” I also dig this comment left by Dan, about science as a conspiracy theory:

What about science as a conspiracy theory? Like taking a few dots of information (red shift expansion, background radiation, etc.) and construction some grand theory (the big bang), and beliving in it dogmatically and fixing it with patches (dark matter, dark energy) when it doesn’t work.

YESSSS!!!! IT’S ALL A CONSPIRACY! THIS IS JUST WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY! MUAHAHAHAHA!

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