Does the world seem less trusting and more paranoid than ever before? I can only sense this anecdotally, but I have met too many people who believe there is a conspiracy behind everything! Internet culture hasn't helped much since anyone can be screaming about something out there, including me. But I try to limit my demons out here, and hopefully offer a coherent view of the world.
I don't deny our government has been involved in some surreptitious, ignoble activities. We know that to be true. But once you start viewing any event through that lens, you need to look from where the claim is being made.
I often believe that conspiracy theories are a psychological mechanism that helps people come to grips with their lack of control over the forces shaping their lives.
Look at 9/11. Huge event, and we all tried to make sense of it. Somehow the idea of Islamic terrorists wanting to bring the center of Western capitalism down wasn't enough. Many believe it had to be an inside job. But we all know that government would never be competent enough to orchestrate such an event (and don't get me started on Building 7). And even if they were, why wouldn't they have also planted some WMD's in Iraq during the invasion? It would have been easy enough for them to do, instead of having egg on their face.
I acknowledge evil exists, but not from our government to this extent and the way our uber-cynical culture has come to see things.
Walter Russell Mead said, "Conspiracy theories give true believers the illusion of power by offering a “secret” and, to believers, a convincing account of how the world works; but they simultaneously disempower the believers because they buy into a narrative in which the Powers are so smart, so well-organized and so far-sighted that nothing short of an apocalyptic meltdown will ever bring them down."
Now, that packs a punch to allow our limited selves and our puppet masters to feel pretty huge. But, as they say, it's all in our minds.
Robert Godwin mentioned, "Most ideas about reality are just a form of paranoia, which is really just a premature closure of the psychic field. It results from a combination of laziness, fear of ambiguity, and discomfort with mystery... Also, in the absence of religion, politics has become the central means for people to express and contain existential anxieties and conflicts that are universal and insoluble."
And the sad part is, when it does come out it can't be reasoned with. It's too far entrenched down the limbic-reptilian nervous system.
All said and done, it's probably not a big deal when it's just a few paranoid crazies floating around. But when it hits critical mass, then you've a problem. At its worst, it can lead to an Utopian movement conflated with a distorted ideological teleology.
In his excellent book, The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, Richard Landes says "although Marxism and Nazism come from almost diametrically opposed ideological positions, by their commitment to a vision of a total salvation in this world, and in their violent engagement in apocalyptic time, they came to resemble each other in two of the most appalling aspects of millennialism—(1) their obsession with “redeeming” their chosen “people” at any cost to “private” life; and (2) their terrifying willingness to engage in coercive purification as a means to accomplish their visionary goals with the stunning numbers of lives lost as a result."
So when a conspiracy theorist comes knockin at your door, don't bother to reason with him and walk away.
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man. -- H.L. Mencken