How Justified Is Anti-Government Lunacy? - Teshale's Comment

Cast your mind back, dear reader, to middle school or high school for a moment. You were probably at some point asked to do a group project, the value of which ranged from “not that important” to “worth 50% of your grade.” Let’s assume for now that we’re at the latter end of that spectrum.

If you were lucky, you could choose the group you worked with, but if not, you were probably assigned to people you didn’t know well, specifically because you didn’t know them that well, and the teacher felt like some sort of Breakfast Club-style understanding might blossom from the result of your all working together. Now, you all need to figure out how to get this project completed to a suitable level, with the least amount of work possible. There was probably someone who never showed up to the meetings, or someone who didn’t really care either way but didn’t want to fail, and usually there was someone who ended up doing the bulk of the work because he or she was an overachiever. You would have to coordinate meetings, and figure out who should do what, while stepping on as few toes as possible, because you’d have to work with these people in order to not fail, and you’d have to do whatever your part was in addition to the other thousand little things that make up a student’s life.



Now, imagine all of this, times a thousand, and imagine that you can’t tell anyone about it or let them find out. This is what I imagine a really good, Roswell-style conspiracy is like to coordinate, except it doesn’t ever finish. You are always covering it up, you are always making sure someone doesn’t find The Truth. You are always thinking about that cutthroat guy who knows how to keep people quiet, and wondering if he’s going to betray you. Frankly, I doubt there’s anyone, good or bad, who has the energy to maintain such a conspiracy successfully. Most people in the business of forcibly asserting themselves over large groups of other people (to put it in a roundabout way) are quite up front about it. I would imagine that anyone involved in pretending to be someone else for much of one's life would have other things to deal with.


I suspect that those in the Western world who believe in such conspiracies as Roswell, or that 9/11 was planned by the American government, put a lot more faith in their government than I ever really could. It’s not that I don’t believe people in government could do secret, crazy-sounding things on a large scale if they wanted to—if I’d been a physics student at UChicago circa 1942 instead of 2009, and somehow stumbled upon the beginnings of the Manhattan Project, it would sound nuts to me, but it would still be true. I just think that people who were that much more powerful wouldn’t bother hiding their power from me for that long.



Most of the conspiracies that we’ve eventually found out about – something like Tuskegee, for instance, or Nixon—are just your general, garden-variety petty types of cruelty. I suspect that what conspiracy theorists really want is to believe, on some unconscious level, that there could be someone who was that badass and that evil in the world—and that they were clever enough to figure it all out. An evil, powerful, intelligent boogeyman is ultimately a lot more exciting than the truth; that there are quite a lot of people out there who are just stupid, selfish, or both. In a way, you know where you stand with Hans Gruber. But what is there to say about someone who uses his power for something as boring as covering up his infidelity, or being a total douchebag? These are depressingly normal crimes. Being a 9-months-out-of-the-year-citizen of beautiful Chicago, I am now pleasantly surprised whenever a politician hasn’t done something sketchy. (This is, of course, discounting Rahm. Ah, Rahm. You are the only person I could imagine carrying out an evil government-wide conspiracy, but somehow… I don’t think I could bring myself to mind if you did. You have too much chutzpah to do something small-scale. Plus, when I ctrl+f “conspiracy” on your Wiki, there is only one result, and it’s to do with your friend Bill. You know what he’s like.)



I could never really summon an interest in politics because it seems, to me, to require a kind of cognitive dissonance—to understand that a politician is probably going to end up lying to you at some point, no matter how good their intentions are, and still believe that they’ll do the sort of things they want you to do because they agree with you on X number of issues. I mean, when people on TV shows do this, I we yell at the screen “You idiot! He will turn on you! That is what he does!" I get annoyed if someone tells me they’ll do something and then gives me reasons they can’t do it, which is basically what politics consists of. That isn’t to say that I don’t believe change is possible through politics; of course it is. I just don’t have the temperament to enjoy it or succeed in it. So I agree with Stanek that blanket paranoia is ultimately useless—politics appears to be reasonably effective, in a lurching, long-term sort of way, and I am very glad that there are people who do not share my lack of interest. I just think people give more credit to politicians than they really ought to, good or bad, and then end up being disappointed.



I will make sure to watch out for that military-industrial complex, though.