27 December

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are collapsing, from religion to science, to government, to education etc. A lot of that collapse is due to sustained attack, particularly from the boomer generation, who have for decades been furiously promoting a ‘lifestyle’ philosophy, where what defines meaning for our existence is the quality of each individual person’s life and lifestyle. In the process traditions, accumulated wisdom, trust, expertise, habits, have all been trashed. What that leaves is individual people, naked in front of the entire world and a vast present without a past, and trying to make sense of it for themselves. Paranoid and anxious people, seeing dark forces acting everywhere. In that situation, conspiracies create big bombastic narratives that help to make sense of what seems like a confusing mess. Like fairy tales do for kids. Conspiracies always have a similar structure, some great guiding power or person or group steering everything. Total anxious overload, because without tradition everything has to be processed by every person, all the time. We lost God and institutions as what holds it all together, conspiracies and their associated paranoia have taken their place.