Why do conspiracy theorists purr?

It probably doesn't need to be said, but I'll say it anyway--this is not an easy thing to watch. And I don't know, in a vacuum, what good it does to watch it, to bear witness to the violence, as if just to confirm for the thousandth time that this is something that we humans do. But every other day somebody is sharing something about how this is all made up, some sort of conspiracy or false flag--something else, something easier, than the horrific actions of one man in violent rebellion against the very humanity of the thousands of people gathered below. I don't know if that makes it "good" to watch this, here, where so many decry reality as the collective delusion of an unwashed majority, but it might make it meaningful, because reality matters.

My favorite JFK assassination "conspiracy theory" is the one that concludes that the final kill-shot was fired, accidentally, by a Secret Service agent running in the motorcade. It's so simple, and you can see why there'd be a cover-up, and you can see why no one in the know would want the rest of us to know--just a big, sad, human bummer. No secret Communist plot, no covert CIA operation to oust JFK, no coup orchestrated by LBJ on his home turf--just a big, sad, human bummer, and a bunch of cops protecting one of their own. I'm not saying it's what happened, but I'm saying at least it follows! At least it holds a little water, unlike so many others.

The conspiracy mongering around the Vegas shooting--and around Orlando and Sandy Hook and Aurora and even the reporters killed live on television in Virginia a couple years ago--it all suffers from the same fatal flaw in logic. The goal of these "false flags" is to "take away our guns" and whatever else amorphous, goalposts-forever-moving nefarious ends THE GOVERNMENT or whoever has in mind by tricking us into thinking one person could do such a thing--as if we've never met, you know, other people. But for all the reality-bending, wool-pulling power these puppeteers apparently evince in their masterminding of these elaborate hoaxes, they sure never achieve their purported goals. Because after these events, gun company stocks go up, gun sales increase, and THE GOVERNMENT never does anything of any significance. Any conspiracy theorist worth his salt should at least consider the far more likely explanation--that those who profit the most from these mass murders are the far more likely culprits of the secret plots, those who produce and sell the machines of mass violence, who sell more with each next Breaking News chyron that ups the casualty count. But that's just as absurd, if not more so, of course--there's no need to secretly plot and plan and conspire for man's inhumanity to man. If we want another example of horrific violence, from which to profit, or otherwise, we need only wait. And not too long, probably.

Cats purr to self-soothe, and the conspiracist believes and promotes his belief for the same reason. (Conspiracy theory for another day: Conspiracy theorists are all secretly CATS, trying to bring order to a chaotic world!) They want to quell the chaos and the fear, to imagine a willful hand behind the scenes controlling some super-narrative, even if it is a malevolent one. It is a religious instinct, and an understandable one. But it makes the world a more callous and inhumane place, to insist that what actually happened did not, to believe that our shared reality is just a tightly controlled causation machine for the unsighted masses to cog away in, while only the masterminds and the few for whom *truth* has been revealed really know what's going on. This isn't critical thinking, or just asking questions--it's refusing to engage with reality. And it's not harmless. It dehumanizes the perpetrator, the victims, and the rest of us witnesses alike by suggesting that our experience is inauthentic in a fundamental way. It is, if not always a call to violence, at least an excuse for further violence. And we need only wait.

So yeah, in a vacuum, I don't know what good it does to watch something like this. But here, where so much of the world insists that what we all know to be true is not so, maybe it is important to stare right at it.

https://nyti.ms/2gX5Nps