Paranoia Inc.

I'm smart. My friends tend to be smart.

Sometimes, you've got to be really, really smart to be really, really stupid.

Case in point? Some of my brainy friends believe that 9-11 was an "inside job." They believe in "chemtrails," black helicopters, secret FEMA detention camps and ubiquitous surveillance and control by a shadow government. Dig it. The media are the puppet theater. We're the puppets. This isn't a hypothesis. No sir. It's a fact. My brainy friends know this. It's all true. If I question their absolute certainty, that's just proof I'm another puppet.

This all started with 9-11. "Started." As-in: "Congealed." Before 9-11, there was the "X-Files" and "JFK." Paranoid movies and TV shows and some loonies with tinfoil hats. A paranoid fringe who actually believed that shit was real. But the fringe remained on the fringe.

After 9-11, the fringe mainstreamed.

9-11, aside from being a very bad day, had the unintended consequence of giving an electric, Frankenstein's Monster "It's alive!" galvanic jolt to America's conspiracy theories. And American conspiracy theory subcultures. Why? Seriously. Why?

Conspiracy theory is a bummer. It's depressing. It's nuts. Conspiracy theory bears a strong resemblance to the delusional architecture of paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoia sucks. It ain't fun. What's the attraction?

Paranoia is an answer. It's a lousy answer. But it's an answer.

Paranoia is a religion. It's a unified field theory. It's philosophical duct tape.

Consider...

Conspiracy Theory for Dummies.

A group of sumbitches sitting around a table are controlling everything. The Commies. The Jews. The Illuminati. The Trilateral Commission. The Project for a New American Century. The Stonecutters. Fill in the blank ... Whoever They are, They're running the show.

That's conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theory is scary.

But it's either that or chaos theory.

And chaos theory is really scary.

Chaos theory means nobody's in control. There's no plan. Just a collision of complex systems and strange attractors. That's it. The butterfly effect, multiplied beyond the capacity of human consciousness.

Consider the alternatives ...

Chaos theory:
The random occurrence of the Industrial Revolution in the West led to a brief period of global domination and resource control of "Third World" countries by Western elites during the Imperialist era. Two "World Wars" ultimately ended overt Western political domination without ending economic domination. This proved problematic in Muslim regions.

Randomly distributed, disproportionate petroleum deposits in predominantly Muslim regions led to excessive Western cashflow and political and economic manipulation, which led to profound cognitive dissonance within Islamic culture, particularly among the Islamic elite. Who celebrated conspicuous consumption and their own achievements. But simultaneously believed in a fatalistic worldview and the Koranic values of poverty and simplicity. I.e.: a wealthy class who felt conflicted by their own wealth.

Said cognitive dissonance (a simultaneous sense of pride and shame) led to distortions of identification and transmission of culture within the patriarchal structure of elite Islamic families.

Said elite Islamic families (while buying golden toilets and other goodies with Western oil money) bought off the angry underclass (and frustrated, high-IQ young Islamic males who lacked upward mobility) of their stratified societies by funding Madrassas which promoted (coincidentally) the Manichean, conspiratorial worldview of Wahhabism. Loving themselves (and secretly hating themselves), the Islamic elite subsidized groups who hated them. Because they were really Western (and pretending to be Islamic). Because they were really Islamic (and pretending to be Western).

Withing this schizoid context, Osama bin Laden's dad dressed him up in a dorky turtleneck back in the 1970s. One of his father's construction workers called him a "fag." This conflicted with Osama's divided sense of identity, reflecting his father's own divided sense of self, and resulted in an obsessive-compulsive reaction formation that festered and grew in Osama's psyche for years. Ultimately, Osama's self-loathing (and rejection of the loathed self-image) found echo and support in the paranoid groups that Osama's guilty family (and others) had funded.

To cut to the chase, when Osama bin Laden grew up, he convinced some gullible chumps to fly some planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In other words ...

2,996 people died because Osama hated his turtleneck.

Conspiracy theory:
To control the flow of oil, the NeoCons staged a fake Pearl Harbor.

See? A group of heartless bastards around a table who control everything.

It's just simpler.

They may be bastards.

But at least somebody's in charge.