THIS IS NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY TRAILER
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Everybody has a theory.
That podcast has a theory. That YouTuber has a theory. That news site has a theory. That channel has a theory. That book has a theory. And your feed… it has lots of theories.
Everybody has a theory.
You have a theory.
Theories make sense of the endless stream of events whizzing past us every day. Theories ease our anxieties and make us feel that we can anticipate the future.
An increasingly popular type of theory is the conspiracy theory, a dramatic style of story that depicts history as the massive, unfolding plot of secretive elites.
Conspiracy theories mostly flow through the outskirts of popular culture. But during times of instability, they can flood the mainstream.
Now is one of those times.
Conspiracy theories lure us in with an exciting promise: to expose the invisible, to unveil the imperceptible laws that control the world around us, much like science once revealed the forces that guide the sun, the moon and the stars.
But conspiracy theories are not like the immensely powerful theories of science. They’re notorious for their dubious evidence, flawed reasoning and absurd conclusions.
Despite their endless failures, conspiracy theories are important, not only because so many people believe them, but because they reveal an essential truth about how we make sense of the world. Conspiracy theories are an exaggerated version of how we all think, and they’re driven by one of the greatest ideas of science. This mechanical vision of planning and control has absorbed into our culture.
And yet, this idea has failed to make sense of the complexity of human society. It has failed to reveal the hidden forces that shape our lives.
But new realms of science are revealing these forces. We are seeing that the enemy is not really an enemy at all. We are seeing that we are guided, constrained, and even controlled by the systems we have made, by the rules we ourselves created. And these systems have no ideology, they have no ambition, they are not greedy, they are not good, and they are not evil. They are simply not like us.
