This column has been a long time coming.
I have been contemplating the current state of the conspiracy theory scene
for several weeks now. However, I have been unable to effectively collect
these thoughts to form any meaningful conclusions. That is until I received
a jolt of inspiration from an unlikely source: the sci-fi/thriller Cube.
With a historic presidential election and global economic crisis dominating
the mainstream press, the alternative media has been busy examining the
conspiracy theories behind these current events. A year ago, I would have
been all over that. But something's different now. Something's changed.
So, first off, that inspiration. I saw the little gem of a movie Cube
for the first time last week. Originally screened at the Toronto Film
Festival in 1997, Cube is the story of seven strangers that find
themselves stuck in a maze filled with deadly traps. What develops is a
microcosm of the human experience--complete with all of the fears and
suspicions that undermine peaceful coexistence.
Near the film's midpoint, the characters begin to wonder who is responsible
for making such a twisted system as a giant cube of torture. A doctor,
played by Nicky Guadagni, is the first to jump to a conspiracy theory.
Something of that size and complexity, she argues, must be the product of
the military industrial complex, probably part of a devious master plan.
Chillingly, this same position was taken up some four years later in the
wake of September 11th.
After we witnessed such uncensored horror on that day, many would conclude
that the attacks were part of a much grander scheme. There's just no way a
band of terrorists, living in a cave half-way across the globe, could have
the resources to deliver such a devastating blow. They must have had
received help, possibly from inside our very own government.
Critics were quick to dismiss this view as the failed product of human
psychology. When faced with something it can't comprehend, they countered,
the brain will find conspiracies even where they don't exist. Besides, a
conspiracy on the scale of 9/11 would require hundreds--if not thousands--of
participants. Certainly one of them would have spilled the beans by now.
The theorists' response? Compartmentalization. Never give one person more
than enough information he needs to complete his task, that way no one sees
the whole picture.
This argument plays out almost prophetically in Cube. In defending
her position, the conspiracy-minded doctor argues, "It's all the same
machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police. If you
do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon, the next thing you know,
it's two miles under the desert, the essential component for a death
machine." To which a pessimistic David Hewlett replies, "There is no
conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the
illusion of a master plan."
Never had I heard these competing arguments worded so succinctly. It was
like everything that I had been thinking about over the past several weeks
had been summed up in a couple concise quotes. And the more I think about
it, the more I tend to lean towards the latter, skeptical point of view.
Once a staunch supporter of theorists like Alex Jones, I find it getting
increasingly difficult to subscribe to their beliefs. I used to partition
conspiracy theorists into two camps--the good guys (Alex Jones), and the
genuinely crazy ones (David Icke). As time passed, however, that boundary
began to fade. Now it's a big swirling mess of half-truths, false
assumptions, and cults of personality.
Let's take the 9/11 truth movement as an example. What the hell happened?
There was a time when it seemed like a new documentary or expert testimony
contradicting the official government explanation was being released every
month. Champions of the cause like Alex Jones were gloating over favorable
public opinion polls and mulling over the possibility of getting 9/11
documentary Loose Change released theatrically. Fast forward to today
and Jones has moved on to economic conspiracies, Mark Cuban (the would-be
financier of Loose Change's cinematic distribution) is under
suspicion of insider trading, and the 9/11 truth movement has essentially
been pushed to the fringe. If there really was a government-sponsored plan
to derail the movement, I'd say it worked.
I'm not going to say that I have matured beyond conspiracy theories. To do
so would unduly imply that all of the theories and their theorists are
immature. Instead I contribute my change of heart to the realization of the
fact that, along with just about every conspiracy theory out there, the full
truth of what happened on 9/11 will probably never be known. Like David
Hewlett's character in Cube, I've grown cynical of this whole mess.
Am I through researching conspiracy theories? Not at all. But I will be
approaching them with a new-found level of skepticism and disbelief. In a
world in which you're bombarded on all sides by conflicting information,
maybe that's not such a bad thing.
