Conspiracy Theorazine - Chapterisode 1

Conspiracy Theorazine - A light-hearted look at awful theories about horrible things

Chapterisode 1 - A method for sorting out madness

 I've been continually fascinated by the imagination involved in conspiracy theories, and frustrated by how many people give them full credence rather than just enjoy them for their entertainment value.

To be clear, some conspiracies really do exist. There is no denying that humans often agree in secret to do something other humans won't like. This basic tendency can range from the most nefarious backroom plotting, to the most petty agreement between workers not to tell the boss they broke the copy machine Xeroxing their asses.

But most conspiracy theories are just absurd. Yet people believe in them. Somehow these ideas take hold, and it takes an amazing amount of effort to clear them out again. To quote Mark Twain: "It's easier to fool someone than to convince them that they have been fooled."

There is, however, one thing all conspiracy theories, from the most credible butt-copying to the most incredible gold-standard Alien false-flags, require to truly be possible: secrecy.

For this reason, it occurs to me that the vast majority of conspiracy theories can be easily debunked by one universally observable truth:

Groups of humans suck at keeping secrets.

Even supposed experts at keeping secrets who are intelligent and at the top of the chain can't keep secrets that well. Consider as just one example: President Bill Clinton. While he was the single most powerful man in the free world, he still wasn't able to keep secret a single intern's blue dress. And that was just at the beginning of the Internet. Imagine how hard it is to keep a secret today - when all it takes is one loose email to open the entire closet for inspection.

So, if there could be a rough way to quantify how bad people are at keeping secrets, this would be a neat rule of thumb to help debunk Birther theories, 9/11 Truther theories, NASA moon launch denial, and other very wide-ranging conspiracy theories, before they take hold in people's minds and then become difficult to dislodge via their human believers' pride.

Put another way, actual thorazine is used to help combat schizophrenia and other delusions. This would be an abstract method of combating conspiratorial theories - a Conspiracy Theorazine.

And no, I'm not part of the conspiracy.

(Or am I?? Mwahahaahaha. )

(If you read on, you can pretty surely see why I too can't be part of whatever outré conspiracy you might have in mind.)

The Method

My first take on how to quantify how these conspiracies kept their secrets, had seven dimensions to it without even trying. I didn't become a writer for the sake of doing math. So I settled on a more ham-handed model of secret-keeping, with three basic dimensions:

- the number of people initially keeping the secret

- the number of people who would care about the secret

- the amount of time the secret is kept

I'll first apply this method to historical conspiracies which we know about. These are all conspiracies that are a) proven, actual conspiracies, and b) have failed to stay secret - by definition. So we can get a gist for what the maximum dimensions are, before something becomes very difficult to keep secret.

Of course, these are by definition the conspiracies that we know about. We can only speculate about conspiracies that kept their secrets. But a review of conspiracies that failed should, at least, show the minimum level of secrecy that conspiracies will need in order to stay hidden.