In Which I Revise and Extend a Comment ...

... on my most recent Garrison Center column.

The original comment:

I woke up with a conspiracy theory this morning: The "deep state" wants to just come out and get its freak on in full public view. 

That's why it's offering us the "choice" between a houseplant and a rabid hamster this year ... so that when it steps into the open and rules openly instead of through the puppet show, many will actually be grateful for being "saved."

The extension/revision:

"Conspiracy theories," or something resembling them, often pop into my head.

I normally discount them, and you should too. Like most "conspiracy theories," they're not really theories, just hypotheses that would only be testable in the form of them coming to pass in very specific and clear ways.

The specific timbre of my own personal "conspiracy theories" tends toward the notion that we're being shown certain things -- on the orders of, or at least at the suggestions of, shadowy power elites -- for the purpose of preparing us to accept things resembling those things.

A couple of variants regarding cinema:

We're being shown lots of entertainment about alien encounters, alien invasions, etc., because something like that is coming, because THEY know it is coming (they've detected or encountered, and perhaps even talked with, the aliens), and because THEY want us to have prior frames of reference to fit it into when it comes.

Or, we're being shown lots of stuff about simulated reality because we are in fact living in such a reality and THEY have the proof, or at least evidence that tends to prove, it.

So in this variant, some very powerful shadowy cabal -- the THEY who rule the US and who probably have since November of 1963 if not before -- have decided that it's time to dispense with all the "democracy" pageantry and bring their dictatorship into the open.

For which purpose they've had their toy "political parties" increasingly putting forward two-way contests that no one sane would really like either fake "side" to win. Like Clinton v. Trump 2016, Biden v. Trump 2020, and Biden v. Trump 2024.

The idea being to bring in a "man on horseback" or something of the sort and have a large portion of the populace be actively grateful for having been "saved" from a system that no longer "works" in favor of one that allegedly does "work." Making the trains run on time, that kind of thing.

The power of "conspiracy theories" is that they offer seemingly plausible answers to vexatious questions.

The pitfalls of "conspiracy theories" are that they tend to fade from believability under even the most basic Occam's Razor or Hanlon's Razor scrutiny, and that attempts to lend them an air of testability usually require making up fake supporting facts in the absence of real supporting facts. Not all  "conspiracy theories," mind you. Just most of them.

But anyway, that's what I've been thinking about this morning.