Assuming reality

I have been thinking about those strange paranoiacs that assume the world to be a conspiracy which only you/i/he/she or it is able to spot.

As some of you have noted there was a strange attack recently on something I wrote prompted by an assumed state of reality that was only speculative. What does that mean.


In this case the conspiracy related to the HIV virus, which a fellow bloggist regarded as an invalid hypothesis.HIV is a media sponsored "Big Pharma" conspiracy he said...and continues to say....

Another favourite is the Moon thing. There are those who believe [the operative term being belief] that Neil Armstrong never landed on the moon and that props and set construction could be seen on the original footage. This conspiracy theory is facilitated by the fact that the original footage has vanished into the labyrinth that is apparently the NASA filing system [according to a recent press report]

One of my favourites is the Global banking conspiracy theory involving the alleged 'Illuminati' of Dan Browne speculation. I was forcibly introduced to this theory once on a Saturday afternoon in the late '70's when I and an associate was held at gunpoint for some three hours by a crazed self-styled 'Christian crusader against communism' and forced at gunpoint to listen to his harangue about someone called Quigley and how something called the 'Council for Foreign relations' was orchestrating a bid to take over the world and how all those who didn't follow the true path [the nature of which was a tad vague] were doomed to remain after the event called 'the Raptures' during which all those who were chosen would suddenly disappear leaving behind all the sinners who would then rot in hell forever. It was visceral stuff especially when viewed from the wrong side of a nine-millimetre pistol held by an apparent madman.

It is bizarre [albeit democratically okay] that there are those who confuse their worst nightmares with reality. If only our worst nightmares were reality then all would be so simple.

This seems to have been the bizarre conjecture pondered by the dissenting human who murdered a screed of little girls in some freak village full of antediluvian social misfits gathered up in sombre kit to face their own definition of reality. I refer to the slaughter this week of primary school kids in an Amish village.

I wondered at first if the assailant had confused the Amish with some profoundly orthodox Muslim sect since there are some cvisual similarities between the participant in either.

Why would a man do this? His perceptions had apparently become confused? Allegedly he had suddenly begun having nightmares about sexual acts committed when he was twelve. In some way this speculative entity called 'god' was involved, only this poor fool didn't realise that god is simply a conjecture . He considered the world of the irrational to be real and therefore was guided by further irrationality to kill little girls for some inchoate purpose.

I am reminded here though with this Amish massacre of the vast cornucopia of conspiracy theories I have imbibed since childhood, the most compulsive of which is this irrational idea of 'god' itself. This poisonous 'conspiracy' is matched by the religious paranoia represented by that mad 'Christian' soldier who held me and that other guy hostage for hours at gunpoint lecturing us on the dangers of the illuminati decades before Dan Brown made them notorious. Others are simpler, like those of a certain Mr Ikey who has contrived a belief that we [humans] are in thrall to those amongst us [specifically George Bush, Queen Elizabeth and even Phony Hair himself ] who are [according to Mr Ikey] descended from aliens who came here from Sirius of all places.

My favourite part of Mr Ikey's hypothesis is that a sign of being descended from aliens is the O Rh negative blood group-an unusual group that is notable for being the universal blood donor. I am O Rh negative and I am hugely entertained by the thought that I am allegedly descended from aliens-.I also don't seem to have ever benefited in any obvious way from this alleged circumstance.

Part of Mr Ikey's paranoia involves 'Manchurian candidate' type zombies. Sleeper's pre-programmed to go out and commit random acts of violence: acts that are often out of character. I always think of these fellows [conspiracy theorists] as grand story makers imposing trends on violence that do not belong, because violence is so inherently random. Nonetheless what if the otherwise ordinary fellow who suddenly develops lust feelings over little girls that motivate him to rush out suddenly and murder a party of Amish kids was a 'sleeper' pre-programmed to trigger off at a moment's notice. It does seem that these random acts of violence that 'suddenly' afflict otherwise normal people are becoming more prevalent-this is either the act of an insane human or a pre-programmed "ikey" type zombie.

So I have to ask who has what to gain from this irrational act by a pre-programmed madman? I am unable to answer this question. Instead I take the view that the standard pressures of living in this increasingly complex and simultaneously increasingly incompetent world are enough to drive all rational persons to commit acts of irrational violence. Consider the simple frequency of road rage, or even the nightmare of rectifying an invalid electricity account, something that recently took me three years to achieve-there were frequently occasions when I could quite happily have wreaked havoc on the electricity people.

Then there is the bizarre fact that my name was misspelt fifteen years ago when my telephone was installed and no amount of requests have ever been able to rectify the thing; meaning that no one wanting to call me by using the phone book to access my number will find me listed-I am, but in a different place motivated by the misspelled name-Our conspiracy theorist would see this as a plot. I see universal apathy and bureaucratic ineptitude spreading out across the planet like an unseen cancer.

I do nonetheless enjoy the random nature of the error. If the end of the world is nigh then as TS Eliot once observed it will not be with a bang but rather with the whimper of indifference and incompetence