The Conspiracy B-Side

Isn’t it neat how conspiracies are — despite their lack of evidence and shaky morals — the most exciting things ever? You’re telling me the mafia killed John F. Kennedy? Fuck yeah. The moon landing was fake? Oh yes. Princess Diana is still alive in Moscow? I love it! Conspiracies are hundreds of things all at once. They’re silly, they’re harmful, they’re addictive, they’re viral, they’re stigmatized, they’re good, they’re evil, they’re ill-fated coping methods, they’re attempts at uncovering the truth. They are Schrödinger’s boxes of culture — depending on the angle you look at them, they shift and change shape. Just as they change, the people they inhabit change with them, with their theories possessing them like ghosts from the afterlife, commanding them to entrench themselves so deeply in their beliefs that they can’t live without them. At a certain point, the truth doesn’t matter. Just faith. And in understanding someone’s theories, faiths and beliefs, you can understand anything about them. And that’s what this B-Side is for: to dissect the hundreds of angles of blind belief to understand a line of thinking. To put the disparate pieces of cultural piety in perspective, aligned on our corkboard of devotion. If we look at it in just the right way, we might be able to find the key to all this … maybe.