Why Conspiracy?

Boing Boing: Essay: The Conspiracy Boom, by Jay Kinney:

"...To what then might we attribute this upsurge in debunkery? At the risk of peddling a conspiracy theory of my own, I think the sources are several, though interrelated.

The first is the fact that, for two generations now, we have been treated to a succession of events that have incrementally chipped away at the facade of governmental credibility. On the one hand we had the series of assassinations in the '60s that blew away our best and brightest -- all courtesy of a curious crop of "lone nuts." The official inquiries fell short of satisfying many questions, and one stream of skepticism was set in motion.

Compounding that was the string of incidents, from the Pentagon Papers to Watergate to Iran/Contra to the Monica affair to the missing WMDs, which cumulatively suggested that we were being lied to as a matter of course. The last six years of prevarication emanating from the White House have only reaffirmed the common perception that the official story is probably just that -- a story.

A related loss of faith in the intelligence community has taken its toll as well. The Cold War fed the popular myth that our good spies were protecting us from their bad spies - epitomized in the romantic lunacy of James Bond. But the revelation in the '70s of the FBI's Cointelpro abuses, and of CIA programs like MK-ULTRA using unsuspecting citizens as guinea pigs, led many to the conclusion that our protectors were really our tormentors.

Then there's the omnipresent Fear Factor. 9/11 was certainly unnerving, but most of the fear that has been propagated over the last six years has come from our own leaders. Constantly augmented fear generates paranoia. A stressed-out populace is more likely to embrace scenarios that validate its darkest fears, as a way to ease the tension. Why harbor resentment against bin Laden, who's off in a remote cave somewhere, when it is much more satisfying to resent the powers close to home who make us remove our shoes at airports, restrict toiletries to three ounces or less, and make us ditch all dangerous weapons such as nail clippers and Habeas Corpus?

...Finally, there's everyone's favorite scapegoat: the Internet. We've now had twenty years of ever-increasing numbers of folks networking, trading rumors, comparing notes, and posting research online, as well as Googling everything under the sun. This has created a boom in connecting the dots, whether the dots were meant to be connected or not. It has also goosed the speed with which memes can be propagated and assumptions widely accepted. But you knew that already."