I'm sat in The Cross Hands in Bristol (a fantastic place for food ever you're in Fishponds) chatting to the owner about 9/11, Diana's Death and the world at large. He, along with many, believe these, and other events, to be a conspiracy by the powers that be.
What's interesting about Conspiracy Theories is less whether they are right or wrong (who knows?) but the social purpose they serve. The existence of a conspiracy theory (for example, that the moon landings never occured) actually seems to me to actually undermine the resistance which, on the surface, they seem to represent.
By this I mean that the proposition that there is a all-seeing, manipulator of current opinion that is capable of consistently fooling all of the people all of the time, does little to support those who believe that the system can ever be improved. What seems to be the inevitable result of Conspiracy Theory writ large is a self-fulfilling cynicism that no matter what the media says, it is inevitably untrue.
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