Overthinking it

In my 2009 essay discussing John Wray's novel, Lowboy, I made the following observation about the schizophrenic teenage protagonist.

But mostly, the novel is an immersion in the mind of a young man who is precociously bright and likeable and in a sense idealistic, but whose perspective on the world is far different from our own -- a kid who thinks deeply and observes much that we would miss, but who overlooks simple meanings and conclusions that we would find obvious.

My observations about schizophrenia may apply equally to the strange mental patterns displayed by conspiracy theorists.  An article in yesterday's New York Times used Hillary Clinton's promise to release documents about the notorious "Area 51," should she become president, as an opportunity to explore the strange world of conspiracy theorists -- folks who have been trying for centuries to make sense of the world by pointing their fingers at mysterious, shadowy groups of insiders:  the Freemasons, the "Illuminati," Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, the Cathars and ancient Egyptian religious cults. 

Our American conspiracies tend to be less mystical, perhaps, but -- in addition to the government's contacts with aliens (and I don't mean Mexican immigrants!) in Area 51, we have the FBI's or CIA's involvement in JFK's assassination, the Trilateral Commission (whatever that is), the Fed's nefarious activities, the Global Warming liberal scientist conspiracy, the Obama Kenyan birth cover-up, and a myriad of anti-Catholic conspiracy theories (including, of course, Dan Brown's fictional Da Vinci Code!).

The Times writer points out that conspiracy theorists aren't necessarily mouth breathers.

It takes great mental powers to construct these intricacies, no matter how crazy they are. Conspiracy theorists are not stupid people. Given a different turn in life, some might have made good superstring theorists.

“The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent,” Hofstadter wrote in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” “In fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.”

Other scholars have found that adherents of one conspiracy theory are likely to believe in others. They are good — maybe too good — at making connections. Maybe the phenomenon is neurological, with synapses packed so densely that the brain is driven to see way more order than can possibly be there.

That makes sense.  To me, folks who are obsessed by conspiracy theories seem to be folks who have a difficult time with ambiguity, with admitting that life and the world are messy and confusing, that reality isn't (and people certainly aren't) always logical and mathematical.  They sit at their desks, spinning their mental wheels year after year, trying -- as would an astronomical physicist -- to fit every known fact into some all-embracing theory that can account for them all. 

But like the fictional schizophrenic depicted in Lowboy, in weaving their webs of complexities, they overlook simple but aesthetically displeasing solutions, based on the randomness and illogic of human behavior.  Sometimes, folks, "stuff" does just happen.

I find this equivalence between schizophrenic and conspiracy theory behaviors comforting and reassuring.  Those guys are just a bunch of nuts (to be non-PC).  On the other hand, I'm not going to make an all-embracing theory out it, and force all known facts into it. 

As the joke goes, even paranoids sometimes have enemies.

And conspirators sometimes actually do form conspiracies.

I can hardly wait to see those Area 51 documents!