I am a conspiracy theorist. I have been since 1958, when I began to research the question of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I have never accepted the official explanation that the government had no advance warning of the attack.
I was the only conspiracy theorist I knew of while a graduate student in history. I was unique. I have kept at it over the years. But, I learned long ago that in order to retain your sanity, and in order to remain productive, you have to accept the official story most of the time unless there is strong evidence to the contrary. If you don’t accept this, you will find yourself in a sea of chaos. You will have no concept of historical cause-and-effect.
One of the major problems of conspiracy theory is that the conspiracy theorist can use his conspiracy theories to separate himself from all cause-and-effect in history.
Someone who believes that a conspiracy is behind everything, and therefore believes that all official stories are corrupted by special interests or the desire to deceive, is in a position of never being able to understand any aspect of history. That is to say, visible cause-and-effect in history has no effect on his thinking. He cannot come to grips with causality in history, because he interprets all history, whether written or unwritten, as the outcome of hidden forces that never reveal the truth to anyone outside the conspiracy.
What if there is more than one conspiracy? Which one was the one behind an event? This creates havoc for conspiracy theorists.
This post was published at Gary North on July 22, 2016.
Recent Comments