Jón Ólafsson

I have had this conversation many times, and now I was having it once again. She said: I am not deceived. Of course the government was behind it. Look: Any sane person can see it. The buildings could not have collapsed this way unless they had been prepared previously. They fell straight down, the planes could not have caused that to happen.

You cannot really really say much to that, can you. What, after all do I know about buildings, and engineering or how and why buildings collapse, when they do.

Do you really believe that much in the government? I ask. What do you mean, she says. Well someone would have had to know exactly at what level of the buildings the planes would crash, since that would be the level where the collapse would start.

You don’t understand, she says, and I get the whole repertoire of folk engineering again.

What about the mastery of the government in controlling people? You see in almost all other illegal and covert operations planned and perpetrated by the government there will be someone coming forward, sooner or later, to tell the truth or some part of it. Why not here?

The conspiracy theorist is reluctant to admit that the government represents an intellectually superior force, but she must do so. That’s why a belief in conspiracies makes one unable to engage in any real criticism of government.

Yet she will also want to distinguish between better presidents and worse. But in a conspiracy better and worse is meaningless.

He is a puppet, she says. Who? I ask. The president of course. You mean Obama? Bush, yes Obama too. All of them. The real planners are behind. They control everything.

Where everything happens for a reason or as result of a previous decision, there is no incompetence. What looks like a mistake or an incompetence has a hidden reason. It follows that there is no such thing as politics. It’s the ultimate anti-intellectual world. You can easily trash the intellectuals, the people who like to talk. They are naïve according to the conspiracy theorist who simply resigns herself to the fact that there will always be a superior intellectual presence who orders things for her.

So here is the belief of the conspiracy theorist: She does not believe in politics, but she believes in power acquired and held by a presence who outsmarts everyone, is even omniscient, probably must be omniscient.