I am a big fan of headless conspiracies:  Vast "conspiracies" of people who are largely unaware (at least on a conscious level), that they are co-conspirators.  On some deeply-buried subconscious level, I think that they are aware of it, and this is why they respond with hostility to challenges.

 

I find that the movie "Cube" illustrates the sort of conspiracy I'm referring to. 

In the movie, a handful of people wake up inside of a gigantic mechanical death maze that has been constructed underground somewhere by government(s), corporation(s), and/or individual(s) unknown. One of them, an engineer named Worth, (played by David Hewlett) realizes that he'd actually helped to design the outer shell of this mammoth death machine. When questioned by the others about who had hired him and why this monstrosity had been constructed, he replies, "You don't get it ... This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's - it's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. Can you grasp that? Big Brother is not watching you. ...I looked and the only conclusion I could come to is that there is nobody 'up there'. ...What [is this] thing? Only we know what it is ... we know more than anybody else. I mean somebody might have known some time before they got fired, or voted out, or sold it, but if this place ever had a purpose, then it got miscommunicated or lost in the shuffle. I mean, this is an accident; a forgotten perpetual Public Works project. You think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck. I mean, I leaned on my shovel for months on this one -- this was a great job! ... Nobody wants to see the big picture -- life's too complicated. I mean, let's face it -- the reason we're here is that it's out of control."

I think that Cube is an excellent metaphor for some of the more abstract constructs that we collectively whip up amongst ourselves, many of which cause undue suffering, and some of which (like some of the rooms in Cube) can kill. Does masturbation cause blindness, insanity, dementia, homosexuality, disease, and/or death? No, but how many have lived in misery and/or been persecuted by their peers for the fear of this utterly harmless act of self-gratification? Is there any considerable medical benefit from infant circumcision? No, but how many infants will be sexually mutilated this year in this country alone, on the extremely slight chance that it might prevent penile cancer later in life (a disease which affects only about 1 out of every 10,000 men), or on the poorly-documented chance that it might prevent them from contracting HIV? Can participating in a perverse sexual act result in demonic possession? Highly dubious, but thousands have been beaten, tortured, and/or killed on the weight of confessions to sexual perversion that were in most cases extracted under duress of torture, and under the argument that as demonically possessed people, they posed a threat to the community if allowed to live unexorcised. Does marijuana use contribute to violent crime, property crime, and/or psychosis? If anything, the reverse is true -- if anything, marijuana makes the user too lazy to get off of the couch long enough to commit a crime, and scientific studies dating back for decades have failed to prove any causal correlation at all between marijuana use and psychosis. And yet, how many have been incarcerated, maimed, widowed, orphaned, and/or even killed for the idea that a common plant, once cultivated by the likes of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, would destroy the very fabric of American society?

As to the question of whether HIV is the cause of AIDS; if it is not, then we, collectively, as a society, have unknowingly conspired to participate in the stigmatization, persecution, prosecution, incarceration, and/or poisoning of certain members of specific minority groups (particularly gay/bi males, Africans, and non-whites), and at the end of the day, those who lead the march into genocide sleep the sleep of the just, with a clear conscience and a fat paycheck, and none of them wants to see the big picture, because it might mean that they'll have to face the fact that they are the unwitting engineers of a murderous, headless blunder which, as we speak, is out of control.

--- Gos
---[email protected]
"Nobody here but us heretics..."