You don’t believe me? I haven’t checked but I’ll bet anything a Google search will turn up a group somewhere that is digging up heaps of evidence about a hidden, failed sunrise. Or something like it.

Consider the current human credulity landscape: You’ve got the Bilderbergers, the Trilaterals, the 9-11ers, the 2012ers, the Area 51ers, plus many, many more. After all these years you’ve even still got people making careers out of paranoid interpretations of the Kennedy assassination.

If you spend some time digging in this illusory garbage heap, several things strike you.

One is that a lot of the people involved are not the stupid nitwits you’d expect but are actually either intelligent or very intelligent.

Yet they write books—really long books—about how, for example, the World Trade Center collapsed not because two huge airplanes loaded with jet fuel hit them but because the __________ (choose one: Jews, Muslims, oil companies, gays, Catholics, Republicans, international bankers) planted—or paid to have planted—demolition charges in the buildings.

Etc.

Of course, smart people believing stupid things is nothing new (consider the SUV and how it litters the highways; consider American voters electing George W. Bush... twice). To err is human, and so on.

But there are small mistakes (comparatively) from which we (sometimes) learn and go on to do better next time. Then there are big mistakes from which we not only don’t learn but we persist in them and make them bigger and wronger the longer we persist (war, for example). The conspiracy theorists and their gullible followers fall into the latter camp.

One of the weirdest, most entertaining, but also saddest comes to us courtesy of the anti-evolutionists. They can’t deny the reality of the fossil record, so they go right to the top and implicate God in the biggest conspiracy of all: HE planted the fossils 6,000 years ago to test our faith, to see if we’d believe HIM and HIS book or the natterings of various academic nabobs who foolishly claim the fossils are millions of years old.

Jehovah as an unindicted co-conspirator? It’s not much more of a reach than believing 9-11 was not what it seemed. (Haven’t these guys ever heard of Occam’s Razor?)

How can people not only argue such idiocies but get rich doing it by convincing large numbers of other people to believe them?

It’s fairly simple.

There are three often-overlooked human tendencies that come into play.

1. We are all closet elitists. Few things are as satisfying as belonging to a group which has THE knowledge about what’s going on in the world. Religion, nationalism, sciencism all feed this need in various ways.

2. Such belonging serves an important purpose: it assuages night tremors of uncertainty about the universe, and at the same time it affirms one’s own sense of superiority and one’s conviction that everybody else is an idiot. In other words, I’m smarter than you are, and because of what I know I sleep better than you do.

3. There’s a whole lot of flattery going on here. Self-flattery and flattery of others. I, as diviner of this or that conspiracy, am as smart as the very smart people who are perpetrating the conspiracy. And you, as buyer of my books and reader of my blog, are smart enough to see how smart they and I are.

Sure, given the human potential for deviousness, conspiracies we shall always have with us, from tiny marital ones to big martial ones. As the old saying has it, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everyone isn’t out to get you.

The tendency—almost a compulsion it seems—to find conspiracies where none exist—arises from our great need for cut-and-dried answers and from our very shaky hold on a shaky reality. Give us an enticing explanation—no matter how half-baked—behind The Big Mess and we’re all hell-for-leather absolutists.

As every trial lawyer knows, it’s possible to argue ANY position strongly and convincingly.

ANY position.

Are there aliens among us? Sure. Give me a few weeks and I’ll write a book proving it. Your local bookstore is well-stocked with volumes proving the U.S. government is hiding alien bodies in a refrigerator in either Dayton (Ohio), Roswell (New Mexico), or Area 51 (Nevada).

Did the sun fail to rise yesterday? Sure. Give me a few weeks and I’ll write a book proving it didn’t—and I’ll throw in an explanation about whose fault it was. If you want to co-author the book with me, I’ll even let you be the one to choose which group to blame.

ALL of the conspiracy theorists make more or less convincing cases for their at-bottom absurd beliefs. They do so by using the age-old technique of selective argumentation.

In any complex event, there are uncertainties and unknowns. The more complex the event, the bigger the uncertainties. It’s easy to construct your own conspiracy theory. Just emphasize the uncertainties while at the same time being very careful to ignore (or warp) the certainties.

Do this diligently and, yes, you too can prove the sun didn’t rise yesterday. Or that God planted the fossils 6,000 years ago. Or that homosexuals caused Katrina to destroy New Orleans.

Or even, if it strikes your fancy, that the world is actually ruled by a council of Illuminati hidden under Dealy Plaza in Dallas, and if you don’t believe me, just read Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy.