The latest conspiracy

Maybe it's naivete, maybe just that I've been out of the loop completing my thesis. Maybe I just underestimate the ability of lunatics to believe things that should be confined to fiction are reality. It shouldn't I suppose, after all, the belief that a small group of sinister people are planning and executing harmful plans is at the center of it all. At least in the leftist version there is some empirical evidence that bankers and executives are manipulating government and society to increase profits and power.

This con theory from the tea bags that the UN and I guess the smoking man from the X-files are undermining capitalism with phoneybaloney preparations for rising sea levels operates without means or motives and only fever dreams projecting their worst fears onto superficial evidence. Maybe I need to review Hofstadter's work on the paranoid style to understand why right wing conspiracies are always constructed like a chinese buffet. Only they never seem to understand that they are in a chinese restaurant and that is why the buffet offers stir frys and egg rolls instead of meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

Joshua Holland at Alternet helps put some flesh on the deformed skeleton of hysteria. The kind of people showing up to shout down the local planning office in the Chesapeake are conservatives in that they do not want things to change. If that is their starting point though, it does not explain why they jump right to aggressive protest. It would be like punching the waitress at our chinese buffet analogy because they only had chinese food. The planners did not cause the sea levels to rise, they are simply trying to adjust and prepare for the changes so life is minimally disrupted. The paranoia buffet allows angry people to choose which group is lying to them and which is telling the truth or to what level of truthiness accorded to each group. As the graphic circulating the intertubes lately says "why is it easier to believe 150 million Americans are lazy than that 400 Americans are greedy?"

Holland also cites Jared Diamond and the exploration of why civilizations die when climate conditions change. In our analogy here, there are no other restaurants to go to. While my example of specifically a chinese buffet is arbitrary, we only have one planet. And there are way too many customers attacking the buffet (resources) at once. This is good for the restaurant's owners but bad for everyone else. In the end, humans are just not rational, and the more humans you put into a group the less likely they are to adjust to really existing conditions, instead trying to impose their will and domination upon their environment.

How do the more rational among us with the foresight to see changes both deal with the irrational and paranoid part of the population and simultaneously combat or adjust the real changes occurring in our environment? I am all for pluralism and accepting diverse opinions, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. If the last 30 years and especially the last 10 are any indication, the irrational and manipulated part of the population can be counted upon to act and vote against their own interests and the interests of their children. The irrational, greedy manipulators are blind to interests beyond the next quarter's profit report and cannot be relied upon to change course. So the answer to that question will elude us for the foreseeable future, unfortunately for the human race and the Earth.