Sometimes, when I’m sitting here with nothing to do, my mind starts to wander. Sometimes it happens when I’m avoiding work that needs to be done. Sometimes I act like I’m working while straining to overhear other people’s conversations. There are these moments when people are talking and they pause to scan their surroundings. They grow quiet for a second. They share an unspoken understanding that whatever they are going to say next is personal and important. They ensure no one is making any kind of eye contact or otherwise paying attention to their conversation, then continue in a near whisper. Those are my favorite conversations to listen to. I like when a public conversation stops being a performance and edges into something more real. What it reveals can sometimes be revealing or puzzling or both. I’m almost never disappointed.
Just now I’m separated from a group of friends by a two vacant tables. It’s enough distance that they feel free to change the drift of their conversation. As soon as they stop laughing and joking with each other, the mood obviously changing, I turn off the music on my headphones and focus my attention on their table, without overtly looking over or changing my demeanor. To them, I’m a random faceless person, sitting alone, enjoying my music, scrolling through my phone, while inside I’m craning to hear every word.
An older woman starts in with a story about a city (I can’t make out which) that changed their law enforcement procedures to allow people to steal from local businesses up to a set dollar amount (I couldn’t hear exactly what the dollar figure was) and it is just another example, in a long line of examples, of rampant lawlessness in what I imagine she thinks are all American cities. Everyone else around the table nods along. Nobody challenges the absurdity of the claim. It just hangs there in the air to be accepted on its face as truthful, regardless of how easily it can be disproved.
A man immediately to her right pivots the discussion to free speech. He rails about how big social media companies are choosing sides and limiting voices they don’t agree with. He says it’s a form of mind control, a conspiracy to limit public conversation to a set of boundaries, which in his convoluted and whispered language sounds something like “mainstream” something or other. The group nods along to that as well. There is a kind of call and response aspect to the conversation. Someone takes a turn going down a rabbit hole and everyone else offers support with nods and yeses under their breath.
The next preacher of buried truth steps up to the pulpit and offers book “curation,” their term not mine, as a way to even the scales and ensure their conception of balance is restored. The flock nods along and encourages more of the congregation to stand and offer their evidence, of what specifically, I don’t know, to the group.
You know, I was just reading a magazine piece about conspiracy theories before I came here. Actually, come to think of it, there were a few different pieces related to conspiracies. One was about the commercial side of conspiracies. It argued that leading conspiracy theory voices (biggest following, most avid fans) are all following whatever is emerging and trending among their peers or fans and fixating on those topics to generate clicks, subscribers, and money for the public mouthpiece of whatever people want to believe. It’s a cycle of validation. Everyone believes it because everyone in their circle is parroting that weird thing a normal person couldn’t possibly believe. Another piece was about an old news story that was reported in a very specific way and went national because it affirmed the majority suspicions about people from a very different socioeconomic group. When digging deeper into the details it became clear that the initial reports were at worst completely wrong and at best a good try under difficult journalistic circumstances. It wasn’t a conspiracy, allied to get the story wrong and reaffirm a particular set of ideas or was it?
Is it a coincidence that people were sharing conspiracy theories and I just happened to read something about them as well? Maybe it’s a conspiracy to question conspiracy theories. Now I’m losing my train of thought a little bit. I’m painting myself into a conspiracy corner. But what if there were conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories? Like, I can just make one up now: the elite gatekeepers, fill in the blank with more descriptive stuff about this alleged (always alleged) cabal, have conspired to make me think certain conspiracies are absurd to dissuade me from finding out the truth about their vague interests, or better yet, to convince me they have no interests other than the truth, when in fact their lack of conspiracy tropes is actually proof that there is a conspiracy. And to take it one step further, my hearing these weird conspiracy theories coming from the table is affirmation that there are others out there that are onto something real.
Whew! I need to wipe my brow. The circular logic I can tie myself into can be confusing, and if I’m honest kind of fun. Maybe that’s a reason why people get into conspiracy theories. Thousands of people don’t just go on social media one day and start making up stories because they don’t enjoy it, right? I don’t know. It could be it’s just too easy to resist. If I’m too lazy to get news from a source that at least claims to follow journalistic principles then maybe the conspiracy narratives are acceptable as a stand in for reality. I get easily confused by all the strands of disconnected information coming together in illogical ways. And any rational set of questions about the big conspiracies usually create gaping holes of absurdity in their facade. But maybe there are people who don’t care about the connecting the dots and just want to feel connected to something unexplainable, like religion or a cult. If that’s true what does that say about us; the collective we?
How did I get from that overheard conversation to here? The group at the table have all started to leave. I let my mind wander again. Before I sat down I was thinking about people or characters, in this case, who can’t discern between two very different things. Do you remember the Yanni vs Laurel thing or the dress that was two different colors depending on who was looking at it? I was thinking that could be used to drive a story. What if that was a medical condition or just a standard difference prevalent in many people? Certain people always see the exact opposite of what someone else sees. Like when I see a clownish buffoon another person would see a debonair gentleman. Or when I see a beautiful landscape they see an abandoned wasteland. I think it would make for a funny character affect that highlights the absurdity of perceptions unmoored from objective reality, though I don’t want to live in a world where we pretend perceptions are as valid as facts.
