There is something very strange going on.
I don't know for sure what it is, but it is extremely sinister.
If either of the above two sentences ring any bells with you, you may be suffering from the millennial disease of conspiratorial paranoia.
Conspiratorial paranoia is the belief that a large and extensive conspiracy lies behind the apparently disconnected surface of events, manipulating and coercing reality into some unspecified but disquieting path. Note that I do not say the unfounded belief in a conspiracy. There have been, and indeed there are, numerous conspiracies; but few are as extensive as those that are believed in by, say, some UFO-Nazi conspiracy theorists, or crazed paranoiacs like Nesta H. Webster (who, in the classic 1926 book "Secret Societies and Subversive Movements" wrote at length about the Jewish Masonic plot to subvert the Christian Nations through the Illuminati). Indeed, Christian Millennialism has a long and dishonourable tradition of conspiracy theories, as exemplified by this contemporary example.
This does not mean, however, that there are no conspiracies. Arguments still rage over the shooting of JFK (although it could be said that if there was a real conspiracy behind the killing it would have been leaked by now). Nobody doubts that in the 1960's and 1970's the Israeli Secret Service (Shin Beth) conspired to acquire large supplies of Uranium by nefarious means, or that the NSA (in its campaign to force the adoption of escrowed key encryption) is pursuing some goal that is not publicly stated.
The critical issue, however, lies in distinguishing hypotheses from truth, in ferreting the real collusions and alliances from the sea of possible conspiracy vectors. And to this end, the general theory of paranoid conspiracy theories is a great help.
When analysing the elements of disjoint theories, it is useful to adopt a quantitative approach towards experimental verification. The problem with this approach is that it rapidly runs into a wall of unsupported or untestable assertions as soon as you move away from the sciences. Conspiracy theory is by definition arational with respect to the scientific method (as formularized by Popper, Kuhn, et al) insofar as it attempts to draw apparently separate elements together in a consistent manner which is not, initially, consistent with reality.
To analyze conspiracy theories, requires a new form of logic that is itself conspiratorial; that lends itself towards the derivation and analysis of theorems which are internally complete and internally consistent. A set-theoretical approach to the analysis of conspiracy elements may bear fruit, but by definition it must be based on a complex calculus, for any valid theory of conspiracy theories must of necessity violate Gödel's theorem.
In the tentative general theory of conspiracy theories, a conspiracy is a vector of conspiracy elements such that refutation-resolution applied to the vector results in an empty set, but inclusive addition of a non-conspiracy element to the vector results in a conspiracy that still matches the criterion. (That is: it absorbs foreign elements and logically integrates them.)
to be continued ...
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