conspiracy

I have a friend at work who is absolutely convinced that the World Economic Forum is a nefarious organization that is slowly reaching its long tentacles into every conceivable aspect of human life. "The agenda," as he calls it, is the WEF's plan to have us all eat crickets, own nothing, and live in government-controlled fifteen-minute restricted movement zones while being surveilled and corralled by an omniscient social credit system.

Maybe he's right. Maybe there really is a not-so-secret globalist agenda to take over the world, and we're all being naive for brushing off such a crazy-sounding conspiracy theory. After all, how do you disprove a conspiracy theory when one of the defining characteristics of such a theory is that discrediting evidence is consistently countered with "ah, but that's just what they want you to think?"

The human mind is, among other things, a miraculously effective pattern recognition machine. But it's also susceptible to a number of very specific and demonstrable biases, among them the tendency to anthropomorphize events that have no observable relationship to human causality. On average, we tend to prefer explanations of why things happen, particularly things we perceive as bad, that blame some human act or intent. Since causality is not observable, the world is just more coherent when we can ascribe events to the machinations of other humans rather than to abstract agents like God or the randomness of the universe.

We all have a strong desire for the world to make sense. As humans, the most natural question in response to undesirable events is, "why is this happening?" Irrespective of intelligence, those of us who tend toward an anthropomorphic rather than a mechanistic understanding of the cosmos must be aware of the danger such thinking may lead to.