(3089/898) Conspiracy

1314) [T]here's something about a facile charge of conspiracy. It eats away at your powers of reason and makes you delusional and at least slightly psychotic. It's a stain, and you can't get it off. It makes you incapable of distinguishing reality from unreality. It throws your sense of proportion all out of whack, and you stop trusting your common sense. What can you trust? You never know. Is what I see really what I see, or is it an illusion being foisted upon me by the conspirators? It burrows into your brain, like termites, and turns it into sawdust.

Anyone who has ever handled a conspiracy case---on either side--- knows what I'm talking about. You never know whom you can trust. Every pathway could be littered with bungee traps. And it makes you crazy. Crazy. (Of which, some would say, I am living proof, cause I've handled a lot of conspiracy cases.)

[Johnny Cochran] and the ["Dream Team"] know this dynamic, too. They know that, by far, the best way to confuse and obfuscate and scatter the truth to the four winds, is to waft the innuendo of conspiracy: suddenly the whole cosmos starts getting viewed through a different lens. What was plainly trivial and irrelevant suddenly becomes relevant, and the smallest ion of information starts taking on a colossal significance: Staples? The staple holes are missing?????? A 2 week trial turns into a 2 year trial (the better to obscure the obvious), and everyone starts scattering off on wild goose chases (the better to fragment the jury). Anyone who thinks this dynamic isn't part of the master plan is being very, very naive.

What's the moral? When anyone tries to "plant" the seed of conspiracy into your brain, without making any effort at all to prove it, he's messing with yer head.

Tom Fellows
"Conspiracy Lore"
posted on the CourtTV O.J. Simpson
discussion board (7/27/1995)

1315) [Philosopher Harald Ofstadt] draws up a number of "laws" for nazism, one of which was that the greater the scale of the decision, the farther the distance must be between the person giving the order and the actual impact of its consequences. Hence, the person signing the order that sends millions of people to their deaths should have no further direct involvement in the process, and should never once lay eyes on one of their victims or their suffering, the idea being that this allows "objective" decisions to be made but in fact allowed the Nazi leaders to live in a fantasy world of idealism and absolutism. This is pretty much how nazism worked, and seems to me to be the key to much of the 20th century political scene. Not surprisingly, [Philip K.] Dick (who was of course interested in the construction & perception of reality) picked up on this in [The Man in the High Castle], where the leaders of the Reich pursue their own mad, fantastic plans that have no connection to the everyday world of the main characters, apart from causing their suffering.

John Morgan
posted on [PKD] (9/15/1995)
citing the work of Harald Ofstadt in
Our Contempt for Weakness:
Nazi Norms and Values (1989)