My Alleged Mother Is An Anti-Catholic Manchurian Candidate Who Once Dated An Alien From Quebec!

Prof. Richard Hofstadter wrote an interesting essay titled "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" first published on Harper's magazine in 1964. Today, some of the more popular conspiracies swirl around the New World Order, Amero, Tri-Lateral Commission and of course 9/11.

Occam's Razor eludes con theo's.

Here's are some excerpts:

"...The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s (Welch founded the John Birch Society)incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. (Yes, they look and sound convincing) The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies."

"...The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

"...A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."

When there are gaps in history, that is, inexplicable black holes because of a lack of evidence or facts, something has to fill them in. This doesn't mean strange or questionable things don't occur but human nature is so vastly complex that reducing it to a conspiracy theories in itself seems implausible.

Jesse Walker put it this way on Reason Online:

"Why all the paranoia? In part, of course, it's because there really are conspiracies out there. Power does attract the power-hungry. No, Hillary Clinton did not murder Ron Brown—but her explanations for her good fortune trading cattle futures do not bear close scrutiny. John McCain is not a deep-cover Manchurian Candidate, but he was a charter member of the Keating Five. Barack Obama is not a closet Islamist, but there are legitimate questions about his ties to the corrupt developer Tony Rezko. If politics is the art of compromise, then politicians will inevitably be compromised."

A conspiracy theorist is willing to expand on these facts and take it to levels most of us wouldn't.