It seems to have become one of the most popular ways of ridiculing somebody’s argument or position, calling into question someone’s sanity or even somebody’s right to their very own existence in recent years are ‘You’re a conspiracy theorist!’, ‘That sounds like a conspiracy theory to me!’ We hear such accusations let fly in TV and radio debates all too often as soon as anyone begins to question a perceived, generally excepted ‘truth’. The accuser always seems supremely confident that this accusation is enough to immediately put the accused beyond the pale of all human reason and that all participants and viewers of the debate should be expecting men in white coats to arrive at any moment and the accused to be led away in the interests of all for ‘corrective treatment’.
The definition of conspiracy of the on-line dictionaries insists on the ‘evil, harmful, bad’ side of things. In other words; in the English language, it is impossible to conspire to do good. This is one of the reasons why the accusation of being a conspiracy theorist remains an effective put down as it implies that the accused believes that their government, company bosses and colleagues, military or police commanders, friends and acquaintances or even members of their own family and partaking in secret, evil deeds and plots for harmful ends which have happened or are going to happen and hence at best implies lack of good faith and paranoia and at worst, extreme negativity, treachery; being a fifth columnist. All labels with which most of us would wish not to be tarnished.
This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jul 10, 2016.
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