This is not a conspiracy theory

You can trust me to tell you the Truth.

It is a terrifying responsibility that we scientists have, as the only people smart enough to truly understand the world.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot while I’ve been in hospital recovering from my visit to the pub two weeks ago.

I was there with Dr. Zadie Revell-Ludovic.

My mistake had been to let her buy the first pints. If I had insisted on going first, she would have bought the second round, and then I could have warded off a foolish third. Instead, she bought the first round, I bought the second, and then via the insidious path of least resistance I said Yes to the offer of a third.

So here I was stuck with most of a pint ahead of me, and the exposition of her conspiracy theory.

I had made what I thought was an innocuous remark, about how conspiracy theories were becoming more plentiful and more popular.

“At least, that’s what social media tells me,” I said. “But we know how they manipulate information.”

That set her off.

“There is only one thing you need to know to see that all conspiracy theories are rubbish,” she declared.

“What’s that?”

“They all explain why bad things happen. The government is ruining my life. The billionaires are ruining my life. It’s always an excuse for why things go wrong.”

“That’s not true,” I objected. “What if you’re the victim of colonial oppression? Then the government and the billionaires are ruining your life.” (That was an example I learned from social media — so it’s not all useless!)

“I don’t think you can call ruling an empire a ‘secret conspiracy’.”

“What about the people who claim the Holocaust didn’t happen? Six million people not dying after all would be pretty good news.”

“I don’t think their goal is to cheer us up.”

“And what about the pedophiles underneath the pizza parlour?” I said. “What was that supposed to explain?”

“Ok, fine!” she yelled. “You’ve missed the point I wanted to make.”

“That most conspiracy theories are rubbish? Very insightful.”

So far, standard pointless conversation over a couple of pints.

Then, as we made our first sips into the third round, she said, “My point is that they’re missing the real conspiracy.”

Uh oh. That’s when I wished that the bar’s owner was himself part of a vast secret conspiracy, and that there was a concealed hatch behind my chair, so I could just lean backwards and fall down an escape chute into an underground tunnel and run all the way home and spend the rest of the evening safely sitting on my sofa watching the new Errol Morris documentary about how Charles Manson was the product of CIA drug experiments.

I should have tried to leave anyway, but it was awkward. The way I was wedged into a corner I would have to push past her to get out. Plus, I still had most of a pint to drink. And there was a packet of crisps. Once again, I followed the path of least resistance, and said, “Really?”

“Think about it. The world is shit. People are stupid, and mean, and greedy. But mostly just stupid. And as scientists we know that entropy is king: everything breaks, everything decays, everything goes wrong.”

“Sounds about right to me.” I took a handful of crisps and quietly munched on them while she continued.

“We don’t need to invent conspiracies for why we’re poor or diseased or being screwed all the time or why wars are breaking out or governments are collapsing. That’s what’s supposed to happen.”

It was a grim outlook, but I couldn’t fault it. I took solace in my crisps.

“So!” she cried. “We don’t need a conspiracy to explain why things are terrible. We need a conspiracy to explain why they’re so good!”

I stopped munching. Her argument had taken a turn that I must have missed. “What do you mean, so good? I thought you said everything was terrible?”

“It is terrible,” she said.

“What a relief.”

“But it should be much worse.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Look around you. Look at this building. Think of the complex manufacturing and supply-chain processes necessary just to build these walls and put down this floor and make sure this ceiling doesn’t collapse. And the plumbing into the pipes at the bar. And the electricity to make the light. Jesus — just think of those light bulbs! With their perfect spheres of thin glass somehow manufactured in crazy bulk and shipped all over the country without breaking, and those teeny windings in the fragile little filament.”

“Do modern light bulbs still have those little filaments?”

“It doesn’t matter! The point is that everything in our lives requires the most vast and sophisticated organisation. Every minuscule aspect relies on thousands or millions of people, all working ignorantly to do their little part in making our society function, and the whole thing has to be stable for decades, or probably centuries, otherwise none of it is possible.”

Ok, now I had backed up and made the turn with her, but I think I could be excused for getting lost earlier. We’d made a pretty sudden shift from “the world is shit” to the miracle of modern industrial society.

Fortunately she was winding up to her conclusion. “Think about it. We’re scientists. We’re the smartest people on Earth. And even we are screw-ups. You don’t even know how a modern light bulb works. Do you really believe that ordinary human beings could possibly keep this civilisation functioning?”

I had to face it. She had a damn good point.

“Someone is making it work!” She leaned forward and did a kind of hissing whisper. “Somewhere there is a group of truly smart people — even smarter than us — who make it work. That’s the real conspiracy!”

Smarter than us? Crikey.

Now I too was whispering. “Who are they?” I asked. I wasn’t really whispering, because this was a pub, and we were probably both yelling ourselves hoarse, but it felt like whispering.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but...” she leaned forward over the table, so that she could actually whisper into my ear. “I’m going to find out.”

I stared at her. Then I looked around the pub, at all of the rubes slopping back their beers and completely unaware of the powerful and mysterious forces moving around them — forces that we were on the verge of discovering.

Then I turned back to her. I took a large enough swig of my beer that I wouldn’t spill any when I thumped the glass down on the table dramatically, and then I thumped the glass down on the table dramatically. “I’m in,” I said. “What do we do?”

From that point the evening got rapidly more ridiculous.

Three of our esteemed colleagues arrived, fresh from a late-running online meeting that they’d made bearable only by joining together in one office along with a bottle of whiskey. At first we didn’t reveal our secret knowledge, but they were buying more beers and soon we were all bubbling with determination to track down the secret cabal that runs our world.

Then we were joined by our hotshot new hire, Dr. Blowhard, who everyone hates because he’s so successful, and plus he was completely sober and when we blurted out our revelations he smugly pointed out that precisely the same theory had been expertly monetised for the last six months by people with the same idea as Zadie, but better internet marketing skills.

People like that are invariably infuriating, even when you haven’t lost count of how many pints you’ve drunk, and now we were both excited and furious.

“It’s still true!” someone yelled.

“We have to find them!” yelled someone else.

“Tonight!” roared a third person. Who might have been me.

The next thing we knew we had spilled out of the pub and onto the street, to begin our hunt.

And that’s the last thing I remember.

That was over two weeks ago.

What happened in the mean time? What did we discover? I like to think that we discovered everything — that we tracked down the brilliant creatures who make our world function, and uncovered their deeper purpose, and very likely it was for good not ill, and we all agreed to keep their secret, but then they decided to wipe our memories anyway.

The official story is that I ran from the pub blathering all sorts of nonsense and ran straight out onto the street and got hit by a car, and spent the next two weeks unconscious.

Do you really believe that? That now I’m fully recovered? Without any scars? Without the slightest scratch?

I don’t buy it.

Zadie’s conspiracy is logically irrefutable. People as smart as us do not make deductive errors. We have to be right.

After all, if we’re so easily deluded, then just think what the stupid people must believe.

---

---

I look forward to people explaining to me how unoriginal this particular conspiracy theory is, and its presumably long and dark history. I hope they will know as well as anyone that every time someone latches on to a conspiracy theory, they’re convinced that they were the first to think of it. Such is Zadie.

The prelude to this story is in the previous piece, and for the uninitiated there is much more to be found in the Table of Contents.

Speaking of conspiracy theories: for those convinced that the protagonist of these stories is the author, or at least his closely aligned alter ego, I should make clear that I have never subscribed to a conspiracy theory, and indeed I usually find them boring, or irritating. For my official stance on authorial identification, I direct you to this piece. For a robust stance on science conspiracy theories, see “The Scientist’s Revenge”. And for those who want even more conspiracy-theory fiction, you might enjoy my fellow stacker Larry Hogue’s serial Ship of Fools.