Are Conspiracy Theories on The Rise? How did we ever get to the point we are at now with all the conspiracy theories? I think one of the reasons was the fact we have caught too many of our leaders in lies. I am not just talking about current leaders, but leaders throughout history. Conspiracy theory has been going on since three people first met and two of them conspired against the third person. Eve concocted a lie to get Adam to take a bite of that apple by telling him it was going to make him smart. The devil and Eve had conspired together to get this done. Unbeknown to Eve she was misled in the conspiracy. The definition of conspiracy according to Merriam-Webster is the act of conspiring together. In other words, it takes more than one person to conspire. Lately it seems Americans have become consumed with conspiracy and no wonder; the rise of conspiracy theory probably parallels the increase in secrets in government. When something important happens and we are not given the facts it makes people think there was a conspiracy. The same is true when we are told an obvious lie. Take the case of the Kennedy assassination. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 and we still do not have all the facts. This has led to many different conspiracy theories. Some say then Vice-President Johnson had something to do with it and point to a famous photo of Johnson standing in Air Force One next to Jackie Kennedy and turning around and giving a smile to a politician behind him. Others say the CIA killed Kennedy, because he was going to let the Russians join our space program. Still another states Kennedy was going to release information on UFOs which would have proven they were alien. To make matters worse the government was supposed to release 8,000 documents on the case and at the last minute they only released 52 new documents and some which had been released previously in a more redacted format. This has created even more conspiracy theories. By now we all know both the Democrats and Republicans have been espousing all sorts of conspiracy theories by both sides. When the government does this it makes people believe many of the other things we have taken as true may not be. How can one know if anything we are told is true anymore when we see two opposing parties each denying the other is telling the truth about a particular subject? If we were asked for famous conspiracies, one which would rank very high was the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Caesar was getting ready to leave Rome to fight a war, so he appointed members of his army to rule Rome in his absence. The senate was angry with Caesar and many hated him and the idea of taking orders from his underlings was the last straw for some senators. Caesar had been handed a note warning him of what was about to happen, but he didn’t read it. When he entered the hall of the senate the conspirators began jumping out and stabbing him. When Marcus Brutus wounded him in the groin he said “You too my child” in Greek. The famous psychiatrist Sigmund Freud started a conspiracy which stated Moses was actually the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten who was the ruler of Egypt from 1353 B.C. to 1336 BC. He stated the famous exodus out of Egypt was actually Akhenaten leaving with the Jews. He went on to say many of the biblical patriarchs like Abraham were also Egyptians. Other picked this up which actually started the conspiracy, because they read it in Freud’s Book. One modern conspiracy states cell phones were invented so we could all be tracked by the government. It doesn’t help to quell this conspiracy theory that cameras have been installed everywhere and it is easy to track our movements with them. Then there are the satellites which can spot a quarter on the ground from a hundred miles up. It seems all of these things reinforce the cell phone conspiracy theory. The second cell phone theory states they were invented to dumb us down so we would be easier for the government to handle, because the microwaves from them would do this to us. Another famous conspiracy theory has to do with the so-called Philadelphia Experiment. This never seems to go away. In 1943 an experiment was conducted which was said to test Einstein’s theory which was a ship could become invisible to mines. This got twisted around by conspiracy theorists to mean Einstein was trying to make a ship invisible. The ship had been wrapped with electrical coils and when the electricity was turned on people said the ship disappeared through time and lost some crew and when it came back some of the crew were fused into the metal of the ship. It seems this was all based on notes someone wrote by someone who was not very reliable, but many still believe there was a government conspiracy to hide the truth. One conspiracy theory which might turn out to be true someday is that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare. For many years people have been trying to find out who Shakespeare really was, but to no avail. We can’t really pin down who Shakespeare was and it just so happens a man who lived in those days was one of the greatest of all geniuses. Francis Bacon was highly educated and very articulate. He has become the basis of conspiracy theories on this subject. There will always be conspiracy theories, but some societies will have more than others and the United States is one which has a lot of them due to the aforementioned amount of government secrecy. The same will be true for any advanced country with a lot of secrets. |
