Human beings are good at recognizing patterns and diagnosing problems. But sometimes this skill can betray us. While we can run down an electrical problem in our car, find the source of a leak in a pipe, manage to figure out how to put together a jigsaw puzzle or solve a murder, it also allows us to create fantasies.

We look at the random blotches on the moon and picture a rabbit, a woman, or a man. The clouds boiling in the sky above us become cows and chickens and monsters. The random stars across the black night come to life as mythological shapes: the hunter Orion battles the bull Taurus, while accompanied by his dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor. To the north, the little dipper and big dipper—or Little Bear and Big Bear circle the North Star from sunset to sunrise.

More peculiar, it is not uncommon for human beings to try to find explanations for the events in their lives and in history. Rather than accept that things can just randomly go wrong, they attempt to find explanations. So, when Germany lost World War I, there were those who imagined that rather than having been bested by superior armies, that instead they had been defeated by traitors within German society—the myth of being “stabbed in the back.” As the economy went bad in the 1920’s—along with the economy of the world—there were those in Germany who sought someone to blame, imagining that someone had, on purpose, sent the economy into a tailspin. Scapegoats are inevitably a minority within the society, never the majority and given the longstanding hatred of Jewish people in German society—and European society as a whole—they became an easy target.

Thus, it is not uncommon in some parts of the world to find every bad thing that happens, every disaster, every bump in the road blamed on the Zionists or the Americans. Often times America and the Jews are linked together in the minds and pronouncements of the demogogues who seek to blame outsiders for their nations troubles in order to distract their people from recognizing the true causes of their suffering.

Not all conspiracy theories and theorists are as dangerous as those who blame the Jewish people for the world suffering. Most conspiracy theorists are not seeking to take us into a new Holocaust.

Most conspiracy theorists are harmless, imagining complicated explanations for well-known events, wanting to believe in a bigger cause for the big disasters that confront us. Or who want the disaster to be the work of those they already hate, or already have created a conspiracy for. Or finding a big event so hard to wrap their minds around that they recoil from it and choose to believe that it instead is impossible.

Thus, we find people imagining the American government responsible for the attacks on September 11, 2001, wishing to believe their own government, which they already hate, is responsible rather than those who really did it could have pulled it off. How could a mere handful of Moslem extremists have done something so monstrous. Surely it took more than that to destroy the tallest buildings in the United States, or so these conspiracists want to believe.

That human beings, barely five decades after learning how to build heavier than air machines, could actually fly to the moon and back seems more incredible than a complex conspiracy—contrary to all the facts—that the moon landings never occurred and were created by the wizards that make special effects in the movies.

Knowing that our government and others have secret research projects, one finds people willing to believe the most amazing things. For instance, some believe that sometime around October 28, 1943, in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, an attempt to render the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible instead sent it skittering about in space and time. The successful time travel event was then covered up. Evidence that the Eldridge wasn’t even in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard at the time is considered further proof that there really is a cover-up and that the experiment really happened.

Countering conspiracy theories is impossible, at least in confronting true believers. If you disagree, you are labeled either a member of the conspiracy, or a helpless dupe. There are always answers to explain away any objection. Those who wish to believe the moon landings were created on soundstages in secret government warehouses will never be talked out of their beliefs, even if you took them to the moon and showed them the hardware the astronauts left behind. Sometimes people simply prefer to believe a complicated conspiracy theory rather than the simple truth.

Bad things happen sometimes for really stupid reasons. An important person really can be murdered by a random unemployed nobody who was nuts. Economies cycle up and down just because that’s the way free markets function. Just because the clouds look like a bunny rabbit, doesn’t mean it really is a bunny rabbit. Time and chance, as the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, happen to all. Most of the problems in the world, most of the disasters, are just that: time and chance. Nothing more.

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