Who knows what happened on 9/11?

Wide-ranging conspiracies do take place, whether you or I, or Charlie Brooker, are inclined to believe it or not

Dan Hind - guardian.co.uk - Thursday July 17, 2008

Earlier this week Charlie Brooker generated the largest number of online responses to an article in the history of Comment is free. His theme was conspiracy theory in general and the 9/11 conspiracy theories in particular – and it collected more than 1,700 comments. Brooker thinks conspiracy theories console those who find reality too dull and complicated without the garnish of a hidden agenda: "Embrace a conspiracy theory and suddenly you're part of a gang sharing privileged information; your sense of power and dignity rises a smidgeon and this troublesome world makes more sense, for a time."

Brooker's line belongs to a mini-genre of attempts to explain the public's willingness to entertain conspiracy theories in psychological terms. Indeed he is very close to that stern rationalist Melanie Phillips, who has decided that, in the absence of religion, conspiracy theories satisfy "our desperate need to make order out of chaos".
...

But this is beside the point. Wide-ranging conspiracies do take place, whether we are inclined to believe that they do or not. It might well be consoling to believe that the CIA plots the overthrow of unhelpful foreign regimes. But it is also true. To insist that, say, the CIA had nothing to do with the fall of Guatemalan leader Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, or the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende in 1973 might feel terrifically sensible and sane – we can't always be seeing the hidden hand of the CIA, there's no call for reductionism. It is also, you know, wrong...

Continued...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/17/september11