Rollende stenen

Jemig de pemig. De Rolling Stone pakt uit met een special rond complotdenkers. Aanleiding is het al eerder genoemde boek van de Canadees Jonathan Kay, die twee jaar lang onderdook in de krochten van het internet. Daarover zegt hij: 'A lot of people I interviewed for the book are incredibly intelligent people – former professors, investigative journalists, scientists, engineers; but they have no idea what to believe anymore, so they go online every morning and each time it’s a fresh trip down the rabbit hole. And their intelligence, far from being a bulwark against nonsense, it just turbo-charges their descent into nonsense. You could spend your whole life analyzing every hundredth of a second of every video that's out there of  the fall of the World Trade Center looking for hints of demolitions going off. And very, very smart people are spending their lives doing this, because they're convinced it will give them some glimpse into the truth. And they wouldn't be doing this if they had some satisfying worldview that gave them the kind of intellectual and emotional stability they were looking for in their life.'

Ook aardig is een classificatie van complotters. Zo is zijn er mannen die zich na een midlife crisis op complotten storten, met 9/11 architect Richard Gage als voorbeeld. 'Like all forms of midlife crisis, the sudden lurch into conspiracism offers middle-aged men a sense of revitalization and adventure. For a middle-aged man who's grown tired of life's patterns, conspiracism provides more than just fresh  surroundings: It offers an entirely new reality.' 

En dan zijn er - hoe herkenbaar - de zwevers, volledig van toepassing op de Argusogers en de Marcel Messings. 'The Cosmic Voyager is the hippy of conspiracist typology. He resembles ... a 'seeker' – a spiritual omnivore perpetually spiraling out toward the margins of Western cultural and political life. ... Since his mythology is vague and labile, he acst as a sort of conspiratorial Zelig, popping up at everything from Truther conventions to quack autism sites. Many get into Eastern mysticism, and all are convinced that reality is not what it seems. Often, the Voyager is a UFO obsessive.'

En dan heb je - Micha Kat indachtig - 'the firebrand type. They are the easiest ones to spot, because they are always the noisiest. For the firebrand, conspiracism supplies an ideological pretext to strike shocking, militant political postures, and thereby satisfy his hunger for public attention.'