Al Duncan, you are a delight. Your “Nationalization of retirement,” column of Aug. 27 brought nothing but smiles to my face.
The proposal to increase the numbers of employees eligible for an IRA account by 42 million without adding any burden to the employer is seen by you as a conspiracy of the government planning to take away our hard-earned money. Never mind that IRAs have been in place for nearly 40 years without any hint of government theft. Cries of the bankrupt Social Security system and Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund prove the government”s dire need for new money; necessitating the take away of our guns, freedom, money and soon our first born. These urban legends do not stand up to the facts but they do make for some entertaining reading.
Professor Jan Brunvand writes that urban legends belong to a category including folk narrative, legends and fairy tales set in the recent past whose actions are believed to be done by normal individuals acting in some underhanded way rather than by ancient gods or demigods. Folklorist Patricia A. Turner adds that these stories are almost always false, but are always told as true.
Conspiracy theorists distrust the mass media and present it as distorting and concealing the truth; making it part of the conspiracy, seeing it as totally controlled by the plotters in order to mislead the public. Even scientific research, nuclear weapons, nuclear power, fossil fuels, genetics and the weather all appear morally ambiguous. Instead of science being seen as totally neutral and a finder of fact, it faces challenges to its authority, notably from those claiming access to non-rational forms of knowledge.
The internet is most attractive to the conspiracy theorists because of its large potential audience, the low investment required to use it and the absence of gatekeepers who might censor its contents. Books are restricted to mail-order or only to the largest specialty bookstores.
There are three principles of conspiracy theory. For the conspiracy theorist, nothing is as it seems. No matter how innocent it looks, there is no guarantee it”s benign. Everything is connected and patterns are everywhere but hidden from plain view. They are in a constant process of linkage and correlation. Finally, nothing happens by accident and everything that happens has been willed. Al, if it wasn”t for your “nothing happens by chance” attitude the day would have no meaning.
Greg Blinn
Kelseyville
