On Conspiracies

I have an embarassing confession: I am smarter than lots and lots of people. Most, maybe. Not in the “facts memorized” sense, I can think of half a dozen friends who can run rings around me in that regard; in the “ability to master complex concepts and synthesize new ideas from them” sense. I do not actually know what my IQ is because my parents refused to tell me, but I can infer from the fact that I was pulled out of normal kindergarten readiness testing into a small office and given progressively more interesting puzzles as a child and then promptly treated like some kind of magical yet fragile freak for the next 13 years that it is large enough to prevent most of the adults who knew me from seeing me as a person and not a projection of their hopes and dreams.

I can also infer that a large chunk of it is mathematical in nature; I have always wanted to use it for creative endeavors — my dream career flip flopped between “astronaut-doctor-president” and “fashion designer” until I was about 16 and decided on law (which I did not end up in, except for some light political organizing for funsies) — and I have always been told that I should use it on math. This may be related to the very large slab of rock on my shoulder as pertains to the idea that women who are good at math and science are obligated to do math and science, because although I am old enough that my poor vision shattered my astronaut dreams at age 11, back when you also had to qualify as a fighter pilot to go to space, it is 2021 and I am not yet a mummified husk according to anyone but my teenager and there is absolutely no reason that people overlapping my lifespan should be astonished that girls can be naturally mathematical, not even in a rural school district in 1980. But I digress.

I have never really believed this to be true. I knew that I got good grades, but even in grammar school I understood that was a measure of your ability to understand what the teacher wanted from you, not the material itself. And I understood that supplying what adults in general, but teachers in particular, wanted from me was my job very clearly from a very young age, because literally everyone in my life pointed out it out to me, the mutant from planet smart. Sure, I went through a mercifully brief yet still insufferably smug phase as a teenager (don’t we all, trying desperately to project certainty as we roil with its opposite in trying to figure out who we are?) but even then it wasn’t about Smart, it was about Deep (read: poor) in a Shallow (read: middle class consumerist) society.

I’m sure that a lot of it was humored more than it should have been because smart-but-weird is eccentric genius, average-but-weird is just weird, but it was a brush with feelings of superiority that absolutely crumpled in the face of the imposter syndrome I felt going to college with people from an entirely different planet of privilege than I had ever seen. No matter that my professors told me I was bright and promising; these girls had connections and money and internships and debate teams and philosophy classes in junior fucking high school, come ON, the only enrichment I had from the school at that age was all that free asbestos we would try to knock off the pipes in the old gymnasium playing dodge ball.

I, too, crumpled like a soggy napkin in the face of it all — I could see no way to becoming better than these girls, when all my life was geared towards the realization of this alleged potential to be better than other people.

A brief aside: I was once chewed out by a guidance counselor for refusing to apply to Harvard, a school I had no interest in attending (and, more significantly, whose application fee I could not afford), because it was my sacred duty to prove that she had been in proximity to someone with enough superiority to attend an Ivy League school. Never mind that I went to a Seven Sisters college; their name recognition did not pervade to West Podunk with the same cachet as Haaaaahvahd.

But the ability of the mutant from planet smart to rule the world could never keep up with the bitches from planet privilege, not even with a thousand year head start. Sure, maybe the world was still a meritocracy, but could see clear as day that I did not have the right kind of merit no matter how many people had told me otherwise. So I rejected all of it. I rejected college, I rejected all the obligations I had carried for other people til now, and I fucked off into the sunset of trying to be ordinary for a few years until I got a job doing catering out of the cafeteria of a private school and I started to resent being seen as stupid by the same ilk who had burdened me with the expectations of being Smart, and received the strangest and most impactful compliment I have ever gotten.

We had student workers; if they happened to be scheduled during a slow period we would sometimes allow them to treat their shift as a study hall. One of the students was having trouble with calculus and I worked through a few problems with him; afterwards a coworker pulled me aside and said “I never realized you were that smart, you never made me feel dumb.”

If intellectualism were a boner, then that sentiment would be your spinster aunt naked and clipping her toenails with her teeth, while she throws ice cold water at your crotch.

I was quietly mortified; even though I had never believed that I was as strange a bird as people made me out to be, there was a part of me that wanted to believe it, way deep down, that the stupid parlor tricks that my brain can do made me somehow more special or more deserving than other people. I am fortunate that this was paired with the self esteem of a poor, not-conventionally-attractive, outside-the-mainstream teenage girl, a force that can take down any sense of worth it meets and still have time for tea. But believe me when I say that I understand how deeply a person can want that to be true.

Which brings us to the conspiracy theories. I have seen, over the past year, dozens of perfectly intelligent coworkers fall prey to them. Maybe not alarmingly smart, but capable enough to hold down jobs in programming and engineering, at least, many with graduate degrees. Despite the prevailing idea that conspiracy nuts are people with absolutely zero grasp of how things like science work, these talking points are actually aimed at mostly-smart people who cannot possibly specialize enough in all of the complexities of modern life to a degree sufficient to pry the kernel of truth away from all of the layers of falsehood it’s been snugged up in.

Not because they’re not smart enough, but because nobody can. Most people have a broad but shallow understanding of a category or three of things, and a ridiculously deep understanding of one or two that they encounter daily. The mistake is in assuming that the depth comes from natural superiority and not just garden variety repetition, or that depth in one field grants you license to claim you understand another. But where the conspiracy theories really take root is in the implication that You, Brave Believer, are the smartest person in the room, the one who Saw Through The Bullshit(TM) when nobody else did, the one who followed the right shell, the one who peeked behind the curtain. You are Special.

You are not.

I say this as someone who was singled out for allegedly being exactly what these theories tell you you are, and who has learned that a superior intellect and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee (as long as you’re at a dive breakfast joint, anyway — who is in charge of updating these things for inflation?)

[Wow, who would have ever imagined that conspiracy theories, invented to help maintain the status quo by dividing the electorate, are designed with features and delivery methods that make them appeal to the very people who are best at adapting to the narrow aims of the status quo? Amazing.]

But I am mostly here to tell you that fighting that urge to believe that you are somehow the only one who Gets It is a lifelong work requiring active participation, and that you had better start flexing those humility muscles any time you hear that siren song being whispered in your ear. Is the starting premise of a conspiracy often true? Yes, absolutely. But that does not grant legitimacy to the 17 layers of increasingly shoddy logic piled on top of that kernel.

If an argument requires belief that hundreds upon thousands of other people are worthless dupes, NPCs, sheeple, or whatever the latest insult is, and you are the eternal protagonist, the lone antihero who can save us all from our folly, it is rubbish, end of discussion. Let go of the desire for that to be true. The real Cassandras, who have been warning us exactly where things are going because they are experts, are dismissed and ignored constantly. If someone is constantly lauding you for sounding the alarm? Rubbish.