According to liberals, sexual continence occurs in virtually all urban civilizations because the patriarchal conspiracy has a malignant wish to make everyone sad and sexually frustrated. The idea that common venereal diseases were lethal before the invention of antibiotics seems to me a pertinent fact that’s more obvious than patriarchal conspiracies. I always thought that culture was a machine for transmitting survival tactics to its members. This probably makes me a bad person.

There is the “creationism of the left,” the blind leftist belief that human evolution and cultural development rendered all people from all points of the compass with identical abilities. The observed differences between races and cultures are believed to be the result of conspiracy on the part of the allegedly dominant tribe, viz., white people. These very same white people have in recent years passed fearsome laws which dictate that one must discriminate against white people. These same white people have elected politicians who seem hell-bent on making them a minority within their own country. The racist conspiracy is so all-fired powerful that it manages to keep everyone else down, despite voting for the laws which discriminate against…white people.

Why did the racist conspiracy of white people do these things? How does it manage these things? Who is in charge, and where do I sign up for my white privileges? What is the all-powerful racist conspirators”€™ ultimate plan, and why do they want these things? To believe in an all-powerful modern racist conspiracy, you’d have to believe in a cabal that actually wants to humiliate other tribes by making itself a small, oppressed, demoralized, self-flagellating minority which still manages to do better than other tribes, barring Asians and Jews. This seems peculiar behavior from the racist white people conspiracy. 

Then there’s the idea that basic social customs are some kind of conspiracy. According to this trope, the nationalism that seems to spontaneously occur in almost all cultures is a form of mass psychosis. The idea that sticking with your fellows keeps you from being invaded and slaughtered seems a more parsimonious explanation to me.

The list is long. From the Koch brothers conspiracy to the big-oil conspiracy to the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” your average leftist lives in a truly paranoid Manichean world of sinister cabals.

There are conspiracies in the world. But if you want me to believe in sinister cabals, you must point to real people and concrete actions. Nebulous and all-pervasive conspiracies to explain unpleasant facts seem a lot crazier than people who worry about fluoridated water.

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