WE ARE ALL CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

I've never had any patience for conspiracy theories. They are so obviously creations of the believer. Decide Shakespeare didn't write the plays and every new piece of information will support some other author. Decide Kennedy couldn't have been killed by a lone gunman and you will interpret every fact as proof positive of your theory. Take a position and you can make everything, no matter how outlandish, fit neatly into your belief...
    I've been thinking a lot about how we each create our own reality and it came to me that in this sense we are all conspiracy theorists, making each new fact and experience fit into what we already believe. It goes to the heart of what our consciousness is - we form ideas and beliefs based on our experience and then we project those ideas and beliefs onto new experience. Our lives are constant streams of  encountered experience and the judgments we make about it, all of it contingent on what we already "know." 
     The world isn't full of ideas; we are full of ideas about the world. We pick and choose according to our temperaments: if you're basically a conservative temperament, you will search out, accept and attach yourself to ideas that make you feel anchored to some Reality with a capital R outside yourself - the orthodoxies of religion or ideologies, ideas you believe to be carved in stone someplace beyond yourself. If you have a more liberal temperament, you will be drawn to models of Reality that make room for evolution, interpretation and relativism. Either way, your ongoing experience will confirm and extend what you already "know." In this way, my belief that there is no Truth with a capital T is very little different than your belief in the reality of the voice of God. Both grow out of a fundamental fact of human consciousness: we choose what we believe.
     But this choice isn't necessarily free. Beliefs are shaped by the culture we're born into, who our families are and what status they occupy, and all sorts of other factors beyond our control. And many of our beliefs are unconscious, assumptions about the world we carry with us and don't realize are controlling how we respond to whatever we meet. We carry this force field of belief with us; it is the core part of our consciousness.
     But disruption to this core is possible; in fact, our human history and our personal histories are full of instances in which we went off in a new direction, had a conversion, reached some kind of enlightenment, clapped our foreheads and exclaimed, "I was blind! But now I see!" This is the great gift of consciousness and can be stated so simply it seems banal: we have the ability to get a new idea.