I read the “Pendulum of Foucauld” of Umberto Eco when I was 20, and it made a strong impression.

The story of the Pendulum is the story of an italian man in the seventies, who (after some tribulations) ends up working for a publisher, who amongst others has a collection of books around the ‘paranormal’. As part of his work, he gets to know some of these characters, and also gets to read a whole lot of essays in that category.

He starts to recognize the patterns of such works, the interpretation of every single detail to prove the theory advanced, the fact that these authors ignore inconvenient truths, and even common sense. The fact they make the craziest of connections, based on nothing but a vague similarity.

So him and two friends start decide to build up The Plan, which is a conspiracy theory spanning the centuries, picking and mixing historical details to come up with a beautiful and moronic story. They have a lot of fun doing it, until things start going very, very wrong.

And indeed, Umberto Eco was spot-on. There are many of these theories floating around. Spend enough time on Youtube. Try anything connected with 9/11, or the googoo stuff of David Icke, some of the ideas in Zeitgeist … Lots of theories blaming mysterious groups of puppeteers, master-minding big catastrophes, to further their own goals.

Quoting Eco:

Someone – was it Chesterton ? – said that when men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

It seems a lot of people are having trouble with life ‘as is’. A vast, indifferent universe, where we live only for a short while, and really horrible stuff happens for no apparent reason. A place mostly out of our control, where we (as a race) manage to be ridiculous and terminallly stupid/greedy. So these people invent patterns and connections, to make it all make sense. Thinking: someone’s behind this. Bound to be.