Conspiracy

No matter how intense the global conspiracy against you may seem, there is invariably another, more subtle and well orchestrated, in progress directly beyond your immediate notice.

Both the observations above are fact, operating in the face of your inability to recall when there was a conspiracy directed against you as an individual or representative of gender, race, or profession.  To be sure, you represent a number of types against which considerable prejudice has been and will be directed.  By no means do you attempt to minimize these discriminations, but you do wish to distinguish such aspects as racism, gender prejudice, political preferences, and other cultural biases such as humor and religion or lack of humor or lack of religion from conspiracy.  The last conspiracy you were aware of had to do with subtext issues during World War II.

To provide additional stacking of the deck, you venture your belief that conspiracy-theory advocates at any place on the political or philosophical spectrum approach bat-shit craziness.  Nor can you venture any plausible reason why anyone would wish to organize a conspiracy against you or, for that matter, participate in one.

You recognize the potential catch-22 here in which such sentiments as those of the previous paragraph could get someone to think of you as naïve, perhaps even hopelessly naive, because, after all, there are a good many crazies “out there,” and in addition, it is a jungle out “there.”  But once again, you observe that such responses do not constitute a conspiracy.  Conspiracies have their etiology in such exchanges, since you mentioned the lower case catch-22, as that between Yossarian and Clevenger, in the upper-case Catch-22, where Yossarian posits that persons he doesn’t even know are trying to kill him, and Clevenger, growing exasperated, challenges Yossarian to be reasonable, it is not personal, “they” are trying to kill everyone.

As you see the matter, were you to rob a bank on your own, the result would be felonious grand larceny, but if you enlisted others to help you rob the bank, you would not only be committing grand larceny, you would be engaging in a conspiracy to commit grand larceny.

These observations are abstracts, of course.  What you are getting at here is that Reality, which may well be unaware of the specific you, is engaging in a regular conspiracy against you because by its nature, Reality causes things to happen, things often expressed by erosion, breach, or outright loss.

You have nothing against Reality, which, you believe, is doing the best it can.  At one time, you staunchly maintained you were ever doing the best you could, but now you willingly acknowledge times when you have coasted, looked for an easier way than the apparent path before you.  You wish to be doing the best you can so that by not being satisfied with a particular act and its downstream consequences, you may push yourself to attempt yet additional expansion, this devolving into your general approach to things.  You would like to think you could do better as opposed to thinking that because of sloth or negligence, you might have done better.

You believe Reality borders on conspiracy because of its relentless, mindless attention to the detail of consequence.  Reality is not out to get you so much as, with or without volition, it is out to get everyone.  You think it well and good that Reality has no volition, that it merely is, merely creates and produces consequences.  You could go so far as to say consequences are the Sisyphean rocks that must be pushed atop the hill whence it totters a moment before tumbling on its downward journey.  If this is so, you have made a joke of it, at the very least by not taking it with sufficient seriousness.