by A. M. Gilbert

Created on: July 17, 2010

My best friend has this rather interesting idea. Several interesting ideas, actually. She accepts them as cold, hard, undeniable fact. I prefer to think of them as conspiracy theories. Sometimes they're tidbits that she picked up “somewhere” from “someone”, but more often they're things that she randomly thinks of and decides to share. Her favorite at the moment is that Osama bin Laden simply does not exist. Not just that he isn't the terrorist that planned and executed the attacks on 9/11 or that he isn't actually the guy in the cave in all of those videos, but that he really isn't a person, at all. She also decided that milk  has no actual nutritional value; in fact, the CIA laces all dairy products with chemicals designed to control our thoughts, causing supposed lactose intolerance in some people.

The funny part about this is not her arguable clinical insanity, though. It's that if she happened to go online and post these on a few choice websites proclaiming them to be true, a heck of a lot of people would likely latch onto the stories and they would become full-fledged, legitimate conspiracy theories. I'll examine why people seek convoluted, often disturbing explanations for things when obvious, usually well-substantiated and accepted alternatives already exist. I'll discuss examples in both ancient and modern cultures to compare the legends of yesterday with the theories of today.

    Looking back to prehistory, we see a prevalence of stories designed to account for natural phenomena through complex, divine explanations. Today, most middle school kids can explain away rain as the precipitation part of the water cycle. However, the lack of substantive science thousands of years ago led to legends like the Maori creation myth, which tells how heaven and earth were once joined as  the Sky Father and the Earth Mother. They had many children who lived in the darkness between them. The children wished to live in the light and so separated their unwilling parents. They continue to grieve for each other to this day. The Sky Father's tears fall as rain towards the Earth to show how much he loves the Earth Mother.  The Lakota, Creek, and Iroquis Native Americans all believe people originally lived underwater; in some traditions, we were forced to live on land, in others, we chose to. These stories helped to explain creation as well as the disjointed areas of land and water throughout the world.

Now, when looking

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