Conspiracy and Circumspection.

I’m one of those who applaud Edward Snowden’s sacrifice. The contents of his open letter to Brazil largely accord with my own views on the matter.

It does, however, raise a tangential point. As far as I can see, Snowden has made no extravagant claims; he has stuck to the single, demonstrable matter of America’s NSA conducting a policy of intruding illegally and unreasonably into the lives of private citizens around the world. There will be others, of course, who will use it as fuel for a general conspiracy theory mindset.

In my opinion, conspiracy theory has its place, but only so far. It’s like religion: it probably contains some truth, and so is worth being aware of and even investigated where possible. I certainly don’t advocate that we should ignore it altogether.

The problem is that most of it is definitively unprovable. As with religion, it amounts to a belief system, so why take a road that takes you into a tangled forest of fallacious certainty? When you do that, it just produces more pointless preaching to rival that foisted on us by religious extremists and rabidly vocal atheists.