Conspiracy of Dunces

I have a huge interest in conspiracy theories, which I've covered before. In order to have any hope of understanding the core of illogic that underpins our political system, we have to try and figure out what motivates people to turn to this mode of inquiry, what makes them unable or unwilling to confront the essential confusion at the heart of the moving world. Psychoanalysis and Buddhism have equally useful and roughly analogous things to say about the fundamentally pathological relationship to knowledge we have established for ourselves as a society, one in which only total mastery amounts to insight. This is the regime that produces the desire for sealed, lost boxes that contain the answers to every unknown. Over at PopMatters, Jesse Hicks has put up a very thoroughly backgrounded report on one of the latest upwellings of the irrational desire for truth, Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura.