Day 57

'Rose Tinted Masses', Pen and Watercolour on Paper

The thinking behind today came from a short lived but ultimately unyielding conversation about conspiracy theories, wherein the only conclusion I could make was that to conspiracy nuts the fantastical tends to greatly outweigh the logical. To these people it would seem that for every major catastrophe or event where people are directly involved that there is a highly intelligent, organised and widespread network of people pulling all the strings. They also believe that even though this network of shadowy figures conspire in relative secrecy for some reason they can't seem to help themselves from leaving clues in plain sight, for any idiot/Dan Brown enthusiast to find and read into in way too much detail. These 'shadowy figures' run the world using a subtle blend of ruthlessness and delicacy, that could be attributed to ruling the world with an iron fist sheathed in a smooth velvet glove. The people who believe in this also somehow have an answer for every possible question, although normally the answer is to merely pose another question that without having an encyclopaedic knowledge of thermodynamics, engineering, woodwork, metallurgy, psychokinesis, time travel and the entire history of everything you can't possibly answer and not because your less intelligent it's more that you don't have the answer, yet... Normal logic states that if you don't now they answer you find it from a reliable source, rather than paraphrasing the ramblings of some guy wearing a tin foil hat, sitting in his parents house in a dressing gown, eating coco pops out of vase with a ladle. Something I read once about conspiracy theorists described them as being, 'like Rambo with bullshit instead of bullets' highlighting the one man war they are waging with every one that's 'in on it' and actually summing things up much more eloquently than I ever could. In truth I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent as this isn't really meant to be a tirade against those people who believe in conspiracy theories or even to suggest that what they believe is wrong...even though it is. Instead it's a general comment on how we tend to have a selectivity to see, hear and deduce what suits our own needs and curiosities at any given time. We effectively allow ourselves to be taken in by our surroundings, to be caught up in and at times overrun by the insanity that exists around us. We do indeed view the world with rose tinted glasses in that we ignore much of what we don't feel is applicable to us. Also even though this is a phrase that is normally reserved for seeing only that which is pleasing to us, it is still very fitting even in instances when we take something negative from a situation. This is as whatever we decipher from the information at hand, negative or positive, it is pleasing to us in that it reaffirmed what we wanted to feel or believe in first place. In short we find meaning in the meaningless and are quite happy to disregard logic as long as it bends the remainder of the information to suit our every whim and desire.