It’s a conspiracy theory!

Looking at news narratives, we hear almost daily about conspiracy theories of organizations all working together to do something nefarious. Even UFOs are now real so surely the aliens must be studying us, right? Many of these explanations are based upon some evidence that has high credibility and could very well be true. But the resulting explanation could still be incorrect when claiming the result was due to a centralized authority or decision maker. We have this tendency to view actions or decisions made by large groups or organizations like they were planned by a single person at the top. This leads us to think large organizations are always pursuing coherent, rational, goal-maximizing policies. Just look at what people assume a government leader can do. Instead, the outcomes we see are often caused in part by accident, coincidence, unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies, compromises and bargaining between empowered bureaucratic entities, improperly executed orders, or following standard operating procedures under the wrong circumstances. Anyone that has been a part of a group that needs to make decisions can easily see how results really happen. How often do you have a manager that gives assignments to their staff and the results are not what was desired? How often do you encounter good people that want to help, but their plan or idea resulted in some unforeseen problem that happened? News media pundits actually play upon that tendency to push narratives that the president of the country is to blame for every problem of the country, including what is happening in your local community. As a critical thinker, you can clearly see that is not true as there are local leaders that are much closer to the responsibility instead. But still that tendency tends to lead us away from seeing that decisions were likely much more complicated and not made by just one person at all.

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