Cult of Dan Brown: Am I confused? hehehehe

Folks, it seems to me that it's worth remembering that conspiracy theories are the lifeblood of Dan Brown's books--and many other stories in the thriller genre, for that matter. The Solomon Key, it's widely believed, will center on some sort of conspiracy involving the Freemasons in the U.S.. With that in mind, it should not be an after-the-fact surprise to anyone here that these forums are rife with speculation about which of the (many) existing Freemasonry conspiracy theories Brown is likely to adopt for his novel.

If you're expecting Brown to uncover a completely provable Freemason plot, you're going to be sorely disappointed. As he demonstrated with The DaVinci Code, he's all but certain to simply adopt someone else's conspiracy theory (think Holy Blood & Holy Grail) and use it for his purposes. If all of the existing conspiracy theories in this area have holes in them, then The Solomon Key will as well. The corrollary to this is that if you're a Mason and you're upset with the current crop of conspiracy theories out there at the moment, you're going to be much more upset when Dan Brown "validates" some of them with his next book. You might as well start writing your debunking books now.

As it regards this forum and this subject matter, I don't see anything wrong with speculation. If EVDebs and Sol want to talk about existing conspiracy theories (which I believe was the point of some of the threads in this particular forum) here, how is that any worse than Dan Brown writing about them and selling a hundred million copies? If the Masons in this forum are determined to set the record straight, they might as well start getting some practice here, because they're going to have a much harder time when The Solomon Key hits the shelves.

It's also worth remembering that any conspiracy worth its salt can be neither proven nor disproven--there's always an unverifiable element to them that enables adherents to cling to them in the face of counter-evidence. To that end, I question whether it's even possible to fully debunk any of these Freemasonry conspiracy theories. The DaVinci Code is a good example of a story based on a widely-debunked thesis that millions of people continue to believe might be true. The desperately conspiracy-oriented mind finds ways to exploit the tiniest of loopholes. Try this, for example: The Priory of Sion is real, and when some of its members tried to leak The Truth to the press years ago, the organization put pressure on the leakers to recant and claim it was all a hoax. It's certainly possible, after all, and that's enough for True Believers to cling to.

On the other side, though, the overly skeptical sorts have a hair-trigger response to anything that smells remotely like a conspiracy theory, and they're most likely to dismiss such things out of hand. In a way, it's a form of inductive reasoning--they've seen how Conspiracy X and Conspiracy Y have been debunked, and so when they see Conspiracy Z being posited, they reflexively assume it to be bunk of the same kind. This kind of closed-mindedness can be just as bad as being too open-minded, since it makes it rather trivial for deceptively-minded individuals and organizations to manipulate public opinion. All one has to do is make any legitimate investigation begin to resemble a conspiracy theory, and these members of the audience will immediately tune out. What better way to undermine the credibility of one's political enemies?

I suppose what I'm trying to say by all of this is that most conspiracy theories do have some kernel of truth to them--there's almost always something factual being exploited by the conspiracy-friendly mind, and to the extent that it's possible to deal in verifiable facts (as opposed to rumors, hearsay, and editorial speculation), these things do interest me. But what I generally want to know in each case is how much is verifiable fact, and how much of the theory hangs on someone's speculative connecting of the dots. A conspiracy theory that has a high fact to speculation ratio approaches an actual proof, and is definitely worth more investigation; when the ratio is low, on the other hand, it approaches fantasy and should be classed as such.

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