I don’t really know what they are (that’s how apathetic I am). Planes spraying mind-altering, or climate-altering, stuff into the air for nefarious purposes, I gather. My disbelief in them is based pretty much solely on my trusting disposition and the fact that I think the world’s rulers are too thick to implement a proper conspiracy. But I could be wrong.

According to the guy who installed my sprinkler system (and did an excellent job!) it’s all true. He’d rather believe that the deep state burnt half of Hawaii down with some kind of energy weapon, in order to inflate land prices, than that climate change and a hot summer did the trick. In fact, he doesn’t believe in climate change. It was hotter, he says, in the fifteenth century (or something).

Why do we believe what we believe? I mean, I believe in climate change because most relevant experts seem to agree on it – but I don’t go and look up the weather charts myself or, as the conspiracists put it, ‘do my own research’. I haven’t looked into the detailed evidence for the use of road-melting energy weapons. I’m lazy. But he isn’t – he looks! He finds! Which makes me wonder if maybe sometimes it’s better to be apathetic, much as people bag it.

What is it that drives some people to look for a reason BEHIND the reason? The REAL truth? Maybe the same impulse that motivates me to wonder if there really is a meaning to life, and motivates millions of people to wonder if – appearances to the contrary – God really is organising things for the best – motivates Fred (as I’ll call him) to scour the internet for the secret scat of the World Economic Forum. If we didn’t have that drive, maybe we’d never have had Watergate, and Erin Brockovich.

Maybe we should love our conspiracy theorists!