Conjecture

When the thing that runs people's lives turns abstract, and a blame story told by authority fails to deliver, the audience must choose between "authority lied" and "the hidden culprit survived", and the second choice is the template of conspiracy theory. Ansary's ch. 18: Philip IV stoked "rumors that the Templars secretly controlled the world," but his men found "mostly ... notebooks with numbers written in them," and the ills continued. Folk "could decide that the king and pope had been lying, or that the Templars had survived somehow and were still controlling the world under a new name from secret headquarters." "This proved to be the template for a conceptual constellation that has endured to this day," with "One root source ... the increasing abstraction of money." Clay's step: AI is a far larger jump in abstraction than banking; a transition whose workings ordinary people cannot see will be explained by hidden-controller stories unless the workings are made legible, and an elite blame story that fails feeds them rather than ending them.

Stories that make people act