You hear it in the Buddhist folk tales, most famously the “butterfly dream” of Zhuangzi, in which the author is uncertain if he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he’s a man. You hear it in the Hasidic wisdom of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”: “No doubt the world is an entirely imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.” You hear it in the writing of the nineteenth-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, whose book Omphalos argued that the fossils that proved the world is older than the six thousand years of Genesis had been put in the ground by God to test man’s faith. This idea that this is not the real world is way older than Pink Floyd (“We’re just two lost souls / swimming in a fish bowl”) and way older than the defining movie, The Matrix. We’re all just figments in a crazy dream.” with Chicago aglow behind us, said, “None of this shit’s real, man. Or, as my friend Mark, standing on Oak Street Beach at 2 A.M. That’s the case with what’s become my favorite conspiracy theory: the notion, argued by futurists and tech visionaries, that we live not in the real world but in a simulation, an intricately detailed game cooked up by a demigod, hacker, or AI mastermind, which, if true, explains the uncanny sense that this is not my real life, that these are not my real memories. The best explain why you feel like you’re being watched, have lived all this before, knew what would happen before the film even started. The most powerful theories-the mind blowers-name something you’ve always known, even if you hadn’t known it consciously, or did not believe it could be named. They let you believe you are finally connecting the dots, finding the missing pieces, experiencing the world as it really is. The best conspiracy theories make sense of what has always seemed senseless. In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all.
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