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- My point is that the form of ‘the story’ as such is ontologically deceitful. The underlying logic of stories is conflict (no conflict, no drama; no drama, nothing interesting to storify) and this, by and large, is not the underlying logic of the universe. If I had to pick one word to describe the underlying logic of the universe it would be: indifference. Stories, though, are allergic to indifference.
- Young people, brimful of piss and vinegar, may think they want to live through interesting times. Older people come to this realistion: we want to live our actual lives in placid time and reserve the interesting times for our imagination. We want to live boring predictable lives that are enlivened by thrilling dangerous stories. That’s why our stories grow more extreme and violent and dangerous as our lives become more settled and prosperous. A universe that was actually made out stories would be a hellscape.
- It’s a story about the way stories inevitably distort, the way the tidal pull of Story As Such can draw us down the whirlpool to where the current picks our bones in whispers.
This, I think, is the aspect of conspiracy thinking that people tend to overlook. When somebody buttonholes us with ‘9/11 was an inside job’ or ‘Paul died in 1966’ or ‘we never actually landed on the moon’ the temptation is to critique their mendacity. But a conspiracy theory exists not to make the world more veracious, but to make it more interesting. Can you ever think of a conspiracy theory that took something inherently interesting and attempted to explain it in terms of an elaborate, secret and more boring counterplot? Of course not. Any given person’s favourite conspiracy theory tells you what they find more interesting about the universe. In this sense all the successful stories are conspiracy theories. Priest’s novel is only incidntally an American Story; what it is more centrally—is a Story.