The Ironic Conspiracy

"The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working."

-Unknown

Let's face it: everybody loves a good conspiracy story. Countless books, songs, and shows revolve around the idea of a grand conspiracy where there is a puppet master or group of them controlling us or the ones we put in charge because we trust them. A conspiracy gives us a chance to stand against authority and use our God-given right to defy injustice to wrestle back power from the "man behind the curtain" and set things right, i.e. the way we want them to be.

Therefore, when King Oedipus learns from a trusted prophet that the unknown man he has sworn to exile as a way of saving his beloved kingdom from a terrible plague has been him all along, he naturally assumes that something's not right. How could be it be that King Oedipus is the cause of the problem, not the solution? There is only one logical explanation for this outrage...FAIRY GODPARENTS!!!! Err...sorry, wrong show. What I meant to say was, this outrage is certainly a conspiracy against his rule. Instantly, Oedipus declares the prophet a scumbag fraud and accuses his brother Creon of conspiring to usurp him to his face. Oedipus is positive, without any empirical evidence mind you, that there is a grand conspiracy to remove him from the throne and replace him with Creon that he will go to any lengths to discover the truth. We now know that he really shouldn't have, but that's how a conspiracy digs into your skin and begins driving your rationale and your motives, all in the name of truth.

Of course, the only thing more terrifying than the realization that there is a conspiracy is the realization that there is no man behind the curtain and that perception is reality. When we see politicians do ridiculous things and think to ourselves, Something screwy is going on, it gives us a ray of hope that there is still a line between good and evil, evidenced by the fact that there is a villain behind the scenes. When do look behind the curtain and find that there was no one there to begin with and that our leaders really are just imcompetent, well that sucks, right? We discover that the ones we trust to lead us were not the good people we elected being controlled, but the bad people that we trusted that are controlling us. I think that this revelation that the truth had been staring him in the face all along is one of the reasons that Oedipus blinded himself, so he would never have to see that terrible truth again.

What I find ironic is that while there never was a conspiracy to overthrow King Oedipus, he was, in fact, the target of a conspiracy he never could have imagined, a conspiracy by Sophocles himself. Now follow along with me here, and try to get what I'm saying. Sophocles needed a tragic character to show his audience, who were living in a relatively proseperous time, how bad life can be and how destructive truth is when it's something we don't want to hear. So he placed a righteous, benevolent, yet prideful man in a truly nightmarish predicament, orchastrating the events of the novel and the events of his life (at least in this play) to make his points. Because of Sophocles, poor Oedipus is now doomed to wander blindly in exile, be laughed at by immature high schoolers forced to read the play for their english class, and be examined endlessly by Freudian psychologists. Indeed, "no man (is) happy till he dies, free of pain at last." (Oedipus Rex 185)

Yes, I realize that I have typed a ton of words, and for those of you who actually read all of this you have my thanks. Please feel free to comment, and good luck to all assassins (unless I'm hunting you or you're hunting me)!

BTW, I commented on Sara Dye's post, Justice.