The moon is made of cheese – mozzarella, to be precise. By saying that, I may have signed my own death warrant. You see, they don’t want us to know. They’ll claim I’m mad. But as Kurosawa said, ‘In a mad world, only the mad are sane.’
‘But men have walked on the moon,’ you say. Wrong. It was all a fake, filmed in a studio by NASA. Haven’t you seen the movie Capricorn One? If it weren’t for lawyers, that would have been billed as a documentary.
‘But other non-manned trips have been made to the moon.’ Most of them were fakes too. Some weren’t, and those were the ones that brought back samples proving the mozzarella theory. But of course, the evidence has been suppressed.
‘But people can look at the moon through telescopes.’ Right, and you’re telling me that you can tell from that whether the moon is hard rock or soft cheese?
‘But if this were true, surely it would have got out.’ Would you keep quiet, perhaps getting paid off handsomely; or be killed or discredited as a madman?
Think about it: how else would Elvis be able to stay alive up there if he didn’t have an endless supply of cheese?
Crazy, isn’t it? But what about the 20 per cent of Americans who believe the moon landings never took place? Are they all crazy too? If not, what makes theirs a sane, even if mistaken, belief to hold and the mozzarella moon hypothesis incredible hokum?
Conspiracy theories are made possible because of two limitations of knowledge formation. The first is what could be called the holistic nature of understanding: any single thing we believe is connected, web-like, to any number of other beliefs. So, for example, your belief that ice cream is fattening is connected to your beliefs about the calorific content of ice cream, the connection between fat consumption and weight-gain, the reliability of nutritional science and so on.
The second is what is rather grandly called the under-determination of theory by evidence. In plain English that means that the facts never provide enough evidence to conclusively prove one theory and one theory only. There is always a gap – the possibility that an alternative theory is true. That is why courts insist on proof only beyond ‘reasonable doubt’. Proof beyond all doubt is impossible.
Put these two limitations together and space opens up for even the wildest of conspiracy theories. There is overwhelming evidence that the moon is a lump of rock, but we are not compelled by the evidence to reach this conclusion. The evidential gaps mean that the evidence can be made consistent even with the hypothesis that the moon is made of cheese. All we need to do is rearrange all the other interconnected beliefs we have in our web of understanding so that they too fit. Hence the need to reassess the power of microscopes, the extent of corruption, and the veracity of the moon landings.
For sure, what you end up with can sound pretty wild. But the crucial point is that it fits the evidence. This is what makes so many people fall under the spell of conspiracy theories (and other outlandish ideas about the nature of the universe). The fact that ‘it all fits’ seems to be a compelling reason for belief. But any number of different theories fit, including the notion that the moon is made of cheese.
So what makes one theory better than another? Why is the theory of evolution sound and the theory that the moon landings were staged absurd? There’s no easy answer to that, which perhaps in part explains why nearly half of all Americans think that the theory of evolution is bunkum too. All we can say is that mere consistency with the evidence is not enough to make a theory rationally compelling. If you believe that, then you may as well accept that Elvis is orbiting us right now, in pizza-topping heaven.
See also
| 1. | The evil demon |
| 3. | The Indian and the ice |
| 19. | Bursting the soap bubble |
| 98. | The experience machine |