The cultural critic Fredric Jameson argued that conspiracy theories are used as an improvised guide to our overwhelmingly complex social landscape. It is often easier to imagine sinister cabals and physically impossible phenomena than it is to accept the open and known injustices of the world. Who needs the Illuminati when almost the entire British government went to the same schools? One only has to read Yanis Varoufakis’ accounts of the internal workings of international financial bodies or look at the dynasties and tiny elites that run the world of government and capital to wonder if the paranoid person is just, as William Burroughs put it “a person in possession of all the facts.” The paranoid impulse is not so much wrong as too often misdirected and it is often not a particularly distant leap from the truth to the fiction. People are right in their intuition that there are dark forces arrayed against them but they’re more likely to find the information they seek in the dull finance section of any newspaper than on chemtrails forums that weave more compelling narratives.

In fact, chemtrail believers have a paradoxical mixture of rationalist skepticism and dogmatic faith. They spend their time carefully parsing documents with a scrupulousness worthy of the IRS. Like committed scientists, they quest after “truth,” they want to know what’s “really” going on. They see unexplained horrors in the world around them, and they are persistent askers of “Why?”

Yet they are fundamentally religious in their outlook, insofar as they believe on faith in something that others cannot see. [...]