Free A Fatal Frame of Mind by William Rabkin

crazy,” Gus said.
    “I said he was boring,” Shawn said. “Which he was when he was droning on and on about subjects no one could ever possibly pretend to care about.”
    “He was talking about art,” Gus said. “And history and literature.”
    “Exactly,” Shawn said. “But it’s amazing how much less boring he became when he held a knife to Lassie’s throat, started screaming about a global conspiracy, and escaped.”
    “Even I thought he was crazy then,” Gus admitted. “That’s what made you like him?”
    “There are three kinds of people who believe in conspiracy theories,” Shawn said. “The first kind is the average guy who listens to George Noory when he should be sleeping and has decided that there are aliens in Area 51, trilateralists in the government, and Illuminati in the drinking water because it’s much easier to blame all your failures on a vast global network that exists only to keep you down than it is to accept that maybe you’re just a loser. These are the guys you get stuck next to when you’re waiting in line at the post office and they recognize the Garfield T-shirt you pulled on because everything else was dirty as a secret welcome sign between believers. They will talk for hours about the dark forces arrayed against them, but they’re completely harmless. If they actually had the gumption to do anything in the first place, they wouldn’t be the kind of loser who has to blame faceless conspiracies for their own lack of success.”
    “That’s not Professor K,” Gus said.
    “Definitely not,” Shawn said. “Then there’s type number two. This is the hard-core conspiracy freak, the guy who knows exactly who killed Sonny Bono and why.”
    “Sonny Bono?” Gus said. “I thought he skied into a tree.”
    “That’s exactly what they wanted you to think,” Shawn said. “And it worked so well they did it to Natasha Richardson, too.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Gus said.
    “Not to you or me, but to him,” Shawn said. “This kind of conspiracy nut can take seemingly random bits of information from anywhere and weave them together into one long narrative. And it will always make sense—at least, to him. Once you expose it to real-world logic, it falls apart. But these people see real-world logic as another part of the cover-up, and they accuse anyone who tries to talk them out of their delusion of being part of the plan.”
    “So you’re talking about crazy people,” Gus said.
    “Not just crazy,” Shawn said. “Crazy and dangerous. These are the ones who are so convinced they’re right that they’re willing to act on their beliefs. They’ll do anything to fight off the conspiracy, including committing violent acts.”
    “You’re not saying that Professor Kitteredge is one of them?” Gus said, trying to imagine his old teacher crouching in a basement rec room wearing a tinfoil hat to keep out the mind-rays.
    “No, because these people are so paranoid they’re completely incapable of functioning in normal society,” Shawn said. “You can’t spend your days finding ways in which Brandon Lee’s death is connected to the space shuttle explosion and the mysterious two-year disappearance of Wonder Bread from Southern California grocery shelves and still convince a university to let you talk in front of teenagers. Unless you teach economics, of course, and even then the tenure committee is going to look at you funny when you come up for review.”
    “You said there were three kinds of people who believe in conspiracy theories,” Gus said. “I guess that makes Professor Kitteredge type number three.”
    “That would be my guess, too,” Shawn said. “These are people who are on the surface indistinguishable from you or me. They seem intelligent, well-spoken, thoughtful. They’ve got meaningful jobs—or even careers. They’ve got rich, full social lives and the respect of their peers, and they seem to be normal, or better than normal, to