they say nature abhors a vacuum.
nature has no problem at all with a vacuum. most of the universe appears to be vacuum.
it is we who abhor a vacuum.
we can’t stand a blank space.
where there is nothing, we find something.
when we’re asleep, we dream.
in sensory deprivation chambers, we hallucinate.
we see teacups and puppydogs in the clouds.
and we see conspiracies where there are merely secrets.
and so finally when we come to it, the idea of seeing conspiracies in world events, taken to its logical conclusion, inevitably leads us to the grandest conspiracy theory of them all: religion.
where we’re confronted with an opaque mystery of the universe and our place in it, we cannot stand our own ignorance.
we create bedtime stories for ourselves, and over time, through the generations, forget their origin, and come to believe them as truth.
throughout history, we’ve populated this blank slate with every conceivable creature: angel, demon and God.
that we may have been universally wrong in our various speculations, does not imply that there are no such secrets withheld from us.
nor does the apprehension of our prior illusion imply that we now know anything at all.
is it any less preposterous to suppose that there may be something more terrible and marvelous than we can imagine waiting to be discovered beyond the veil of reality, than that there is nothing, nothing at all beyond what we already know?