There’s a whole class of literature that involves caricatures. Fables, fairy tales, morality plays, allegories, Westerns, superhero tales, the list goes on and on….

These are fine in their place: they simplify moral issues so that you can see what is going on. There’s generally a “good guy,” and a “bad guy,” and they duke it out and the good guy wins. Or sometimes, the good guy loses, but becomes a martyr (or a helpful spirit) that inspires and aids the next good guy in the sequel.

One of the things that always gritches me — yes, I’m verbing an adjective, deal with it — is the traditional shallowness of the bad guys. They want “absolute power” for instance: but why? If you look at Star Wars, the evil emperor wants absolute power over everything, so let’s just assume he wins and gets absolute power over everything. So now, he just sits on his throne, immortal, unchallenged, all-powerful? Does he let out an evil chuckle every now and again, just because that’s his greatest remaining joy in life, chuckling while he remembers the good old days when he had something interesting to do with his time?

Of course, any sensible person would point out that this is a sci-fi/fantasy movie, an upscale comic book plot, and I’m taking it far too seriously. I agree, of course.

But then we come to “conspiracy theories.”

A lot of people believe that these things are real. That they are an imminent threat. That we all have to “do something” to respond to the threat, though it seems that — in most cases — the only thing we need to do is “see through” their evil plot and say, “Aha, I see through your evil plot!”

There are two sniff tests I always apply to any tale of conspiracy pretending to be real.

The first is this: never ascribe to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by mass stupidity.

The second is: if there is a conspiracy, and a bunch of “bad guys” secretly pulling strings and getting mass stupidity to work for them, then there is an objective to their conspiracy, and the objective makes some kind of communicable sense — otherwise, the conspirators would not have fallen in together in the first place.

There had to be a point in time that they were having lunch at a very upscale bistro, and one of them said, “Say, you know if we decided to do this thing that we would have to keep secret, just among us, it would benefit us all….” And then the others thought about it and decided they were all in.

People don’t conspire to “do evil.” They conspire to do something else, and evil is a side-product. They’ll often even acknowledge this, calling it a “regrettable, but necessary evil.”

In short, the second sniff-test is, “Follow the money.” It isn’t always money — sometimes it’s pride, or vainglory, or ideology — but there’s always some guiding benefit.

So there’s a conspiracy theory trying to make the rounds right now about how this whole COVID-19 thing is a hoax/conspiracy. Two, actually. Trump thinks (or says he thinks, which doesn’t mean much) it’s part of a conspiracy by the Democrats to take him out of power. Others, on the web, have been saying it’s a government/media conspiracy to try to enslave common citizens.

Neither makes an ounce of sense.

If it’s a hoax to take Trump out of power, then it started in China, spread to Italy, and is now worldwide. While I could easily believe that most of the world would like to see him kicked out of the Oval Office, quarantining Northern Italy is a very strange way to go about it.

But this other one is equally strange.

Again, you have the global nature of this. You have to assume a global government/media conspiracy, which is a bit like the evil emperor of Star Wars — what is the point of a global government/media conspiracy that … asks everyone to stay home for a few weeks?

Yes, like a curfew, it’s a ham-handed way of maintaining control. But you have curfews to quell riots, uprisings, and crime waves. During a curfew, you expect — demand, even — that people go back to work during the day. There’s no benefit to the powerful to asking people to stay home instead of going to work.

Indeed, quite the opposite. Business suffers.

And then the stock market tanks. It has already wiped out all the claimed gains of the Trump presidency, and we’ll see where it goes next week. The Federal Reserve has just announced it will cut the prime interest rate to zero. Were I trading in the stock market, I’d have sell orders placed with my broker, for execution at opening bell on Monday. Because I don’t expect swift recovery. In fact, I’d not be surprised if it reaches a point where the markets are closed altogether, to prevent financial panic and meltdown. I’ll not be surprised if we see a financial panic and meltdown, anyway.

It will be worldwide. Because the hoax, if it were a hoax, is worldwide.

This benefits whom?

Certainly not a global media conglomerate, which makes most of its money from advertising bought by the companies that make their money in a global economy that has to be functioning in order for them to buy advertising. If the stock market tanks, the global media empire gets hit, too.

Certainly not government. Governments do not benefit from economic meltdowns. In fact, they often fall, and the people in power get booted out, sometimes assassinated, sometimes driven out of the country to seek asylum elsewhere.

No one is going to deliberately fake a global pandemic. That would only happen in a comic book.