I try to limit my superstitions to knocking on wood and not making predictions about the future. Having winnowed my overt irrational belief system to these two pillars, I cling to them for support at the slightest mention of possible future tragedy and, absent any handy piece of wood, I bring the irrationality full circle by knocking on my own head as though it were wood, an act of self-deprecation which, by rational calculation, would invalidate any conclusion arising inside my skull. 

And yet, faced with a friend or family member in some potentially dangerous situation, the impulse to plead with the cosmos is almost impossible to resist. I have, as an experiment, resisted on some occasions, and the result was a feeling of worry and fear. I had a completely secular upbringing with no religious guilt lingering from childhood Sunday school. Every bit of formal education I have had has served to further my agnosticism. But there it is, the desire to believe in an underlying plan, and not just a plan but a system I can affect with an act as ludicrous as knocking on wood. Why?

Truthfully, I was aware of my hypocrisy for years, but as you age the contradictions of life grow less surprising and more numerous and it did not cause me even a moment’s discomfort, until recently. The proliferation and vehemence of conspiracy theories got me thinking. I have been appalled, intrigued, sympathetic, and hopeful, depending on the theory on offer. But who am I, wood knocker, to judge someone else’s irrational belief? And what is it that makes us susceptible to believing that there is a secret plan controlling the world?

Here are some observations: The basis of religion is the belief that there is an invisible plan and this invisible plan is executed by an invisible force working in mysterious ways including through the actions of a select group of people who are believed to understand or have some insider knowledge about the intention of the invisible force. This is also an accurate description of a conspiracy theory or the functioning of the free market whose organizing principle is explicitly described as an invisible hand by whose mysterious intentions we have arranged our society such that the free market is a sufficient explanation for keeping the peace amid inequities as great as one man being rich enough to sightsee in space while millions are too poor to afford teeth.

Ah, you think science is your refuge. Not so fast. Remember that gravity is also an invisible force, one described by Newton with elegant math which rendered predictions so true that the science of economics, at its current rate of progress, would have to advance for a million, billion years before it even came close to that level of accuracy. And yet Newton’s story would eventually be overturned by Albert Einstein who created a better story with more complicated math and even more accurate predictions for explaining invisible forces. And don’t forget dark matter, a mysterious, invisible substance perhaps accounting for 85% of the matter in the universe and necessary for keeping galaxies from flying apart.

My point is that we understand the world through stories. Even the scientific explanations are essentially stories–objects with mass pulling on each other–and these stories also sometimes rely on invisible forces. The stories told by science have the advantage of being based on experimentation and observation rather than dreams, hallucinations and imaginations, and this makes scientific explanations enormously useful, but even the best explanation by science is always incomplete and subject to revision. The story, or theory in the case of the scientific method, comes first for us and then we fill in the facts either with what we want or guess to be true or, in the case of science, with our most objective experiments and observations. 

And science has no answer for questions about meaning, purpose, value, or for where to put your feelings of betrayal and anger when the government bails out the banks from their own foolishness but lets your job get outsourced to China or your kids become addicted to opiates. 

There is something in us that needs a story, that needs to believe in an underlying system, particularly when times are tough or uncertain. As the country has become both less religious and more unequal the desire for a story to explain why things happen has increased while the religious explanations have become less popular and consequently all sorts of crazy stories are rising up to fill that need. When the story of the earth at the center of the universe got too preposterous compared to the observations of planetary motion, it crumbled. Right now the story of a free market making us all richer, happier and safer, a story which has worked for years, is full of holes. I’m knocking wood in the hope that the high priests who proselytize the free market story will either come up with a new, better story, or else make sure the invisible hand gives people teeth and healthcare and affordable housing.