“Belief in conspiracy theories can be comforting,” you muse in your article on American politics (“Still Crazy After All These Years,” August 22, 2009). “If everything that goes wrong is the fault of a secret cabal,” you continue, “that relieves you of the tedious necessity of trying to understand how a complex world really works.” How true. And how commonplace. But you eschew the conspiracy of choice, especially in America—that of a handful of worthy humans in miraculous cahoots with one divinity or another. In their everlasting ignorance, humans are given to conspiracy theories of all sorts, and it is only a sign of their bungling evolution that such theories involve only humans as of late. That is a huge step forward in the psyche of the many, who are forever in search of petty comfort. Only a century ago, a conspiracy theory would have been utterly hopeless without one divinity or another right in the middle of the ploy.