Tinfoil hats and communal air

One of the ways those in authority, whether in government or a corporation, deflect unwanted attention is to dismiss people as "conspiracy nuts".  There are indeed conspiracy nuts, people who make grand edifices of conjecture based on the absolute minimum of fact.  There are also conspiracies, people acting in collusion to defraud the public, take over governments, hide wrongdoing.  But in my mind, the most interesting thing is the ways in which people act in concert where it doesn't qualify as a conspiracy in the normal sense, but the results might as well be.

Conspire means to breathe together and the picture it conjures is of a small room with a group of men huddled together speaking in whispers, literally "breathing the same air".  In that sense it works well.

There is another way, however, that you can look at "breathing the same air".  We all have unconscious assumptions about the way the world works, values we don't even think about.  We make split second decisions without even realizing they are decisions.  These things are as invisible to us as the air we breathe, and people who share these same assumptions will often act in concert without needing to communicate at all.