We didn't go to Iraq for oil, we went there so that more of our own money could be funneled from government coffers into politicians' bank accounts by way of defense contracts.
We're terrified of the fact that we live in an arational, incomprehensible world. It's a comforting fiction that some large conspiracy controls everything for the benefit of itself at the expense of everyone else, because at least that admits the possibility of control. And if societies can be controlled, at least in principle they can be fixed.
Much scarier is the idea that power stumbles blindly around like a drunken three legged elephant, arbitrarily murdering half a million people for no coherent reason beyond, well, why not?
I didn't say that the entirety of society is under the control of a single cabal, only that the people in power at the time were able to exert enough influence in that instance to send the country into an unnecessary war so as to benefit themselves financially.
Perhaps scarier and more accurate is the idea that it's done for a very good reason, but that we lack the context/intelligence to understand it as individuals. No one wants to be the organism in a superorganism.
Seriously. The regular and systematic murder and disposal of countless innocent intestinal flora, sometimes bordering on genocide, is considered healthy and even joke-worthy by some of us superorganisms.
