Millions of Americans have been abducted by aliens. Flight 800 was shot down by the Navy. The U.N. will soon invade the U.S. Bill Clinton is a known smack addict. Once a month, your computer secretly phones up Microsoft and tells a much bigger computer what's on your hard-drive. JFK was assassinated by the Mafia, the Cubans, the Military-Industrial Complex and Lyndon Johnson. He still makes occasional visits to his grave with Marilyn Monroe.

Life is confusing, and people want explanations. So, they look for patterns. Things have meaning because they are part of something organised. The separate bits of your morning routine make sense only because one thing predictably leads to another. The same goes for the defining rhythm of your life -- birth, school, work, Florida, death.

There's something deeply satisfying about finding a pattern in the noise. Robert Nozick once noted that when we set out to explain the world in this way, our answers are generally of two kinds. Call the first sort invisible hands. Sometimes, we can show how a population of individuals can accidentally produce a big pattern by just doing their own thing. Ecosystems work like this. Maybe economies do as well. We like these explanations because they change our focus from a micro-mess to a macro-order. Academic social scientists spend much of their time looking for invisible hands. Study sociology or economics and you'll spend most of your time learning about known ones. Invisible-hand patterns don't have to be beneficial in order to qualify. Systems often bite back at the individuals who create them. So much the better: we are as much pleased by a perverse cycle of poverty as by a perfect market.

The opposite of an invisible hand is a hidden hand, not a visible one. Hidden hand explanations appeal to the same love of organisation as before, but instead take macro- messes and give them micro-order. They show how unordered or apparently unrelated events are all part of a giant pattern deliberately created and controlled by specific individuals. JFK, Area 51 and Flight 800 all qualify. So does every single episode of the X-files. Through connection after connection, via secret after secret, the code is broken and you see clearly for the first time. This kind of explanation is absolutely beyond the pale in Universities. Tell your Econ preceptor that money markets are controlled by the Zionist conspiracy and you'll fail the class. (Or get a B minus, which amounts to the same thing around here.) Spin your Secret World Government theory to your Soc lecturer and she won't believe you, either -- at least not in public.

But step outside the Academy and hidden hand theories are everywhere. They saturate the Internet, TV dramas and the movies. Tabloids do little else besides unveil implausible cover-ups, or consult those - like Nostradamus, Jesus or Dionne Warwick - who have special insight into what's going on. University reputations rest on one kind of answer, and popular culture feeds on the other. Pop culture tends to win out if there is any competition. To the academic mind, the beauty of invisible hand explanations is precisely that no-one is pulling the strings. There are no conspirators, only unintended consequences. Unfortunately, this does not make for good TV. If a movie needs a director, a producer and a script, then why should society be any different? It's very difficult to make a good film starring Christopher Walken as the education system, with Donald Sutherland as an emergent property. Have the two of them conspiring against Tom Cruise, though, and wait for the cinema queue to form. Hidden hand explanations have lead characters, and so provide much the more interesting story. This is a pity, because as a rule their stories are false. There is no puppet master, even though there are a lot of puppets. The invisible hand explanations of social science don't get the airtime they deserve, because generally the culprits can't be interviewed. Instead of thinking hard about the world around them, people rest happy with implausibly complicated stories about who controls the way things are. Someone out there is responsible for this state of affairs, and I want to know who.