You know all those insane-o conspiracy theories? The ones that claim that the governments of the world are being influenced by secret behind-the-scenes organizations who meet in opulent-yet-dimly-lit rooms where everyone wears robes and whispers about who gets to live and die?

Supposedly there's subtle proof of these conspiracies everywhere you look. Coded doodles on the dollar bill mean that the Masons are picking our presidents, the digital scans of priceless paintings reveal that the Illuminati are guiding the world's economy, and the fact that Spectre from the Bond franchise and Hydra from Captain America are the same exact bad guys proves that they're real and that they're controlling our minds.

Yeah: all those theories are bunk.

But what is lurking behind the world's governments and guiding some of our most fundamental beliefs is an eight-hundred-year-old piece of parchment called the Magna Carta. It doesn't have any invisible ink writing on the back that only Nicolas Cage can decipher…but the proof that it's influencing events is everywhere you look, if you know what to look for.

The Magna Carta is in all the little details of government, like the fact that accused people deserve a fair trial, leaders should have to follow the same rules as the people they represent, and bills shouldn't become laws just because one guy said so.

Yeah, these may not be as exciting as breaking into a museum and finding out that aliens built the pyramids, but that's probably because you're not considering what it's like to live under a despot.

The Magna Carta of 1215 was supposed to end a disagreement between King John of England and a group of rebel barons who were basically sick and tired of John abusing his power as monarch. In the agreement they happened to include a bunch of stuff about how citizens should be treated and how governments should function.

And people have been talking about that stuff ever since.

You know how lawyers are always using old cases to win new ones, and telling the judge, "Based on the case of WhoCares vs. Madeitup, we feel that you must rule in favor of our client"? That's called citing precedents…and the Magna Carta is the ultimate legal precedent that pretty much applies to every court case and every law everywhere.

No joke.

And it's especially impressive considering that the Magna Carta was an almost immediate and total failure. The rebel barons still went to war with King John, and none of the promises in the Magna Carta were realized right away. But even though it didn't really work out at first, the thing to remember is that everyone has to start out toddling with baby steps.

The Magna Carta wasn't very popular right away, but over centuries it mysteriously started popping up everywhere and taking bites out of rude monarchs. People kept finding it and essentially saying, "Hey! This super-old paper says I've got rights!"

And some of those people wrote other papers that weren't failures…like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But they never could have written anything if it weren't for the Magna Carta lurking in the shadows and whispering in their ears about good governance and the limits of kings. It's a conspiracy that continues today.

Have you ever cheated at Monopoly? You're going along and you're like, "Wait, new rule: if you land on Free Parking you get to grab a handful of cash from the bank." Or, "New rule: I'll just write you an IOU for my stay at Boardwalk." Or, "New rule, I'm breaking out of prison because I almost rolled a double…and that's close enough."

Cheating at Monopoly and getting away with it is what it's like to be an absolute monarch…except that an absolute monarch gets to act like that all the time and no one can really argue with the way he changes the rules.

And—oh yeah—the money and the prison are very real.

So why should you care? You don't live under an absolute monarch.

Love or hate the president, they can't go around making up new taxes just because they want some extra spending money. The president can't send a person to prison without a trial and confiscate all their stuff just because that person happens to have really cool stuff. The president also can't just yell, "New law time!" followed by whatever previously illegal action they feel like committing today (as in, "New law: Everybody has to stop what they're doing, invade Canada, and bring me back some maple syrup").

And you have the Magna Carta to thank for that.

The Magna Carta was the first time that people decided that kings shouldn't be allowed to do literally anything they wanted. Sure, some people had probably been thinking that letting kings run amok wasn't humanity's greatest idea for awhile, but in 1215 they actually put it in writing and got a king to sign it.

They took the "absolute" out of an "absolute monarchy." Basically, somebody finally found the rules hidden in the Monopoly box and let all the other players know that actually you can't sort through all the Community Chest cards until you find one that you like.

Governments, much like board games, can have limits. And those limits make things considerably less fun for the leaders…but noticeably more tolerable for everyone else.