There have always been complaints about people obsessed with imagined conspiracies. In our day we’ve seen a massive and steady increase in use of the term “conspiracy theory” that began in the late 1990s, when an otherwise forgettable Mel Gibson movie was released with this name.
Most of us have heard how mad or gullible people must be to indulge what’s considered a schizophrenic tendency to seek obscure patterns within facts. While leftists and centrists can be identified by a desire to constantly signal their lack of ‘racism’ and commensurate loathing of ‘racists’, across the entire range of political opinion you’ll see a kind of stratification which favors affectations of mature skepticism. Being too suspicious – paranoid even! – is to invite censure. This holds true further to the right where we observe the same preoccupation with distancing oneself from kooks and their conspiracy theories.
Yet both “fact pattern” and “conspiracy theory” are technical bits of legal language, with which all competent lawyers are conversant – particularly prosecutors. When any conspiracy is charged it’s framed in terms of a conspiracy theory, the merits or shortcomings of which are then argued in court before a decision regarding the truth or falsehood of the allegations is made. This is to say conspiracy theories are a legitimate part of our legal process, and have long been recognized as such.
Nevertheless, in our everyday discussions “conspiracy theory” has become a kind of incantation to consign any given expressed suspicion to the outer darkness, as a thing fit only for dismissal. Serious people don’t pay attention to conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are for conspiratards.
Given such a perspective, why would a prosecutor, for example, want to pay any attention to a conspiracy theory? And why would we, by extension, dare to imagine any prosecutor should be receptive to such addlepated finger-pointing? Never mind the fact conspiracy theories are the only bud from which explicit allegations, charges, and even convictions can bloom.
May we be permitted to suspect this legal reality accounts, in large part, for the relentless imposition of this dismissive ‘conspiracy theory’ framing? What if a kind of collective discretion operates just outside the threshold of prosecutorial cognizance that a thing needs looking into? Does public pressure not drive at least some of the prosecutions that occur? If so, wouldn’t it make sense to attempt to thwart the operation of that collective discretion? Wouldn’t it make sense to jam the signal, introducing uncertainty into any attempts to cultivate such discretion? Is it a sign of schizophrenia to suppose that if one could, say, buy off judges and prosecutors, the only thing left to worry about would be public perceptions? Or would even imagining such things make kooks of us?
It should be clear to you by now I think this entire framing of reflexive dismissal sucks for you and me and everybody, and worse still, is extremely helpful to those who sob with laughter as they abuse us, daily, in ever more brazenly inventive ways
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For human beings, the tendency is to view any event as something susceptible to explanation. We tend to focus on cause and effect because this has clear evolutionary advantages. According to the ‘cause and effect view’, things can be made to happen. It’s recognized that one can make plans and shape outcomes, and conversely the causes of things can be identified, understood, and harnessed. Anyone who adopts this perspective is going to enjoy certain advantages, not least of which is imagining possibilities that people less confident and curious cannot even fully formulate. This is the primal and necessary step in realizing or making manifest any such possibilities. It’s no exaggeration to say that this lies at the heart of all intentional behavior.
This brings us to the much-maligned conspiratard, who should be praised rather than ridiculed for his awareness of intentional behavior and its foundational importance for civilization itself. He seeks out its traces in the affairs of men. And he comes from a long line of our ancestors who survived and prospered in doing so, especially in the most competitive human domains, such as warfare and politics.
People at the highest levels understand conspiracies perfectly well. To conspire is to breathe together, to whisper together quietly, or even just to sit down and plan things in groups without anyone having to raise their voice. As my late friend Tim used to say, “Only the poor conspire; the rich simply make plans”. If you’re a grug you’re conspiring, obviously. But when real people do it they do so with little concern, because they’re the ones – broadly speaking – in charge of who is on the receiving end of The Justice System.
When it’s a federal prosecutor coming after you there are very broad guidelines that can determine whether you are subject to criminal penalties for conspiring, in the narrow legal sense. Take 18 U.S.C. § 371, the primary Federal conspiracy statute, which states that a when two or more people agree to commit an act that is criminal, or “defrauds the United States”, it’s a conspiracy. But the crime isn’t complete until one or more parties to the agreement commits an overt act to further the aims of the conspiracy. In broad strokes, it’s really that simple.
And conspiracy is an ongoing offense. As long as the most recent overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy falls within the statute of limitations they can go back as far as they like. They’re constrained by nothing more than establishing – often with dubious plausibility – that things done in the past are part of a conspiracy continuing to the present day. It’s also very easy to haul people in as co-conspirators and apply pressure to them to give evidence of the conspiracy. It’s bread and butter for prosecutors. 18 U.S.C. § 371 is just one of such statutes. There are dozens of them, including ‘conspiracy to impede the free exercise of rights’. Worse still, many don’t even have an overt act requirement, in which case the crime is complete upon agreement, even if nothing further is done.
It’s worth learning about conspiracy laws. Any familiarity with them makes it uncomfortably clear that alleging conspiracies, and charging those involved in them, is as easy to do as it is common. From our legislators who make these laws, to the judiciary that interprets them, and the executive officials who apply them, our entire system recognizes conspiracies and uses a laughably low bar to establish their existence.
Don’t expect this to work bottom-up though. These standards are applied strictly top-down. When you’re on top you get to charge anyone you like with conspiracy, which makes sense given that “conspiring” is just another way of saying “making plans”. And if there’s one thing our masters enjoy it’s making plans. They recognize that people who can’t make plans don’t matter. So they’ve focused some of their most potent legal weapons on making sure that they can, at their discretion, utterly destroy people who make plans they don’t like. If you don’t believe me take a look at what “conspiracy to defraud the United States” covers.
But for the rest of us, forced to live downstream from where our betters empty their bladders, “conspiracy theory” is – at best – just another way to say allegations. Dismissing conspiracy theories is usually equivalent to dismissing an allegation. I can’t blame anyone for observing quite correctly that all sorts of insane allegations are being made these days, but that doesn’t change the fact they’re sometimes true. Nor does it change the fact that the habit of mind leading one to stay alert for conspiracies is obviously useful, though of course like all good things when it gets out of hand it can turn into something bad.
I don’t know about you but if I were guilty of particular things – arguably evil things – I’d be very interested in ways to dismiss any corresponding allegations. A particularly clever way to do that would be to assert that not only did nobody do anything, nobody could’ve done anything! I’ll discuss this further in Part 2, but there are aspects of the idea I’ll mention here.
In our circles it’s commonly observed that the ratchet always cranks to the left. In using this expression we acknowledge there is a trajectory. We acknowledge that something is afoot. If the successive developments in the world across decades are the result of dice throws, those dice are weighted. On balance, events are not random.
Most people who aren’t stupid see this. But even in the face of these naked trends, many people assert it’s foolish to imagine planning – or at least effective planning – at the scale of nations or across nations. It’s very strange many of us refuse to accept claims of competence in our ruling class. Allowing ourselves to recognize effective planning and execution would deprive us of the last soporific, which amounts to little more than asserting it must all be the result of misunderstanding. That’s probably why there’s such a strong tendency to assert that shit just ‘happens’. We hear things like “Nobody could plan and execute this or that – it’s just too complex. There are too many moving parts. Nobody has that much power. Nobody could control so many different elements!”
But that’s precisely what board members, CEOs, business proprietors, top brass and technocrats do. They manage enormous global enterprises of great complexity on a daily basis. I’ll be considering Great Men and effective leaders in Part 2. For now it’s enough to say the idea that nobody could manage elaborate plans across large territories and spans of time is given the lie by countless historical examples. And that’s leaving aside the entire question of contingency planning, by means of which many second and third order effects can be anticipated and exploited. This last bit matters when one is thinking seriously about whether or not chance occurrences can in some sense be considered planned.
But to the extent we swallow the line randomness rules in the affairs of men – that all of it or most of it “just happens” – we reveal ourselves to be believers in the idea of an inescapable teleology of Progress. We accept Whig History in some sense, given that we see no contradiction in the idea of randomness on one hand, and on the other an obvious and consistent arc of events towards particular ends. Everyone deciding to cut the tits off teenage girls at the same time, across a whole panoply of nations, is not random.
What I’m trying to say is many of us have seen that the ratchet always applies pressure to the left; if that’s true and we assert randomness and incompetence, we’re basically saying it’s Divine Providence which has ordained we march through history in the direction of rainbow dildos. While there might be a mystical truth in that idea, anyone who witnesses the isomorphism in patterns of change yet persists in stubbornly asserting it “just happens” would be incapable of grasping it.
Anyway. Some people like to use a more highbrow basis for refutation. Or at least as a basis for a kind of explanation. This has to do with emergence – the idea that complex entities have properties their constituent parts don’t have in themselves, which ‘emerge’ only in the wider interaction of the whole.
Obviously there’s truth to this idea, and it has its place. But we should be very careful whenever ‘emergence’ or something like this is offered as the most parsimonious explanation for all the systematic, methodical and cumulative impositions we suffer, many of which – as we see daily – are built on previous stages or steps, almost as if there’s a clear trajectory in there somewhere.
While we’re on the subject of parsimonious explanations, Occam's Razor seems to me almost useless in the domain of human motivations and goals, and worse, a piece of asininity when it comes to competition and conflict wherein misdirection comes into its own.
As regards human motivations, if Occam's Razor were of much use we wouldn't have developed much of modern psychological theory (unconscious, repression, etc.). As regards war, let's just say that when looking at aerial surveillance we should - according to Occam – just assume we're looking at artillery if we see what seems to be artillery because recognizing it as inflatable decoy artillery would needlessly multiply entities.
There’s more I could say. And not just about the limits of being putatively parsimonious. In particular we should also consider that people who pursue great wealth and power do so in order to make things happen in their favor or according to their will and aims. As I mentioned above we’ll be looking at that in Part 2.
What I’ve said thus far should be enough to make it plain there are good reasons to look for conspiracies. I say again: to conspire is simply to plan. To plan is to make it possible to achieve goals, and usually to become ever more capable of doing so. We see clear signs of plans unfolding across time and space, manifesting in general trends.
We know that people have, since time immemorial, sought power and capably wielded it across vast tapestries of organizational complexity. And we know that those currently in power not only recognize conspiracies based on the standards most convenient to them, they prosecute them mercilessly, since that’s the best way to pull the ladder up behind them.
Much more can be said in defense of the conspiratard. I’ll be saying it in Part 2, wherein I’ll turn to the following question:
Who in positions of real power wouldn’t wish to amplify and propagate the notion they’re incompetent – if they even exist at all?
Basic knowledge of human nature suggests that when you're rich enough to buy anything you could ever want, you either take to a life of idle dissipation or look for higher goals, e.g. power over others. Those goals will involve long-term planning, coordination, and most likely a degree of secrecy.
Very Good, as an addition I'd like to add, I explained this via an analogy to my friend once, so I will do the best to restate it here.
'Effectively a conspiracy is a group of people organising to have a set goal come about, but the goal isn't determined to occur even with the best laid plans, an analogy for this is, say you wanted to have a Football game rigged, what you would do is bribe a small number of people on the pitch or even just the Referee and or Linesmen, all they need to do is make certain calls that provide and advantage to one team, this is the conspiracy. But it is not determined to happen as you are still reliant on the players of each team to actually score points, this is the uncontrollably variable.'
This is to me where many get mixed up, most likely they are too stupid or blind to this, a conspiracy does not need every single angle to be planes out, only the key parts to swing an event in a desired direction.