Reality Check: Conspiracies Fail ALL THE TIME
Corona bologna and some of its attendant evils (like the vaccine) have turned many otherwise-respectable mainstreamers into conspiracy believers, like me (though most will soon move on).
This is great. But, as wide-eyed newcomers to the idea, they tend to make some errors. This article is my quick guide for the beginner.
Some newbies both vastly exaggerate the recency of conspiracies, minimize the number of contemporaneous competing and conflicting conspiracies, and vastly overestimate both the conspirators’ power and time horizons.
This can also lead to rejecting out-of-hand the notion Corona was manufactured by the U.S. since this quickly “backfired”, as though the “U.S.” is either a reified, uniform body or sensible (Ha!).
But the same U.S. originally trained the mujahedeen (a.k.a. Al Qaeda) in Afghanistan to oppose the Soviets, and handed them ground to air missiles – and built the highway for the Soviets, too. America sold guns to border drug cartels the better to shoot border guards, trained both ISIS and its defectors, etc., etc.
The people who started the British Empire also quickly ran it into the ground by helping start the World Wars (they weren’t known as “Milner’s kindergarten” for nothing…) to bankrupt their own empire, by running out of other people’s money. They were and still are “too clever by half”, as Brits say.
“Migdal Bavel” didn’t work, and Nevuchadnetzar of Bavel wasn’t much better; “the more things change, the more they stay the same“.
Also, it’s important to understand the threat is never the private individuals (lots of money is no substitute for accurate knowledge – always widely distributed among people), but the great enabler: the regime. And the regime rests upon (at least begrudging) acceptance by the public. So, the public is the problem (Quick tip: don’t be shocked when exposing some secret plan is greeted by the listeners with yawning yawns!). And you’re part of the public in a sense.
And the very case for conspiracy thinking rests on universally correct assumptions about human behavior. But then, those very axioms also inform us that the State will fail (as elaborated by Austrian School praxeology), per the Misesian Economic Calculation Problem, bureaucracy, and more.
As Dr. R. J. Rushdoony wrote:
The important question to ask is this: What makes a conspiracy work? Let us suppose that a number of us conspired together to turn the United States into a monarchy, and ourselves into its nobility; let us further suppose that we could command millions from our own circle to achieve this goal. Or, let us suppose that, with equal numbers and money we conspired to enforce Hindu vegetarianism on the country. In either case, we would have then, not a conspiracy, but a joke. A successful conspiracy is one which is so in tune with the faith and aspirations of its day that it offers to men the fulfillment of the ideals of the age. It is an illusion to believe that dangerous or successful conspiracies represent no more than a small, hidden circle of diabolical men who manipulate the world into ruin. Such groups often exist, but they only exist and succeed because their plan and hope is closely tied to the public dream and the faith of the age. If the threat were only from small circles of hidden men, then our problem would be easy. Then, as Burton Blumert has observed, “if we only unmasked the conspiracy, all our problems would be solved, but if the trouble is in all of us, then we really are in trouble.”
…
If tomorrow the secrecy were stripped from all conspiracies, and their goals revealed, most people would merely say, “Well, isn’t that what we all believe?” and go on with their daily lives.
Please ponder that for a few seconds…
Or, as we wrote about the Fabians, quoting Murray Rothbard defending non-interventionism during the Cold War, no less:
… The danger is statism. I don’t think communism is any particular danger except insofar as it is statism. We’ve got enough statism to try to roll back here, and part of that rolling back is the sort of foreign policy and anti-military policy that I advocate. I don’t think that anybody really thinks Russia or China or Albania are out to conquer us militarily. If you press the cold warriors hard enough, they will admit that.
But they’re worried about so-called subversion. In other words, they’re worried about internal communism, either here or abroad. And what I’m saying is that the internal problem we have to worry about is statism. The main objection I have to communism is that communism is statism. And American statism is what’s oppressing us.
It’s a moral\religious problem, not one of economic education, either. The majority prefers rule by politicians to a true theocracy, as Shmuel Hanavi discovered much to his dismay. Most people hate anarchy (even if they aren’t Backroom-dealing Big Businessmen), no matter how much they stand to gain in the narrow sense.
As for questions about the government’s narrative, don’t assume you can easily know the answers to good questions. And if others are “dupes” (vastly oversimplified), then certainly some of those same forces, can be dupes, too! (But don’t exaggerate that line of logic, either.)
Bottom line (to quote Subbota‘s father): Never Fear Them!
Yeshaya 8:12-13:
לא תאמרון קשר לכל אשר יאמר העם הזה קשר ואת מוראו לא תיראו ולא תעריצו. את ד’ צבאות אתו תקדישו והוא מוראכם והוא מערצכם.
Malbim there:
לא תאמרון, שיעור הכתוב, לכל אשר יאמר העם הזה קשר לא תאמרון קשר, מה שיחלטו העם שהוא קשר של קיימא, אני מצוכם בל תאמרו שהוא קשר, כי אינו קשר ולא יתקיים. ואת מוראו, של הקשר לא תיראו, כי לא יוכל להרע לכם, ואף גם בל תעריצו, בל תחשבו אותו לדבר חזק ועריץ כי חלוש הוא בעצמותו, (כי לפעמים ייראו מחלש אם יוכל להזיק. ולא ייראו מגבור בלתי מזיק ומ”מ יחזיקו אותו לגבור, לכן כפל דבריו)…
So, brush up on your Bitachon (and “Serenity Prayer” or equivalents)!
As for spying concerns, I strongly recommend my older article: Stop Being So Paranoid!
Far more to say; let’s leave some for later.