I like the way Robert Anton Wilson looked at conspiracies and I have accepted a truth for myself that I thought I might share. I find that it is never worth trying to track such things nor to try and intuit greater meaning or secret sinister purpose from events of already great evil or the machinations of power. Here is how I see it:
1. Conspiracies exist. They are everywhere. Wherever two or more meet with purpose, there is conspiracy. In some abstract but effective way we are all conspiring right now on this fora. Here is to our triumph!
2. People with power and influence also conspire. Duh, and there is no better game than domination of other men. For this, at any one time, there are many hundreds of thousands of power plays going on every day that involve men with gangs, militias, or armies using them to force their will on others.
3. Influence and power, backed by violence is also applied through the color of law. Any sane man would not separate this ethically from the conspiracies of point 2, but it has a different flavor here. The law is supposed to have a different purpose, an opposite purpose.
Given those tenets, there is always conspiracy to do evil to other men. Evil is profitable, there is a natural market force driving it. For that, good men should not get caught up in trying to track machinations, focusing on icons for hate. There are too many of them and conspiracies rarely last very long before the participants are all stabbing each other in the back anyways.
Instead, we MUST build a society wherein men are not able to raise up armies and gangs upon their fellows except in self defense of other such gangs; and that the need to rise them up is diminished in culture as a purposeful force. Trying to track conspiracies does not help us move forward; in my opinion, and my experience they only tie us up and hold us back.
For example, the JBS has long suffered a kink in the purity of its message. The great communist “conspiracy” was more a movement than a central conspiracy an amorphous blob you simply cannot fight; within it thousands of conspiracies with common goals. In reality though, the enemy they were fighting wasn’t communist at all, the soviets and the Chinese were fascists pretending to be communist.
Now before any other Libertarians feel they need to school me let me say now that I am NOT hating on the John Birch Society. As a child the JBS was strongly present in my life. We were raised to be horrified at the way the Soviets would persecute people with taxes; how they engaged in mandatory universal conscription; how police could enter a home without warrant; and how the elections were rigged with laws that prevented social or political competition.
But in the few decades since I heard all of these things, they have come true here in America. All of those policies were driven forward by laws that the JBS supported in their anti-narcotics stance. To me, looking back at it, it was a travesty, and an ironic tragedy of morals for all men. narcotics were enveloped in “the conspiracy” and right and wrong, free and enslaved, capitalist versus communist all became insignificant factors in the social effects of the drug war and the mudslide like erosion of the constitution and institutional protection of our natural liberties.
My point here is that “conspiracies” are a distraction. The enemies we fight are not men but their fears.
Fear is the mind killer.
We do not win our freedoms by enslaving ourselves and others with fear. We win our freedom by enlisting and encouraging the minds and hearts of men with hope and prosperity.
If we engage in fear mongering, we will deaden the heart and minds of our allies and we will make many more turn away without a consideration for their safety.
If freedom is our goal we need to empower, not enlist. We can only succeed by giving our fellow human beings something to live for beyond the boxes the machine has dropped them into.
It is an easy sell, freedom, once you can get someone to hear what it means. That happens best with open hearts and minds listening to those whom they trust, not with minds numbed with terror, anger and retribution.
Tenants are people who live in your house. The word you want is probably tenets (meaning underlying principles or beliefs).
Great article! Far too often we get bogged down in describing how bad things are, and why we should be afraid of losing our freedom if we don’t do something, trying to cause people to enlist with us out of fear. As you point out, this has the opposite result. Sometimes we need to set aside the bad and focus on the new, better way, giving people the hope and desire to join us.
Roger Browne, thank you for the spelling help; obviously auto-correct failed me; but there you were for me, and there you were for the aestetics of the article – a night in shinning amore.
I wish I had a little more time to polish my posts. 🙂