Are You A Conspiracy Theorist?
Questioning authority and engaging in critical thinking is essential for a functioning democracy, and why there is a need to challenge simplistic labels.
Photo by Tom Radetzki on Unsplash
by framersqool:
I have long suspected the origins and intentions behind the emergence into the language of American discourse of the very term 'conspiracy theory' itself.
In current and what by now is its longstanding usage, the phrase is a slur, an epithet, a gallery-appealing incantation of ridicule toward the very notion that any two or more people could possibly have ever crafted any intention which had not been what it was presented to be.
This entirely simplistic means of dismissing the very core nature of human interaction, in effect, that human beings tend to do whatever is necessary to secure advantages against our circumstances, by no means excluding that we get together with others and come up with ways to get what we want without stating our motives in complete candor to those we target with our intentions, has done a lot of harm in my estimation: to say that a hypothesis about any form of interactive intent is nothing but a 'conspiracy theory' is pretty ridiculous, because it dismisses out of hand any possibility that two or more persons might conceivably be acting in accord, with compatible ulterior motives in mind.
So who was it that first launched the term itself? What were they after?
Could it possibly be that, in the early stages of this so-called 'information revolution' brought to us by improved circuitry and semiconductors all consolidated onto a new form of 'information superhighway,' the imminent potential for too many people to find out too many things someone else didn't want them to know posed dangers to forces and factions whose very real conspiracies had kept them in positions of advantage all along?
What better way to muddy the waters of all these new 'information age' discoveries about the true nature of the inner workings of modern civilization than to trot out a simple-minded phrase meant to ridicule the idea that things are not always what they seem because somebody is making them seem to be what they are not?
For my own purposes, I don't need any 'conspiracy theory' to be satisfied with the questions of where the loyalties of the American civil service sector are aligned. I have taken it as a given, since long before this era of easy online access to entirely distorted, contradictory, and rarely truthful 'information,' that anyone on government payroll at any level down to the local dogcatcher regards me as their enemy.
All I have to observe is their behavior, which is not concealed at all, to conclude that, given an opportunity to lie to me and manipulate me with falsehoods, they will, and they do. This is simply a matter of policy and, at a much deeper level, of the very nature of public employment itself (and of the standing alliances between corporate interests, financial concerns, unions, and organized crime syndicates which make it possible at all for any 'government' to keep its functions functioning from one day to the next.)
There is no 'government by the people' in the forcibly and deceitful United States of America. Any fearless reading of our history as a nation reveals this.
It has always been elite interests, held in place by esoteric and essentially separatist means, who have presumed to 'govern.' Their approach to the 'rule of law' has always been that this is a procedural nuisance that must be outmaneuvered at every opportunity. Part of this maneuvering has always been to deceive the public, primarily by means of deceiving the press and thus allowing this Fourth Estate to do the heavy lifting of misinformation in the government's favor itself while upholding the thoroughly fictitious narrative that what they are reporting is the product of 'freedom of the press.'
The problem with the internet, as soon as it began to be more widely available and especially with the advent of cellular telephones equipped with WiFi, is that this meant that too many people might start asking questions, and finding answers to them, which might compromise the imperialist posture of the public sector, and pose the unthinkable threat of the government being compelled at long last to govern according to the rule of law, instead of the dictates of its true owner-operators, in the corporate, financial, big-labor, and criminal spheres.
So then, suddenly, here comes this easy phrase, 'conspiracy theory.'
It was far more effective than the original conspirators who coined it must have envisioned.
Some building not hit by the planes on 9/11 seems to have been a target of carefully-engineered explosive demolition engineered far in advance. Don't bring that obvious observation up; that makes you a 'conspiracy theorist.'
Some superbug, by all appearances, was pretty obviously ninety-nine parts social-media gossip and one part genuine public health threat since the day Fox News ran all ten of its top headlines with the word 'coronavirus' on display? Don't you dare name that emperor as shamefully naked; that would make you guilty of spreading a 'conspiracy theory.'
As for the topic at hand, whenever I encounter the term 'CIA,' I mostly roll my eyes and say to myself, 'Here we go again.' Discussions throughout my lifetime about what this Cabal of Incompetent Airheads have allegedly been up to ring about as reliable as the discussions of 'The End Times' I've heard out of evangelicals for that entire time do.
What-evarrrr, in other words.
The problem with the whole idea of 'conspiracy' as it is presented in popular discourse is that it is held out as something exceptional and, by extension, sinister and dangerous by its very nature.
This is entirely misleading.
There has never been a species to walk this earth (that we know of) which has indulged in more conspiratorial behavior, as normally and necessarily as breathing, than our own.
It is what we do. To be a human being is to be a conspirator, or else this hairless variety of sentient apes would have proven too vulnerable to every circumstance nature might have confronted us with to have survived long enough to walk out of a cave and build the first house.
I prefer to think of conspiracy in terms of my own self-styled Theory of Conspiratorial Chaos, which holds that conspiracy is so UN-exceptional that literally, everyone is doing it, which postulates that at any given moment, so many conspiracies are in motion that no one conspiracy could ever possibly hope to achieve its original goals other than purely by accident, because most of its energy is consumed in countering other conspiracies, all of them working against each others' intentions, and many (if not most) of them coming from within the very groups which had set a given conspiracy in motion.
Suppose you want to understand the conduct of government or human behavior. In that case, you have to assume that conspiracies are everywhere and are nothing besides normal human interaction.
We are advantage-seekers, more than we can truly believe in such high-toned constructs as 'justice' or 'rule of law' because, without the continual quest for advantage over our every circumstance, we would not survive more than a few days.
Government agencies are nothing but human beings conspiring - because this is what human beings do.
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.