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Hi guys
I'm really interested in the way that the discourse of "conspiracy" operates in our thinking about the nature of power and politics. I don't want to talk about specific conspiracies, but the idea of conspiracy as such. When people dismiss something as being "a conspiracy theory," this seems to rest an an a priori assumption that there are no conspiracies - an assumption which I find to be much more absurd, on the face of it, that the claim that there might be conspiracies. So what do you guys think about conspiracies?
A) There are no conspiracies at all; any analysis of power which relies on something that sounds vaguely like "a conspiracy" is therefore incorrect and should be mocked.
B) There are some conspiracies, but they don't have any power and exist at the fringes of society.
C) There are some conspiracies which have some power but it's nothing to worry about.
D) There is one conspiracy which rules everything and all those in power participate in it.
E) There are multiple competing conspiracies which divide the ruling elite.
What do you think. Let's talk about conspiracies. I especially am interested to hear from people who think that there aren't any conspiracies in power in the world explain their reasoning for why they think that. What does it mean for something to be a conspiracy, and why are you so sure they don't exist?
 
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United States24600 Posts
On October 28 2015 07:34 notesfromunderground wrote:
When people dismiss something as being "a conspiracy theory," this seems to rest an an a priori assumption that there are no conspiracies - an assumption which I find to be much more absurd, on the face of it, that the claim that there might be conspiracies.
You might want to reconsider this assertion. It may be true for some people, but I think it's far from universal.
If someone tries to tell me we never landed people on the moon, I'm going to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory... not because I don't think there are any conspiracies, but because I don't believe there is a conspiracy that is covering up the fact that we didn't go to the moon. You can argue at length about why most people share my beliefs, but that's a separate topic from the claim that everyone who calls something a conspiracy theory doesn't believe conspiracies can exist.
I mean what is a conspiracy? It merely requires two or more people. There are plenty of conspiracies, so you should define more specifically what you actually mean when you say conspiracy here.
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I guess specifically I'm interested in what people think about "the visibility of power in society." So is most of the power in society visible, or invisible? If there does exist some power which is invisible or secret, what is the status of claims ABOUT that invisible power? Can we know anything about it?
A claim which we might call 'conspiracy theory' would be one which holds that most of, or all of, the real power in society is 'invisible' power - a power which is somehow distinct from the visible, 'official' power.
You brought up a point about the relative absurdity of the narrative which might be told about that invisible power. So one kind of conspiracy theory has a sort of impossibly convoluted story about how the moon landing was not real - leaving us to wonder why anyone in power would spend their time on such absurdities.
But what if the claim being made also assumes an invisible power, but involves a less prima facie absurd story? For instance, I do believe that the US equities market is rigged. When I suggested this, Kwark banned me from his blog and compared me to some person named Alex Jones (I have not heard of this person). Surely we would agree that the claims "the moon landing was faked" and "the stock market is rigged" are claims of a very different order of absurdity. So when Kwark accuses me of conspiracy theory, is he claiming that a belief in the rigged nature of the stock market is akin to beliefs about UFOs or moon landings? Is this is a legitimate rhetorical move? What is going on here? That's what I'm interested in, because this is a very common thing to say (I think Kwark is a silly person, but not an especially silly person),
So I think it would be entirely naive and absurd to think that the economic elites who control the markets DO NOT collude and engage in secret agreements in order to further their own interests. I mean, just think of the LIBOR scandal. Of course they do this. So what does it mean to call something like this a conspiracy theory? Suppose before the LIBOR thing broke, I had suggested that traders at major banks were conspiring to rig the interbank loan rate. Would this be an example of what we mean by 'conspiracy theory'? Would it be an illegitimate claim, AS SUCH?
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Really, the point is: once we accept the obvious conclusion that there really are conspiracies in the world, and that they are powerful, how do we investigate them without descending into a kind of gnostic hysteria characteristic of that thing we call "conspiracy theory"? What is the epistemologically rigorous way to investigate secret power? Is this possible?
It's a very serious question for me. I'm trying to write an essay about it. So I guess this is a "homework thread."
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A)
Why should there be any? There is no need for them.
If you want to see the invisible power, you just have to look close enough.
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Why not?
(I don't necessarily disagree I just want to hear your reasoning)
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On October 28 2015 09:16 Paljas wrote:
you just have to look close enough.
"What, with a microscope or something?"
![[image loading]](http://images.hngn.com/data/images/full/122623/hillary-clinton.png?w=650)
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What is a conspiracy supposed to accomplish? The power doesn't need to hide, thats why it is power.
That doesn't mean that everything is clear and that one can see and understand everything, but an investigation of conspiracies which are, by my definition at least, secret and thus impossible to detect seems rather esoteric.
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You don't think powerful people make plans at cocktail parties which they would not care to have known?
I don't buy your claim that power doesn't need to hide "because it's power." Why couldn't power function from a place of secrecy? What about the CIA? What if some power is power because it is secret? What about the Wizard of OZ?
I feel like conspiracies could accomplish very banal things. Really I guess what I am trying to get at is a certain claim about the 'banality of conspiracy,' perhaps. I don't think conspiracies are these grandiose things with rituals and organ music and stuff. They are just sort of everywhere.
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What about the CIA? We know what it does and what role it plays. There is a wikipedia article on it.
Power might function from any place it wants. That doesn't change the fact that the idea of conspiracies is rather useless to understand how power and the world work. Why would you investigate such a concept.
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You seriously think that you know what the CIA is and what role it plays?
On October 28 2015 09:35 Paljas wrote:
That doesn't change the fact that the idea of conspiracies is rather useless to understand how power and the world work. .
this is just a question begging assertion, my friend 
I'm interested in the question because I'm trying to investigate hidden power located in the distant past (specifically, the financial power of (pre-)classical temple complexes). This produces a reading practice which becomes rather "conspiracy theoretical." You search for clues and hints and get led down a rabbit hole.
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I think there's a lot to be said for the general inability of different holders of a particular threshold amount of "power" when it comes to getting along with one another, particularly with enough cooperation to give rise to a "conspiracy" with any real force. Normal terms of cooperative motivation start to look very different once a given person or group of people accrue a certain amount of "power" in that the very boundaries of that "power" can oftentimes run up against the boundaries of other powerful people or groups. In other words, the top becomes lonely not because the ladder is too small but because the top stops seeming like the top when you have to share it. This is not to say that different powerful groups or individuals don't cooperate to great effect; the issue is that the very same motivations that go into a desire to conspire are also those that motivate a suspicion that one's own "power" necessarily requires a disjunction from the plight of competitors. I legitimately think that the phrase "power is paranoia" has a lot of truth to it.
I'll add more if I have time Homework calls.
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I'm using TL to help with avoiding writing a book review on a boring book. To hell with homework!
you've made a good point
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there is lots of "wink-wink-nudge-nudge" crap that goes on between leaders in the country in which i live.
the Canadian Liberal "AdScam" got blown open for the public to see during a year long backroom power struggle between Paul Martin and Jean Chretien. Chretien's little power empire was being threatened by Martin's new lieutenants and the squabbling occurred on many levels.
Had Martin and Chretien come to an amicable settlement then AdScam would've remain hidden and never to be discovered. It would've remained an undiscovered criminal conspiracy.
Jean Chretien and his power empire did such a good job managing Canada and its economy... i say... let'em sneak away with a few billion dollars. You can't run an economy as big as Canada without some level of embezzlement, corruption, and fraud. In fact, if all you did was work to eliminate fraud and corruption you'd never get anything else done.
Did Jean Chretien and his power brokers embezzle and rob canadian taxpayers for untold billions? sure they did. They did such a great fucking job running the economy.. i say... let'em keep the money.. they earned it.
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HA! So you are just in favor of conspiracies on pragmatic grounds. I love it!
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Chretien is the most underrated leader in Canadian history.
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United States1434 Posts
Richard Nixon has been wiretapping folks. I know it.
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On October 28 2015 10:15 Ty2 wrote:
Richard Nixon has been wiretapping folks. I know it.
Bob Woodward called, he wants his conspiracies back.
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I think that one good starting point if you want to have a good discussion is the unfortunate but necessary debate of semantics. What constitutes a conspiracy? Perhaps "an organized secretive plan to accomplish something nefarious"? The intent is to gain something (political power, financial, strategic, etc.) or otherwise by hiding the truth from certain people?
By those standards, conspiracies happen constantly. Most politics happen behind closed doors with power brokers who remain nameless, and people who aren't part of government like lobbyists collude with government to have certain benefits, sometimes at the detriment of the actual electorate. But those are not interesting conspiracies, even though sometimes the goal is specifically to avoid public scrutiny by maneuvering politically under the radar. Yet it seems to fit the conventional definition of conspiracy, despite the lack of theatrics.
The reason why some people are hesitant to admit the existence of conspiracy is the following: the term conspiracy lost its meaning to whacky and far fetched conspiracy theories. Now the conspiracy has to be Mission Impossible/James Bond level fuckery, involving highly complex criminal networks with insane technology or something like that. A key meeting happening behind closed doors that leads to a certain decision that favors a certain group of people over another doesn't bother anybody. Mundane collusion and corruption is no longer worthy of the title "conspiracy". The Watergate scandal is a real life big-ass conspiracy that happened in real life and that is massively documented, and undoubtedly Nixon participated to tens of other little underhanded maneuvers like that on a smaller scale, namely to keep the populace in the dark about some of most disgusting shit the US did at the time. So in other words, everyone knows that conspiracy happens, it's the term "conspiracy" that has changed in the minds of people because of how it has been used.
And so this leads us to conspiracy theories.
-9/11 was an inside job
-The free masons and the Illuminati run everything: two secret societies so secret that 16 year olds with youtube are onto them.
-Triangles on shit
-Katy Perry and a bunch of actors used the same words referring to the devil, what does it mean? (TRIANGLES?)
-All powerful people are actually lizards that look like men
-No moon landing
-No holocaust
-Vaccines as a form of mind control and to dumb people down
-AIDS is bio weapon
-Aliens, Area51 and shit
Some of those are more absurd than others, but none of them have enough evidence to be actually believable. Literally every argument that is made in those conspiracy theories is either unsupported by evidence completely, or it's wild conjecture. Often, the conspiracy theorists make up some motive and build upon it by assuming things, drawing insane conclusions from fuzzy pictures, and rejecting the "official" version of what happened by saying that the evidence is not conclusive, while offering evidence which is much worse.
In the face of this kind of behavior, and with these ideas getting as much traction, the term "conspiracy" is basically being dragged in the mud. Conspiracies are in movies. In real life, no one is capable of pulling off these huge operations that require thousands if not tens of thousands of people to stay quiet.
TLDR: Everyone agrees that conspiracies exist but they're not called conspiracies anymore, they're just labeled under collusion and corruption. Big ass spectacular conspiracies (like the ones that are being theorized by people who scrutinized evidence based on their personal preferences rather than credibility) are fantasy and they don't happen because no one has the organisational capability to pull them off.
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EPT
