A Wildcat Is Pulling Our Carriage

Conspiracy Theories

By John Taylor; 2007 Nov 03, 18 Ilm, 164 BE

"Upon the death of a favorite concubine of the Lord of Lu, somebody in Lu wrote an obituary for her. The Lord of Lu was pleased with it and employed the writer. Mo Tzu heard of it and remarked: An obituary is but to narrate the ambitions of the dead. To employ the man because his obituary is pleasing is like making the wild cat pull a carriage." (The Ethical and Political Works of Mo Tzu, at: http://www.humanistictexts.org/motzu.htm)

Let us turn our thoughts to wildcats pulling carriages, the tyranny of Adolph Nobody, and to what his power base really is.

I was surfing this morning through alternative media sites and came across the following video of Noam Chomsky talking about conspiracy theories and the absurd idea that the Bush Administration planned and executed the 9-11 attacks.

<http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/66473/>

He makes interesting points against these hand wringing speculations, the most important being that pre-occupation with conspiracy theories is essentially anti-scientific in spirit. It acts in the end as a distraction from issues that really matter, things that we can change if we put our minds to it. In response I looked up "conspiracy theory" on the Web and found that there is a pretty healthy literature about the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it is not easily accessible outside a university library. As so often happens lately, Wikipedia proved to be the most accessible source of further information. The online encyclopedia offered the following standard tests for a given conspiracy:

1. Occam's razor - is the alternative story more, or less, probable than the mainstream story? (However overeager application of "Occam's razor" can lead to acceptance of oversimplified views of history.)
2. Methodology - are the "proofs" offered for the argument well constructed, i.e., using sound methodology? Is there any clear standard to determine what evidence would prove or disprove the theory?
3. Whistleblowers - how many people -- and what kind -- have to be loyal conspirators?

As Chomsky says, there are too many chances for leaks if a prominent politician starts to conspire. Richard Nixon's fall after Watergate is an example of what happens to a President who dares challenge powerful interests (as Chomsky points out elsewhere, Nixon got away with assassinating minority leaders, but when he tried bugging Democratic Party leaders, that was going too far).

My own inclination (based on some Ancient philosopher I read long ago, but for the life of me I cannot remember who it was) is to regard the popularity of conspiracy theories as a sort of medical symptom, an illness of a sick body politic. Conspiracy theories start to take over when people are shut out (or shut themselves out) of consultation and practical political involvement. Now that I think of it, maybe Niccolo Machiavelli was the one who wrote about conspiracies. He was one of the first to talk about checks and balances in government, and that became the foundation of the American system. Machiavelli wrote,

"In fact, when there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these three powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check." (Machiavelli, Discourses, Book I, Chapter II)

Conspiracy theories, then, take over when there is checking but not balancing. Watching goes out of whack, and the checking is not reciprocal checking. The exact equivalent happens in family life when blaming others gets out of hand. Accusation is habitual. In theory just about anything you or I do or neglect to do in daily life can be held up for criticism. Any happenstance by one family member can be interpreted by the others as an intentional plot to mess them up. Blame, then, is a symptom of spiritual illness, failure of faith in others. A unified, harmonious, non-bickering home is the result of a contract where each member offers others the benefit of the doubt, stops the blaming and rises above conspiracy theories.

That is why I find Adolph Nobody a useful person to invoke when I want to blame. Adolph is the only one that it is safe to blame. He is born when everybody is so busy blaming that they become culpable for a general deterioration of the situation, then the best way to blame everybody is to blame nobody, Adolph Nobody. He is at the core, he is the real source of our present failure to act on the crises that threaten.

The real danger that threatens the world right now is not some dark plot to commit any single evil deed, however compelling and satisfying it may feel to think it so. No, it is a failure of all, world disorder, an illness of the whole set-up that makes our body politic too clumsy to respond to basic survival needs. We all fiddle while the environment degrades and the climate de-stabilizes. We all have to get over the blame game, experts complaining about lay, people blaming politicians, and, as Machiavelli points out, leaders vis-a-vis the masses,

"Let not princes complain of the faults committed by the people subjected to their authority, for they result entirely from their own negligence or bad example." (Discourses, Book III, Chapter XXIX)

Adolph Nobody and his expanding no-man's land are taking over. He is the wildcat pulling our carriage. He makes us all victims of ourselves; his plots embroil us all in a huge, conspiracy-in-the-breach, a conspiracy of silence, a total failure to cast aside imitations and work out common presuppositions on which to act on our actual situation. Seek truth, do not blame, do not set up scapegoats, trust in your fellows, love, act... Only then will our body politic be mature enough to join into a world confederation capable of addressing the dangers looming before us all.