September 29, 2023
I have a surefire method of determining when I have a great idea.
It’s when I find it shedding light on all sorts of unexpected phenomena.
Today the phenomenon in question is conspiracy theories, and why they are (almost) always wrong. (I add the parenthesis merely to be polite. Conspiracy theories are always wrong, even when they are “right.” See “Clock, Stopped, Twice Daily.”)
Conspiracy theories have some important qualities in common with standard textbook organizational planning techniques. Each seems to assume that perfect knowledge is possible.
The reason why conspiracy theories cannot be relied upon is essentially the same as the reason that standard extrapolative organizational planning techniques cannot be relied upon: reality always changes things up, throwing in some previously un-thought-of factor into the mix and rendering any great conspiracy to determine the large-scale outcomes of society (or any past-data-spreadsheet-based, extrapolative, predictive model) completely futile.
Let’s say you believe that elite world organizations created COVID-19 as a way of taking control of international government policies and business practices. This conspiracy theory is often based on “The Great Reset,” a set of recovery ideas proposed in June 2020 by then-Prince Charles and the head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab. Charles said, in the video launching the initiative, “We have an incredible opportunity to create entirely new sustainable industries…. The time to act is now.”
Schwab said, in an article accompanying the launch, “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future.” A 280-page book that explained the initiative further was panned by critics for a lack of clarity. It mentioned ending fossil fuel subsidies, instituting a wealth tax, and increased environmental regulation, but did not go into detail.
This lack of clarity was a feature, not a bug, to people who decided that “The Great Reset” was a devious elite plot to wrest total control of humankind. You see, when there is a lack of detail, it means “they” are hiding something. And when they deny they are hiding something… well, that just means they really don’t want “us” to find out what they are up to.
It was a short step between thinking the nabobs at the Davos World Economic Forum were taking advantage of the crisis of COVID-19, and thinking those same elites had created COVID-19 to give them an excuse to take control of the world. (Just to be clear: they did not do this. And yes, I am hiding the fact that they did, in order to profit from their evil scheme! Ha ha ha! …Not.)
COVID-19 may, as it turns out, have escaped from a Chinese virology lab in Wuhan, rather than (as every other virus that has come out of China the past century or so) emerging from the “wet markets” where exotic animal-based foods are sold in that country. But it was not concocted by humans. On this I have the word of a friend who heads up a virology lab in the United States. He has told me that the technology to create the sort of infernally complex molecule that is the COVID-19 virus simply does not exist.
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the World Economic Forum, Prince Charles, the IMF, the government of China (they must have been in on it, since the virus came from their country), and various other nabobs concocted this virus in order to take further control of the world economy and increase their power.
As the late Mike Royko, chronicler of Chicago Democratic Machine politics, would put it, “Cui bono?” That’s Latin roughly for “Who’s gettin’ what?”
The U.S. lost an estimated $14 trillion in economic output over the three years of the virus, and its political divisions were made even sharper and more divisive by COVID. The E.U. lost a similar amount of output. China presumably did as well; it watched its commercial air flights to and from the United States, its main foreign customer, decline by 94 percent. Those flights have yet to make any real recovery. China’s harsh lockdowns in 2020 kept the numbers of their dead fairly low, but opening things up in 2022-2023 allowed those numbers to mushroom, causing further lockdowns and stunting economic growth. India lost less, economically, but they, too, ended up on the minus side.
Essentially, COVID was a dead loss for the entire world. Even for the elites.
And we have not yet seen the ultimate results of COVID, beyond the mere mortality, morbidity, or economic devastation. China’s property market seems to be in crisis, which has its financial stability in question. The Communist Party is looking shakier now than it has for a long time. Public disaffection, especially among the unemployed young, is higher than it’s been since the days of Tiananmen Square. This seems to have caused the government to increase its aggressiveness toward Taiwan. An invasion of Taiwan, in order to distract the Chinese public, seems far more imminent than it did a year ago. And that invasion would be another dead-weight loss for the entire world. Taiwan is a very profitable enterprise right now, even for mainland China. It is a main source of chips for the entire world’s markets.
Anyone concocting COVID-19 would have had to understand that such consequences would occur, and decide that it was still worth it. For whom in the world could this have possibly been worth it? Cui bono?
Nemo. No one. Every nabob at the IMF or WEF eventually answers to their own people, and there was not a single nation on earth that escaped COVID-19. No amount of personal aggrandizement of influence can make up for dead relatives and friends.
More to the point: who could have foreseen all these results? No one. Humans are simply not that good at prediction. No plan can contain them all.
And it’s even less possible than the foregoing makes it appear: that’s just the results of the alleged policy itself. Whole other, unrelated, categories of unpredictable events are arising all the time, throwing monkey wrenches into the plans of organizations, businesses, governments, nabobs and Machiavellis of all types. The biggest one in this period? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s very hard to fit the Russian invasion of Ukraine into this conspiracy theory. There are two choices, as far as I can see:
– The Ukraine war is no big deal and could have no effect on the COVID machinations of the WEF/IMF/Illuminati/Rothschilds/[Your conspiracy group here].
– Putin is secretly running the WEF/IMF/Illuminati/etc.
The first hypothesis does not stand up to scrutiny. The price of fossil fuels skyrocketed, wheat stocks were severely affected, and NATO suddenly was revivified. There’s no possible COVID conspiracy that would remain unaffected by these facts.
The second hypothesis also seems rather unlikely. It would explain how the WEF could plan its COVID machinations with knowledge of the war, but why Putin would coordinate with elite international institutions that had already put sanctions on him remains a mystery.
Occam’s Razor dictates that the simplest explanation is usually the best one. When you have a conspiracy that has achieved none of its planned results, has benefited no one (indeed, has harmed virtually everyone), and has been overtaken by huge events that have partly overwhelmed any possible desired effects of said conspiracy, you do not have a conspiracy.
My experience working with elite international (and even national) institutions has led me to have a very limited expectation that any big thinking they come up with will lead predictably and directly to desired outcomes (or even be capable of exiting a wet paper sack). My experience of conspiracy theory aficionados leads me to the opinion that they must not have much experience in dealing with elite institutions.
Conspiracy theories do provide a window into why rigorous imagination is the only way to anticipate the full universe of what actually might occur. Rigorous imagination forces us to imagine the full range of fully fleshed-out worlds – worlds that have been not been created by some master conspirator, but have evolved from the present. You cannot create the future world, even if you are the WEF director or King Charles; you need to create an organizational strategy that can survive the full range of plausible worlds you might face. Like conspiracy theories, single point forecasts of the future, derived from models based on past experience, assume perfect prescience. For better or worse, such prescience seems impossible to achieve in this vale of tears. Imagination is the only way to anticipate the unpredictable; and imagination and conspiracy are fatal to one another.
