Are conspiracies self-organizing, at least in part? In general: yes. There is no centrally-controlled conspiracy run by Satanic servants or omnipotent bureaucrats. There are networks of those who inherited wealth and power and those networks are sometimes refreshed by new blood of the ambitious and talented. There are also tightly organized operations with a specific result in mind, such as the murder of President Kennedy seems to have been. In countries with a more publicly respectable class system, we can even see open domination of governments by networks of blood-relatives, marital-relatives, and school-chums. What some Americans see as a all-encompassing conspiracy, and many see in occult terms, seems to be no more than the operations of an American class system which we prefer to remain invisible. Even those who do see this situation in more realistic terms have to speak crudely in terms of insiders and outsiders because there is no socially acceptable way to speak of the classes of American society, not even in New England so shaped by the blue-blood families whose ancestors allegedly came over on the Mayflower.
In chapter 2 of The Anglo-American Establishment, Carroll Quigley gives far too much detail for most of us of Lord Salisbury’s dominance of the British government and of Oxford through that network which Quigley calls the Cecil Bloc. This Bloc, which was very strong from about the late 1885 through 1930 or better included only a small fraction of the aristocratic class of England, but it’s the sort of development to be expected in a nation where it is, or at least was, accepted that some are more equal than others, especially when it comes to access to sources of power and wealth. The situation is similar even in the New World, but far less rigid.
[The Anglo-American Establishment and other books by Quigley are available for free download at a website devoted to Carroll Quigley who was a rational and sometimes admiring historian of these power elites. Quigley was a professor at Georgetown University and, amongst other activities, taught a course in “how to think historically” which was apparently required for State Department and CIA employees studying at the School of Foreign Service.]
I’ll remind my longer-term readers and inform my newer readers that my interest in exploring conspiratorial theories is centered around their nature as pathologies of human moral systems, including social and political and economic systems. I study pathological developments that I might understand the healthy forms of the entities. I’m following a path like that blazed by Louis Pasteur who came to richer understandings of biology partly by the study of disease. In this case, I’m studying a rather spectacular disease which has helped to destroy the possibilities of peace and prosperity which seemed within our grasp in 1910 or so, then miraculously reappeared around 1990. It would take one heck of a miracle for those possibilities to reappear in the next few decades and I maybe should even say, “this century.” The power-elites of the modern world seem to be addicted to brinkmanship and to the wars and other disasters which result.
I perhaps have written too often about so-called conspiracies without yet being able to propose a good way to think and talk about them in terms acceptable to my worldview, something of a Thomistic existentialism updated to account for modern empirical knowledge. Yet, I was inspired to travel this circuit once more by an article, Information flow can reveal dirty deeds , which tells us “The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s (Enron’s) electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, hub-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.”
We’re also told that:
And the work suggests that networks aren’t just static conduits for information.
“It’s intriguing,” said Aven. “We’ve treated social networks as contained plumbing systems directing the flow of information, but we should think about them as water that carves river beds of social relations.”
In other words, sophisticated criminal operations are self-forming, dynamic networks rather than rigidly structured bureaucratic regimes of the sort that we lesser folk are supposed to inhabit with smiles on our faces. The far more complex ‘conspiracies’ which are actually the operations of our hidden class system are still more dynamic than the specific criminal conspiracy in which the owners and top employees at Enron tricked themselves into forming.
This idea of self-organizing networks is implied by Adam Smith’s speculations on the Invisible Hand and also by modern work on self-organizing systems. I’ve written about Smith’s Invisible Hand doctrine as being morally neutral, it can work towards evil or good, in Freedom and Structure in Human Life: The Invisible Hand, Good and Evil.
When human communities form, whether a social club intending to support little league and other local charities or a criminal gang or a corporation turning to illegal exploitation or a political machine masquerading as an open political party, networks of various sorts will form. How do the members of a lodge of Elks or the local VFW decide to support a new athletic group or a community pantry? Well, they’ll vote eventually, but it’s likely that the more energetic and more involved members would have already discussed matters, exchanged information and opinions, in various informal ways, when they crossed paths at the local supermarket or when they met at the bar during a wedding reception or a political fund-raiser. Criminals? Did Boss Tweed or Lucky Luciano communicate action-plans by way of office memos? Did they gather information from reports produced on schedule by the research department? It’s likely that Boss Tweed’s desires were expressed to the boys gathered in his office and also likely that Lucky Luciano’s research department consisted of barbers and bartenders and bookies and the cops on the beat.
The situation isn’t so much different with more exotic conspiracies or the general conspiratorial air of American political and economic life caused by our refusal to see that the Emperor indeed has clothes, the purple toga of a man behaving as the superior of the vast majority of us. We don’t yet have a Caesar but we have a society separated into Patrician clans and plebians who are being reduced to a proletariat state. The modern-day Patricians aren’t so tough and virtuous as those ancient Romans, but they can be just as ruthless, just as nasty, though most can’t handle weapons themselves. There are plenty of plebians willing to sign on as mercenaries for the opportunity to loot their fellow plebians or to stomp on their faces. Or at least to grope their genitals and breasts.
Ruthless and brutal but usually genteel even when speaking to the common folk. And they know which fork to use at state banquets. They even know the rules about which neighbor to converse with and for how long. They might not have much to say of interest, but they know how long to dwell upon it before turning to the Senator’s wife across the table. And many even know how to switch to the small-talk appropriate at the corn-cob booth at a state fair.
The idea that the good, as defined by some, might be served by the murder of a national leader, American or Congolese, might be discussed on the deck of a sailboat or the green of the 1st hole at a golf-course. The destruction of a local banking system in the interests of central banks and big-city banks might be planned during dinner at an elegant restaurant in Midtown Manhattan or even at a backyard celebration of a baptism or a bar mitzvah. The lower level workers, the servants of the powers-that-be, have their own networks of information and their own ways of planning the tasks which fall to them by various formal or informal paths. Undoubtedly, much of this discussion and planning takes place at second-tier country clubs or tennis clubs, at backyard barbecues in neighborhoods of houses awfully nice but less than mansions. They don’t just talk about the Red Sox and Yankees during their cocktail parties, waiting for a formal request for proposals on how to deal with a difficult country. Each banklord who has an opinion or a stake in the results will contact Congressmen or friends in the State Department to push for another war or against a war or for construction of a dam in Africa. Kill an African leader or build a dam to supposedly raise living-standards in some region of Africa. The entire globe and not just the West, is but an exploitable realm for the Western elites. This doesn’t mean that they march in lock-step though they seem to develop fixations in a way indicating some factor of mob psychology is at work.
And I repeat, the elite is an underground aristocratic class which sometimes engages in criminal behaviors or sometimes just behaves in secretive ways as they try to protect and enlarge their own wealth ad power. What always remains true is that the rest of us are excluded.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans collude in maintaining their own status as exploitable sheep so long as they are allowed some basic luxuries and a life where they don’t have to exercise initiative or use their minds. Even historical facts are ignored if they conflict with that oh-so comforting view of American history dished out in public schools. What will they do when the luxuries disappear? Will they grumble and continue to fill their roles as an underclass so long as the new television season looks promising?
In fact, I don’t think the model of network is quite rich and complex enough to describe the structure of the ‘secret’ American class system, though it works for systems of communication. I think the proper model would be one similar to that of curved spacetime in modern theories of the universe. And yet there is a major difference in that the curvature of spacetime in this universe is caused by gravity, a force which — so far as we currently know — is only attractive while the forces of what might be called social-spacetime also involve repulsion of a certain type. Those in the power-elite don’t want to drive all others far away only the proper distance; they’re useful if only as oil-rig workers, farmhands, or compliant politicians or government bureaucrats.
Yet, I’ll invite readers to contemplate the words of the American physicist, John Wheeler:
Space acts on matter, telling it how to move. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to curve.
In social or moral terms:
Social-space acts on human beings, telling them how to act. In turn, human beings react back on social-space, telling it how to curve.
Class systems set up different regions of social-space so that some are excluded. At the same time, the regions of power-elites exert a strong force on many other regions, forcing members of lesser classes to orbit the upper-class system, even though not allowing them to come too close. No, Ernest, the difference between us and the rich, at least the established rich, is greater than having money or not. They have money, more importantly power, but they inhabit a different world than the world of the poor and the powerless.
Only the smallest of baby-steps and I’m far from happy with it, but it’s worth thinking about in order that we know how to move forward in describing our current situation in our moral, social, poltical, and economic structures. Such a description is important not for pure ‘academic’ reasons but so that we know how to create better structures, perhaps resembling the moral, social, political, and economic structures so many Americans imagine to already exist.