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Ultimately, all political activity is conspiracy.
A simple legal definition of conspiracy is that it is an agreement among two or more parties to commit some illegal act, but in the larger sense of the word "conspiracy," the element of illegality is not necessary. What is necessary is the element of secrecy, and in the sense of an agreement among two or more parties to undertake some common action for a secret or undisclosed end or by secret or undisclosed means, it ought to be obvious that human beings do little else but conspire throughout their entire lives. One plans to get married, to have children, to pursue a particular career, to promote a particular business transaction, to run for office, or to adopt a certain policy toward the Third World, and each and every one of these courses of action, in so far as it is undertaken in concert with other participants and in so far as the participants do not disclose their plans before it is convenient to do so, constitutes a conspiracy. The collaboration involved in them and the degree of secrecy that attends them are not different in kind from those involved in planning a revolution, an assassination, or a longterm subterfuge by which a close and cryptic oligarchy takes over the government of a republic. Not only do politicians, bankers, priests, Freemasons, Jews, and intelligence agencies conspire, so does everyone else. The main difference between the undisclosed plots and plans of the principals of the most popular and perennial conspiracy theories and those of everyone else is that nobody much cares about Aunt Gertrude's conspiracy with her bridge club to arrange the marriage of her nephew or Mr. Podsnip's conspiracy with his business partners to build more parking lots. But whether we are engaged in designing One World Government or new drapes for the upstairs guest room, all of us are neck-deep in conspiracies of one kind or another most of the time.
Up until the blessings of modern government and journalism were inflicted upon us, this was obviously true of political affairs. The kings and even the republics of Voltaire's age did not spend a great deal of energy informing their subjects and citizens of what they were doing or why they were doing it. To most of the literate public of pre-modern Europe, what went on in the councils of state or even in those parliamentary assemblies that existed was obscure, and to the far larger non-literate public it was totally invisible. The elementary facts of history that any college survey text recounts about the age of Louis XIV or Charles I were unknown to most of their contemporaries, and even well-informed public servants like Samuel Pepys in late-17th century England entertained only the foggiest ideas about what his government was really doing. It is not inaccurate to describe conspiracy as the normal mode of government throughout most of human history, and even today we learn what really went on in a particular administration, war, or congressional battle only after a generation or so of the most intense investigation by participants, journalists, and historians.
Of course, to say that conspiracy is a normal and regular mode of conduct for human beings does not mean that all conspiracy theories are true. The late Murray Rothbard, with his usual clear-headedness, pointed to two abiding flaws of conspiracy theories in an article published in Reason magazine in 1977. One flaw is that simply showing that an event benefitted a particular party (the cui bono argument) does not prove that that party was behind the event; you have to produce empirical evidence of the party's causal role in bringing the event about. The other andmore serious flaw is that conspiracy theorists have an irrepressible habit of piling their theories together to formulate what might be called the Unified Field Theory of History.
"The bad conspiracy analyst," Murray wrote, seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume -- again without evidence -- that a small group of men controls them all, and only seems to send them into conflict.
Sam Francis, "Conspiracy", Chronicles, September 1996
If all political activity is conspiracy, how do we distinguish what is reasonable and what isn't?
A simple legal definition of conspiracy is that it is an agreement among two or more parties to commit some illegal act, but in the larger sense of the word "conspiracy," the element of illegality is not necessary. What is necessary is the element of secrecy, and in the sense of an agreement among two or more parties to undertake some common action for a secret or undisclosed end or by secret or undisclosed means, it ought to be obvious that human beings do little else but conspire throughout their entire lives. One plans to get married, to have children, to pursue a particular career, to promote a particular business transaction, to run for office, or to adopt a certain policy toward the Third World, and each and every one of these courses of action, in so far as it is undertaken in concert with other participants and in so far as the participants do not disclose their plans before it is convenient to do so, constitutes a conspiracy. The collaboration involved in them and the degree of secrecy that attends them are not different in kind from those involved in planning a revolution, an assassination, or a longterm subterfuge by which a close and cryptic oligarchy takes over the government of a republic. Not only do politicians, bankers, priests, Freemasons, Jews, and intelligence agencies conspire, so does everyone else. The main difference between the undisclosed plots and plans of the principals of the most popular and perennial conspiracy theories and those of everyone else is that nobody much cares about Aunt Gertrude's conspiracy with her bridge club to arrange the marriage of her nephew or Mr. Podsnip's conspiracy with his business partners to build more parking lots. But whether we are engaged in designing One World Government or new drapes for the upstairs guest room, all of us are neck-deep in conspiracies of one kind or another most of the time.
Up until the blessings of modern government and journalism were inflicted upon us, this was obviously true of political affairs. The kings and even the republics of Voltaire's age did not spend a great deal of energy informing their subjects and citizens of what they were doing or why they were doing it. To most of the literate public of pre-modern Europe, what went on in the councils of state or even in those parliamentary assemblies that existed was obscure, and to the far larger non-literate public it was totally invisible. The elementary facts of history that any college survey text recounts about the age of Louis XIV or Charles I were unknown to most of their contemporaries, and even well-informed public servants like Samuel Pepys in late-17th century England entertained only the foggiest ideas about what his government was really doing. It is not inaccurate to describe conspiracy as the normal mode of government throughout most of human history, and even today we learn what really went on in a particular administration, war, or congressional battle only after a generation or so of the most intense investigation by participants, journalists, and historians.
Of course, to say that conspiracy is a normal and regular mode of conduct for human beings does not mean that all conspiracy theories are true. The late Murray Rothbard, with his usual clear-headedness, pointed to two abiding flaws of conspiracy theories in an article published in Reason magazine in 1977. One flaw is that simply showing that an event benefitted a particular party (the cui bono argument) does not prove that that party was behind the event; you have to produce empirical evidence of the party's causal role in bringing the event about. The other andmore serious flaw is that conspiracy theorists have an irrepressible habit of piling their theories together to formulate what might be called the Unified Field Theory of History.
"The bad conspiracy analyst," Murray wrote, seems to have a compulsion to wrap up all the conspiracies, all the bad guy power blocs, into one giant conspiracy. Instead of seeing that there are several blocs trying to gain control of government, sometimes in conflict and sometimes in alliance, he has to assume -- again without evidence -- that a small group of men controls them all, and only seems to send them into conflict.
Sam Francis, "Conspiracy", Chronicles, September 1996
If all political activity is conspiracy, how do we distinguish what is reasonable and what isn't?
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