I see the great people’s choice and oracle Diane Abbott
is trotting out her favourite themes again - ‘white people’ and ‘playing divide
and rule’ – as if she is entirely innocent of playing the race card herself at
every opportunity. In her world view it appears there is a secret cabal of
lilywhite puppet masters overseeing our every move, funding this, directing
that, with the express aim of keeping her people down. It’s always keeping people
down, you notice, never raising people up.
Others talk of Papal plots to dominate and control the christian
world, some central force coordinating islamic attempts to overthrow the west, governments
rigging elections and a global plan to deliberately dumb down the population
into reliable, unquestioning drones to do the bidding of the One World President.
Who he, you rightly ask, though answers are thin on the ground. Some posit a
complex familial and historical conjugation of royalty and religion, tangled up
with the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail. Others see a mysterious, shadowy
banker, coveting all the world’s wealth like Smaug in his lair.
I’m not saying people don’t conspire; we do it all the
time, at some level, but I’d have more truck with global conspiracy theories if
there weren’t so many of them. Everywhere you look people believe that dark
forces thwart their ambitions because to believe otherwise reveals some unfortunate
truths about the reality of human nature. In the same way believers in
intelligent design can’t accept that the simplicity and elegance of evolution
requires no contrivance, conspiracy adherents see the hand of Marx, or
Rockefeller, in everything.
They would rather maintain their faith, with all the hard
work that entails, than accept the simpler truth that conspiracies are such
hard work. Keeping secrets is difficult, maintaining the lie is difficult and
justifying every twist and turn that doesn’t accord with the imagined master
plan is tortuously like trying to explain why your god allows floods, famines, earthquakes
and terrorism to happen. It’s so much less contrived to just accept basic human
naivety, fallibility and a yearning to explain the inexplicable.
The very idea of a planned society is attractive at some
level. We all bring to the table what we can and we all take what we need; isn’t
that the basis of socialism? To a struggling population this sounds completely
fair until, of course, you feel that you are putting in more than you are
getting out. Equality and fairness; don’t judge, accept everybody, embrace
diversity. Again, it sounds wonderful until you realise some are accepting their
favours without passing it on. And education; it is far easier to allow the
slow drift downwards than to apply rigour, which looks too much like an authoritarian
past.
Of course, sooner or later, society has to introduce legislation
to enforce what started out as egalitarian ideals, but it just gets out of hand.
Think though, if it really was a massive plot we wouldn’t have access to information
sources like the internet and all our news output would be strictly controlled.
Instead we have unprecedented oversight of everything happening pretty much everywhere.
And what do we do to explain everything, when the chaos of human interaction is
laid bare? We create even more conspiracy theories to address ever more
specific themes.
Social evolution, not planning, has thrown up the
mutations of feminism, black lives matter and all the many factions and
splinter groups of the various gender, race, sexuality, equality and fairness
movements. Occupy, Corbynistas, Nats, Cons, Neo-cons, Greens, Trumpettes,
Hillaryites, Ukip, Charlie Hebdo, Pride... all supposed answers to various
perceived problems. Which of them survive will ultimately depend on whether you
can, metaphorically, breed from them!
In all the hubbub you could be forgiven for being
confused.; for clamping your hands over your ears and shutting out the world.
Which cause to follow; which to despise? Making choices is hard, it’s something
we humans are notoriously poor at doing, which is probably why most people don’t
become activists and just get on with living. But if that melee of competing demands
for attention sounds like a conspiracy to you then maybe you are still looking
for the intelligent designer solution; good luck and don’t forget your tinfoil
hat.
No comments:
Post a Comment