The Russians Are Coming!

Wherever you stand and whatever your personal investment in the notions of free-thinking, critical thinking, rational debate and the like, sooner or later you will come across people who believe you are the irrational one. This past year has been an orgy of indulgence in the most fanciful of theories; lockdowns have given those idle hands plenty of opportunity to spin the most bizarre of conspiratorial webs.

While rational conspiracies undoubtedly exist – to collude, to hide the truth, to smear, to monopolise, to maintain power, to unseat power - most weapons-grade conspiracy theories begin with a fallacy. Probably the most fallacious of all are those posited on world-wide mind control, on subjugation of the population. For some reason they believe that wealthy capitalists want us all held as slaves.

Surely, what capitalists want is for as many people as possible to participate in consuming what they produce, whether that be physical products, services, or even just ideas. They have no need of the troublesome and probably expensive business of shackling anybody to anything; humans have shown themselves all too ready to clap themselves in ideological irons. What capitalists want is lots and lots of gullible people with money to spend.

Whether it is politics, race, religion, sport or whatever, humans will quickly adopt a tribe, and once that tribal bias is formed it is a rare and exceptional individual who can fully break free of the biases it brings. Being rational, thinking humans of course, we instantly dismiss any rebuttal of our concerns as evidence for the same concerns. After all, if we are so unimportant, why would anybody take the time to try and deconstruct our fears and our antipathies? But if, tight-lipped, the supposed conspirators refuse to debunk the theories, that must itself be evidence of a cover up.

And just as ready as we are to accept complicated explanations that confirm our preconceptions, we are quick to dismiss simple explanations that go against them. And so the perfect conditions for disinformation, it seems, are baked into our very nature. Offer somebody the hand of friendship and a body language expert will manage to turn that honest gesture into a deceit. Show the receipts and somebody, somewhere will concoct supposed evidence of a forgery. In a reversal of Occam’s fine razor, the simplest explanation suddenly becomes Russian meddling.

Maybe we want to believe we are cleverer than we are, and that any simple solution has to be the smoke and mirrors of the media? In a world where we have been persuaded to assume that malevolent intent is behind every person in office – shilling for the elites, being useful idiots for the communists – we have lost the concept of simple trust. Does the homeless man on the street corner assume that every coin in his cup is somehow proof of the plot to keep him down?

Perhaps there is nowhere a more insidious twisting of the human psyche than the promulgation of critical race theory. ‘Ebony and Ivory’ was released forty years ago, for goodness’ sake, and yet here we still are. And with each passing year, white people – a minority in the world – are more boldly painted as the bad guys. No matter what concessions are made, apologies offered, or reparations paid, it is not enough. To be white is to be racist, and to try not to be racist is more racist still. I reckon the Russians are behind it all, mark my words! 😉

Believe it or not

If 2020 was the year of the conspiracy theory it was little different from most years, apart from the perfect storm of Brexit, Trump and ma-ma-ma-MY-Corona! But there is nothing new under the sun, so although lots of locked down idle hands embarked on dot-joining fantasies of the highest order, all they really did was take a few of the old myths and use them to create a Hollywood-style remake of the classics.

Examine the claims and watch a few of the YouTubes, read a selection of blog posts and immerse yourself in the gloriously crazy world of what are now referred to as memes and you will see all the old favourites there: Chemtrails, 9/11, Elders of Zion, the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan, Agenda21, the Barcelona Declaration, Paris, The Great Reset, the 5G conspiracy, critical race theory, flat earthers, Q-anon… and of course Covid (and many, many more).

There is a book called Plotto, by William Wallace Cook, originally published in 1928, which purports to contain the basics of every narrative structure you will need for your novel, play, or movie. It is a starting point for struggling fiction writers, bringing together characters and situations from which you can weave your literary masterpiece. It has oft been said that 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual, because you can read in that 70-year old book, astonishing parallels with what is happening today.

But, guess what, you could easily apply much of Orwell’s dark ‘prophecies’ in reverse to events which happened millennia ago. The Greek myths are filled with portents of doom, with mankind being manipulated by playful, fickle and sometimes evil gods. The only difference today are that the gods are no longer called Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon and Athena, but Bezos, Soros, Gates and Zuckerberg. Wait a minute; that last one – you don’t think he’s… Jewish, maybe? (See how easy this is?)

It would seem on the surface that it takes a great deal of denial of reality, of unquestioning credulity and an enormous effort to maintain the complex narrative of your typical convoluted conspiracy theory. That, in contrast, the simplicity of applying Occam’s Razor would seem so easy that almost nobody could be fooled into falling down the rabbit holes. But there must be something deep in the unconscious that prefers complexity to truth, that prefers a plotto to notto. And when you see this it all suddenly makes sense.

The Norse gods, the Egyptian idols, the fabulous manimals of Indian theology, the dreaming of Australia’s aboriginal people. Everywhere you look in history, from the original creation myths to the highly structured rituals of birth and death and the control hierarchies of the Catholic church, you can see the basics of every modern conspiracy myth. When Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup shouted “You can’t handle the truth!” he was shouting at all of us.

In our world nobody got fired just for being bad at their job, nobody got sick by sheer coincidence and no election was won simply by one side getting more actual votes than the other. We crave complexity; there has to be something more and, to be fair, life seems somehow more vibrant, more edgy, if behind every sleepy community some overlord pulls all the strings. Will 2021 be the year we wake from our own Dream Time, taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge and realise that what we've got is just what we see? I somehow doubt it.

Correlations

Everybody is a bigot. This is undeniably true. Nobody has a mind so open to other people’s opinions that they can smile beatifically and accept the validity of every such differing view without question. You simply can’t survive in the vast herd of mankind without taking sides. Family, village, county, country, football team, political affiliations, etc, etc, etc. We ALL harbour antipathy towards some views and look more kindly on others.

Well, maybe there’s a the odd little, old, white-haired guru who has mastered his consciousness and conquered human concerns, but what use is he, sitting there, cross-legged on top of his holy mountain? Besides, no matter how other-worldly his mien, surely he must be working a scam, no? But put aside such ignoble suppositions and grant that there are a handful of such mystics who can actually practice true impartiality and there are still 7.8 billion of us who are in thrall to bias; possibly the best we can do is accept it and take steps to moderate it.

In these days of lockdown I am spending far too much time on Twitter, exposing myself to the plethora of deadly, infectious, perverse beliefs that inhabit that realm, and in the process I am aware I am reinforcing some of my own entrenched beliefs. I know it is my own biases which drive me to certain conclusions, but there are some quite clear correspondences between certain collective mindsets which may help to explain some of the lunacy out there.

As a big fan of the principle of Occam’s Razor I tend to view with deep scepticism any attempt to add two to a potato and get conspiracy. But there they are, Occam-free disciples of what they think is ‘the bigger picture’. The more likely they are to have been struck done by the Covid-5G connection, the more likely they seem to think that the Conservative government is somehow to blame. Those who harbour antipathy against the current government are also highly likely to have voted to remain in the EU; some of them even signal their delusions by keeping the redundant FBPE hashtag in their Twitter bios.

But one thing which universally seems to connect the more fragile and gullible is the insistence that they, alone, possess the open-mindedness to tell fact from fiction. When this is coupled with the characteristic exchange and response mechanism you can usually predict the outcome. It goes like this:

·       Here's my totally hatstand theory, founded entirely in truth!

·       That's just ridiculous.

·       But, see the facts. Look at my research! (Link to nutjob blog)

·       Those are not facts.

·       You have a closed mind!

·       No, I have a functioning brain.

·       Hater!!!!

This is immediately followed by a block because then, see, they must have won the argument. Or at the very least they have protected themselves from yet another source of dissent and wrapped themselves more tightly in the self-reinforcing bubble of delusion. How fragile must be your grip on reality that you cannot tolerate dissent and get so angry with anybody who challenges your unhinged gibbering?

Confucius, he say: Don't eat bat and cat and shit...

Anger is, in my worldview, an immature emotion and one engaged in by people of a less rational bent. There is no need for it and it usually indicates a low-information approach to life. But the knee-jerk blockers are so confused by other people’s lack of anger that even that makes them angry. They seem to even hate the fact that you wish to engage with them in a civilised manner. I find this highly amusing… which is why I continue to do it.

Fiction is just more fun

They say fact is stranger than fiction and at times the truth is so oddball that it wouldn’t pass through the sieve of readers’ credulity, but within its own context fiction has the power to transcend every law of existence. We can’t time travel and as entertaining and believable such science fiction tales are, the fact still remains that time travel isn’t possible. But the clay of conspiracy theory, fired in the crucible of social media, has the power to warp reality so far that some people will fall for it.

Today, I encountered the following tweet: “According to some people, HRC died Sept 2016. Today, HRC is a clone. I've seen some very strange info about this theory, it's definitely interesting.” Woah, what, Hillary Clinton is a clone? The tweeter, not to be misunderstood, doubled down with: “Apparently there could be as many as 2000 people who are influential and famous who are cloned people under control via mind control programs like MK Ultra…” Whaaaa? Milton Keynes is controlling minds now?

Once you escape the bounds of gravity’s reality there is nothing that can’t become plausible in the malleable minds of people who have the time to dwell on such things. Often, I find, it’s the same people who believe in global conspiracies to keep the poor poor and imagine that the coming of the messiah is made flesh in gnarly old liars like Jeremy Corbyn. But not always; there are some alarmingly warped minds on the right, too.

Of course, the notion of mind control is appealing, especially to governments who want a placid, pliable population, but also to those who imagine they are the Honest Joes in the fight against such regimes. And thus Project MKUltra, as wacky as it seems, was a real thing. The Cold War spawned paranoia of epic proportions and if the reds under the beds were going to be resisted the CIA needed to give itself powers to work outside the rule of law. After all, they were the good guys, right?

But if you have ever been approached by a friend or a colleague who uses, as the prelude to a revelation, the phrase, “This is just between me and you, right?” you will know how hard it is to keep a secret of even the most mundane kind, let alone one involving thousands, if not millions of willing and conscripted co-conspirators. Like gods, most conspiracy theories are reverse-engineered from observed or imagined events.

You’re broke, the car just fell apart and the landlord is raising the rent. It is far more likely that these phenomena are totally unrelated, in fact that unrelatedness is likely to an extent approaching absolute certainty. But how much more comforting to find a unifying single theory that explains all your misfortunes in one easy, somebody-else-is-to-blame package? ‘They’ are out to get you; the New World Order, The Vatican, The CIA, Richard Branson and Dominic Cummins have conspired to keep you down.

But wait, why would all these powerful entities want to get at little old me? Maybe it’s not just me? Oh my, it all seems so clear now. You’ve watched The Matrix and now you imagine you’ve been red-pilled. Wake up, everybody, you cry. And then, when your pleas hit deaf ears, it is a simple step to imagine that this proves your deranged imaginings. Are they all in on it, or are they all dupes? From then on the metaphorical tinfoil hat is always on your head to protect you from…

From what, exactly? When confronted with something that defies your immediate ability to explain it, why do people find comfort in the convolutions of conspiracy? Maybe it’s because the truth is mundane and we are not the very special creations we imagine we are? I have my own theory about this, borne out of seeing the horrific rise of so-called ‘reality’ TV, the obsessions with other-worldly nonsense and the elevation of idiots to icons. Conspiracy theories are nothing more than entertainment for the unenlightened. Or is this just what they want you to think?

Elite

Oh, the old globalist conspiracy reared its head again recently, although I expect the job of the conspiracy theorists is never just part time; more of a mission than a one night stand. The ‘global elite’ goes the trope, seek to keep us in poverty. Really, they seek to keep us in poverty do they; why would they do that? Surely they would be far better elite global conspiracists if they sought to make us just wealthy enough that we don’t whine about it and dangled just enough gewgaws in our acquisitive little faces that we kept recycling that wealth and in the process made themselves all the richer still.

But such logic can never surface above the film of envy which cloaks every leftists manifesto for their perfect world, filled with perfect humans who never want more than they need. But think about it, really, if your serfs are happy and fed they are less likely to agitate too strongly for change. What would and does make all of us poorer, however, is an insistence on a nebulous, unobtainable ‘equality’ which seeks to restrict those who do better and advance those who don’t. When every little setback is given its own special place in the pantheon of grievance we end up punishing thrift and rewarding indolence and fraud.

Conspiracy? We don’t need conspiracy when so many people have brains hard-wired to see injustice and conclude, therefore, it must be Tory injustice. People being killed off by austerity? Deliberate policies to punish people for falling ill? Seriously, you think that Tories (spit that word, son, spit it) actually, deliberately, wish to cause people harm? Wish to push people into needing expensive treatment which they then deny them? How sick must your mind be to come up with stuff like that? And in any case it’s what you would denigrate as ‘Tory types’ who will foot the bill; it always is. (And you can bet it isn’t Tories who are currently defrauding universal credit recipients to the tune of millions.)

If you want a simpler theory, here’s the evolution-versus-divine-creation comparison: What if making everybody wealthier made the rich wealthier still? What if, people actually having money to spend better serves the globalist ambitions than keeping them in poverty? Steal from people and soon they have nothing left to steal [give a man a fish]. Or allow people to amass spending power of their own and let them buy stuff from you forever [teach him to fish]. Which is the more likely? Which is the least trouble? Which of them requires the least amount of collusion and contorted conspiracy?

Meanwhile we keep on researching poverty and in doing so introduce ever more measures to tell people how badly done by they are when we should be explaining to them how to best participate in the only economic model that has ever really worked – western capitalism - a system in which output has increased 100-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled in the last two hundred years. But all this is wasted on those who would rather wallow in grievance and believe the world is set against them. Now, excuse me, as I must go and skin another poor person for the pot.

Tin hats at half-mast

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.

Conspiracy Theory

Whisper it and pass it on, they are out to get us. The best conspiracy stories spread quietly, underground, much as the events they seek to reveal. Occasionally they gain a foothold in the wider media where they spawn a demand for further information, but usually by then the plotters are dim and distant memories and the clandestine purpose consigned to history. But humans conspire all the time and keeping secrets is almost a part of our nature; from surprise birthday parties to overthrowing governments they are ever present.

But some people are not satisfied with your everyday machinations and seek the exotic; some even go ‘full-Icke’ over their research. And that phenomenon is becoming more prevalent. Once, all we had were libraries, so conspiracy nuts had to put in some long hours and hard graft to uncover truths, by poring over dusty tomes and painstakingly putting two and two together. But now we have the internet and where once the determined researcher was a lone figure, struggling to persuade others it is now the work of but a few tweets and a cobbled-together website to recruit believers.

The gold standard for a conspiracy theory is one that affects billions yet is unknown to all but a few. Ideally at least one of the few will have died in mysterious circumstances following an incautious disclosure. And like all the best novel plots, you have to work backwards; start with an ending then carefully interweave reality with a bit of fiction and use any piece of historical record as sources of evidence to support your after-the-fact suppositions. Once you have planted the seeds the blogs will grow; each product of imagination adding provenance to your claims.

Take this site, for instance, concerned with the shadowy objective of World Government and the – whisper its name - Coudenhove-Kalergi Plan. Here’s an extract:

“Although no textbook mentions Kalergi, his ideas are the guiding principles of the European Union. The belief that the peoples of Europe should be mixed with Africans and Asians, to destroy our identity and create a single mestizo race, is the basis of all community policies that aim to protect minorities. Not for humanitarian reasons, but because of the directives issued by the ruthless Regime that machinates the greatest genocide in history. The Coudenhove-Kalergi European Prize is awarded every two years to Europeans who have excelled in promoting this criminal plan. Among those awarded with such a prize are Angela Merkel and Herman Van Rompuy.”

Try to Google-search this fabled ‘prize’ and beyond Wikipedia mostly what you get are more blogs. Ah, but this proves that all the world’s media are controlled by the same silent forces that seek our destruction, they will claim. Perfect. Secret plan – check. Long history – check. Many of originators now dead – check. Lots and lots of ‘evidence’ all over the internet – Oh yes. Bingo; we approach full-Icke.

Full Icke

But of course, evidence is not proof. Supposed facts are not necessarily all they seem and in the murky world of Internet ‘historians’ two plus two can equal whatever you want it to equal. Maybe it is simple envy. Maybe impotent keyboard warriors have found common cause in their helplessness and they secretly crave power over the rest of us. So while others cry ‘no conspiracy!’ is that just what they want us to think? Could it be that it's the conspiracy theorists who are really plotting to take over the world?

The truth is in here...

As ever, Twitter has been alight with left and right arguing the toss over immigration. Depending on your perspective it is variously: a human right, an unmitigated disaster, essential for our survival, pivotal to our overthrow and all stations in between. Whatever the merits, or demerits of net immigration exceeding 300,000 per annum into the UK it surely cannot be denied that it is a strain on every aspect of our nationhood: housing, health education, transport and welfare are negatively impacted beyond our ability to deal with it rationally. And our identity as a nation is threatened as a result. It has been and will continue to be at the heart of our politics, when it really ought to be a near non-issue.

Despite the Blair government’s desire to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity’ I don’t have enough faith in human cooperation to believe it is part of some sort of global conspiracy. I realise, however, that my often repeating that “I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but...” makes me sound like I do believe... or worse, makes me a ‘conspiracy denier’, denier being the pejorative word of choice to silence common sense.

So what is going on in the civilised world? What about the Frankfurt school, Agenda 21, Common Purpose, Cultural Marxism and New World Government? What about Davos and the Bilderberg Group and the well-known inner circle of bankers who, ‘as everybody knows’, work with the Zionists to keep everybody poor? All these theories about shadowy movements, cliques and cabals have traction with malleable minds, especially those of the young and the disadvantaged and the mentally feeble, as the driving force behind every bad thing in the world.

But think about it for a moment. Oxfam’s annual wealth report is intended to feed the anger at apparent inequality when a simple examination of everybody you, personally, know should tell you that we are far from equal. The very diversity that so many worship as a new faith is directly contrary to the fanciful ideal of equality. It is not in the interests of anybody to keep those they control poor; poor people have a nasty historical habit of actually conspiring to bring down their governments. Where rulers have amassed great wealth at the expense of their citizens it has usually been through simple, crude greed and they have often met with sticky ends.

In sorting the truth from the chaff, I usually look to the mighty razor of Occam to solve the ‘mystery’ and I think the explanation is at once both simpler and more complex than the idea of an elite setting out to control the world. Oh, for sure, I have no doubt that such things have been discussed, but such plots soon unravel. For the current crop of theories to bear examination, literally thousands of world leaders, parliamentarians, influencers, advisors and financiers would have to be ‘in on it’. And I just don’t believe that people greedy enough to want it are capable of the levels of agreement and secrecy that would be required, especially given the huge timescales involved. This whole inequality ‘conspiracy’ goes back generations.

No, our willingness to see connivance everywhere is down to the fundamental flaw of democracy. In the absence of the mythical ‘benign dictator’ representative democracy is the least-worst system yet devised. Its most democratic aspect is the fact that it cannot please the majority who vote for it; to a greater or lesser degree almost all people are tasked by the societies it creates. Those least disadvantaged don’t see what the fuss is all about and the rest insist that this group pays a penalty for that lesser disadvantage by way of tax, thus increasing their level of discontent. It’s the closest thing to equality we are ever likely to get – equality of disenchantment.

We all want fairness, I believe that, but we don’t want to be responsible for it, so we elect governments to impose fairness on our behalf and hand to them the instruments of control. What do we expect? And as each successive generation wants ever more nuanced fairness we get ever more fractured thinking and legislation intended to make us be nicer turns us all into potential thought criminals. Locking down imagined ‘hate speech’ is quickly portrayed as police-statery. Those with wealth try to hang on to it, avoiding tax via the very loopholes designed to encourage wealth creation for the good of all. We end up with the inevitable ‘them and us’ scenario as the demands on welfare grow and those who fund it try to avoid doing so.

It’s not a conspiracy inflicted on the many by the few, but a series of uncoordinated strictures imposed by the disjointed, but well-meaning will of the majority on themselves. Mass self-harm, if you will. Yes, some groups practise deception and exclusion, as any ‘club’ will do, but not in concert with any planet-wide communion of evil. This, of course, is a disappointing conclusion and the more dramatic spectre of global domination by dark forces – as inhabits every branch of superstition and folklore and religion and cultish creed – is a far more attractive story to tell around the camp fire. You want a lightbulb moment? The illuminati are in your head*.

(*Or is that just what they want you to think?)

Infamy!

“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” So goes Kenneth Williams’ classic punchline in 1964’s Carry on Cleo, on discovering the dastardly plot to murder his character, Julius Caesar… or was it Biggus Dickus? I forget, but there’s always a plot, isn’t there? According to ‘divers sources’ the word plot can be a noun or a verb and it can mean, variously: ‘the main events of a play, novel or film’; ‘a small piece of ground marked out for a purpose such as building or gardening’; ‘a graph showing the relationship between two variables’; ‘a diagram, chart, or map’; or ‘the making, in secret, by a group of people, a plan to do something illegal or harmful’.

Shakespeare had Hamlet say “the play’s the thing” but of course it’s the plot which is the thing. It’s the plot that makes the money shot, after all. When it comes to global domination of national economies the idea that foolish people naively entered into commitments they could not fulfil is too mundane, too ordinary, too much like real life to ever make it to the silver screen. What we need to satisfy the full-on conspiracy nut-job is a driving logic, a subterranean imperative for extreme prejudice to be levied against the unsuspecting herds of human cattle to compel them to stampede toward a cliff of their own choosing. Oh, it is so clear now, in hindsight, how the evil bankers, in league with the royal heads of Europe and the lizard people manipulated the very laws of the financial universe to create chaos.

But wait a minute; a theory is defined as: ‘a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something’; ‘a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based’; ‘an idea used to account for a situation or justify a course of action’; or ‘a collection of propositions to illustrate the principles of a subject’. If it is to have any validity a theory should not only account for a historical series of events, but it should also be capable of predicting the outcome of future such events. Thus, ‘what goes up must come down’, ‘if it sounds too good to be true, etc.’ and ‘pride comes before a fall’

Forgive me, then, for not having much truck with those really big global conspiracy theories which only surface after the action. Much as with religion, when such ‘theories’ are revealed before the events they purport to explain I may begin to take notice. Ah, but, say the tinfoil hatters, that’s exactly what they want you to say, conveniently deflecting the burden of proof from their own goal line. To which I respond, but what’s the point? Really, what is the point?

I mean, owning all the money in the world is a ludicrously meaningless end game; once you have all the money the game is over, the money becomes worthless and what happens next? Deliberately putting people out of work and into poverty is equally pointless – you’d surely have far more to gain from a billion cheap workers doing your bidding than a billion pissed off workless folk with sharpened sticks heading your way. It absolutely makes no sense, smacking more of a need to have a complex fictional reason rather than accepting a more mundane and simple chain of events. Again, like religion… or left-wing politics.

I don’t doubt that some people conspire to corner markets, to gerrymander elections and to fabricate statistics in their favour. And undoubtedly there are conspiracies among we mere rabble to best our rivals, but in my experience successful people often turn out to be annoyingly normal, frequently quite dull and refreshingly frank about their good fortune; right place right time and all that. Not evil overlords at all. Given the choice of the Greek debacle being engineered from the outset by masters of dark arts or being the result of human frailty and Mr Fuckup, I’ll go with fuck-up every time.

Piece of Cake!

All the world’s a stage, wrote Shakespeare, and the stage is set for conspiracy! I’m not going to write about Nigel Farage; plenty of others (in fact everybody else) are already doing that anyway. Suffice to say that whatever you thought about him on Tuesday you still think the same today, unless you were undecided in which case you’ll have probably seen the press and politicians laying into him, thought it all a bit un-British and gone out to buy yourself a membership and a nice new kipper tie. Far from harming the party’s reputation, the mud-slinging has been a rather effective recruitment drive.

No, Nigel doesn’t need my help, so today I’m writing about conspiracy theories and all the fanciful notions and secret meanings people see in events which have the simplest of real explanations. At least I was going to write about conspiracy but instead, as you never know who’s watching, I’m really going to write about cakes. Bear with me because it is a subject fraught with difficulty and danger, not least due to the proliferation of internet sites dealing with the subject. For a confection consisting variously of flour, sugar, fat, eggs and some odds and ends, they don’t half make a meal of it. What, to you or me is just a mash up of ingredients - follow the recipe and bung it in the oven - is an obsession for some.

People get seriously worked up about it all, discussing the subtleties of sequence and the hidden messages in the handling techniques. And the type of cake you bake has much to say about you and your personal values. To the uninitiated it might just be a chocolate cake, but did you ever stop to examine the subliminal racist message you are sending there? Then there’s the ‘Lemon Drizzle Cake’. It’s yellow - LDC - Liberal Democrat Conspirators? The clues are all there if you look hard enough and if you want to see them badly enough and once you have seen through the subterfuge, you will keep on looking. Take nothing at face value.

Safe with a Battenberg? You’d think so wouldn’t you, but did you stop for one second to consider what this innocent-looking, marzipan encased teatime treat is actually saying? It can’t decide on a single colour (multi-coloural, if you like) it is simultaneously both sweet and yet bland and it is deliberately designed to offend nobody; surely a cake to suit everybody and the perfect cipher for the European Union. But what about that German name? Doesn’t seem so harmless now, does it?

The world-wide-web is awash with these traps for the naïve; is it frosting or icing? Do you use butter or margarine, Demerara or Muscovado? And every time you view or post a recipe online you leave your sticky little fingerprints in the butter cream, from which it is possible to construct a detailed narrative of every aspect of your life. You think this isn’t happening? You haven’t been listening; once you get sucked into this murky world it becomes habit-forming and you keep coming back for more. It’s a honey trap.

A million misspelt, poorly punctuated and grammatically inept blogs out there daily disseminate and in turn collect the distilled hopes and dreams of a billion housewives. It’s a ploy; for every genuine, well-crafted dairy-based diary turned out with love and care there are a hundred cobbled-together sites monitored by the security agencies. And what a ploy it is. These sites apparently, consisting of nothing more than stream-of-consciousness, burnt fairy cake tales accompanied by blurry, badly composed photographs, are visited thousands of times a day by the addicted masses, willingly selling their souls for a few tips about the use of cherries and almonds.

Forget Agenda 21, the Bilderbergers, Common Purpose, New World Order, Elders of Zyklon, The Illuminati, Opus Dei, The Black Dragon Society, the Fabians or the Bullingdon Club. Put aside musings over chemtrails, predictive programming, water fluoridation, the moon landings, the grassy knoll and the looming great worldwide blackout. These are just diversions to divert you from the truth. While you are worrying about the rise of the Feminazis, your wives are obsessed with the perfect bake – what Shakespeare really wrote was “All the world’s a cake”. Or is that just a conspiracy theory?

Conspiracy!

There may not yet be need for the national distribution of tinfoil hats and ‘Keep Calm’ public service announcements, but there is something badly wrong at the heart of British politics. Nobody in Parliament quite knows what to do any more and nobody outside quite knows how to vote; just what do the parties stand for? Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Franciscan friar William of Ockham gave his name to the theory known nowadays as Occam’s razor whereby, among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.  Or in modern parlance the least complicated explanation is most likely to be the truth. But to hell with all that theoretical bunkum - everybody loves a good conspiracy theory, don’t they? And both sides have them:

Polemicist gob-for-hire, Owen Jones likes to talk about some odd sort of right wing conspiracy whereby the (Boo!) Nasty Tories seek to permanently subjugate the former working classes, denying them a living wage and forever keeping them down. They hiss and point and stare down their beaky, toff noses while quaffing Champagne and passing legislation to allow their cronies to buy bits of the NHS even while millions die in unstaffed wards. Oh and they closed down t’pits in which the young Owen once dreamed of earning an honest crust. Now he’s reduced to spouting his neo-Marxist waffle at any newspaper willing to pay his fee.

Well, I’ve looked into all this right-wing conspiracy how’s-yer-father and as far as I can see, those with a right-of-centre bent are far too busy making a living to give a toss about keeping the workers down. The only thing they’re bothered about is paying as little tax as the system will allow. One thing that seems actually demonstrable is that in administrations practicing a light touch, almost laissez-faire approach to their economies the role of the state shrinks, as do its costs, as prosperity rises for almost everybody. Because these devious capitalists actually cause jobs! Of course some people can’t be helped, whatever system is in place.

On the other side of things we have the left and oh my, what a lot of devious meddling has been going on since 1848 when Uncle Karl offered up the family recipe  for, er… the destruction of the family, among other things. We get Lenin and Stalin and Mao and all sorts of purges and five-year plans and plots to murder intellectuals before they think about you too cleverly. We get Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and we get Jean Monnet, the architect of the EU, with his plan for a full-on federal European state by stealth, which is going so well that even when countries try to leave they can be told to vote again or are forced to follow economic bail out plans that leave their people starving.

We get Cultural Marxism and Common Purpose and Demos and the Fabians and the Frankfurt School and so on. Every campus is riddled with right-on children wearing Che Guevara tee shirts and dreaming up witty and ungrammatical slogans for placards. We get all sorts of variants on the theme such as Utopian Socialism and Anarcho-Syndicalism and Mutualism and even, oxymoronically enough, Libertarian Socialism. My god, Marx could make a few bob on licensing if he was still about. It’s no wonder his followers can’t run a country - they can’t even agree what flavour of pinko they are. How about, for the chattering classes, Mocha-Marxa-Cappu-Commuccino?

And so to those conspiracy theories: Capitalist conspiracies - for they do exist – always revolve around a few people forming cartels to make big profits, usually by offering something too good to be true and relying on human greed to do the rest, taking advantage of a few thousand gullible mugs. Socialist conspiracies on the other hand involve ambitious, evolved, disconnected Über -brains plotting over many years the means of bringing about the subjugation of hundreds of millions of people to a form of interminable Sisyphean serfdom on the basis that only the schemers know what is best for everybody else. But which is true?

Sherlock's method quickly dismisses the socialist conspiracy as impossible, so where does Occam’s razor guide us? Will people fall for the stealthy, clever-clever socialist plan for the breakdown of society by attacking its traditions and criminalising words and deeds and thought itself, eventually driving everything down to its lowest level in pursuit of an undefined equality in which everybody is too poor to rob? (Labour currently call that ‘One Nation’.) Or is it more likely that some greedy rich bastards try to get richer by exploiting the just-as-greedy poor? Either way it seems we're doomed.

 You know what? Owen must have it right, after all. No matter which way you look at it, Communism is just too bloody complicated and implausible to ever work - all those rules! Now excuse me while I fashion myself a hat...

(PS: You want real conspiracy? Try this: Christopher Booker)