Sutton’s Law In Action

     As I age, I have more and more days when I feel I have nothing left to say that I haven’t said before, possibly many times. Today is such a day – and damn me, it’s not yet 4:30 in the morning. This is not the way I prefer to start the day.

     That might seem an odd introduction to an article of importance. Nevertheless it is an accurate picture of my mindset at this time. The reasons are not far to seek. They fall under this label, which is appallingly relevant to the national discourse and our current political and social crises.

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     I have an immense admiration for Ann Barnhardt. She exhibits a degree of courage that American women should emulate, and should teach their daughters to emulate. She says things few others are willing to say – and she lives according to her expressed convictions.

     However, every now and then, Ann sidles up against the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle. It often meshes with her passionate nature. Her most recent piece, which focuses on the commonly used drug Ivermectin and its possible efficacy against the Wuhan Virus, is relevant. Please read it all, as it contains information of potentially huge significance to Americans concerned about the WuFlu and what it could do to them.

     Now, I’m not a medical man. My knowledge of medical and pharmacological matters is so tiny as to be nonexistent. So I can say nothing of substance about Ivermectin or any other treatment currently being used, proposed, discussed, or dismissed with regard to the COVID-19 virus. I simply lack the expertise to say anything about any of them, and I refuse to allow superstitious reasoning to intrude on a subject of this importance.

     So: Stipulate that Ivermectin is an effective treatment and / or preventative for the Chinese Crud. Allow further that it’s cheap and safe, and has been widely used in the Third World for some time. Allow still further that a cheap, safe, common drug for combatting the WuFlu would not make as much money for the pharmaceutical companies as a brand new, patent protected, hideously expensive drug that only they could provide. Profit normally varies directly with price, even in industries as heavily regulated as pharmaceuticals.

     Does any of that imply that the pharmacorps are actively trying to suppress news about the effectiveness of Ivermectin? Or Hydroxychloroquine? Or whatever other drugs – remember, please, that I’m not a medical authority – that have been discussed as remedies or preventatives against COVID-19?

     I can’t see it. What it does imply is that the pharmacorps would see the more expensive drugs as better for their balance sheets. It would follow naturally that they would promote those drugs. They might even seek to have governments confer legal or regulatory advantages upon their new drugs. Sutton’s Law applies here as in innumerable comparable circumstances. But an a priori conspiracy is not necessary to explain their current behavior.

     Ann doesn’t quite say that there’s a conspiracy to suppress knowledge and availability of Ivermectin. She does anticipate such action – and let’s be quite frank: it is possible, especially given the potential utility of a brand-new drug available only from one or two sources as a tool of social and political control. Should it come to pass, it would be, just as Ann says, a monstrous crime against Mankind generally. But it’s not guaranteed to happen. It might never happen. Ann’s observations properly constitute an exhortation to be watchful, not a reason to break out the torches and pitchforks...though it can be said with much justice that we had ample reasons to muster those items long before this.

     A posteriori coordination that results from common motives is an easier explanation to substantiate than an express, a priori conspiracy. Awareness of such common motives provides a reason to be vigilant, but it falls short of a justification to indict. For further thoughts on the subject, I recommend this essay from April 2016, and perhaps a review of these other pieces on the general subject of conspiracy.

Try To See The Little Pictures

     There’s a general preference, embedded somewhere in the human psyche, for simple explanations. Multicausality frustrates and irritates us; we want unicausality, at least when it’s available. One of the tragedies of life under the veil of Time is how seldom unicausality is even imaginable, much less plausible.

     I know, I know: you’re about to cite Occam’s Razor, aren’t you? But Occam’s Razor isn’t a law of nature; it’s a heuristic device, a technique that accelerates investigation. We don’t prefer simple explanations because they’re more likely to be right. Indeed, the opposite is the case. We test the simplest available explanations first because they’re the easiest to disprove!

     About ninety-five percent of all scientific investigation is concerned with the elimination of possible explanations for phenomena. The simpler the potential explanation, the easier it is to design an experiment whose results could conclusively disprove it. That’s really all there is to it.

     But that doesn’t help the average man to cope with his instinctive attraction to devil theories.

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     A devil theory is one that attributes some terrible condition to the conscious action of an agent or agency that strove – successfully, of course – to bring it about. Every devil theory implies all the following:

• Without the deliberate actions of the devil, the condition would not have come about.
• Conscious actors peripheral to the condition are merely remora, essentially irrelevant to the cause of the condition;
• If we succeed in finding and destroying the devil, the condition will become soluble. Indeed, it might go away without any other remediation efforts.

     Most conspiracy theories are devil theories. The conspirators aren’t always named or defined. However, one or more deplored conditions are attributed to their conscious action. The proponent implies that exposing and destroying the conspiracy will make those conditions correctable.

     It is among the truly great ironies that the purveyors of devil theories also propose government action to counteract the devils’ machinations. The great Milton Friedman noted this in his Foreword to William E. Simon’s book A Time For Truth:

     The view that if there is a problem, if there is something wrong, the way to deal with it is to pass a law, set up a governmental agency (staffed, of course, by the intellectuals urging this solution), and use the police power of the state to correct it is, as Mr. Simon demonstrates so well, a superficially appealing view. It is simple, as well as simpleminded, and appeals to our natural impulse to take personal credit for the good things that happen and blame a "devil" for bad things...
     On the other hand, the view that the government is the problem, not the cure, and that the invisible hand of private cooperation through the market is far more effective than the visible hand of the bureaucrat is a sophisticated, subtle view that is far harder to get across. It requires thought, not emotion, to comprehend. It does not lend itself to ringing phrases, to high-flowered sentiment, to promises to particular people or particular groups. Moreover, the market has no press agents who will trumpet its successes and gloss over its failures; the bureaucracy does.

     There are many reasons for my admiration of Dr. Friedman. The above is only one of the lesser ones. And with that as our preface, we turn to the massively irritating, sociopolitically devastating phenomenon of the Chinese Coronavirus: the Kung Flu, the Lung Pao Sicken, the Pangolin Plague, or the Bat Gobbler Bug more commonly known as COVID-19.

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     My esteemed Co-Conspirator Colonel Bunny has written feelingly of his conviction that the various major maladies we suffer have been deliberately inflicted upon us:

     The same analysis makes sense with the issues of mass immigration, fiscal lunacy, monetary recklessness, black hatred and cultural failure, and the willful and determined refusal to deal with the Antifa scourge -- Antifa the shock troops and street thugs who serve Soros and the DNC.

     It is simply im…bleeping…possible to believe that what has been done in these areas is motivated by a sincere concern for the welfare of the American nation and its citizens.

     As the legal maxim has it: People intend the natural consequences of their acts.

     Yes, they do.

     As regards COVID-19 and the “containment and remediation” efforts, I’m right there with him. The notion that those who have attempted to imprison us in our homes, shut down our businesses, destroy our social and entertainment outlets, and generally put an end to American society as we know it have done so out of “sincere concern” for our well-being is too ludicrous to entertain. Indeed, the Colonel cites a Zero Hedge article that elaborates on the theme. But one snippet from that article will stimulate a few extra thoughts:

     We’re not saying that Covid doesn’t kill people, and we’re not suggesting that Covid is a bioweapon released on the public for nefarious purposes. (although that’s certainly a possibility.) What we’re saying is that scheming elites and their allies in the media and politics see every crisis as an opportunity to advance their own authoritarian agenda.

     In fact, the restructuring of basic democratic institutions can only take place within the confines of a major crisis. That’s why the CIA, the giant corporations, the WHO and the Gates Posse gathered for meetings that anticipated an event just like the Covid outbreak. They needed a crisis of that magnitude to achieve their ultimate objective; total control. That’s what they mean when they say there will be “no return to normal”, they mean they’re replacing representative government with a new totalitarian model in which the levers of state power will be controlled by them. So while the virus outbreak might be coincidental, the management of the crisis certainly is not.

     Note the phrasing in the first paragraph above. The author is “not suggesting...(although that’s certainly a possibility.)” This is a prime example of “weasel-wording.” The author is suggesting that COVID-19 was a deliberately engineered and released bioweapon; indeed, I’d wager that he believes it and wants us to believe it too.

     Is it possible that COVID-19 is an engineered bioweapon inflicted upon us to advance the purposes of a power-hungry Super-Elite? Yes, it is. But whether or not that’s the case has essentially no bearing on the governmental responses to the pandemic. Whether COVID-19 was accidentally or deliberately released, the governmental responses would have been exactly the same.

     Why? Because public officials and their hangers-on are opportunists. In the classic phrase of Rahm Emanuel, they never let a serious crisis go to waste. Every such crisis is an opportunity for them to expand and intensify their power. When one happens along, they leap at it.

     When a conspiracy is proposed, always check whether opportunism would serve to explain the facts. Opportunism is always in operation, and unlike conspiracy, it doesn’t need to hide its face.

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     A large conspiracy is the most difficult thing in the world to conceal. It requires communication, coordination, and operational secrecy that become geometrically more implausible as the number of persons involved increases. (The probability that a group with a common secret will “leak” rises with the square of the number of persons in the group.) Even if we postulate the most powerful motivations imaginable, the notion that a conspiracy that involves a thousand persons wouldn’t “leak” is mind-bogglingly unlikely. The operation of advancement-seeking and profit-seeking motives among those at the lower levels of the conspiratorial hierarchy virtually guarantees that someone down low in the pyramid would trade his knowledge for some form of compensation, whether internally or externally available.

     A conspiracy postulated to exist within a government would be far too large to be concealed successfully. The “Russian Collusion hoax” conspiracy can stand as an example – and that one didn’t require anywhere near a thousand participants.

     But we want that Big Picture, that identifiable Devil. We want him because we need to hate him. And of course, we need to believe we can target and destroy him. If he’s not there, what on Earth would we do?

     Yet the little pictures – the many, many men, from low status to high, who see an opportunity to grab more of what they most value – are both easier to see and more plausible in the scheme of things. Check for them first. By their motivations shall ye know them. Those motivations are most easily and reliably deduced from the careers they’ve chosen: the positions they’ve taken and clung to like man-sized barnacles.

Quickies: What You Want To See

     Ace posts a quick dismissal of conspiracy theories:

     First of all, I am on guard against them because they are always something constructed to suit a purpose or reinforce an already-held belief. but even though they are backwards-created from an already-held belief, they are then used to justify that belief.

     The conspiracy theory generates the "evidence," and then the evidence is used to prove the conspiracy theory.

     And the already-believed idea suggest the conspiracy theory, and then the conspiracy theory is used as "independent evidence" to support the already-believed idea.

     This is circular logic, which is to say: Not logic.

     Conspiracy theories are just a form of wishcasting, a term I use instead of "forecasting." Wishcasting doesn't involve forecasting the future from evidence, but from working backwards from the worldview you'd like to see vindicated.

     That said, it's a blurry line where "informed speculation" shifts into "pure speculation" and then shifts into "conspiracy theory."

     This is largely accurate – yet conspiracies, in the sense of persons with a common motivation who plan and collaborate in secret, have existed, will exist, and probably exist today. The problem with conspiracy theories is almost entirely a problem with conspiracy theorists. In brief, they’re excessively determined to see what they want to see. They want you to see it, too.

     Conspiracy theories are almost always devil theories. The desire to associate a devil with a despised evil is incredibly strong. It provides a target to be attacked and destroyed, after which the evil will presumably vanish:

     People prefer conspiratorial explanations over the more depersonalized sort. It gives them hope that the evils they see can be traced to specific evildoers, who can then be eliminated, solving the problem for all time (or until the next batch of conspirators gets its engine running).

     But a monocausal explanation for a persistent condition is usually almost completely wrong. Note the ‘almost.’ The cited influence might play a part, but it’s seldom determinative in and of itself. Quoth Arthur Herzog on "the rotten apple theory of police corruption:"

     ...a few bad cops cause the trouble; get rid of the bad cops and you’ve “eliminated the source of corruption.” What accounts for the bad cops? It must be human nature and/or general conditions, in which case the bad cops you fire will be replaced by other bad cops.

     That a spot of corruption can act as a seed crystal for more is indisputable...but it does not account for the existence of the original spot, nor for why, despite many previous and vigorous attempts to cleanse police agencies, corruption among law enforcers persists.

     Beware any explanation – for anything — that shows you what you want to see, especially if it carefully selects its “evidence” from the great basket of human behavior and experience.

Who’s Watching You?

     We are involved here in a far reaching conspiracy to undermine our most basic beliefs and sacred institutions. Who’s behind this conspiracy? Once again ask yourself who has the most to gain. People in high places, their names would astound you! People in low places, concealing their activities beneath a cloak of poverty! People of all walks of life, left wing and right wing. Black and white. Students and scholars. A conspiracy of such ominous proportion that we will never, never know the whole story and we'll never be able to reveal all the facts! We are readying mass arrests. I am going to see that you people get every possible break. If there is any information you would like to contribute at this time, it will be held in the strictest confidence....

     [From Jules Feiffer’s play Little Murders]

     Conspiracy is currently one of the hottest words / concepts in the American lexicon. Everyone is accusing everyone else of conspiring at something. We hear of plots, counterplots, camouflage, espionage, sabotage, and intrigue of all sorts. You can hardly say “good morning” to a neighbor without seeing him pull the face that says “What did he mean by that?”

     People love this stuff. I can’t be sure why. My currently favored thesis is that it’s “devil theory” stuff. If something’s wrong – that is, if there’s something about “things” that you dislike and would prefer to be changed – the explanation that satisfies best is that some person or agency deliberately brought it about. Find the “devil” and kill him, and thereafter all will be well!

     Devil theories are most comfortable within a theological framework. They’re as unfalsifiable as any other claim about the supernatural. But when advanced as the explanation for large-scale political, sociological, or economic developments, they tend to be dubious. Moreover, they tend to make the proponent look ridiculous.

     Devil theories underpin a lot of popular fiction. A dramatic clash of good against evil is hard to bring off without a discrete enemy to carry evil’s banner. For the really big evils, you need more than one individual devil. A conspiracy is a good fit to that bill. If you’ve read Robert Ludlum’s novel The Matarese Circle, you’ll know what I mean.

     As Murray Rothbard wrote in For a New Liberty, a conspiracy theory must involve the perception of a common motive. Moreover, that motive must be strong enough to animate action. But another element is required to produce a functioning conspiracy: coordination. If those animated by the common motive don’t work together, what you have isn’t a conspiracy but a social, economic, or political trend.

     The John Birch Society, of which I was briefly a member (and of whose overall philosophy I still approve), is closely identified with conspiratorial thinking: specifically, that a great part of our troubles can be traced to one or more functioning conspiracies. This is not perfectly correct. The Society does advance the concept of the powerful or influential insider, who shares a principal motive with other insiders and who works to advance that motive through political mechanisms. However, it allows that such persons might not conspire in the classical sense. Simple commonality of motives among a significant number of powerful or influential persons might suffice, especially if those motives are venal and therefore must be shielded from popular scrutiny.

     But that’s not sexy. It can’t be made into a best-selling novel or a blockbuster movie. If you don’t have evil persons working together – preferably in secret, around a rickety table in a darkened room lit by a single guttering candle – you don’t have an identifiable agency that can be exposed and destroyed by the good guys…whoever they are, and how come nobody ever calls them a conspiracy?

     The strangely paradoxical role of contemporary digital technology deserves mention here. The Information Age, especially as enabled by the Internet and its most prominent subcategory, the World Wide Web, was supposed to be a liberating force. The more people know, runs the theory, the more effectively they can arrange to protect themselves while they pursue their individual interests. And indeed it is so…but what’s this? Has a shadowy group of Big Tech magnates conspired to control the flow of information while herding us all into a single corral? Are we being made into a nation of sheep, our every emission curated by faceless censors as we’re monitored by the ubiquitous digital “conveniences” we’ve so eagerly embraced? Sound the general alarm!

     It could be that way. There are days it seems more likely than not. But commonality of motive, without actual coordination among the Big Tech firms most commonly cited in this connection, would also suffice to explain their behavior. Not to mention that they hardly trouble to conceal with they’re doing, whether it’s to us or for us.

     What I’m saying here is that while conspiracy is a possible explanation for many developments, it’s seldom the only one, and in many cases is not the most plausible one.

     As far as popular consumption goes, that’s essentially irrelevant. People prefer conspiratorial explanations over the more depersonalized sort. It gives them hope that the evils they see can be traced to specific evildoers, who can then be eliminated, solving the problem for all time (or until the next batch of conspirators gets its engine running). They who promote conspiracy theories are aware of that. They don’t need to believe their own formulations, as long as it gets them nearer to their ultimate goals. Why, as a method for galvanizing popular support, it constitutes a clever innovation, a breakthrough in the technology of mass manipulation. I’d name names and provide dates and places, but they might take it badly.

Quickies: Conspiracies And Fiction

     There’s a lot of fun to be had in writing about conspiracies. Many Liberty’s Torch readers will be familiar with the Illuminatus! trilogy by Shea and Wilson. Umberto Eco produced a dazzling turn on the subgenre in Foucault’s Pendulum. I dabbled shallowly in conspiracy in Which Art In Hope. And more recently we have Hans G. Schantz’s conspiratorial techno-thriller series that begins with The Hidden Truth.

     Except for my book, the above efforts make use of the motif of multiple, competing conspiracies. And why not? Why limit oneself to a single shadowy player, when the laws of economics (such as they are) almost compel the emergence of competition into a field, once its viability has been established by an outrider?

     But note that they who ostensibly write non-fiction about conspiracies nearly always do so under the contrary assumption. The Gary Allen / Larry Abraham books on the subject are only the examples that first come to mind. They could be right that there’s only one conspiracy – Allen once told Michael Emerling after a lecture on his thesis that “We only need one conspiracy to explain the facts” – but as I’ve written several times lately, the simplest explanation isn’t the one that’s most likely to be correct; it’s only the one that’s most easily tested.

     This strikes me as a failure of imagination among the non-fiction writers. Conspiracy arises from a strong motive shared among a group of actors who resolve to operate in secret. When you’re dealing with a strong motive, it’s more reasonable to imagine that many persons would share it, but without necessarily being friendly toward one another. That would automatically give rise to competing conspiracies, including some that would be friendly toward one another’s aims without being friendly toward one another’s personnel, or their personal ambitions.

     Hans Schantz’s books are particularly elegant treatments of this idea. He incorporates conspiracies for both good and evil ends into his narrative – but in a fashion that makes it plain that the good guys don’t trust one another all that much. Indeed, in his upcoming third volume The Brave and the Bold, one of those seemingly benign conspiracies threatens the life and work of his young protagonist for “acting too rashly,” even though the action brought about a major advance toward their shared objective.

     For motives are seldom unalloyed. Indeed, they’re nearly always entangled with personal considerations. The highest of motives – i.e., the ones that attach to abstractions such as justice — are normally far weaker than one’s desire for self-preservation, to say nothing of the desire for self-exaltation. And a conspiracy will always be made up of people: ornery, self-interested people to whom their hangnails are of far greater import than a famine in China (Adam Smith).

     Which is mostly prefatory to this announcement: Hans’s two books The Hidden Truth and A Rambling Wreck will go on sale Thursday, October 25, for only $0.99 each. Get ‘em while they’re cheap!

What If?

     What if, in 2015:

• Hillary told the Democratic National Committee she “had something” on them?
• And she threatened to expose them if they didn’t get her the presidential nomination?
• And they knew she would lose, but until she got the nod she’d be a millstone around their necks?
• So they jimmied the nominating process to ensure her victory?
• And then they watched with satisfaction as her campaign crashed and burned?
• And now they’re somewhat disgusted, because she still won’t go away?
• And now they’re considering “stronger measures” (hey, the Clintons didn’t shy back from them)?
• And the DNC has just bought majority control of Hillary’s favorite Chardonnay vendor?

     Yes...what if?

     (Memo to me: Hat is wearing out. Must buy more tinfoil.)

Elites In Crisis

     Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual human beings act, that is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in conscious actions toward chosen goals....Furthermore, that a man acts implies that he believes action will make a difference; in other words, that he will prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that from no action. – Murray N. Rothbard

     The aim of the High is to remain where they are. – George Orwell, 1984

     The most obvious truths are among those men struggle most desperately to deny.

     Like a college fraternity, an elite of whatever variety is an in-group. Those “in” possess privileges, perquisites, and (in the specific case of governments) powers that those “out” do not. He who values those things will compare the requirements for admission and the barriers to entry to his own assets, motivation, and endurance, and decide on that basis whether to “pledge.” Similarly, each of those “in,” should they feel their status threatened by developments, will assess the magnitude of the threat and the difficulties of active resistance, and decide on that basis whether to fight – and how.

     Recent revelations, nicely aggregated and summarized here, make it seem incontrovertible that the political elite, a.k.a. “the Establishment,” has been waging a quiet campaign to defeat the Trump Administration before it can get fully into motion.

     Scoffers will scoff. They’ll slow-clap and bray “Yeah, yeah, another evil conspiracy.” And because conspiracy and allegations thereof have been systematically ridiculed for so long, they’ll succeed in deflecting some of the attention the timeline in that article would otherwise get. But in point of fact, a conscious, all-pervading conspiracy is not required for the events in the cited article to have their full sinister import.

     The individual members of the Beltway Elite, being uniformly motivated by the same considerations and to approximately the same degree, are all too likely to act uniformly in defense of their “in” status.” Given recent events, we may take it as written that that’s exactly what they’ve been doing.

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     Members of the progressive Hive likewise act on their own instincts and have their own code of communication. They feel free, but they are also predictable. Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control; but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern. – Joseph Sobran, “The Hive”

     Several categories of actors have participated in the dogpile on the Trump Insurgency and its nominees. The federal officeholders are the most easily understood, as they have careers to preserve. Civil Service employees, though protected by law from dismissal for even the most grievous wrongdoing, will feel a similar impetus toward defense against the interloper and his lieutenants. Slightly less obvious is the central motivation of the media, which has become an open handmaiden of Big Government since the New Deal. Bluntly stated, the more government there is, the more things it involves itself in, and the more “access” reporters can acquire, the more there will be to report. Thus, they will feel much the same survival pressure to collaborate with those resisting the new regime as those more plainly affected – and they will do so whether or not their cooperation is requested.

     “Leaks” are the key. In the view of a reporter with “access,” a leak is merely possible material for his next story. While the reporter’s political preferences should not be entirely discounted, it is nevertheless to his practical advantage to use those leaks:

• That will entice the interest of many readers;
• That will enhance his reputation for investigating allegations of wrongdoing;
• That will further ingratiate him with those who’ve granted him “access.”

     It is plausible that the highest echelons of the Beltway Elite consciously set out on the path Joel Pollak has delineated. Such persons have great pride. They feel a terrible resentment of those who would undo their handiwork. They’re surely capable of using indirect implication to communicate their preferences to underlings. Some conscious collaboration among lower-level leakers is possible, but once the word has been whispered, it’s hardly required. The motivations that impel their disclosures are much the same as those of the strata above them. The matter passes thence to the media, of which the Left’s conquest is no longer in doubt.

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"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places, and by different workmen...and when we see those timbers joined together, and see that they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few...in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that...all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was struck."— Abraham Lincoln, deducing from objective evidence the blueprint of a political plot to save the institution of slavery. [From Garet Garrett's essay "The Revolution Was"]

     Lincoln’s deductions notwithstanding, sometimes the cause-and-effect pattern we think we see is backwards from what has really occurred. While the bees in a hive don’t possess awareness of what drives their actions, human beings are more completely equipped. Sometimes our “bees” act originally on personal motivations, but later on become aware how their efforts interlock and synergize with the efforts of those around them. The questions that arise then are two:

1. “Do we want to keep doing this?”
2. “How will we get away with it, now that the pattern is so visible?”

     From the evidence, I’d say the media megaphones, the minions of the Deep State, and the more visible members of the political elite, to the extent that each participant has realized what the others are doing and how it interlocks with his own efforts, have answered those questions:

1. “Yes;”
2. “By doubling down and never letting up.”

     Will Trump and his lieutenants impose penalties upon any of those involved? Perhaps. Indeed, to judge from Rex Tillerson’s purge of the State Department’s 7th floor cabal, the process might already be in motion. However, the federal government is vast. Cleaning house will not be a quick purge. The media, of course, are beyond direct correction; all the new Administration can do is limit their access, thus compelling them to work for what they seek.

     We shall see.

Coordination Chronicle

     I feel a certain admiration for those who openly speak of conspiracies against the commonweal. I don’t admire them out of agreement with their root idea – i.e., that the persons benefiting from the onrush of statist transnationalism and amoral secularism are consciously conspiring with one another – but because they do a superb job of unearthing the evidence of what Joseph Sobran called The Hive:

     Twenty years ago, I was struck by the way various sorts of political “progressives” — Communists, socialists, liberals, “civil libertarians,” “moderates,” “pragmatists” — all spontaneously cooperated with each other. It wasn’t a conspiracy; there was obviously no central direction. But the pattern was too clear to be denied.

     The word “left” was a dead metaphor; it said nothing interesting about the people it referred to. So I used the metaphor of an insect hive, which captured the way such people moved in harmony and communicated with each other.

     In a beehive, the worker bees have many specialties. The hive is organized around the queen bee, but she doesn’t have to give the workers their instructions. The bee that finds pollen returns to the hive and flies in figure eights; this tells the others the direction and distance of the pollen, and they go get it. And of course the bees need no orders to attack an enemy.

     Tom Bethell assisted Sobran in expanding on this conception:

     The Hive image, first proposed by the writer Joseph Sobran, illustrated the key point that liberals and Communists, seemingly distinct, belong to the same Hive. They share the same goals, even if they perform different tasks. The metaphor allows us to speak of their activities as coordinated without having to invoke a conspiracy. The queen bee was the Kremlin, and the worker bees toiled in coordinated fashion to serve the queen without ever taking orders. Real bees work in that fashion. They communicate. They signal openly. They serve the queen. What goes on in their “minds” we do not know and do not need to know. But a careful study of their signaling patterns allowed researchers to decode them.

     In the same way, liberals and socialists and communists communicate openly. Their claims and arguments fall into a consistent pattern. There was a period (up to and including the 1930s) when Communists did indeed have to conspire, that is, communicate secretly. Alger Hiss began his career in that period. But by the 1950s open communication had become possible. H.G. Wells foresaw something like this in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy. Then, less than a decade ago, unexpectedly and swiftly, the Kremlin-centered Hive expired. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, this happens with real hives, too. The workers kill the queen. They surround her and pack themselves in close until she suffocates. In analogous fashion, that may be what happened with the progressive Hive.

     In my not particularly humble opinion, this is one of the most important, nay critical conceptions in contemporary sociopolitical thought. It deserves millions of words of exploration. However, as it’s a special day for me and mine, and I try to be kind to my Gentle Readers even on not-so-special days, I’ll limit myself to the usual thousand or two.

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     Recently, Stefan Molyneux produced a quick-hit video that delineates an essential problem of government-run education:

     Molyneux actually stops a pace short of the most inclusive, most terrifying conclusion:

The mind, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

     If it is not filled by consciously planned material, a young mind will unconsciously suck in whatever’s around it that will fill it. Combine young minds emptied of values by government schooling with a journalism / media / entertainment complex – the expressive media – whose products and personalities uniformly parrot a seemingly benevolent notion of “progress,” and the result is moronically easy to predict. Yet there needn’t be an actual conspiracy – no, not even among politicians of a single party – to bring it about or further it.

     The patterns – what the late Murray Rothbard called “red threads” – that run through our society and its sociopolitical devolution are several:

• Relativization of truth.
• Ridicule heaped upon Christianity.
• Demonization of the Caucasian race and its values.
• Open hostility toward child-bearing and child-rearing.
• Weakening of intergenerational duties and responsibilities.
• Denigration of work as a good and vital aspect of human life.
• Relief from responsibility for members of any “protected group.”
• Promotion of present-moment satisfactions and scorn for deferred gratification.
• In keeping with the above, constant opposition to the concept of absolutes in morality and ethics.

     Large numbers of persons promote those currents. It’s possible that far larger numbers find them noxious...but their virtual exclusion from the educational institutions and the expressive media that transmit and reinforce particular ideas and patterns of conduct, has rendered that group far weaker of voice than its “progressive” opponents.

     The above makes the coordination aspect of which Sobran and Bethell wrote irrefutable...yet no actual conspiracy, in the sense of persons conscious of one another and consciously collaborating with one another, is necessary. The subliminal and subconscious signals that pass among them are more than sufficient. “Progressives” are tuned in to those signals in ways of which even they are unaware.

     “Conservatives,” broadly defined, have cooperated with these developments to a terrifying extent: by refraining from any hint of an objection for fear of being called “prudish,” “uncaring,” “bigoted,” or “greedy.” And we are paying the price:

     "He had been wrong to reject Provin, dead wrong. He had collaborated with the enemy. Now he must pay the price of his silence, which is more silence: silence when one wishes to speak: the gag." – Ursula Leguin, from “The Road East,” in her Orsinian Tales

---

     Many in the Right would argue that the conquest of the educational establishments and the expressive media mentioned above are clear indications of a conspiracy. Yet there is an alternative explanation that doesn’t require conscious coordination. It inheres in the attitudes prevalent among Left and Right pertaining to accountability for results.

     The products of the expressive media are curiously insubstantial: reportage; ideas; opinions. Evaluating them can be difficult even for the seasoned observer. Moreover, the rise of national broadcast networks and specific sites of concentration for the entertainment industry gave those institutions disproportionate bargaining power: over who would be admitted to their ranks, and which commercial organizations would be permitted to advertise through them.

     In a sense, educational institutions have a product: the formed minds they release upon graduation. Yet it’s a product whose quality assurance is left in the hands of those institutions themselves. (Note also that attempts to change this, legislatively, have always drawn furious opposition from “educators’ unions.”) The result has been the promotion of appearances over reality: the possession of diplomas rather than the possession of knowledge and critical thinking skills. Behind such appearances, all manner of evils can hide.

     Educational institutions and expressive media, therefore, became optimal habitats for persons who decline to have their products judged by others in the fashion of the marketplace. They were a powerful lure to persons of a Leftist bent even before Antonio Gramsci’s pronouncements on the Left’s need to undertake “a long march through the institutions.”

     Inversely, persons in the Right largely eschewed the educational and expressive realms. In part they were confident of their ability to flourish in the productive trades, and enjoyed the wealth and esteem they earned from those who bought their products. As matters progressed, they disdained to rub shoulders with those who were already “colonizing” education and the expressive media and turning them to political ends. That left those fields open to Leftist dominance.

     And no express conspiracies were required.

---

     Today matters are near to climax. The Left-dominated educational and expressive institutions have become aware that they’re critical to the Left’s overall project. Having felt the threat to its bastions from homeschooling, charter schools, infant voucher programs, and the “new media,” the Left has undertaken to rub them out. Note the hostility to such things among left-liberal politicians and the spokesmen of Left-dominated institutions. Note also how the Left has used “lawfare” to suppress even completely private corporations that depart from its agenda on subjects of special interest to the Left, such as gun control and “global warming.”

     Now that the political elite and the “permanent government” have been suitably Left-aligned by the use of power and “job security” incentives, electoral processes are similarly under attack: from vote fraud, voter intimidation, voting by non-citizens, and the swelling tide of illegal immigration. Thus the electorate cannot be permitted to vote itself any new rascals. The Left has installed persons suitable to its tastes, and they will guard their frontiers religiously.

     All it took was the operation of the natural incentives that guide men to the things they value most.

---

     The emergence of the assumption of differential rectitude among left-liberals was part and parcel of their creation of the bastions delineated above. When nearly everyone around Smith is a left-liberal, the pressure on him to fall into line with them is immense. They are Smith’s environment, and can make it unpleasant enough to expel him if he should persist in his deviance. Presently Smith will either have conformed to that environment, or he will have exited it. This dynamic allows those in it to preen themselves on how right they are...and how stupid, if not evil, are those who disagree. And of course, one doesn’t willingly hire those one deems stupid or evil.

     Herein lies the power behind the Left’s armor-plated coordination: the purification of those environments it dominates by conversion or expulsion of dissident elements, and the erection of barriers to entry for those not already aligned with the Left.

     And no conspiracy was required.

Plots

     Conspiracy theories about secret alliances between European governments are flying, owing to recent developments in the “refugee crisis.” Substantial numbers of persons – ironically, more here in the U.S. than in Europe, where the problem is at its worst – have adopted the thesis that the political elites of the First World find the Islamic tide useful: a stick with which to beat us cranky types into submission to the Omnipotent State. Those recent developments, and the wildly irrational behavior of highly placed public officials in response, make the notion more credible than not, though we must concede that in such matters proof is always elusive.

     I wrote earlier this year:

     If we can be induced to fear others, particularly those nearest to us, the more credulous among us will be more likely to look to the government for “protection.” The government is quite amenable to such developments. In fact, it strives to help them along:

Crime stats published by the FBI and relied upon by the media distort the gun violence and leave the public with the impression "mass shooting" incidents are a much bigger threat than they really are, according to a criminologist and Second Amendment scholar.

The bureau's annual reports tabulating and classifying a wide range of crime throughout the nation have been historically free of politics, but John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said the latest statistics contain numbers that are misleading at best and deliberately fudged at worst. Lott believes the numbers may have been presented to overstate for political purposes the true risk of being a victim of random gun crimes.

“The FBI put out a clearly incorrect set of numbers on public shootings shortly before the November election last year,” said Lott, a frequent opinion writer for FoxNews.com and author of "More Guns, Less Crime." “I have been reading FBI reports for 30 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is one thing for the Bureau of Justice Statistics or the National Institute of Justice to put out politically biased studies, but there has always been a Chinese wall separating the FBI raw data collection from political pressures.”

     Also, I wrote several years ago at Eternity Road:

     There's a lot of entertainment value in a good thumping conspiracy theory. Your Curmudgeon is particularly fond of the ones that involve aliens, subterranean civilizations, and the control of the president by radio signals tuned to the resonant frequency of his fillings. Mel Gibson's marvelous movie Conspiracy Theory puts the subject to excellent use. But the significance of the growing frequency of conspiracy theories with political coloring must not be overlooked. They're not just a way to cast one's ideological adversaries as devils intent upon despotism, death, and destruction. A conspiracy is invariably rooted in the perception or construction of a plausible common motive.

     And also:

     Political conspiracy-theorizing that garners a significant number of participants is possible only when the power structure becomes remote -- that is, when those who wield power are sufficiently detached from “ordinary folks” that we groundlings cannot see them as ethically or emotionally comparable to us.

     By my assessment, all the prerequisite conditions are in place.

---

     A conspiracy is a variety of widely shared but difficult-or-impossible-to-prove belief. Needless to say, there are many other such beliefs that don’t bear the conspiracy label:

• Religious creeds;
• Political / economic ideologies;
• Confidence in the virtues of “statesmen;”
• Convictions about the fidelity of one’s spouse;
• Confidence that “he really will leave his wife for me;”

     ...and many more. Of course, that a belief is widely shared doesn’t guarantee its veracity. Neither does the impossibility of proving it guarantee its falsity, as various supposedly smart persons such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris really ought to know.

     The impact of a belief flows from the behavior it impels, among both assenters and dissenters. A belief that aliens control the president’s brain by sending radio commands through his fillings isn’t likely to stimulate a lot of action. A belief that our political class has decided to subjugate us thoroughly by importing predators while simultaneously stripping us of our weapons is the sort of conviction that breaks kingdoms.

     At this time, there are many in Europe who have opened their minds to that latter idea. The majority may not yet be convinced, but they’ve started the necessary search for evidence and are trying to measure it against their political masters’ statements and behavior. It doesn’t take a lot of raped mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives to get a people accustomed to public safety wondering what the Hell the forces of order are doing instead of rounding up the savages and deporting them.

     America is not and will not be exempt. The Obamunist plan to import the very same savages currently despoiling Europe, on the grounds of “compassion,” will reap the same fruit here as it has there. Already Muslims are disproportionately represented in rape statistics – as the perpetrators. And of course, while their mouthpiece groups scream “Racism! Bigotry! Islamophobia!” the miserable excuse for a human being the electorate was persuaded to install as president – twice! – is Dutch-uncling us about our fears, telling is that all will be well. Why will all be well? How can anyone be confident that all will be well here when all plainly isn’t well in Europe? No answer.

     The sovereign attraction of high office is power over others. The avidity of those who lust for it exceeds all their other desires. More, once they have it, their every word and deed is bent toward keeping it, or gaining more of it. Fear and envy are their principal tools.

     We might not be looking at a conspiracy of men in high places. It might be more of a Hive effect: that is, persons with comparable characters and highly similar motives, responding to a common set of incentives, are merely acting in a fashion that resembles a secret, malevolent plan among them. But as I said above, the impact of a belief is in the behavior it impels – and the millions, both here and in Europe, who are gradually coming to believe that their rulers have leagued against them have already begun to act on it.

     Stay tuned.

Conspiracies, Motives, And Hypocrisy

Just yesterday, longtime reader and frequent commenter Furball wrote as follows:

I think I know one reason why liberals win. This probably isn't new to you, but I want to explore it by talking to you about it.

Liberals win because we all sin.

That is, every Conservative has probably committed adultery or "lusted," or stolen or broken a commandment.

So liberals always have the argument that Conservatives are hypocrites.

Never mind that that presupposes we're supposed to perfect and that just by not being perfect, we "fail."

What liberals can do is negate the entire moral argument by pointing out that Conservatives have moral failings and yet "hypocritically" demand morality.

Or - as we've seen so often - "Since you did THAT, who are you to point fingers at US for THIS?"

To take the most obvious example, the Nixon stuff is supposed to be the cover and excuse for Clinton and Obama. "Hey! Look! He did it, so don't tell us how bad our guy is!"...

It's not just "moral relativism." What they're really saying is that ANY error of Conservatism (as in Bush promoting Medicare Plan D, or anything Conservatives might not like about his policies) is the SAME as any error of liberalism.

Indeed. Which compels me to resurrect my favorite Neal Stephenson citation:

"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of climate, you are not allowed to criticise others -- after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?...

"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all the vices. For, you see, if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour -- you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all the political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

"You wouldn't believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi....

"Because they were hypocrites... the Victorians were despised in the late Twentieth Century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves -- they took no moral stances and lived by none."

"So they were morally superior to the Victorians -- " Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under.

"-- even though -- in fact, because -- they had no morals at all."

"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late Twentieth Century Weltanschaaung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception -- he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course. most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."

"That we occasionally violate our own moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."

"Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved -- the missteps we make along the way -- are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power."

[Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age ]

Furball agreed that Stephenson had captured the essence of the thing. But only this morning did it occur to me that the syndrome possesses a powerful coupling to the conspiratorialism that afflicts contemporary political thought.

---

First, that we might not be impeded by pro forma objections: Yes, there have been real conspiracies. Some might well be in motion today. But real conspiracies are usually much less important than a pervasive air of conspiratorialism, such that developments in law, policy, and politics cannot be discussed free of that association.

The reason is not far to seek: A conspiracy requires a commonality of motives. Conspirators work upon a common plan to effectuate a common end, which they all deem desirable. The sort of a posteriori pseudo-reasoning many persons employ works this backwards: If a particular development in public policy could plausibly suggest, given the "right" set of assumptions, that common motives might lie beneath it, the conspiratorially minded will immediately assume a conspiracy to bring that development about.

Persons educated in logic and aware of fallacious departures from it will recognize this as the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle. Proper deductive logic would run thus:

1. Postulate: A conspiracy that applies stimulus S must intend result R.
2. Observation: A conspiracy has been brought to light, and has applied S.
3. Conclusion: Therefore, the conspiracy intends R.

Straightforward implicative / deductive logic! If P, then Q. P is true; therefore Q is true. But in the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle:

1. Postulate: A conspiracy that applies stimulus S must intend result R.
2. Observation: R has come about.
3. Conclusion: There must be a conspiracy somewhere doing S!

Uh, sorry, that's not quite right. And unfortunately, the tendency to commit the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle isn't restricted to the Left. But this is really just prefatory.

---

Yesterday's satirical piece provoked quite a lot of email, much of which protested that I mustn't ridicule the real reason things are going to Hell in the proverbial handbasket. It was quite a torrent for a while, simultaneously entertaining and exhausting. As I don't have the time, energy, or patience to answer each of those missives individually, I hope the material above will be considered adequate.

The core point is as stated above: A conspiracy requires a commonality of motives. Thus, if you can't assemble a group with demonstrably common motives -- common enough, at least, to militate toward some well-defined end -- you can't identify (or produce) a conspiracy. However, in political discourse and maneuvering, such groups are easily identified. From these the conspiratorialist, in thrall to the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle, "deduces" conspiracies, and thus succumbs to yet another logical sin: that of "proving too much." For in almost every case, the existence of the fallaciously inferred conspiracy would strongly imply still other developments that have not occurred.

The dedicated conspiratorialist waves such objections aside. "Wait for it," he might say. For his "inference" is something he needs -- indeed, something that much of Mankind has always needed and always will: a target at which to aim.

A conspiracy theory is merely a devil theory -- the attribution of some unpleasant development to an evil agency -- with multiple devils.

---

Accusations of hypocrisy take conspiratorialism to a dimension one step beyond the skeleton presented above. The accuser has assumed something the "basic" conspiratorialist has not: the existence of the common motives themselves. He doesn't trouble to search for and establish them; he merely assumes them and gallops on from there.

In the political realm, for example, one who claims that he wants "the poor" to be better off and therefore supports the expansion of the welfare state is a hypocrite if he really intends that "the poor" be worse off, that there be more of them, or both. We in the Right, viewing the destruction the expansion of welfarism has wrought, argue against its furtherance on that basis. When the left-liberal waves our arguments aside, the temptation to charge him with hypocrisy -- e.g., that he wants "to produce more government dependents" -- is very strong.

When we look through the other end of the telescope, we find the Left claiming that the Right, which rails against both illegitimacy and abortion on demand, must be hypocritical. Why? Because a large percentage of the babies aborted each year would be born to single mothers. So we can't really be opposed to both those things, because one mitigates the other. We must simply want to limit women's sexual behavior -- "to control women's bodies."

The strength of the temptation to make such accusations flows from the varying availability of objective evidence and the universality of Man's most important failings: his susceptibility to deceit and wishful thinking.

---

This is a large subject, well beyond my capacity to exhaust in a single essay, so allow me to close for today with just one more observation: A large group of persons might well contain persons with specific motives in common. The larger the group, the more likely that becomes, for any motive one might choose to specify. Thus, in a political family that wears a common appellation, the existence of subgroups with specific motives not shared by those outside their number becomes more plausible as the enveloping group grows. When we speak of "conservatives," "liberals," Republicans, and Democrats, the relevant groups are very large indeed.

That doesn't imply that hypocritical subgroups have significant power to sway the larger group. However, it doesn't imply that they don't, either. I hope to address this in my next.

More anon.

The Men Behind The Curtain

Look at these lists of proposed justifications, so helpfully compiled by Victor Davis Hanson. Let their wild, totally erratic lurches from rationale to rationale rock you. Let their complete lack of logical and evidentiary foundation stun you. Let the lunacy of imagining that such incoherence could come from "the most intelligent man ever to be elected president" confound you. And ask yourself the central, all-pervading question of the Obamunist Interregnum:

What The BLEEP! Is Really Going On Here?

It's time to really peel this onion.

---

A few days ago, Lou Dobbs interviewed Dr. Gina Loudon:

Quoth Sara Noble:

I think Barack Obama is a little crazy, maybe a lot crazy. He’s ruining the country in a way that would put Nero to shame. Would a sane person lie constantly to over 300 million Americans? Would a sane person release war criminals and terrorists to attack our soldiers again? Would a sane person destroy the best healthcare system in the world?...Mr. Obama refuses to follow the law, he replenishes the enemy lines with terrorists, he’s disarming us, he’s allowing us to be invaded by uneducated people from other countries who will turn our country into a welfare state, spending us into oblivion, establishing a terrible healthcare plan administered via a horrible website, gave us common core, alienating our allies and bowing to terrorists, and so much more.

Sara and Dr. Loudon merely express concerns many Americans -- possibly most -- must feel at this time. The Won is acting not merely as a tyrant would, but as a tyrant with a serious mental disorder, perhaps the sort of degradation of rationality caused a serious venereal disease in its latter stages. Yet Obama is almost offensively healthy, at least in appearance, and makes a great show of his participation in various athletic and pseudo-athletic pastimes. That makes it hard to imagine that he's somehow unsound...physically, at least.

But there's an alternative explanation: one that covers all the above and a lot more.

Barack Hussein Obama, who once described himself as "a blank screen," onto which others project their own ideals and desires, is a front man for "the only known form of life with six or more legs and no brain:" a committee.

---

We are involved here in a far reaching conspiracy to undermine our most basic beliefs and sacred institutions. Who's behind this conspiracy? Once again ask yourself: who has the most to gain? People in high places: their names would astound you! People in low places: concealing their activities beneath a cloak of poverty! People of all walks of life, left wing and right wing. Black and white. Students and scholars. A conspiracy of such ominous proportions that we will never, ever know the whole story and we'll never be able to reveal all the facts! We are readying mass arrests. I am going to see that you people get every possible break. If there is any information you would like to contribute at this time, it will be held in the strictest confidence.... [Lieutenant Practice, in Jules Feiffer's black comedy Little Murders]

Imagine a gaggle of evil-minded persons who come together, perhaps at random, and realize the commonality of their aspirations. Imagine further that each is the commander of an agency through which he seeks to dominate the world. Imagine further still that each of them says to himself, as evil-minded persons will, "I can use these clowns to help me get where I want to go." What would result?

Of course! We'd get S.P.E.C.T.R.E.! A steering committee for all the great evil forces at work among us.

Perhaps the membership would consist of the masters of:

• The Council on Foreign Relations;
• The Trilateral Commission;
• The Bilderbergers;
• The Round Table Group;
• The Rosicrucians;
• The Knights Templar;
• The International Banking Conspiracy;
• Ordo Templi Orientis;
• The Freemasons;
• The Jesuits (hey, the Vatican has to have a say);
• And of course, the Illuminati.

The chairmanship would rotate among them.

Whatever their provenance, once the shakeout was over the members of The Committee would all be as evil as Man has ever been. However, despite their seeming alliance, they would hate one another and scheme perpetually against one another for ultimate power. Thus, inasmuch as each member really wants totalitarian power over the world for himself and himself alone, their common enterprises would be underlayered by individual schemes that are inherently at cross purposes. The seething result would possess a surface consistency -- they're all totalitarians, after all, and would all favor anything that increases the State's power over Man -- yet would lurch from side to side like a drunk unable to walk a straight line, incapable of positing a defensible explanation of its deeds…and thus, would be symptomologically consistent with what we’ve seen since The Won took office.

The deep incoherence of The Committee's agenda would be most visible in the words and deeds of whatever poor schmuck they chose to be their representative to the public.

What's that? Of course none of the members of The Committee -- and "The Committee" is all the name the group would ever have -- would willingly become its visible face! Power is safest when wielded from behind the throne. Let the supposed King take the opprobrium, the condemnations, and the bullets; they who hold the true scepter can always find another to replace him.

Now compare the aggregate of Obamunist policy, and the many mutually contradictory rationales put forth in its defense, to the sort of enterprises one would expect from the The Committee. Don't the edges line up nicely? Doesn't the congruence seem just too perfect for it to be nothing but a giant Fran Porretto fantasy?

Heh, heh, heh!

---

Liberty's Torch possesses a readership of unusual intelligence and knowledge, easily able to recognize satire when it's put before them. Yet, though I've made the above as tongue-in-cheek as possible and with nothing but entertainment in mind, I fear (hopefully unnecessarily) that some reader might take it seriously, buy himself a fresh package of Oreo Double-Stufs, unpack a Barrett .50, and look for a well placed clock tower or church steeple. (Saint Augustine's in D.C. is both conveniently situated and really nice.)

So please! Don't take the above seriously. Not too seriously, at any rate. I mean, it fits the facts and all, and I can't come up with a better explanation given what we've seen from the Obama Regime, but really, the federal government of the United States captured by a world-girdling conspiracy of conspiracies? How likely is that? Don't we have laws against such things?

Maybe you should forget I said anything of the sort. I really shouldn't post this, as many chuckles as it contains. Writing this stuff at 4:00 AM is a bad idea. Say, what's that? Someone banging at the front door at this hour? It can't be about the dogs; they're both still asleep. I'd better go see who it is. You have a nice day, now.

Investing Your Credulity

What to believe? is among the eternal questions. So many people are propounding so many dramatic claims about so many different subjects -- often in stark contradiction to one another -- that the most common reaction is to dismiss them all, draw into one's own protective shell, and spend one's attention solely on reruns of Millionaire Matchmaker and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

The critical word in the above is believe. The propositions of which I speak are ones which resist objective verification. Some are about things that happened long ago; some are about things to come; and some are about things supposedly going on right now under a thick cloak of concealment. Whatever the case, the claimant is passionate about his claim and wants you to invest in it equally.

Is this wise? Seldom. As I wrote just yesterday, Man is highly fallible. We screw up a lot. We keep damaged, tendentious records; we forecast on the basis of insufficient knowledge and insight; and we tend to believe lurid fantasies over banal facts.

Yet it is in the nature of things that now and then a wild-eyed type actually gets one right and surprises us all...all of us, that is, except for whatever tiny group took him seriously. Sometimes, being a part of that tiny group produces a payoff. And we like payoffs. So: when confronted with such a dramatic proposition, how should we allocate our credibility?

Hmmm...

---

In case you were wondering, this subject is on my mind because of a flock of recent Web articles. The Web has become the preferred outlet for outlandish claims, a phenomenon that should require no explanation. The mere fact that such claims appear on the Web and not in "respectable" organs is often cited as a reason to dismiss them with prejudice. Yet now and then, a claim will prove correct, startling the more skeptical and reinforcing the credulity of the credulous.

Here are three such articles:

• The Stock Market Has Officially Entered Crazytown Territory
• DHS Insider Gives Final Warning
• Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse

Note the epistemological commonalities among the three pieces:

• All three forecast a looming disaster;
• All three rely upon imputed authority over the subject matter;
• All three imply that drastic action on the part of individuals is necessary to ensure our survival.

These pieces are about as lurid as lurid gets before we enter alien-invasion territory. Yet any one of them could be correct in its claims. The average reader has no way to know.

Assuming you haven't adopted the turtle-defense measures I mentioned above, how do you cope, Gentle Reader?

---

I'm a skeptical sort. I prefer to deal with verifiable facts and causal mechanisms that I can confirm from observation. That's my front-line defense against being panicked about some development or some representation being urged upon me by crisis-mongers. Were I present in Seldon's Trantor, I'd have been one of those reluctant to put stock in his forecast.

But skepticism is a play on probabilities. It's not guaranteed to be correct; unlikely-seeming things happen all the time. Inasmuch as some of those unlikely-seeming things have had significant, wide-ranging consequences in the past, giving some attention to those who prognosticate about them is a reasonable investment of a modest fraction of one's time...always with the proviso that one be on the lookout for evidence at all times, and ever mindful of the major wisdoms about human credulity:

• We tend to believe that which favors our prejudices;
• We tend to believe that which would benefit us personally;
• We tend to believe that which issues from persons we like or admire;

...to some degree independent of the plausibility of the claim involved. Which makes mechanisms for "tuning" one's degree of credibility investment important enough to ponder at some length.

---

"Proportion your belief to the evidence." -- David Hume

Facts trump theories, always. If facts relevant to a claim are available, they should be gathered and measured against the representations of the claim. This is particularly important in gauging claims based on trends -- and the most dramatic claims are all based on trends.

Trends are important. Trends can have a significant impact on our decision-making. But trends are neither universal nor eternal. Indeed, by their very existence they tend to evoke damping mechanisms of equal intensity.

Financial trends are a good example. If you haven't heard the term contrarian investing, it's proved to be one of the surest routes toward modest but steady gain. Contrarian thinking proceeds from the postulate of fallibility, as confirmed by the evidence: Nearly all forecasts are wrong nearly all the time.

The contrarian must have a stolid disposition, inclined to walk, not run. He doesn't bet on the exact opposite direction of the current trend. Rather, he prepares for its eventual dissipation. He looks for "irrational optimism" and cautiously takes a stake in the opposing view. Speculators riding the trend, looking for a "big score," are the contrarian's natural feeding ground. It's an approach that requires patience and an imperturbable nature, but it's solidly founded on the facts: No trend lasts forever. Equilibrium always triumphs.

Which leads to the next yardstick for gauging the plausibility of a claim.

---

"Action equals reaction." -- Sir Isaac Newton

As I stated above, a strong trend is likely to evoke a damping mechanism of equal intensity. The nature of the damper will depend on the nature of the trend; it need not be of identical form.

In the late Nineteenth Century, when a largely free market, the rapid industrialization of the cities, and a little political favoritism gave rise to the first very large enterprises, a critical damper arose in the form of the Progressive movement. This rapidly swelling movement, founded upon envy and inherently fallacious in its claims, was the counterweight to the great industrial fortunes. It was a political response to an economic and technological phenomenon. And it largely succeeded in reining in the industrial development of the United States.

Compare that development with its contemporary analogues. The Eighties and Nineties saw a second huge burst of capitalist enterprise, resulting in a new crop of major commercial firms and figures. The most effective counterweight in recent years was political environmentalism, only modestly buttressed by old-style "compassionate" Progressivism. (The latter had been weakened by rampant "compassion fatigue" from the Great Society and its sequelae.) Some who bet on the speeding elevator of Eighties capitalism gained from their gambles, but more others lost their shirts as the countertrends kicked in.

Consider in this light the massive gun purchases by private citizens since 2008, the Tea Party response to Obamunism, and the flood of new interest in preparationist writers, non-traditional schooling, concierge and other alternatives to traditional medicine, and the precious metals.

Keeping an eye peeled for asymmetrical responses to a development is among the most prudent ways to gauge the credibility of a claim founded on a trend.

---

"Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." -- Origin unknown

There's nothing quite as confounding as a claim premised on "inside information." The claimant might actually have it; you have no way to tell. What, then, are we to make of dramatic claims founded on such knowledge?

These are the cases that demand the most reliance upon our knowledge of Mankind. In particular, we must lean upon the aphorism at the start of this segment. No matter the stature of the claimant, the mere fact that he claims knowledge or insight unavailable to others casts a pall over his representations. Why him and no one else? Alternately, If others also know, why has he alone spoken of it?

The principle is most significant in assessing claims that imply a degree of conspiratorial action. There have been real conspiracies in the past, and no doubt there will be others in the future. However, the larger a conspiracy becomes, the more visible it becomes, both from the impact of the coordinated actions of its participants and from the inability of most people to keep their mouths shut.

We've all read about "conspiracies in plain sight" such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberger Group, and so forth. Those are all real organizations, each with a moderately coherent agenda. But the public nature of such groups gives rise to the forces that dampen their influence. To be genuinely important, a conspiratorial organization would have to fly under the radar, working its will without being detected until it was too far along to be thwarted. This isn't impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult, for reasons already stated.

Besides all that, a completely secret conspiracy of power and skill sufficient to impose its will on the nation against all countervailing forces would therefore be unopposable. There'd be nothing to be done about it. So believe in it if you please, but take Bobby McFerrin's advice to heart and tend your own garden.

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This ramble proceeded from that part of my psyche wherein resides my faculty for amusement at Man's follies, including my own. I recognize my own credulity -- mostly after it's gotten me kicked good and hard -- as typical of the human race. I've believed enough absurd things in my sixty-plus years to have taught me the value of amiable skepticism: a let's-wait-and-see attitude that gives way to others' assertions only after amassing significant evidence and slow-roasting it on the rotisserie of reason and history.

This isn't a brief against ever believing any dramatic claim. It's an exhortation to a degree of imperturbability: not absolute immovability of conviction but a preference for reposing confidence in the laws of equilibrium. Yes, things change; that's absolute and inevitable. But swift, dramatic changes are fairly rare, are normally preceded by visible harbingers, and are predicted consistently by more than a few prognosticators at any given time.

And now that that's off my chest, on to more practical matters. I must pay the dues for my memberships in the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati today, and buy another quarter-ton each of rice, beans, and peanut butter before DHS and FEMA close the stores. After that, perhaps I'll have time to clean all the guns. The voices have become most insistent about that lately.

Mindset Engineering

Many if not most readers of Liberty’s Torch will already be familiar with the phrase battlespace preparation. It refers to the attempt to establish certain propositions as beyond question, essentially making them into postulates for an impending political argument. Some such effort is dedicated to establishing explicit public policies as necessary beyond dispute. The rest is distributed over a broad range of subjects, including premises about rights, valid and invalid interpretations of the Constitution, and the characters and backgrounds of significant public figures.

I like the phrase, but though it has broad application, it doesn’t quite cover the phenomenon that’s on my mind this morning: the conditioning of the public to react in a particular non-rational way to suggestions that point in certain preferred or dispreferred directions. Non-rational reactions, by definition, have nothing to do with reason. They’re visceral in nature, proceeding from physiological mechanisms that can occlude the reason. Despite that, we tend to refer to the source of such reactions as one’s mindset.

An example of mindset engineering pertinent to political discussion would be how we’ve been conditioned to react against any suggestion that the State isn’t really necessary. It no longer matters what facts or reasoning are marshaled toward that thesis, because as soon as a listener notices that your argument is heading in that direction, his gut will cast up a near-to-impenetrable wall against it. Why? He’s been conditioned into that reaction by decades, even centuries, of hectoring to the effect that anyone who advocates the abolition of the State is either too silly to take seriously or too dangerous to tolerate.

(An aside: I can argue the inevitability of the State as well as anyone. I can argue the inevitability of anarchy equally well. Both arrangements are inevitable, because both are inherently unstable. But that’s a subject for a three-volume novel.)

Today’s tirade focuses on a bit of mindset engineering of comparable gravity.

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Have a gander at this article from Forbes:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) quietly dropped a bomb in its October Fiscal Monitor Report. Titled “Taxing Times,” the report paints a dire picture for advanced economies with high debts that fail to aggressively “mobilize domestic revenue.” It goes on to build a case for drastic measures and recommends a series of escalating income and consumption tax increases culminating in the direct confiscation of assets.

Yes, you read that right. But don’t take it from me. The report itself says:

“The sharp deterioration of the public finances in many countries has revived interest in a “capital levy”— a one-off tax on private wealth—as an exceptional measure to restore debt sustainability. The appeal is that such a tax, if it is implemented before avoidance is possible and there is a belief that it will never be repeated, does not distort behavior (and may be seen by some as fair). … The conditions for success are strong, but also need to be weighed against the risks of the alternatives, which include repudiating public debt or inflating it away. … The tax rates needed to bring down public debt to precrisis levels, moreover, are sizable: reducing debt ratios to end-2007 levels would require (for a sample of 15 euro area countries) a tax rate of about 10 percent on households with positive net wealth....

“Financial wealth is mobile, and so, ultimately, are people.… There may be a case for taxing different forms of wealth differently according to their mobility … Substantial progress likely requires enhanced international cooperation to make it harder for the very well-off to evade taxation by placing funds elsewhere.

“A revenue-maximizing approach to taxing the rich effectively puts a weight of zero on their well-being—contentious, to say the least. What then if some weight is indeed attached to the well-being of the richest? Figure 19 provides a way to think about the trade-off between equity and efficiency considerations in setting the top marginal rate in that case. … If one attaches less weight to those with the highest incomes, the vote would be to increase the top marginal rate.”

The article’s author, Bill Frezza, makes several indisputable observations about this proposal, but one stands out above the rest:

If ever there were a roadmap for prompting massive capital flight and emigration of productive citizens toward capitalism’s nascent frontiers in Asia, this is it.

They who saunter casually about the halls of power, both here and in Europe, might be evil – indeed, I’d give odds on it – but they’re not stupid. They know full well that what Frezza said above is absolutely correct. The next question is inevitable: If they know it, why have they mused publicly about plans that would trigger it?

Give that a moment’s thought while I refill my mug.

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One of the lines of thought we’ve been conditioned away from considering seriously is that of political conspiracy, particularly as it applies to persons who officially wield power. Conspiracy has been made almost as unspeakable a word as nigger. The mere suggestion that elements of the United States federal government might be conspiring to fasten a totalitarian, social-fascist regime upon our necks is enough to get you snorted out of most social circles as a hairy-eyed kook.

Cui bono? the old Latin scholar asks. Who benefits from having made the consideration of that possibility so viscerally frightening that virtually no one will entertain it?

Don’t all answer at once, now.

The IMF report above, if publicized – and you can bet the rent that Forbes won’t be the only organ to cite it – is nearly certain to intensify the ongoing flight of liquid capital from the economies of the West. As capital departs our shores, our economic malaise will deepen. Jobs will grow scarcer. Loans will get even harder to obtain. The overall mobility of goods and services will shrink, as it always does when its essential lubricant – money – is in short supply. Our anemic 1% to 2% growth rates of the Obama years will dwindle still further, perhaps into the negative numbers.

That will put enormous pressure on the American welfare state and the ability of the federal government to fund it: a perfect justification for exactly the sort of confiscatory policies and capital controls delineated in the IMF report.

The IMF is a creature of the Western governments. Its policies are determined and ratified by consultation among highly placed persons from the major states of the West, including the United States. That all such governments have been swiftly tightening down on all economic and fiscal matters for decades is hardly in dispute. Until recently, Westerners’ attachment to property rights retarded them from the ultimate assertion of “eminent domain” over our bank accounts.

But now they can point to Cyprus. Shortly they’ll have Greece as well.

And we upon whom their crosshairs rest are absolutely inhibited against even thinking the word conspiracy.

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In Catherine Drinker Bowen’s marvelous narration of the Constitutional Convention, Miracle At Philadelphia, she records delegate Gouverneur Morris’s statement to the Convention that “Men don’t unite for life or liberty...they unite for the protection of property.” Indeed, the desire to protect Americans’ property rights was so strongly and sincerely felt by the Conventioneers that they all but forbade direct federal taxation, by mandating that it be uniform across all persons and places:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; [Article I, Section 8]

In such a scheme the major impetus toward direct taxation, the redistribution of wealth, would be impossible, thus greatly reducing the desirability of such taxes. It wasn’t until the Sixteenth Amendment:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

...that direct taxation of property in the possession of individuals became a regular feature of these United States.

The merits and demerits of direct taxation have been voluminously discussed in other fora. My point here is that we avoided all such taxes for more than a century, because they were regarded as an infringement on property rights. But Americans’ attachment to property rights – at least, to the property rights of other Americans – has been weakening over the decades. Today it’s about even money that a randomly selected American can’t even articulate the concept. Don’t bother asking him for the reason behind that clause from Article I, Section 8.

Redistributive policies founded on the income tax have thus set the stage for an assertion that the State has first claim on all wealth, in the name of the “common good.” A small sovereignty in the eastern Mediterranean has already acted on that premise. Another will soon follow. And the IMF, and the governments that support it, are looking on with unconcealed avidity.

Does the word conspiracy come any more easily to your mind, Gentle Reader?

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Please reflect on that IMF report and the labyrinth of approvals its publication required. Then please reread this emission from a few days ago. Please reflect on the phenomena of “ObamaPhones,” and no-exclusions medical insurance, and 99 weeks of unemployment insurance payments, and the removal of most restrictions on welfare eligibility, and on author/commentator Matt Bracken’s pithy evaluation of the scene developing before our eyes:

It looks like Obama plans to crash the economy and instigate massive food riots in November. This will be blamed, naturally, on the Evil White Racist Tea Party Republicans. American Pravda, (ABCNNBCBS, the NYT, the WaPo, the LAT) will dutifully serve as Obama’s microphone for this scapegoating....

Last Saturday’s hours-long EBT “glitch” led to mass panic and near riots in 17 states. Was that just a “warning” from the regime to the GOP to extend his infinite debt ceiling pronto, “or else?” If the EBT system is shut down for even three days, every supermarket will be looted, and riots will sweep our cities that will make 1968 look like a picnic. This is not an accident, this is deliberate.

We’ve seen this kind of deliberate provocation before: Reichstag Fire, anyone? I’m beginning to feel like it’s Berlin, 1933, and my name is Goldstein. And the new “Berlin Zeitung” will be the NYT and the Washington Post.

If you can come up with a non-conspiratorial reason our government is behaving thus, to say nothing of the governments of Europe, I’d very much like to hear it. For the nonce, I’m going to whisper “Conspiracy...conspiracy...conspiracy” to myself throughout the day. Just to see if I can decondition my guts out of reflexively convulsing at the sound of the word, of course.