Re: memes and conspiracies

James Daugherty (daugh@home.msen.com)
Sat, 16 Aug 1997 05:34:50 -0400


At 07:02 PM 8/13/97 +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, Anton Sherwood wrote:
>
>> I would argue that the conspiracy meme, by denying (or distracting
>> from) the results of Public Choice theory, supports the democratic
>> myth that statism will be just fine when we clear the bad apples out.
>
>Yes. I'm a bit irritated that so many otherwise reasonable people
>seems to think that you need a conspiracy (a shadowy group of people
>in black cloaks meeting to actively plot something secret and nasty)
>to explain things; quite often collusion develop out of
>self-organization

Growing self-organization is what sophisticated conspiracy theorists mean
by conspiracy.....why keep arguing against staw men? Why not argue with
the ideas actually being proposed here and now?

>between different parties who notice they gain when
>they act in a certain way, no centralized planning is needed to
>create a cartel.

But, there is some centralized planning none-the-less. Remember, the most
powerful forces on Wall Street sent their representatives to plan the
Federal Reserve cartel in secret at Jeckyl Island Georgia in 1913. Paul
Warburg (Daddy Warbucks) had reviewed the history of Central Banking
cartels prior to the meeting and presented his results. The shadowy
figures travelled to the train station in disguise and under false names to
avoid the press. They came to an agreement and then sold their agenda
covertly "as a populist measure to limit the power of Wall Street"! The
Jeckyll Island "conspiracy" is well documented in the autobiographies of
several of the attendees.

>"Designed" conspiracies ("Psst, want to rule the world?") seems to
>work much less well than "grown" conspiracies ("Thank God for the
>anti-nuclear activists, now we can sell more oil. Give them some
>money, would you?")

And, now that we see their usefulness, let's have our Foundations take
over the anti-Nuclear movement lock stock and barell, re-organized them
with acceptable leaders, etc. etc. CONSPIRACY

, and everybody seems to overestimate their
>efficiency and prevalence (because it is untestable: if you see a
>failed conspiracy, then there might be a dozen successul conspiracies
>behind your back, and if you can not find any large conspiracies it
>must be because they are good at hiding).

No one said the scientific method was easy to apply to the study of
society, and extremely complex phenomenon.

However, conspiracy theories are no more untestable than any other theory
of history. And people do attempt to test them...pefectly cotnrolled
experiments, of course, are possible only to the rich and powerful in a
position try a conspiratorial strategy and see if it works...those using
the scientific method outside a conspiracy can only only look for data that
would tend to support or deny the theory and then make a reasonable
judgement....

>-----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
>nv91-asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~nv91-asa/main.html
>GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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