Conspiracy theories are another huge trap for smart people...I know a bunch of brilliant people, often highly educated, who never accomplish anything because they believe the government is watching their every move and there's about to be a complete societal breakdown as people realize how much the power elite is fucking them over.
Of course it's true. Whenever there's a power imbalance, one party is being fucked over, and whenever there's more than one person, there's a power imbalance. It's almost a tautology.
But acting like it's true gives you an excuse for not doing anything. And then instead of just having the power elite fuck you over, you're fucking yourself over too.
This is a silly attitude. Ultimately everybody is fucking everybody else over simultaneously. You fuck your boss over as your boss fucks you over. You fuck your employees over, and they fuck you over too. Occasionally you'll get fucked over by someone you can't fuck over, like the phone company, but the chances are that they're being fucked over by somebody who's being fucked over by somebody you're fucking over, so it all evens out in the end.
> This is a silly attitude. Ultimately everybody is fucking everybody else over simultaneously. You fuck your boss over as your boss fucks you over. You fuck your employees over, and they fuck you over too. Occasionally you'll get fucked over by someone you can't fuck over, like the phone company, but the chances are that they're being fucked over by somebody who's being fucked over by somebody you're fucking over, so it all evens out in the end.
You wouldn't be working in the porn industry, perchance?
I don't agree that whenever there is a power imbalance, one side will get "fucked over". Indeed, the whole idea of having a market is that people are mostly equal in terms of power (read Hobbes' Leviathan). It's only when power imbalances are so gross that they're obvious that one side is guaranteed to get "fucked over".
agree that pawer balance != somebody get fucked over
for instance America is a benign hegemony. Though they still fuck over people at times, they did it much less than, say, UK, or Rome, etc.
but a counter-point
- having a market means people with more money fuck over people with no money.
Are you saying that Steve Jobs is fucking me over somehow? By contrast to him, I basically have no money. If so, what exactly is he doing to me? I thought he was helping me a lot.
He does seem to base his thesis exclusively on conspiracies of cause (intentional, active plots) and leaves out the subtler but more broadly effective conspiracies of effect (think of the combination of bad education, bad social programming and predatory practices that create and perpetuate the poor as a social class).
The definition of a 'conspiracy' requires conspirators. There has to be a group of people doing something secret or it doesn't count.
I do agree with you that 'conspiracies of effect' exist, and in fact I think they are more common than conspiracies designed by people. A good example is lies told to children; that can't work unless the vast majority of adults won't spoil it by telling the truth to kids they meet. However, there is no secret leadership organizing the thing; there are no people behind a curtain; there is no smoke-filled room; it's just a nasty tradition with no secret group of conspirators causing it.
In many cases people who are participating in one of the conspiracies of effect are aware that what they are doing isn't necessarily kosher, but will have some justification that makes it OK for them to do it.
(eg. a mortgage broker might think "I pushed my lower-income clients into balloon mortgages because it helped them get lower monthly payments. Plus I really needed these Ferragamo's")
In other words given the human mind's capacity for self-delusion, it's not impossible for people to participate in these anarchic leaderless conspiracies without being consciously aware of it.
Unraveling that conundrum might actually get us close to a description of social behaviour that could be considered science.;
