💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › andrew-dobbs-conspiracy-or-anarchy.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 06:45:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Conspiracy or Anarchy Author: Andrew Dobbs Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: conspiracy, direct action, Fifth Estate, Fifth Estate #383, leftism Notes: From Fifth Estate #383, Summer 2010
If you think space aliens killed JFK and brought down the twin towers,
and no one realizes it because of government chemtrails, you may think
this article is part of the conspiracy.
Like God before her, Reason is dying. Her fast life has taken its toll:
God took a millennium or two to live out His days, Reason has had a mere
three centuries of gallivanting to the moon and back.
People now find her insufficient to explain their experience of nature
just as they once found God unnecessary.
Rational logic triumphed because it didn’t answer “because God made it
so” or “it’s magic.” It offered more testable and nuanced reasons for
natural phenomena.
Reason seemed more utile than her predecessors, but now this utility
looks disastrously inconvenient: the threats of nuclear war, global
terrorism, ecological catastrophe, cultural decadence and the misery of
our emerging cyberpunk dystopia raise doubts as to Reason’s ultimate
usefulness. Social conformity is now called “Freedom” in the common
tongue, and the load-bearing walls of power’s edifice are called
“rights.” Logic no longer orders everyday reality, and Reason is
increasingly impotent — the grave rushes to meet her.
In this context, myths — fantastic narratives explaining the mundane
elements of natural experience have made a comeback. In their heyday, a
dozen or more centuries ago, myths were inscribed in the discourses most
credible then: bardic poetry, folktales, paintings and drama. Today’s
myths are inscribed in our most credible discourse: scientific theory.
As Reason fails to explain public things, so-called conspiracy theories
spread their thrall.
These myths are inherently reactionary, and any movement rooted in them
will bear monstrous fruits destructive to human freedom. This is
particularly exigent today because we risk missing the moment when
Reason can be succeeded by something truly liberatory, where the terms
of history are redefined and the opportunities for freedom might be
widened. Knowing why people believe these ideas and how these beliefs
rot movements for real change is key to making it through our times.
Conspiracy theories can appeal to some radicals by claiming to analyze
issues of real concern. They see a world where power is concentrated
into fewer and fewer hands, where state secrecy and surveillance are
more and more common and in which popular opportunities for resistance
erode further every day. These are real concerns, but conspiracists have
inane systems for connecting these facts and they marry them to
perceived threats which lead them to ignore real change.
A fevered hunt for new connections replaces honest curiosity, so
conspiracists never really learn how power works. For example, every
conspiracy theory asks the indignant question, “Why is the government
keeping secrets if there’s nothing to hide?”
Anarchy can answer this question: states lie and keep secrets because
that’s what they do. In totalitarian states nobody is allowed any
secrets, but all of the states’ activities are secret. Short of this,
every state maintains secrets, and they all maintain surveillance
methods to dispel individual secrets. Unanswered questions in the 9/11
Commission Report or shady behavior by G-men indicate nothing like what
conspiracists imagine. It is done for no reason beyond the routine
extension of the state’s domain. It works better without a reason — you
don’t need a conspiracy to explain things.
Conspiracists attach themselves to retrograde canards of the ruling
order. Our eroding “U.S. national sovereignty” is one of their chief
worries. Sovereignty, according to the dictionary, means “the state of
being a... supreme ruler,” so the conspiracist right wing fears any
alternate supreme ruler, such as the United Nations or the mythical
North American Union that would replace the domestic nation state.
Internationalism and immigrants pouring across the border threaten them
because it could mean they’ll be ruled by foreigners rather than
bureaucrats of their own color and kind. That perhaps each individual
ought to rule oneself never occurs to them; they instead yearn for
nationalism and that can purify their rule.
Even those leftists drawn from the anti-war movements or numbed to
nonsense by hysterical Bush hatred end up as reactionaries. Progressives
inspired by conspiracists get tunnel vision about “bankers” at the
expense of analyzing capital’s broader crimes or apologize for the
Taliban and al Qaeda as unfairly maligned by the “Inside Job.” That this
fringe fantasy is now widely held among proles and radicals alike, is
good news to power, indeed.
Myths also bear utility for their believers. Believing that rain comes
from a particular deity with well-known likes, dislikes and means of
communication assuages one’s concern about the weather. Similarly,
believing that a clandestine cult has awesome control over the function
of global power absolves one of any responsibility for power’s crimes.
If 9/11 was the work of Dick Cheney, et al, and not al Qaeda, then the
fact that North American people have long ignored or endorsed a
loathsome Mideast policy in return for cheap oil and cash investment
need not bother us. Like misbehaving children conspiracists insist, “not
my fault.”
This is the soul of reaction, the ugly vice which doesn’t hold us back
so much as turn us out (in the pimp’s sense); it makes us forswear
freedom for some pitiful treat. Freedom only exists under conditions of
responsibility, and responsibility itself liberates.
Once the horror of discovering your responsibility for the totality of
your life passes, one is empowered. Direct action follows from this
discovery; this is the heart of anarchy. To instead refuse even the
merest responsibility for the prevailing order with fantastic scapegoats
is to bar all paths to addressing our crimes.
Their praxis is insidious, too. The conspiracist bogeymen are, in fact,
contemptible — bankers, the Bush and Obama administrations,
international bureaucracies, but conspiracy theories take advantage of
honest opposition to these elements and canalize this energy into
irrelevance.
Conspiracists always demand “A New Investigation,” and their activism
consists of the same boring, sign-waving, handbill pushing, and
orchestrated shouting characteristic of the mainstream. As Reason dies,
conspiracists exploit the energy of this revolutionary moment for base
reformism.
Such reform movements improve power’s operations. Reformists cannot
envision a world without state, money, or God, and insist that these
institutions shape up and ingratiate themselves more comfortably into
our lives. The institutions of authority benefit from the way
conspiracist reformism makes the state a distant, omnipotent force as
opposed to the immediate creation of our own perverted desires.
Conspiracy theory seeps into all our ideologies, making resistance seem
futile and submission inevitable.
Under anarchy, we liberate ourselves; under the conspiracy, subjection
is our comfort.
Still, it isn’t just right-wing quacks and left-wing liberals who
tolerate conspiracy theory; some anarchists do as well. If people now
believe the bankers and feds can commit any atrocious act — kill
thousands of their own citizens to start wars of conquest or use
“chemtrails” to control our brains — they think, that is good. Yet while
it is good that people believe the government is capable of any evil,
conspiracists don’t follow this to the conclusion that the state ought
to be abolished. Conspiracism does not undermine the state, the state’s
crumbling legitimacy creates the material basis for conspiracism’s rise.
Your typical right wing conspiracist just wants “the good ol’ days”
back, or “Constitutional governance,” or other reactionary red herrings.
Well-meaning progressive leftists — on the other hand — who lack
anarchist or even Marxist theories of power end up spoiling campus
radicalism, the peace movement, resistance to the expansion of the
state’s power, and other movements. They supplant direct action or at
least direct demands with pushes for the “New Investigation” and
activism aimed at stopping fantasy threats.
If we are to tap the tremendous energy wasted in conspiracy mongering,
we must start with the issue of efficiency. One can sympathize with some
conspiracist concerns all the while offering better explanations. A
tiny, interconnected, world-ruling elite does exist, but this elite’s
power isn’t a secret, and their aims and operations are quite public.
Self-replicating power inevitably accrues to fewer and fewer hands, but
we don’t need the Illuminati or the Bilderberg Group to explain this.
Direct action offers concrete opportunities to attack and undermine the
real conspiracy of power. We can assume responsibility and be free. This
narrative can compete with the conspiracism that oozes out of the status
quo.
But anarchy is, after all, a narrative, a simplification of reality, a
myth. Reason’s collapse is about how one myth — that innovation,
technology and development can persist infinitely — has run its course.
The desire for a new myth won’t be satisfied by some absolute objective
standard for Truth, it will be satisfied by the strongest of Reason’s
challengers.
Anarchy is a myth which posits chaos as the only true order, which
indicts attempts at control for increasing the level of disorder. There
is, thus, no power higher than the individual conscience ordering one’s
own life.
Institutions of authority consume individuals as parasites on human life
and freedom. By reorganizing our lives around human-scale institutions,
and by creatively destroying the state, market, and church among other
monstrous systems, human freedom can reign.
All this to say, what we believe matters. The notion that there are no
natural laws and so our consciences are the highest power looks just as
wild in the light of “reality” as the idea that a powerful secret cult
rules the world for arcane ends. The difference is in what each demands
of their respective adherents.
Conspiracists spin in a totalitarian frenzy; anarchists take power for
themselves, over themselves. One is attuned to the decadent childishness
of our time, eager to abandon all hope for freedom to avoid any threat
of responsibility.
The other offers a maturity the future demands. Reason is dying, and a
new answer will be sought by history soon. We can be defeated by this
history or we can write it in the tongue of our wills.
Conspiracy or Anarchy; when many are compelled to answer, the age will
have pulled up to its end.