pms wrote:
>
> The problem with conspiracy theories is, the assumption is that someone,
> somewhere, is actually In Charge -- an interesting variant of Weber's
> vanishing mediator, actually. The reality is that history is made
> by massive, gigantic, bumbling bureaucracies, bound up in
> historical constellations of power, which need to be carefully analyzed
> and decoded.
>
> - -- Dennis
>
> So your saying that those long generations of vast fortunes don't willfully
> exert influence on world affairs?
You just repeated what Dennis said. What you offer in this sentence is not a conspiracy theory but a description of what goes on in the open. Almost any CEO would be quite willing to say this in the pages of the NY Times.
That big capital doesn't realize that an
> ageing and increasingly unemployed US population needs to be "managed"?
This is not special to capitalism even, let alone to the present situation in the U.S. Ruling classes have always been quite conscious and quite open about the need to "manage" the work force, and not merely "aging" or "unemployed" work forces. In fact under capitalism unemployment is the _chief_ way of carrrying out that task of managing. The _Federalist Papers_ revolve around the task of managing the population.
It
> took years of hard work to get the people to label progress as petty
> "political correctness". It took concerted effort to get women enjoying the
> benefits of feminism every day, to disown feminism. You don't think that
> certain elements in the US have worked toward disappearing the dreaded
> Vietnam Syndrome?
Again, you are just giving quite open (and non-conspiratorial) examples of what those bureaucracies _do_. The very phrase, "Vietnam Syndrome," was invented by those who were explicitly discussing how to dissipate it.
> One persons conspiracy is just another persons dream.
> And dreams manifest. Visions permeate whole bureacracies.
> They come from somewhere.
I don't understand your point here.
The real weakness of "conspiracy theories" is that they seriously interfere with seeing the open and non-conspiratorial conspiracies which go on every day and are recorded in the headlines. There is indeed a huge cospiracy going on today, the whole Afghanistan War, but there is nothing really secret about it. In exposing it we don't need to search for hidden facts. We just need to explain in clear terms what the government describes itself as doing. In fact, even the claim that it is a war about an oil pipeline, while quite possibly true, is beside the point and merely distracts from the main business of the antiwar movement, of showing that the U.S. is wrong regardless of what its motives are.
I disagree with Dennis (Redmond) on almost everything, but "The problem with conspiracy theories is, the assumption is that someone, somewhere, is actually In Charge." Particularly interesting to me is that it beautifully describes the biggest conspiracy theory of them all, Religion. [Hi Chip! :-)] This is very clear in the earliest document of "western" culture, the _Iliad_. Someone does something that causes trouble and doesn't make sense: The god(dess) made me do it," he or she says. In Christianity this is called Providence, a conspiratorial explanation of human history. See _Paradise Lost_ which revolves around (a) Satan's conspiracy and (b) God's counter-conspiracy.
(I am less familiar with modern xtian theology than with that of the 12th through 17th centuries, but I would tend to see as broadly "conspiracist" any attempt to explain human history in terms of any consciousness not itself historical.)
Carrol