There is no Inner Party who can explain how the world really works, like at the end of 1984 and Brave New World. Nobody knows anything.
Conspiracy theorists have much too high an estimation of the capabilities of the people in charge.
Comments at Steve Sailer:
* I witnessed this firsthand at my first board meeting of a large healthcare system as the pandemic began in this country. Everyone was scared and was figuratively running around like chickens with heads cut off. People in charge just didn’t know what to do.
My wife is the head of a local healthcare facility, and the same panicked scene unfolded in the conference call she had with other heads of hospitals and their corporate overlords.
My contacts still in the alphabet soup tell me the same thing. There is no “Inner Party.” People believe too much in conspiracy when the combination of sheer greed and incompetence will do.
* Maybe it’s not a coincidence that we didn’t / don’t know what we were / are doing. In this interview, Dr. Fauci sets the record straight; until well into January, the ChiComs were telling everyone that this disease spreads from animal to human. Period. And it was on that basis that Fauci told everyone that there would be little to no problem in this country.
As a nation, we need to see China’s lying and disinformation as the actions of a deliberate foe. They should be stripped of most favored nation trading status; we should make what we need here, in the United States, or with trusted trading partners.
This could go on for years, for all we know. We need to weed out the people (illegals) who have no business here, and send them elsewhere. Our economy might well contract to half of its pre-Covid-19 size. Men to rebuild infrastructure and women to rear children at home. Because maybe there’s no public school (daycare) for a few years.
* Except for maybe a few Cassandras, the entire American medical establishment—with reams and reams of framed office credentials—was sleepwalking on this. Suddenly doctors realize hospitals and the public needs millions and millions of masks— Supply chain? Pandemic? What’s that?
* “Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.”
― H.A.L. Fisher, History of Europe: v. 1
* This is not proof there is no Inner Party. This is proof that humans are not omniscient. Even when they get information, they often fail to grasp the significance. And when they grasp the significance, they still may not translate that into meaningful action or extrapolate that to other aspects of their life.
If by Inner Party, you mean one cabal of final authorities, that doesn’t seem to accord. But there are certainly powerful entities in world events who lead factions to accomplish their goals, and said persons are bound by class, outlook, and social clubs. And there does seem to be a near monolithic Establishment ideology of Globohomo.
Formulated as you put it, the statement appears to be: “Man cannot be God.”
* …the World is too big, too complex and too unpredictable for elite individuals and groups to effectively control it. The best that elites can do is push for certain legislation, military and political action that forces a very small fraction of the economic, political, cultural and human totality of the World to shift in ways that favor them. And even then, it is extremely difficult because there is a lot of competition with other elite individuals and groups that have diametrically opposite interests.
The reason why so many people believe in conspiracy theories is because it offers simple explanations to a fantastically complex, scary and inscrutable World that they do not understand. The reason why things happen the way they do is do to extremely complicated interactions of apparently unrelated facts that number in the trillions. Even extremely intelligent people get confused trying to get a “big picture” of everything, and they usually are only able to have certain theories on why some aspects of the totalityof the World behave the way they do. Nobelists and intellectuals can do no better than propose suppositions about why things are the way they are, and then support their suppositions with evidence and propose experiments and comparisons to asses whether their suppositions are true. If the very smart struggle, what hope is there for average people?
But a conspiracy theory is something that everyone can understand. Humans are social primates that play games of interpersonal trickery on each other to achieve dominance(resources, attractive mates, etc). It goes back to high school, and bitchy girls gossiping to each other.
It’s much more satisfying to the average person to hear that the reason why they lost their job or why their wages haven’t risen is that elites are conspiring to bring them down. Listening to an explanation that involves concepts like comparative advantage, cash flow, international division of labor, production cost, accrued human capital value, etc, is just frustrating not only because it is inscrutable, but because there is no one specific to place the blame. Humans like to anthropomorphize the sources of their pain and suffering, and impersonal and complex culprits are just not attractive.
* The reason why so many people believe in conspiracy theories is because it offers simple explanations to a fantastically complex, scary and inscrutable World that they do not understand.
* Yes, I think that’s a large part of the motivation for believing in conspiracy theories. It’ much easier to believe in conspiracy theories than to try to figure out how the world actually works.
It’s not the only motivation. There are also people who like to think they have Secret Knowledge that ordinary folks don’t have.
And there are people who are simply inclined to paranoid delusions.
* There might not be a “Inner Party” per say, but there are formal/informal and prestigious networks across the globe. Your old friend Mr.X who works at the CIA’s bioterrorism department gives you the heads up of a nasty virus spreading in China one month before the news picks it up. (You hired a hooker in college to help him lose his virginity 30 years ago and is repaying the favor. His NSA contacts can read CCP intelligence reports despite the Wuhan media blackout and military encryption.)
You spread it to your fellow yuppie friends. Some ignore it while others plan ahead accordingly. The “Inner Party” isn’t a centralized entity but more of a private Facebook chat group. What’s discussed over the grapevine is instantaneous and not executed by committee. It’s insider trading but not (often) about stocks.
* If you want a real strong anti-conspiracy point on this whole thing…
In two major purchases in December and January Blackstone bought around $10 billion of Vegas casinos.
Ouch.
* There is something in political science known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy… All complex organizations come to be dominated by smaller groups because that’s the only way such things work.
* C.S. Lewis had interesting views on “the inner circle” : he wrote several novels about how an inner circle tried to bring down (a) Venus and (b) England, etc., and he had a deep bitterness against the privileged boys who bullied him when he was in public school (the passage where he describes his reflections on the fact that most of the older boys he despised (because they were cowardly bullies at public school) were killed in WWI is one of the most brutal things I have ever read, and I have read lots of brutal things):
His view was that smart people gravitate to an inner circle, they get addicted to it, and as they gain power the Devil begins to use them.
* Like I said, please identify who was pulling the strings behind, say, FDR or TR. Enough time has gone by that all the memoirs should be written and available.
