This is important, because
From childhood, we experience the fact that people round us are communicating with each other in ways which are mysterious to us (i.e., non-verbally). We have to wonder whether they are communicating about us. Sometimes they are. We have to wonder whether they are intentionally excluding us, for more or less malicious reasons. Sometimes they are. Anyway, malicious or not, their motives are often invisible to us.
Based on that experience, it is easy to believe that the world in general is run like that.
Look at people you know in positions of power - your boss, for example. It may be apparent to you that the more senior they get, the less time they have for finding out what is really going on, let alone controlling it in any fiendishly sophisticated way. Now look at people you know who have both a broad-based body of knowledge and a strong personal commitment to a particular ideological position. Are they in positions of power? No, they're geeky losers like you and me, aren't they! Now look at people who have made real bids for world domination - such as Adolf Hitler or Bill Gates. Did they work to a deep and complex pre-conceived plan? No, they were and are opportunists; they react to unexpected events and sometimes fall victim to them.
This doesn't mean that conspiracies never happen. However, real life conspiracies tend to be simple, and to work with the grain of human nature - specifically, the nature of non-nerdy humans. Next to us nerds, those humans tend to look fairly stupid and, when it comes to causes or ideals beyond their own material interests, fairly cowardly. By far the most common kind of real-life conspiracy is the 'conspiracy of silence'. What happens is that there's a bunch of loosely-connected people, many whom have accumulated a bad conscience about one petty thing or another while advancing their careers; one day, something goes wrong: the word gets around that someone has screwed up, and everyone connected with the incident tacitly agrees to shut up about it, for fear that it might have been them...
...and that's it. They're not trying to change history. They didn't get where they are today by staring out of the window thinking about history.
My handler tells me I've said enough now ;) ...
- Jeffrey Darwin 2008-02-15 13:56:28
Google is the best search engine Google
- Jane Lawrence 2008-02-15 14:02:18