Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Conspiracy Theories
I caught part of a History Channel program on conspiracy theories this week. It may have been an old one, but it was new to me. The program mentioned three groups considered by conspiracy buffs to contain the evil core of the committee that really runs the world. They are the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and of course the Skull and Bones of Harvard. They had a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in an interview, and in spite of the fact that he insisted that there is no underground conspiracy going on, and the fact that I’d bet real money that he was telling the truth, the conspiracy folks say that it’s actually the “secret core” of these three groups that is so secret that even the general membership doesn’t know what’s really going on. Sure. But even the hard-core conspiracy buffs will tell you that the entire Skull and Bones Society is the secret core. The Skull and Bones is so secret that, as G. H. W. Bush says in his one-line reference in his autobiography, “I can’t say anything more about it.” Yep, one heckuva secret society it is.
Except of course that in two-hundred years more than one member has spilled the beans about what goes on in the meetings. They do use skulls and bones in their rituals, of course. And they are like any other fraternity in that they have secret handshakes and rigmarole that they go through to prove to themselves that they’re special. Their clocks, for instance, are set five minutes fast. Standard time is referred to as “barbarian” time or some such epithet. They meet at 6:30 several days a week. One day is just sharing biographical information: you know, what you been up to, brother? Another day is devoted to sharing sexual exploits. Their rituals are borrowed or stolen from Freemasonry as practiced a couple of centuries ago. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Freemasonry got into all sorts of trouble with even murders and cover-ups attributed to it. What Freemasonry is today I have no idea, but most of the people who wrote our constitution were Masons, which in those days meant Rational Deists and Deep Thinkers. Good for them, and as the Skull and Bones predates the great fall of Freemasonry its members can presume to have an authentic link to the rituals and beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Somehow I can’t see Adams and Jefferson sitting around trading kiss-and-tell stories, but you never know.
There have been three Presidents who were members, one of whom still is. Thomas Jefferson is rumored to have been a member but there’s no collaboration. The third was Twentieth Century, although I don’t recall at this moment which one it was. It was not Carter, Reagan, or Clinton, or Nixon, I know that for sure. In fact I think it was early in the century, or maybe even in the nineteenth.
My point in writing all that is not to let everyone know how much we know about this secret society, but is rather to question very strongly the conspiracy theorists’ ideas about this secret fraternity. If these guys are a secret cabal running the world, then I’d expect them to exhibit some craft, skill and wits. Instead, the current incumbent, who is a member, seems better suited for a sitcom than public office. If it’s such a great conspiracy, why is it being run so poorly? If your aim is to get the public behind you by telling them some formerly secret information, wouldn’t it be simpler, and safer in the long run, just to do that instead of telling somebody to ‘leak’ the information, risking who knows what sort of contamination in a sort of political game of “telephone?” If you’re a deep thinker, wouldn’t you think about the various factions in the country you aim to convert to a more favorable form of government before you go in and depose the current ruler? If you’re so savvy, would you be fighting your own party over things like immigration reform and budgetary policy? Would you be quite so much the butt of jokes from everyone who presumes to be a comic if you were so slick as all that? I have the answer: no, you would not. There is no way in heck that any organization that grooms and promotes an obvious doofus is capable of any major conspiracy that has a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding.
What do we really have? First, a fraternity that closely guards it rituals, which are apparently mostly an insult to Freemasonry. Second, a group of individuals dedicated to trying to improve the world situation in the form of the Council on Foreign Relations. And of course, a smaller group dedicated to getting nations talking and trading rather than fighting, of course I mean the Trilateral Commission. But, it is so reasonable that there is a vast conspiracy loose in the world. What could that be?
Walt Kelly had it exactly right. His cartoon strip Pogo ran for decades, and one of the signature lines of the strip was “We have met the enemy and he is us.” That’s right, folks, the vast conspiracy is human nature. Consider that absolutely no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to form a government at all. Yet, having overthrown England, the first thing the American Revolutionary movement did was set up a government. That one didn’t really work so well, so they formed another one, creating our Constitution as the framework. There’s not a bit of holy writ anywhere that says “thou shalt elect representatives, and verily they shalt govern in a lame and senseless manner.” But that’s what we’ve been doing since before the Revolutionary War, and that’s what we’ll keep right on doing in all likelihood. Other countries’ rulers claim divine right. The English Parliament rules by consent of the Queen (officially at least) and the Queen gets her power from God as it says in the Royal Motto (Dieu et mon droit.) Emperors have ruled by divine right for millennia. Caius Caesar, you remember him, of course, rigged an augury so that the people would know that the gods favored his reign. I doubt if he believed in a single power anywhere greater than himself, but he knew how to use the tools he found lying about. Caesar ruled because the gods willed it so. So did William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, and every other despot prior to our revolution. Now only some of them do, and most that do have ceded most of their powers to elected bodies. Yet, even without any gods chartering them, governments continue to be formed and re-formed. That we have this innate instinct to form governments (which after all might be a good thing if you look at them properly) is the reason that people see a conspiracy. The driving force is the very nature of human beings. We act from instinct, much more often than we’d like to admit, and a vast worldwide conspiracy is the result.
That makes it difficult to figure out who to blame. I mean, if God isn’t setting up our governments, then who is at fault. Oh, wait, I’ve got it. Maybe God set up the world so that humans would have that instinct, so we can still plop the blame right at God’s holy feet. Yeah, that’s it. Good! Just so it isn’t our fault, huh?
Except of course that in two-hundred years more than one member has spilled the beans about what goes on in the meetings. They do use skulls and bones in their rituals, of course. And they are like any other fraternity in that they have secret handshakes and rigmarole that they go through to prove to themselves that they’re special. Their clocks, for instance, are set five minutes fast. Standard time is referred to as “barbarian” time or some such epithet. They meet at 6:30 several days a week. One day is just sharing biographical information: you know, what you been up to, brother? Another day is devoted to sharing sexual exploits. Their rituals are borrowed or stolen from Freemasonry as practiced a couple of centuries ago. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Freemasonry got into all sorts of trouble with even murders and cover-ups attributed to it. What Freemasonry is today I have no idea, but most of the people who wrote our constitution were Masons, which in those days meant Rational Deists and Deep Thinkers. Good for them, and as the Skull and Bones predates the great fall of Freemasonry its members can presume to have an authentic link to the rituals and beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Somehow I can’t see Adams and Jefferson sitting around trading kiss-and-tell stories, but you never know.
There have been three Presidents who were members, one of whom still is. Thomas Jefferson is rumored to have been a member but there’s no collaboration. The third was Twentieth Century, although I don’t recall at this moment which one it was. It was not Carter, Reagan, or Clinton, or Nixon, I know that for sure. In fact I think it was early in the century, or maybe even in the nineteenth.
My point in writing all that is not to let everyone know how much we know about this secret society, but is rather to question very strongly the conspiracy theorists’ ideas about this secret fraternity. If these guys are a secret cabal running the world, then I’d expect them to exhibit some craft, skill and wits. Instead, the current incumbent, who is a member, seems better suited for a sitcom than public office. If it’s such a great conspiracy, why is it being run so poorly? If your aim is to get the public behind you by telling them some formerly secret information, wouldn’t it be simpler, and safer in the long run, just to do that instead of telling somebody to ‘leak’ the information, risking who knows what sort of contamination in a sort of political game of “telephone?” If you’re a deep thinker, wouldn’t you think about the various factions in the country you aim to convert to a more favorable form of government before you go in and depose the current ruler? If you’re so savvy, would you be fighting your own party over things like immigration reform and budgetary policy? Would you be quite so much the butt of jokes from everyone who presumes to be a comic if you were so slick as all that? I have the answer: no, you would not. There is no way in heck that any organization that grooms and promotes an obvious doofus is capable of any major conspiracy that has a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding.
What do we really have? First, a fraternity that closely guards it rituals, which are apparently mostly an insult to Freemasonry. Second, a group of individuals dedicated to trying to improve the world situation in the form of the Council on Foreign Relations. And of course, a smaller group dedicated to getting nations talking and trading rather than fighting, of course I mean the Trilateral Commission. But, it is so reasonable that there is a vast conspiracy loose in the world. What could that be?
Walt Kelly had it exactly right. His cartoon strip Pogo ran for decades, and one of the signature lines of the strip was “We have met the enemy and he is us.” That’s right, folks, the vast conspiracy is human nature. Consider that absolutely no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head forcing them to form a government at all. Yet, having overthrown England, the first thing the American Revolutionary movement did was set up a government. That one didn’t really work so well, so they formed another one, creating our Constitution as the framework. There’s not a bit of holy writ anywhere that says “thou shalt elect representatives, and verily they shalt govern in a lame and senseless manner.” But that’s what we’ve been doing since before the Revolutionary War, and that’s what we’ll keep right on doing in all likelihood. Other countries’ rulers claim divine right. The English Parliament rules by consent of the Queen (officially at least) and the Queen gets her power from God as it says in the Royal Motto (Dieu et mon droit.) Emperors have ruled by divine right for millennia. Caius Caesar, you remember him, of course, rigged an augury so that the people would know that the gods favored his reign. I doubt if he believed in a single power anywhere greater than himself, but he knew how to use the tools he found lying about. Caesar ruled because the gods willed it so. So did William the Conqueror, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, and every other despot prior to our revolution. Now only some of them do, and most that do have ceded most of their powers to elected bodies. Yet, even without any gods chartering them, governments continue to be formed and re-formed. That we have this innate instinct to form governments (which after all might be a good thing if you look at them properly) is the reason that people see a conspiracy. The driving force is the very nature of human beings. We act from instinct, much more often than we’d like to admit, and a vast worldwide conspiracy is the result.
That makes it difficult to figure out who to blame. I mean, if God isn’t setting up our governments, then who is at fault. Oh, wait, I’ve got it. Maybe God set up the world so that humans would have that instinct, so we can still plop the blame right at God’s holy feet. Yeah, that’s it. Good! Just so it isn’t our fault, huh?
