"Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy." - Wendell Berry
This essay examines what would really happen if conspiracy theorists got their way. It is an examination of a splintered pseudo-religious cult and its dangerous ideas and how - if such ideas were ever to gain ground - society as we know it would would be severely affected. Their far-right libertarian view of revolution is fueled by a conspiratorial paranoia whose consequences are readily obvious. The problem right from the start, of course, is that the conspiracy theories are false, and their adherents ideas for changing the world are based on an incorrect and often downright delusional view of reality. That means that their post-revolution solutions would have very severe unintended consequences because their solutions aren't aimed at solving real problems in the real world, but rather solving false problems that exist only in their fantasy world.
The first step on this journey would probably be the gallows. Those deemed traitors to the 'cause' would be rounded up and strung up. I myself have been told twice (on the David Icke forum) that when the revolution comes I will be standing on the gallows with the other 'traitors'. This talk of gallows (among other ways of execution including burning people alive) appears all too common among conspiracists and examples are not hard to find:
9/11 Truthers:
https://sites.google.com/site/wtc7lies/semiliterateparanoiacswhofantasizeaboutt
http://www.vice.com/read/the-conspiracy-theory-community-are-dangerous-enemies-to-make
Chemtrailers:
This reasoning, which is (like most things conspiracy theorists believe
in) not fully thought out, assumes that there will be some sort of
'revolution' where presumably the current political order will be
undone, the conspiracies that these people believe in will be halted,
and those who supported them will be punished.
So now what? The government is toppled, the traitors are swinging from their ropes and society has more or less come to a halt. Here we find the vacuum that is so common with all revolutions. How will it be filled? Examining just one of these group's ideas it is quickly understood that the post-revolution philosophy found in most conspiratuality is centered around a far-right libertarian agenda. Thrive is a movie and movement centered around conspiracies and New Age ideas which has quickly developed into a movement. It was set up by Foster Gamble and you can see their site here:
http://www.thrivemovement.com/
The website's Liberty page for example is a real shocker:
http://www.thrivemovement.com/solutions-liberty
Peppered with quotes from Ayn Rand, Ron Paul and Stefan Molyneux, the page even includes an attack on democracy. Gamble lumps democracy in with bigotry, imperialism, socialism, and fascism, and claims all of these - including democracy! - violate the "intrinsic freedom of others." Although Gamble thinks he is creating a political center where the right and left can join together - in part because he interviews progressives throughout his film - most of the actual solutions he proposes are strictly libertarian.
The political center to which Gamble refers is a myth. George Lakoff, author of The Political Mind, explains why there is no such thing as an established 'moderate' or 'centrist' worldview - i.e., no single set of ideas characterizes a center or moderate political position. Consequently, different people will describe 'the center' in different ways, depending on their particular beliefs about what defines a political center. Moreover, the 'center' will also be defined by the prevailing political narrative. If libertarians, conservatives, and ultra right wing factions are debating liberal Democrats, the center will always be on the right. However, if socialists and communists were added to the debate, the center would move toward the left. So, identifying who is allowed into the discussion is a determining factor in defining the 'center.'
Lakoff's discovery is an important contribution to understanding how and why people vote the way they do. It explains the role of emotions, metaphors, and psychological history, all of which determine which buttons we push in the voting booth as well as which buttons have been pushed by the manipulators who know how to influence our behavior.
But I fear we are diverting too much into discussion here so let me quickly return you to that post-revolution world.
Show Me the Money.
Just as everywhere today, the key factor in the world that conspiracy theorists have built is money. The problem, however, is that there isn't any. In a post-conspiracy world there are no banks or formal financial institutions. In the past 50 years, conspiracy theories regarding banks, finance and currency - infused with libertarian propaganda - became so prevalent that the banks either collapsed, were outlawed, or were driven out of business. Needless to say in America the U.S. Federal Reserve was the first to go. 'Fiat currency' is the ultimate evil, the tool of the Illuminati for world domination, so the very appearance of it is social taboo. Just as libertarians and conspiracy theorists today demand, the U.S. is back on the gold standard: all currency is backed by gold. However, early in the revolution, large corporations quickly purchased all of the gold bullion in the United States from the failing banks. All of this gold is still held in their vaults, heavily guarded. It never enters circulation. Gold and gold-backed currency are still traded by the large corporations, but in purely theoretical transactions that take place on balance sheets and in computer programs.
Looking at the situation in America alone as a result of this situation, there is no currency in circulation. The U.S. Treasury stopped printing money. In fact, due to massive de-funding of government, the U.S. Treasury no longer exists. No one has seen a piece of paper currency or coin except in a museum. But because the amount of gold bullion in the United States is only a tiny fraction of the amount of money needed to keep the economy moving, and because the gold reserves are under effective control of private corporations, America has become a land of barter economies. Corporations who wish to do business with each other trade favors, contractual obligations and customers; this form of barter has been unofficially institutionalized in the form of 'credits,' which are not backed by any precious metals. Ironically, credits exactly mimic most of the features of 'fiat currency' that has been supposedly outlawed and socially stigmatized. In rural areas, as we will see, the chief form of currency is ammunition. Needless to say, the ideals of a conspiracist economy and the realities do not match up.
The Cities: Corporate Feudalism.
The supplanting of democracy by conspiracist thinking and libertarian ideology had the effect, during the revolution, of dismantling government at all levels. Because there is no effective law and the economy collapsed, the result was large-scale anarchy. Major cities are the only islands of calm in a sea of violence and lawlessness.
These major cities are all run by an interlocking coalition of corporations - the same ones that control all the gold and all the wealth. The major function of these corporations is to sell social services to city residents, and they are all monopolies. The Law Enforcement Corporation sells physical security. The Habitation Corporation sells housing. The Food Corporation sells food. The Justice Corporation sells access to the wholly-privatized court system. There is no economic competition. There is also no regulation. Prices are fixed, but in this environment prices don't matter, as we'll see.
The cities are walled enclaves, heavily guarded by military personnel, where residents have at least a chance at a life above the anarchy and poverty of the outside world - but at a huge cost. The price for a house alone in one of the cities is far beyond the amount of gold, credits or barter that any ordinary person could ever possess in a lifetime. Nevertheless, the corporations waive their prices and admit new residents in exchange for lifetime commitments to work for them - commitments secured by immense debt loads. This form of indentured servitude is essentially feudalism: the workers cannot quit, cannot lobby, cannot organize, and can be fired and expelled from the city for any reason or no reason. Social mobility is unknown. It is impossible for a common worker—one who cleans the streets, works in the restaurants, drives the bus, provides childcare, etc.- to rise above his or her station; the debt load that the common person has taken on in exchange for living in the city is insurmountable in a dozen lifetimes. In fact, the corporations have begun to tack the balance of peoples' unpaid debts on to the debts of their children in exchange for agreeing to let their children continue to live in the city after they reach the age of majority. In this way, the corporations acquire an underclass of hereditary serfs, bound to the land and the lord, just like medieval feudalism. These serf-like customers are often traded between corporations as a form of barter.
The corporations have no incentive to treat the workers well. So many more people want to get into the cities than the number of slots available. Consequently the labor supply is cheap and inexhaustible, so any concessions to workers are an unnecessary drain on efficiency. Workers toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week. If they get sick, they are fired and sent out of the city. Although they live better than anyone else in the society, the directors and managers of the corporations don't live without fear. The influence of conspiracist thinking at all levels of society makes a stable existence very precarious. All it takes is one errant accusation that a person is working for the Illuminati, or even sympathizes with the Illuminati, and the person will be ostracized from society, fired from his job, possibly expelled from the city itself or hung from the same gallows as the 'traitors'.
Evidence is irrelevant, and legal process is unnecessary; an accusation, even an implausible one, is tantamount to guilt. Savvy businessmen routinely accuse their rivals of being Illuminati agents. Promotion and demotion within corporations is due far less often to merit and hard work than it is personnel shifts as a result of firings and expulsions from the city, most of them reactions to conspiracy allegations. Consequently, the corporations are poorly-run, grotesquely wasteful and rife with incompetence. Because they have a captive base of indentured customers, however, and competence and efficiency have no economic value, the ineptitude of the corporate managers has no effect on profits.
The Countryside: Mad Max With Pogroms.
If life is bad in the cities, it's even worse in the countryside. Government - feared and vilified by conspiracy theorists as the root of all evil - simply does not exist. Outside the cities, there are no police, no local or state officials, and no organization of any kind. There are no courts. There are no hospitals. There are no schools. Roads crumbled into dust decades ago because no one was around to maintain them. No one provides any private social services. For one thing, the big corporations have nothing to gain by selling their services outside the city; the rural population has no money to pay for them anyway. For another, they don't need the business; they've got more customers than they can serve within the walls of the cities. Outside those walls, people manage to survive - barely - by tilling their own tiny farms at a subsistence level.
The level of violence in the countryside is shocking. During the revolution, the only personal liberty that was even remotely respected was the right to bear arms, and out in the country you can't survive without heavy firepower. Family farms are defended by minefields, barbed-wire fences and kids toting automatic weapons. In many areas, warlords have managed to take over the more productive farms, resulting in irregular patchworks of fiefdoms that are constantly fighting with each other. In addition to outright barter, ammunition is the chief de facto currency in these areas. Heavy weaponry looted from abandoned military bases is the chief source of power. Life in this libertarian paradise is, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, "nasty, brutish and short."
Disease takes a terrible toll on all sectors of society, including the rich in the cities, but out in the countryside it's particularly bad. Vaccines of any kind are distrusted as tools of the Illuminati. As a result, diseases that are easily preventable - polio, measles, rubella, chicken pox, etc. - kill and cripple tens of thousands every year, especially children. Infant mortality is frightful. There are no doctors in these outlying areas. They too were denounced long ago as tools of conspirators; during the revolution many doctors, accused of hiding cancer cures and collaborating with Illuminati-controlled pharmaceutical companies, were massacred or driven out of business. Even medical knowledge itself is dying out since all the medical schools were closed long ago.
The people who fare the worst in this society are Jews. Universally blamed for the imaginary conspiracies that supposedly brought society to the brink of ruin, Jews are refused entry to the cities, and in the countryside they are ruthlessly persecuted and massacred with regularity in horrific pogroms that resemble those of medieval Europe - except with automatic weapons. What few Jews remain have walled themselves up in heavily-armed ghettos with even worse conditions than the countryside whose virulently anti-Semitic (and heavily-armed) population they are hiding from. Nevertheless, as much as they hate Jews, the common people and the more powerful warlords of the countryside cannot organize any collective efforts to exterminate them, as much as they would like to. This inability is the only thing that allows the insular Jewish communities that still exist to carry on, hopeful that someday conditions will change and the world will come to its senses.
Knowledge—Forbidden Fruit.
The revolution that brought the conspiracy order to power was profoundly anti-intellectual. Experts on anything - especially scientists, economists (who argued against the economic changes), historians (who explained how the past had really occurred) and doctors (who were accused of suppressing cancer cures and tainting vaccines) - were mercilessly persecuted and massacred. In the revolution, all the universities were closed. Many libraries were burned or destroyed, their books distrusted as tools of the Illuminati. The Internet was regarded as a much more pure and reliable source of knowledge, because the Internet contained 'the truth' about conspiracies and books did not. As a result, in this conspiracist order, systemized education barely exists, libraries are virtually nonexistent, and most books are locked away and forgotten in vaults owned by the major city corporations - similar to the way books in the Middle Ages were locked up in monasteries.
If you think this is an exaggeration you should look at some of the Chemtrail conspiracy theories which allege that all the science books in the world (along with old films, WWII photos, and newspaper archives) have been tampered with to make it look like contrails have always been persistent, when in fact it only started around 1997. See for example here:
http://tankerenemy.blogspot.com/2009/01/contrailsciencecom-fake-books.html
The corporate managers of the cities, understanding that their power rests upon the perpetuation of conspiracy theories, carefully control what knowledge gets out to the common people. Any book or document that even remotely refutes or even questions conspiracy theories has been destroyed or altered after the fact to support conspiracy explanations. In this world, Osama bin Laden is lauded as a martyr, on whom the Illuminati unfairly blamed 9/11 and then assassinated him for this imaginary crime. Books or websites about Adolf Hitler routinely omit the Holocaust and instead laud his pro-free-market policies. American history books are wildly inaccurate, and present the country’s history as a relentless narrative of exploitation and conspiracies by the Illuminati and the Jews. Even science books contain numerous errors and omissions.
But, not many people read these books anyway; in fact, literacy has declined greatly because education as we now know it has ceased to exist. Most common people get all of their information from the Internet, which is controlled by the Information Corporation. There is very little written text on the Internet. Most material is either in the form of pictograms or videos. Almost all are either pornography, or simple morality plays dramatizing the evil and immorality of the Illuminati and the Jews. Most of these videos are less than a minute long and feature some hideously gory act of violence. Even very young children are desensitized to the most horrible images of human suffering, having been exposed to an unending stream of images of brutal retributions carried out against Illuminati sympathizers.
As the knowledge of true history, true science and critical thinking gradually fades, society is rapidly losing any real sense of its past or itself. Almost all events in history are reduced and simplified to a one-note narrative of exploitation by the Illuminati followed by the redemption of the revolution. Ancient history and the origins of man are described as being the result of extraterrestrial visitation. No one in this society knows that humans built the pyramids; even well-educated elites accept and honestly believe that all prehistoric structures of this nature were built by aliens.
The major religions are all waning in practice. There are very few churches left. No one in this society has read or even heard of Shakespeare, of Tolstoy or of Leonardo Da Vinci. No one has ever been to an art museum or a music concert. In 100 years’ time, the collective store of human knowledge existing on Earth will have been reduced by half or more. It is truly a new Dark Age.
The Environment - A Rising Tide of Disaster.
Because there is no government, no environmental regulation and the city corporations have no incentive to be environmentally responsible, most countries are a stinking cesspool of environmental degradation. The corporation-run cities generate power through burning coal and oil - all reserves privately owned and controlled, of course. The cities export their garbage to the countryside where it sits in rotting heaps, breeding diseases and cancer clusters among the semi-feral rural population. Rural dwellers routinely build and furnish their own houses from the refuse of the cities, much of it contaminated. Because the corporate-run cities have no need for water treatment facilities—they can simply pump their sewage into the rivers at zero cost - rivers downstream of the major cities are indescribably foul. There are few forests left, the rural residents having deforested their lands for firewood.
The worst problem is global warming. Because the conspiracist order denounced anthropogenic global warming as a scam and a hoax by the Illuminati, even mentioning the existence of this problem is absolutely forbidden. Absolutely nothing has been done to ameliorate global warming - in fact, carbon emissions since the revolution have increased, despite having much less industry, because the corporations that run the cities have changed over to dirtier and more inefficient means of energy production and industrial usage. Rising sea levels have inundated coastlines. In the larger coastal cities like New York, makeshift seawalls have been built to hold back the ocean (built by slave labor of customer-serfs), but in rural coastal areas, the rising sea levels have turned many areas into fetid swamps. These swamps breed mosquitoes, which results in a high incidence of malaria in areas where it had once been thought to be eradicated. Combined with society’s distrust of doctors—thanks to conspiracy theories about suppressed cancer cures and tainted vaccines—the mortality from tropical diseases is much higher than it was before the revolution.
Global warming has also made peoples' jobs of feeding themselves much harder. Food crops are more difficult and costlier to raise, invasive and parasite species are hardier and more difficult to kill, and erosion of desiccated topsoil has turned vast areas into semi-arid wastelands incapable of cultivation. The increased strength of hurricanes due to global warming results in large swaths of the Atlantic coast being decimated at regular intervals - and because there is no government there are no relief agencies. No one pays any attention to these problems. In the cities, even mentioning the words “global warming” will mark you as an Illuminati sympathizer; in the countryside, the scientific knowledge to explain what’s happening no longer exists. In the meantime greenhouse gases continue to foul the atmosphere at an ever-increasing rate. The disaster of global warming is now, fifty years after the revolution, far beyond man's capacity to reverse it.
When the sun sets on this bleak country, filled with pollution and decay, its rays bleed through layers of carbon dioxide vapor and sulfuric acid. It sets on mosquito-infested marshes that were comfortable beachfront communities 60 years before. The clouds approaching on the horizon are filled with acid rain. Their caustic drops fall on acres of landfills and junkyards, oozing poison into a water table already contaminated with toxic chemicals and human feces. This is the brave new world that conspiracy ideology has built.
But there is worse yet to come...
