The They/Them Paradox

Cock up, Conspiracy or Just Members of the Same Club?

“George Soros said to me, “You don’t know what they can do.” ~ David Rogers Webb from The Great Taking

“[P]ointing out that conspiracy stories aren’t literally true misses the important sense in which, very often, they are.” ~ Mary Harrington from The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies (Unherd 16th Feb 2023)

During the pandemic years Tim Price, London based investment manager of his eponymous firm Price Value Partners , co-host with Paul Rodriguez of the always excellent State of the Market podcast, cinephile, publisher of “The Price of Everything”

series of essays here on Substack and all-round good egg, would routinely ask the question “Cock Up or Conspiracy?” to those he interrogated on his Joe Rogan-length conversations with a broad range of financial, business and investment types. Tim, an old mate of mine and indeed friend to a good number of Pitchforkers, has been unequivocal in his robust stance on all the topics we tend to get most triggered by and the ones which demonstrate the most egregious breaches of previously sancrosanct standards of normative behaviour (COVID, ZIRP, CBDCs Brexit etc) over the past decade.

His question is a good one, in that it forces a nuanced examination of the evidence of genuine collusion of various parties all of whom appear to have a vested interest in the erosion of civil liberties and individual rights or some shorter-sighted profit motive. Co-ordinated behaviour in support of a shared strategic objective is a fact of human life. Expressions of power through the deliberate organisation and coordination of resources to an intentional end is called strategy and it is safe to say that the greater the power, the greater the impetus for strategic coordination whether in politics or business or anywhere else. Capitalism’s irredeemable flaw and the one (of two) for which it is most actively attacked and discredited is its irresistible tendency towards monopoly and the aggregation of market power in the hands of a very few with oligarchical control of production, distribution and pricing. Conspiracies in business are called cartels and their existence is as old as our economies.

While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive, servants of consumers in a free market economy, they are also all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges, or cartels furnished by big government. Often, business lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist, interventionist system. ~ Murray Rothbard.

But talking about coordinated strategic behaviour amongst a small group of those with power and agency in defence or furtherment of that power and privilege is likely to get you into serious trouble and branded as a conspiracy theorist, a term the mere brandishing of which is sufficient to get most mildly critical observers pulling in their horns and meekly submitting to whatever the prefabricated and approved narrative is. So powerful is the ostracizing threat of no longer being seen as reasonable person that potential dissenters are cowed into submission and self-censorship before they even utter a narrative-contradicting statement. Jon Ronson, an author and exposer of the swivel-eyed lunatic fringe of the conspiracy theory movement captured the emergence of this social phenomenon in a book entitled simply ‘Them’ in 2001, just as social media was beginning to become a thing.

Now Jon and I could - probably - not be further apart on the political spectrum, he being a beloved contributor to the Guardian and generally approved by the liberal luvvie faction and I, well, not so much, but he tells a cracking good story and in a speech I once heard him give, makes a good case for conspiracy theorising being a form of narcissitic behaviour. As he explains this, unravelling a conspiracy theory gives the narrator a tremendous sense of power over his (or her) audience, as seemingly disparate and unconnected events are woven into a fine tapestry of coherence that, obviously only someone of superior intelligence could begin to comprehend. This feeling of understanding the “big picture”, seeing through the subterfuge and mindfuckery being perpetrated by “them”, of actively taking the red pill instead of choosing the sedative of the blue alternative, of comprehension and sense-making is appealing and to a narcissistic personally type, hungry for attention and wanting to be admired for their powerful insights in explaining the world in a coherent story that power must be irresistible. To stop ourselves being pulled into that endless warren of rabbit channels through one of the many holes through which they can be accessed, we are dismissive and avoid the conversations and the narrators who drift into proofless metaphysical confabulations that bring everything down to a cabal of master manipulators comprised of lizards-in-disguise Bill Gates, the Rothchilds and the Board of the Rockefeller Foundation.