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I have noticed that Leftists are very free with accusations of conspiracy theory.
When evaluating some undesirable phenomenon, the options given are 'chaos or conspiracy' - and these are assumed to be exhaustive.
The error is to assume that a conspiracy is the only form of explicit purposive group action.
Yet clearly this is not the case. 'Conspiracies' are pretty rare, but explicit purposive group action is pretty common.
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There are plenty of examples of groups, some very large groups indeed, who are quite explicit about their aims: these aims are published, preached, discussed, enforced.
And they are purposive in pursuit of these aims, they push in a particular direction and keep pushing - they take a long term strategic attitude (they want to win the war, not just the next battle).
They know what they are doing.
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The whole debate seems to hinge on self-awareness and consistency.
The bar for a 'conspiracy' is set at an impossibly high level such that the conspirators must all be wholly aware of what they want and what they are doing: must be wholly explicit and relentlessly purposive.
Since humans aren't like that, then the reality of the situation is denied.
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The end result of this style of reasoning is a peculiar state of denial concerning the reality of evil, and even the reality of enemies.
When 'chaos' is used to explain everything in opposition it does (at least) two things.
The first is that the 'my side' is seen as on the side of reason and order; while 'the other side' are seen as irrational and random - my intelligence and knowledge versus your stupidity and ignorance.
While this distinction may seem fairly aggressive, in the modern context it points to an enlightened solution in more and better-directed remedial education (aka propaganda).
The second consequence is to get rid of the problem of deliberate and strategic evil, to get rid of it from individual and social awareness.
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Confronted by immense, organized examples of explicit and purposive evil; our response is first to prove that it is not a conspiracy (not wholly bad, not self-consciously bad, not completely organized); then to regard any evil phenomena as generated by random causes, and then simply to ignore the threat.
Anyone who regards an example of evil as explicit and purposive must themselves be evil.
By such methods any conceivable evil can be ignored, no matter its scale or obviousness, no matter how explicit or purposive.
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I think constant the constant leftist drumbeat about "white (sometimes male) privilege" is a case in point. "White privilege" sounds like a mere phrase but in fact it is a complete idea - what whites have no right to keep what they have since, as whites, they can never legitimately earn anything.
ReplyDeleteI used to object to the phrase because I didn't really buy that property rights, the right to not be libeled, and the right to safety on the streets were something peculiar to whites. I thought about it, though, and it seemed like a subtle sort of projection was cropping up on the left. The left is always trying to promote non-whites by giving them credit for anything previous generations of non-whites have done, so they assume that rights do the same for whites and western civilization.
The association between current whites and western civilization deeply hurts leftist feelings. As such, they commit openly to a campaign to break that connection. The hurt feelings aren't a conspiracy, because they're not conscious. The campaign to tear down western civilization and dispossess whites isn't a conspiracy, because it's not a secret.
All criticism of the left must be interpreted as "conspiracy theorizing" because that absolves the left of its own basic nature.