Is this the chemtrails forum?

[napoleon_in_rags]

34. Same here.

I saw this good series, called "Prophets of SciFi", I think on the science channel. IT goes over how so many wacky ideas SciFi authors dreamed up have come to some kind of fruition. You've heard the old saying: "Life Imitates Art"? I think there is a lot of truth in that, more than most people know. So conspiracy stories, even when they are just stories, can get at certain truths. Also, perhaps more important, they can shape social truths, like propaganda is designed to do, but unwittingly.

Societies rise and fall based on the stories they believe in. Some time ago I was studying Soviet propaganda. It revolved largely around this fat, cigar smoking character in a top hat, 'the capitalist', who was the source of oppression for the people, and through his designs held them down from achieving the communist state. This created a short term common enemy facilitating social cohesion, but ultimately set in the people's minds the idea that communism was the natural state, just waiting to break out if this guy got out of the way. In retrospect, I can see how this weakened the communist cause, because in the end, there is no "the capitalist"...Capitalism is an emergent system, like a life form, that grows in certain conditions, decentralized in many facets. It was the communists who depended on centralized control by powerful soviets and individuals who chaired them. So in the end, while their stories addressed very real inequalities that emerge in capitalist systems, they were divorced from reality in their belief it was caused by a few malicious individuals, and that divorce from reality ultimately lead to their demise.

I bring all this up because I see the same trends largely playing out in the conspiracy scene. They address all these real evils, these real threats, but then the faces of this malicious elite are pasted on, like "the capitalist". But what I fear are not some evil malicious few, what I fear is a new kind of emergent entity, larger than any of us, who's designs are accomplished through the summation of our small, individual, and seemingly rational actions. (Check out my new cell phone! What tracking device!)

In other words what I fear most is not a conspiracy of them, but a conspiracy of us.