I see a lot of people complaining about "crazy conspiracy theorists". What is the definition of a conspiracy?
First, a conspiracy must involve secrecy. If everyone knows about it, then it isn't a conspiracy!
Second, a conspiracy must involve using force to impose your will on others. Suppose I secretly agree with you to meet at a restaurant for dinner. There's nothing wrong with that.
Suppose I'm a Congressman, and I accept bribes in exchange for favorable laws. That's a conspiracy. If everyone knew about it, they would resist those bad laws or not reelect that Congressman.
An actual conspiracy usually must involve abuse of State power. Without government, there's no conspiracies!
Suppose I'm a marijuana farmer. I secretly meet with other people to grow and sell marijuana. That's not really a conspiracy. My customers are voluntarily purchasing my services. I'm providing a free market product. The laws banning marijuana ownership are not legitimate. This free market activity is fraudulently declared to be a crime. The State might accuse me of being a member of a conspiracy, but I'm not directly injuring anyone. In practice, marijuana farmers settle their disputes violently, because they're locked out of the State dispute resolution process, there aren't any viable free market alternatives, and the stakes for marijuana farmers are high.
It's very hard to abuse State power if everyone knows about it. The abuses of the Federal Reserve and income tax continue because most people are brainwashed to believe they're legitimate. A corrupt media is a type of conspiracy. The mainstream media monopoly derives from abuse of State power, so it's already covered by my definition.
Some conspiracies, such as the income tax and Federal Reserve are hidden in plain sight. Everyone knows about them and the approximate details of how they operate. However, the mainstream media is never critical of these two institutions. The income tax and Federal Reserve are the backbone of the corrupt economic and political system. Insiders bought up all the TV stations and newspapers, guaranteeing that the abuses will never be reported. Imagine what would happen if a mainstream media source regularly reported on the evils of the income tax and Federal Reserve!
A conspiracy must involve two factors, secrecy and abuse of State power. There are no conspiracies without government, because without government a handful of people can't efficiently use violence to impose their will on others!
Saturday, December 20, 2008
What is a Conspiracy?
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4 comments:
There are conspiracy theorists, and then there are coincidence theorists.
Statists, are usually coincidence theorists when something goes wrong.
What about a conspiracy to commit a murder? You don't need the state to conspire with others for this, do you?
Or murder is not a murder when it is not by the state?
I like the conspiracy of the federal drug administration.How they completely test drugs to make sure they are safe to administer to the public. When they are just a front for the drug companies to sell drugs and make lots of money with the ruse of endorsed safety ...I like this post a lot and will post a longer comment in the morning...
Fritz
Dixie has an interesting angle, and fritz has certainly been 'round the block more than once.
Anonymous raises a question, though, as Anonymous is wont to do. Sure, there can be criminal conspiracies that don't involve the contributions of state actors. When we talk about real crimes, however, such as murder, the "conspiracy" charge is one that is added on to give a hard-to-defeat thoughtcrime dimension to the prosecution's case. The person who pays a broker to hire a hit man to kill his wife for the insurance money, the broker who hire the hit man and the hit man himself (or hit woman, herself) all conspire to commit murder, but the charge of "conspiracy" was historically unnecessary to hold the hirer and the broker legally responsible as accessories to murder.
When you talk about conspiracy as a crime of state (and perhaps it should be distinguished from the pedestrian conspiracy outlined above, for example, by capitalizing it: Conspiracy, or by adding an article: the Conspiracy) however, you are talking about a set of secretly-coordinated actions which, while legal, result in the production of what would but for the perpetrators' access to the mechanisms of the state be victims of "ordinary" offenses, aided and abetted by people in power. In legal terms, The Con must be charged under a "conspiracy" law because the separate actions they took are legal, it is the pattern and the motivation which are criminal.
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