Noted he used the word "atomized," which seems like a Hannah Arendt reference. Personally, I don't worry about conspiracies, as I'm indexed on something much more plausible and serious. To scale and really be dangerous, you need for an idea to be simple and seductive. Arendts view was the idea of truth being the enemy, and once people were unmoored from it, they could not resist the directed chaos used against them. The sufficient condition was that good men did nothing. With no truth, there was no basis or identity on which to organize.
So there is no conspiracy. Just a set of incentives to align to and sustain the narrative, and the more absurd the gymnastics, the greater the rewards, because only the powerful can afford to seem so stupid and inconsistent. In that model, absurdity becomes a status signal, because to be that stupid requires hidden power.
Imo, Poppers paraphrase had been used to justify this precise set of incentives, and I don't think he's a useful reference for insight into what's going on now. Arendt, however, nailed it.
Since reading some of the Subgenius tracts I've found my tendency to see conspiracies to be a useful internal barometer. It doesn't really matter whether I'm blaming interdimensional psychic vampires or misaligned incentives in the federal bureaucracy for not living my best life, what matters is the degree to which I've associated my problems with an external locus of control. Keeping an eye on that, and trying to get 'the conspiracy' to look less intimidating over time is a useful exercise.
External locus of control is the key idea there and can change some peoples self image. It's such an important concept. The view I have is about strategies to navigate dmeoralized environments without personalizing them, and while being able to appreciate the local pools of relative goodness when they occur.
On absurdism, part of the beauty of the show Rick and Morty is they travel to different universes that seem physically ridiculous, but there is a fairly constant moral theme in each of them that maps to a plausible human interaction that is just insane enough to be funny because each one is the expression of an human incentive iterated over time that forms a culture. It's a lot like consulting.
Yes. But the degree to which I blame my own frustrations on this or that conspiracy's machinations is the degree to which I'm not seeing the situation clearly. It's the difference between something raining on one's parade and parading in the rain.
Or as it was put to me: 'To a man with no slack, even "Bob" served the Conspiracy. To a man with "Bob"'s slack, even the Conspiracy is of service"
I would argue, moreover, that conspiracy is the very definition of capitalism: everyone competing against each other and making alliances to crush competition.
It's not disconnected from reality to consider some groups of people to have too much power and to conspire against the best interests of society at large for their own benefits. What is delusional is to link that to reptiles or illuminatis, when the people pulling the strings are the same ones we see smiling on TV: multinationals and their lobbyists, bosses unions (eg. MEDEF in France), political parties.
Some of these interest groups tend to be more secretive (eg. Bildeberg, Dîners du siècle) but they are comprised of well-known figures whose interests align, and there's certainly not a single group of people controlling the entire planet's fate. It just so happens the rich and powerful have strong incentives to unite in order to screw the rest of us.
Of course! Whether it's plots to assassinate powerful people, or police setups like Sacco & Vanzetti, or FBI's CoIntelPro infiltration, sabotage, setup and assassination program of all US revolutionary groups of the 50s/60s (Black Panthers, Young Lords, MOVE..)
If you're strictly speaking about marxism-leninism, which as an anarchist i do not recognize as a form of communism (but rather a form of State capitalism), that's also the case long before Stalin came in. Notoriously, the revolt of the Kronstadt soviet in 1921 was framed by Lenin and Trotsky as counter-revolutionary, see: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Trotsky_Protests_Too_Much
However, communism as a political perspective (whether libertarian or authoritarian) promotes mutual aid and emulation as principles of organizing society, not competition. So my specific critique of capitalist mindset/education/system as a major factor in the development of actual conspiracies does not really apply to communist ideas in themselves.
So there is no conspiracy. Just a set of incentives to align to and sustain the narrative, and the more absurd the gymnastics, the greater the rewards, because only the powerful can afford to seem so stupid and inconsistent. In that model, absurdity becomes a status signal, because to be that stupid requires hidden power.
Imo, Poppers paraphrase had been used to justify this precise set of incentives, and I don't think he's a useful reference for insight into what's going on now. Arendt, however, nailed it.