Are Great Conspiracies Possible?

If there is a great conspiracy, then our politicians will be the last to know about it, and the general public will be the second to last to know about it.

Why? Because it would be impossible to run a successful conspiracy if a given politician, at any time, could say "I've changed my mind" and then give the speech from jupiter for all to hear. 

There's only one way you could pull off a grand conspiracy from the political end. You would have to get your lawmakers to change things for XYZ reasons, while having them believe it's for ABC reasons. And, of course, the ABC reasons would need be considered apparently honourable.

Milton Friedman (video) highlights this dynamic perfectly.

I can give you a good example. Hon Bill English, a previous New Zealand Prime Minister, changed the old School Certificate system to a system called NCEA back in the early 1990's. I myself agreed with the change at the time, as the School Certificate system was based on streaming. Failing half the country because the other half did better seemed wrong to me, and I presume it seemed wrong to Bill English as well...

15 years later I learnt more about education and I saw the mistake. Education at the high-school level is mostly about sorting people - not educating them, as such. The School Certificate system, as crude as it was, served to remove the less academic half of the nation from further formal education, so they could sooner get on with more practical training and build a life for themselves. 

Alas, without streaming, we have now massively inflated tertiary education and at an awful cost to both society and the student. All we have to show for the change is the situation where people now need a degree to prove the same thing that School Certificate used to prove - that is, proving the student has a certain level of institutional intelligence and good boredom tolerance.

So was NCEA a disaster? It depends on what you want to achieve. If you want to delay fertility and reduce family size, then NCEA is fantastic. And if you want to create an army of indoctrinated professionals with somewhat lazy and uncritical minds--set for government and the media--then the NCEA system has been a success to that end as well. 

I would bet that if Bill English understood what kind of a monster it was that he was creating in the 1990's, he would never have introduced NCEA. 

So then, there's the question of whether NCEA was authentically a mistake, and if its effects were in fact predictable or ultimately deliberate - that's the "conspiracy" question. I for one don't know. But again, the implementation of NCEA is only an example for my point. If you want to action a 'great conspiracy' then you will have to sell your policy-propositions on grounds that are publicly acceptable, if the real purpose behind those policies is publicly unacceptable (like population control). 

If the real intent of the change to NCEA was ultimately to hijack government with university-generated institution workers, of the type who will struggle to recognise a poor argument when they see it, and to help keep fertility under control, then the guys behind the game would have told Bill English something very different to that, of course. 

Ok. So if this is what's going on, and we do have some kind of government-behind-the-government that possesses two different reasonings for every contentious policy proposition, then how would we know it? 

Loosely speaking, I think a clue could be in political dumbing-down. Conspiracy must be protected from serious analysis. Your chosen politicians would tend to be shallow and immature - that is, not the kind of people who would take the time to really look into things. They would be 'believers', not thinkers, and prone to rationalising over scrutinising (sell-outs, to put it simply). People like myself would be isolated from politics because people like me are too independent-minded to be reliably inculcated into anything. 

Is this the picture we see in modern politics, today? Curiously, we actually do. Genuinely interesting people no longer seem to hit the stage. Practically all our politicians are overwhelmingly poll-driven and are in turn politically irrelevant. The opinion-makers (media, schools, Facebook, universities and Hollywood, etc) run the show. The politicians just take the public's media-manufactured orders.

-Today, even the most credible of our politicians would only be character-assassinated for as much as challenging accepted narratives. Nearly all professional politicians have given up on serious politics largely, I believe, because the media has taught us to disrespect and in turn ignore them. Hence all that's left for professional politicians today is to be poll-driven to survive. In turn they become the very losers that the media has taught us to see them as.

None of this in itself proves there's some kind of great conspiracy - but you cannot dismiss it as a possibility. Everyday life is infested with 'conspiracy' so please don't think I'm talking about aliens or silly death cults. What is a conspiracy? It's just someone saying they're doing this or that for reason A, when really it's for reason B, because for better or worse they don't want you to know the truth. 

The best response for the public? Just keep an open mind and never ask a politician if their policy moves are a conspiracy. They will laugh at you if you ask because the honest answer, from their end, is No. But if they're a bit of an airhead you might want to be worried - a childish mind can be filled with anything, from anyone, so long as that 'anyone' seems like an authority to them. 

-Andrew Atkin

Addition: 1-03-21:

How to protect a grand conspiracy?

One thing you want to do, is teach people to laugh, not ponder, when confronted with a conspiracy theory - any conspiracy theory. How do you do that? 

You do it by promoting esoteric conspiracies that are fun though far-fetched. This base is covered today as you will notice. There are a huge number of expensive [to produce] online videos promoting any kind of conspiracy you can think of. Most of them are conceptually silly. Believing in possible conspiracy is now embarrassing, is it not?

Another thing to do, believe it or not, is to carefully leak your conspiracy. Though, leak it in a way that ruins the conspiracy's credibility. This is like immunisation. Even if it gets out - no one will then believe it.