Retangling the Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy 2

Conspiracy theory advocates are often criticized by those who more or less believe in the official version of events as making far too much out of mere coincidence. On the other end of the spectrum, conspiracy theorists claim that these nihilists, holding the view that history is essentially a purposeless, random process, are "coincidence theorists."

Hail Satam

A coincidence theorist, from this perspective, actively dismisses all of the most anomalous, contradictory details in the mainstream media account of things as being nothing but a set of coincidences. To be dismissive in this manner, conspiracy theorists argue, is to either be willfully ignorant or complicit in the conspiracy on some level.

The fact that the towers on 9/11 fell in a way that exactly resembles buildings that are brought down by controlled demolition is an example of this type of "coincidence." The fact that one of the passports of the accused hijackers miraculously survived this devastation intact and undamaged enough for the authorities to determine that it was owned by a member of Al Qaeda is another example.

A third such coincidence is the anomalous spike in market shorts, during the days before 9/11, against those companies -- airlines, insurance companies, etc. -- that were most negatively impacted by the attacks. Similar 9/11 "coincidences" are legion.



In almost all major events coincidences of this kind can be found in abundance. A good conspiracy theory can account for all of these while "coincidence theorists" will argue, often to absurd lengths, that they are nothing but instances of pure chance.

At times, though, even the believers of One Big Conspiracy, the absolutists, will become bothered by coincidences that are so strange that to accept them as being facets of the conspiracy would imply that the conspiracy was far vaster, far more powerful, more supernatural, than even their grand theories would allow for.

This creates a dilemma. Either the absolutists, like the nihilists, must also dismiss these things as being sheer coincidence, thereby implying that many of the central planks in their own theory might be jettisoned accordingly, or they must inflate their theory to even more all-encompassing dimensions.

This inflationary move is the course most often taken. The theories grow in complexity and absurdity, but this is the only means to safeguard the absolutist position.



 There are a large number of coincidences of this order. By now almost everyone has heard of those connecting the lives and assassinations of presidents Lincoln and Kennedy. Here is a sample:

Both presidents were shot in the head.
Both presidents were shot on a Friday in the presence of their wives.
Both presidents were accompanied by another couple.
The male companion of the other couple was wounded by the assassin.
Both presidents had a son die during their presidency.
Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre; Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald in a Lincoln automobile, made by Ford.
Both presidents' last names have 7 letters.

A staggering amount of paradigm-bending coincidences of this second order can also be found in relation to 9/11. For several years now researchers have claimed that the uncanny frequency of the number eleven in the events of that day, the immense volume of "predictive programming" allegedly foreshadowing 9/11 in the popular media, the esoteric symbology of the twin towers (Jachin and Boaz), the Pentagon, Flight 93, etc, all identify 9/11 and other mass events as nothing less than occult "mega-rituals." 

All of this would appear to take us well beyond the customary bailiwick of the intelligence agencies. At this point in their journey the believers in One Big Conspiracy face a very abrupt fork in the path. They must either abandon their absolutist perspective and embrace a rather nebulous notion of cosmic synchronicity or they must consider that the conspiracy ultimately transcends what is humanly possible.

The most notorious proponent of the latter view is David Icke:

So, The Biggest Secret for me, in summary, is that an extraterrestrial race has interbred with humanity, creating particular hybrid bloodlines which they can work through from this dimension very close to ours, and that as it expanded over the thousands and hundreds of years to the present day, they've managed to expand their power out of a power base in the Near and Middle East, other places too but particularly there, until today they are actually in control of the planet.

And it is the ultimate control because they're controlling the planet from another dimension, but most of humanity doesn't even think that there are other dimensions. And this suppression of knowledge about other dimensions, the suppression of knowledge of the nature of life, the nature of frequencies and vibrations, ... the eternal nature of consciousness, ...  the very knowledge or even perception that there could be any other dimension or any other levels of life ... means that they can go on controlling humanity from levels of existence that most of humanity doesn't even accept exist. I mean, you can't get better forms of control than that.

The Ruthless Love Of The Dreaming Mind

Icke's idea that beyond the intelligence agencies, beyond the financial institutions that fund these agencies and their governments, beyond the ruling family dynasties that have always dominated these institutions, and beyond even the esoteric societies that practice the secret religion of these dynasties, are non-human, off-world, extra-dimensional entities -- the true archons of this world -- is not really all that novel.

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in their bookThe Sion Revelation, explain that just such a belief became widespread among European occultists of the mid-18th century:

The arrival of the Unknown Superiors marked the introduction of an important new element into European esotericism, which was to develop into the idea of orders being under the guidance of spiritual or nonterrestrial entities rather than anonymous human beings -- this notion eventually became more or less indispensable to magical orders.

This doctrine of the "Secret Chiefs" became increasingly prominent within late 19th century esoteric organizations like the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Precursors of this idea, though, can be traced back to the early and medieval Catholic belief in the Communion of the Saints, a mystical body of all Christians, both living and dead, with Christ at its head. From a pessimistic perspective, though, which is far closer to that of Icke, these entities greatly resemble the original Archons of Gnosticism.

 

Only entities of this capacity, being unbounded by the third dimensional barriers of space and time, would have the ability to carry out conspiracies apparently forged from the raw material of synchronicity itself. One of the first absolutist, occult conspiracy theorists of this type was James Shelby Downard.

Downard called the sinister architects of the conspiracy "masonic sorcerers," and it is clear from his writing that even if these beings were human in name their abilities and ambitions were in no way limited to the human sphere. Downard lays this out in the context of the JFK assassination:

But the ultimate purpose of that assassination was not political or economic but sorcerous: for the control of the dreaming mind and the marshalling of its forces is the omnipotent force in this entire scenario of lies, cruelty and degradation. Something died in the American people on November 22, 1963 -- call it idealism, innocence or the quest for moral excellence. It is the transformation of human beings which is the authentic reason and motive for the Kennedy murder and until so-called conspiracy theorists can accept this very real element they will be reduced to so many eccentrics amusing a tiny remnant of dilettantes and hobbyists.

"Control of the dreaming mind" implies a near complete mastery of the realm of synchronicity and the archetypes, and this is precisely the radical thesis that Downard is presenting. We are all the dreamers of this world, but increasingly this dreaming power, which most of us do not know that we possess, is being stripped from us. We dreamers become disposable bit players in the grand consensus nightmare of the masonic sorcerers.



Even Robert Anton Wilson appeared temporarily fazed by the extremes of Downard's vision. In Cosmic Trigger he writes about a tape that Downard and his partner, William Grimstad, produced summing up their theories, entitled "Sirius Rising":

Later, Mr. Grimstad sent me a tape, entitled "Sirius Rising," in which he and another conspiracy buff named Downard set forth the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all. The only trouble is that, after all the weird data we have already surveyed, the Grimstad-Downard theory may not sound totally unbelievable to us.

The idea, though, that advanced entities use coincidence or synchronicity in order to communicate with and control humanity is not limited to sublime paranoids like Downard. The scientist John C. Lilly also held that an institution called the Earth Coincidence Control Office  (E.C.C.O.), which ultimately takes its orders from a Cosmic Control Center  (C.C.C.) via Galactic and Solar System sub-centres, is a non- or trans-human collective that is fully enabled to generate and control the coincidences of individuals on Earth. Lilly conveyed the following message from ECCO:

To all humans
If you wish to control coincidences in your own life on the planet Earth, we will cooperate and determine those coincidences for you under the following conditions:

1) You must know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO

2) You must be willing to accept our responsibility for control of your coincidences.

3) You must exert your best capabilities for your survival programs and your own development as an advancing/advanced member of ECCO's earthside corps of controlled coincidence workers. You are expected to use your best intelligence in this service

4) You are expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour of every day and of every night.

5) You must be able to maintain conscious/thinking/ reasoning no matter what events we arrange to happen to you. Some of these events will seem cataclysmic/catastrophic/overwhelming: remember stay aware, no matter what happens/apparently happens to you.

6) You are in our training program for life: there is no escape from it. We (not you ) control the long-term coincidences; you (not we) control the shorter-term coincidences by your own efforts.

7) Your major mission on earth is to discover/create that which we do to control the long-term coincidence patterns: you are being trained on Earth to do this job.

8) When your mission on planet Earth is completed, you will no longer be required to remain/return there.

9) Remember the motto passed to us (from GCC via SSCU):
"Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent:
it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not."

Ignoring the abrasive cosmogonic bureaucratese of the whole dispatch, the final motto is particularly ominous. Not only conspiracy absolutists like Downard and Icke should be alarmed by it. The motto amounts to saying -- we will make you experience synchronicity, positive and/or negative, in order to usher you into "Cosmic Love" regardless of your feelings in the matter. At the same time, though, it is obvious that Lilly concluded that this was absolutely necessary for the good of humanity. Sometimes love is tough.

Instruction and Frustration

From here on the spaghetti theory of conspiracy reenters the story. Just as at lower levels of the conspiracy, within the relatively mundane cloak-and-dagger charades of the intelligence agencies, there is no single unified plot of dominance but rather a multiplicity of cliques jostling for total control, it is the same thing in the more rarefied spheres of the transhuman entities.

Robert Anton Wilson in Cosmic Trigger, recording a discussion with personal student of Crowley and O.T.O. head, Grady McMurtry, brings up the question of why movements that beneficially expand consciousness are always so rapidly squelched by the authorities rather than allowed to flourish.

"I'll tell you what I think," Grady said. "There's war in Heaven. The Higher Intelligences, whoever they are, aren't all playing on the same team. Some of them are trying to encourage our evolution to higher levels, and some of them want to keep us stuck just where we are."

According to Grady, some occult lodges are working with those nonhuman intelligences who want to accelerate human evolution, but some of the others are working with the intelligences who wish to keep us near an animal level of awareness.

This is a standard idea in occult circles and it can safely be stated, without exaggeration, that every "school" or "lodge" of adepts that exists is regarded, by some of the others, as belonging to the Black Brotherhood of the evil path.

In a sense, this is a very traditional idea. Since the time of Adam, angels and demons have been in perpetual warfare over the possession of the souls of humanity. There have always been at least two great and conflicting conspiracies. One wants us to soar to the realm of the Spirit and one wants us to become ever more enmired in base and debasing Matter.



The late medieval grimoire, The Book Of The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, also takes up this theme:

The infamous Belial hath no other desire than that of obtaining the power of hiding and obscuring the True Divine Wisdom, so that he may have more means of blinding simple men and of leading them by the nose; so that they may always remain in their simplicity, and in their error, and that they may not discover the Way which leadeth unto the True Wisdom; seeing that otherwise it is certain that both he and his Kingdom would remain bound and that he would lose the title which he giveth himself of "Prince of this World," having become the slave of man. This is wherefore he seeketh to annul and destroy utterly this Sacred Wisdom.

Given the influence of this text on Crowley and the Golden Dawn in general it is easy to see how this teaching would enter into notions of the Black Brotherhood. To me this also brings to mind the work of Philip K. Dick and his opposition of Belial with VALIS/Zebra. Dick was certainly not one to believe in a single all-controlling cosmic conspiracy.The Dickian reality is multifaceted, fluid, schizophrenic, spaghetti-like.

In W.B. Yeats's magnus opus, A Vision  (a book which I intend to explore deeply in future posts), Yeats reveals that the "system" of the book was presented to him and his young wife during automatic writing sessions and "sleeps" by mysterious disincarnate entities which Yeats simply calls the "Instructors." Fascinatingly, Yeats also mentions opposed entities called the "Frustrators."

Because they [the Instructors] must, as they explained, soon finish, others whom [they called] the Frustrators attempted to confuse us or waste time. Who these Frustrators were or why they acted so was never adequately explained ... but they were always ingenious and sometimes cruel. The automatic script would deteriorate, grow sentimental or confused, and when I pointed this out the communicator would say ‘From such and such an hour, on such and such a day, all is frustration’ . . . but had I not divined frustration he would have said nothing . . . and a Frustrator doubtless played upon my weakness when he described a geometrical model of the soul’s state after death which could be turned upon a lathe . . . One said, as though it rested with me to decide what part I should play in their dream, ‘Remember, we will deceive you if we can.’

As mentioned before in this blog, in his field studies among the peasants of western Ireland Yeats discovered that Irish fairies could be similarly divided into groups that either tended to help or hinder humankind. The Instructors and Frustrators appear to be higher order representatives of the same phenomenon. Clearly, as on all other levels of nature, there is also abundant diversity on the planes beyond the all-too-human.

Disguises Of Enchantment

In postmodern ET lore the number of different reported alien races, cryptoids and preternatural beings of all sorts is immense and growing. The Watcher Files website has compiled an extensive, heavily annotated list of such entities ranging from the Agharians and Alpha-Draconians to Zombies. In the face of all this "evidence" it is hard to imagine that anyone would hold the view that there is just one cosmic conspiracy. The spaghetti stretches up to the stars and deep into the bowels of the hollow earth.



Nor should we assume that this is something new. Graham Hancock, carrying on the research of people like Jacques Vallée and John Keel, argues in his book Supernatural that the whole UFO/alien abduction phenomenon is structurally very similar to accounts of fairy encounters, to shamanic ordeals in which the shaman has his body dismembered by spirit entities -- his bones removed and replaced by quartz crystals, and to the DMT experience. And Hancock finds the record of virtually identical experiences in cave paintings dating back to the Paleolithic. He concludes:

The bottom line would be that non-human, apparently non-physical intelligences, whose first interactions with us are documented in rock paintings of therianthropes dating back 35,000 years, and who inspired all the world’s religious traditions, are still present amongst us today, following their own agenda according to their own timetable and purposes.

And what is the nature of these intelligences? Hancock explains that even the top academic investigators of the DMT experience, Richard Strassman and Benny Shannon, have no real clue who or what their case studies are contacting.

The upshot is that Strassman and Shanon, the top scientists in this field, are able to offer theories, but not definitive explanations, for the mysterious universal hallucinations of spirit beings that our ancestors first depicted in rock art 35,000 years ago, that took the form of gods and goddesses for the high civilizations of antiquity, that were known as fairies, elves, demons, and goblins in the European Middle Ages, and that continue to manifest in the twenty-first century as spaceships and aliens while still retaining much of their ancient “enchantment” and many of their traditional disguises. Nothing that Strassman and Shanon have discovered rules out the possibility that these complex hallucinations, and the distinctive themes such as therianthropy, hybridism, abduction, and the wounded man that run through them from the earliest times until today, might represent veridical encounters with alternative realities. 

For me, it is without question that these are "veridical encounters with alternative realities." To Hancock's list, though, I would also add the beings reportedly encountered during Near Death Experiences, angelic and Marian apparitions, beings evoked in ceremonial magick, ghosts and the shadowy realm of the ancestors and the dead. Terence McKenna stated at least once that is was very probable that the famous "machine elves" of his own trips to hyperspace were, in fact, the dead.

My own private opinion about this is, I think that what psychedelics in these high-dose, correct set/setting situations carry us into is an ecology of souls. . . . Those ‘things’ in that place are our ancestors.

This would seem to agree with Yeats. The poet explained throughout A Vision that the entities he communicated with were quite human although not presently existing in physical bodies. Yeats went on to state that all angels and demons are likewise human in one form or another. Fairies in Irish folklore also were once a race of men, the Tuatha Dé Danann, that retreated into an underworld or parallel dimension of the landscape. In fact, this is the most ancient view of such entities. Are the myriad of races of aliens, therefore, also different character types of humanity? Could they be in actuality our shape-shifting ancestors?

The Root Of All Demons

From Tibetan Buddhism, however, is found another piece of this puzzle. In a ritual practice stemming from pre-Buddhist shamanism, and very closely related to the shamanic ordeals covered by Hancock and as recorded by Mircea Eliade in Shamanism, called chod or gcod we find a very different explanation of the encounter with spirit entities. Described as a "tantric feast," the chod practitioner ventures off alone at night to a haunted charnel ground where wild animals devour corpses left exposed to the elements -- or to some equally horrifying location.



Here, the practitioner bangs a drum made from human skull caps and blows a trumpet fashioned from a human thigh bone while dancing madly. He is summoning all of the spirits of that place, all of the gods and demons of the world in general to rip apart and consume his body and mind. As Giacomella Orofino writes in "The Gcod Tradition" fromTantra In Practice:

This dance is followed by the evocation of all kinds of gods and spirits, invited to attend the ritual sacrifice of one's body. The gcod pa [practitioner] visualizes the transformation of his consciousness into a dakini, who cuts the head off his physical body and then places the corpse inside the cranium, which stretches to cosmic proportions. The corpse is subsequently transformed in accordance with the wishes of the guests, multiplied infinitely, and offered to them as a gift.   

What follows is a series of coloured offerings: white, multi-coloured, red and black. These recall the stages in the alchemical process, including the multi-coloured stage called the Peacock's Tail. Clearly, the chod practitioner has become the lead or shit which will be tortured and "killed" in order to become gold.

Then the offering is divided into various categories: the white offering, in which the yogin visualizes that his body is transformed into ambrosia to be consumed by the higher deities and the three jewels: the buddhas, devas, and dakinis; the multicoloured offering, in which his body is transformed into all kinds of riches and material goods and offered to the dharmapalas, the protector spirits of Buddhist law; the red offering, in which the dismembered flesh and blood are multiplied infinitely to appease the demons and fierce spirits; and finally the black offering, in which the officiant visualizes that all the errors and wrongdoings in the world are absorbed into his body, which is then offered as a meal to the demons. These offerings aim to satisfy all spirits, both higher and lower, in order to placate negative impulses and to eliminate definitively the ills of the world.

Structurally, this is recognizably the shamanic dismemberment ordeal and initiation, the alien abduction experience, a bad trip on DMT or datura, an evocation of the demon Choronzon without the protection of a magickal circle, etc. but shockingly it is very welcomed in this tradition. It is, in fact, the goal of the entire chod practice to suffer in this most excruciating and madness-inflicting manner. The final aim of the gcod pa is to attain the realization that all of the demons and gods attacking her very being, both physically and spiritually, are in truth only aspects of her own mind.

The root of all demons is one's own mind.
If one feels attraction and desire
in the perception of any phenomenon, 
one is captured by the demons.
When the mind grasps at phenomena
as if they were external objects
one becomes contaminated

This is from the 11th century poem, "Great Collection of the Teachings,"by Ma gcig Lab sgron, the woman teacher who developed the practice of chod. And with this practice the whole of the absolutist cosmic conspiracy is literally turned on its head.



The chod demons are the exact equivalents of the entities of shamanism, the "machine elves" of the DMT experience, the space alien abductors, and the "secret Chiefs" of the occult orders. With this extreme Tibetan ritual practice we finally discover who it is that looks out from the Eye in the Pyramid: as yet unintegrated aspects of our own mind.

Objects of Animation

At once this recalls Jung. It is very tempting at this point to reduce everything down to the workings of the unconscious mind. From this viewpoint the "entities" are not real at all. They are temporary autonomous portions of the psyche that can be, through analysis, consciously integrated into a more healthy and enlightened sense of the Self. The experience of synchronicity, prodigies, encounters with spirit beings and so on are merely necessary stepping stones on the path to full individuation.



In other words, this Jungian interpretation is a great way to dismiss cosmic conspiracy and the actual existence of the entities altogether. Unfortunately, the spaghetti will not let us rest here. And however "Jungian" this might sound it would seem that the Master himself is in no way this reductive. As Jung wrote in Psychology and Alchemy:

Since we cannot possibly know the boundaries of something unknown to us, it follows that we are not in a position to set any bounds to the self. It would be wildly arbitrary and therefore unscientific to restrict the self to the limits of the individual psyche, quite apart from the fundamental fact that we have not the least knowledge of these limits, seeing that they also lie in the unconscious. We may be able to indicate the limits of consciousness, but the unconscious is simply the unknown psyche and for that very reason illimitable because indeterminable. Such being the case, we should not be in the least surprised if the empirical manifestations of unconscious contents bear all the marks of something illimitable, something not determined by space and time.

And with this we are swept up in the swirling, tangled noodly strands once again. These experiences cannot be reduced in the above way because the psyche itself has no known limits. We can, as in Tibetan Buddhism, view the entities as being aspects of our own minds but we cannot conclude that they are unreal. They are at least as real as the psyche itself, which Jung admitted as being illimitable and indeterminable. Wow. The carpet is yanked from under our feet and the floor erased.

In the tradition of Buddhism that Ma gcig followed, all is Mind. The universe, really only existing as a concept, is far more like a vast, complex dream than any sort of mechanism. Any laws that appear to be in place are really only provisional, temporary. Mind is primary.

The same idea, more or less, can be found in a neglected corner of modern Western philosophy. The much ridiculed George Berkeley arrived at a very similar conclusion. We can read this at the close of Three Dialogues Between Hylas And Philonous:

Whereas to say - There is no Matter, if by that term be meant an unthinking substance existing without the mind; but if by Matter is meant some sensible thing, whose existence consists in being perceived, then there is Matter...

 

What we call matter, in other words, exists only as and through the mind. Truly, we are the stuff that dreams are made of. Berkeley called his philosophy immaterialism  and it is also called philosophical idealism. Jung did not, to my knowledge, confess to holding such a view, but his above idea that there is no definable limit to the mind takes us very close to Berkeley.

William Blake, however, was a big fan of Berkeley (as was Joyce). If anything, Blake thought that Berkeley did not go far enough. For Blake, all is imagination. And in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake relates a fable that sums up nearly everything that this post is trying to express:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

The Gods and Geniuses, the entities of all kinds, were once understood as residing in the human heart. Through the expression of the imagination the archaic Poets animated the world with these beings. Eventually, though, things became systematized. Certain Poets became Priests and began to monopolize knowledge of the new system. And in this way they were able to mystify and then enslave the masses who continue to forget the true power of their imagination. 

Towards A Worldwide Chod

All of these characters, Icke and Downard and McMurtry and Lilly, are correct in many respects. The world is dominated by warring factions of beings and their more human representatives who control us through their knowledge of reality as imagination. Conspiracy theory itself, becoming more and more psychedelic in nature, is gradually taking us all to this realization. Perhaps there will need to be the equivalent of a collective, worldwide chod to cause us to remember once more where all the deities truly reside.

As conspiracy theory becomes increasingly psychedelic, though, there is an alternate theory, growing in popularity, that everything psychedelic, including presumably this entire post, is total conspiracy. The crooked trail of iridescent meatballs takes a turn next in this direction.

Retangling the Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy 1

In 1987, Robert Anton Wilson wrote "The Spaghetti Theory of Conspiracy" as an introduction to a work of fiction on alien conspiracies. In his essay, Wilson advances the view that conspiracies are ubiquitous and ever-present but at the same time the idea of One Big Conspiracy is a complete myth.

Contending In The Night

Wilson begins by clearly explaining the fact, now widely known, that the real power in this world does not lie with governments but with the international banks that provide them credit. He explains,

...governments cannot do anything—good or ill, wise or foolish—unless the banks first lend them the money for the project. The power is in the banks. The governments survive on the permission of the banks. If the banks cut off their credit, governments die. Any government that resists has its credit cut off and dies.

It is obvious that this form of financial control involves conspiracy. Bankers conspire to further their own interests and manipulate governments with credit and debt to do so. This blog has covered this process in depth in a previous post.



Wilson makes it clear that conspiracies are nothing new. In fact, conspiracy may be a major factor in evolution as a whole. Life itself is a conspiracy.

Conspiracy is the first manifestation of intelligent life.

The original organic molecules formed affinity groups and conspired to exploit the resources of this planet. Working in small cells originally, these DNA conquistadores quickly developed organizations of higher complexity and spread a network of hungry, predatory Life over the previously dead Earth. In less than 3,500,000,000 years this network has expanded from the ocean beds to the very peaks on the Himalayas. No square centimeter of Earth is uninfested.

RAW is kidding around here to some extent, but it is evident that he did seriously hold conspiracy to be a necessary factor of biology. This view, though, leads him to conclusions that are unpopular to dogmatic believers in One Big Conspiracy.

From this evolutionary perspective, every paranoid is partly right. The major error of the paranoid appears to be his characteristic belief in one jumbo Mega-Conspiracy that explains everything. This is impossible, because it violates basic laws of primate psychology. Domesticated primates like wild primates are mischievous, sly and have a keen sense of humor: the double-cross is their most characteristic invention.

As in every other level or niche of nature conspiracies are characterized by diversity. The multiplicity of life choices and strategies of competition and cooperation make any long-term conspiracy completely unstable. Power relations are fluid in nature and the wielders of political and economic power in human societies are certainly no exception to this. The "double-cross" is everywhere evident.

George Washington, who rose to power by conspiring against his king, said with blunt honesty, "Nations have no permanent allies, only permanent interests." This is why governments, corporations and other large-scale conspiracies all have a natural life-span, like other living systems. There is no government on this planet that has existed in its present form for more than 200 years; aside from the Dutch East India Company, most corporations rise and fall within 100 years (average). Outside of paranoid fantasy and Romantic fiction, most conspiracies collapse of their own"internal contradictions"within months or years.

It is as big a mistake, then, to claim that there no conspiracy as it is to assert that One Big Conspiracy controls everything. As Carl Oglesby puts it in The Yankee and Cowboy War,

... a multitude of conspiracies contend in the night.... Conspiracy is the normal continuation of normal politics by normal means . . . and where there is no limit to power, there is no limit to conspiracy.

The spaghetti theory brings us to a sort of shifting Middle Way position on conspiracies. It is opposed to the random, nihilist view of the daily headlines and the Official Story that there are no conspiracies, but it is equally against the absolutist assertion that One Evil Cabal controls the entirety of reality. Both the nihilist and absolutist extremes are too simplistic. It is much more accurate to take the kaleidoscopic view. Reality is complex and shifting, and mutating, evolving conspiracies exist at every level, sometimes cooperating and sometimes in deadly competition. 

Like spaghetti on a plate, there are many strands and layers of conspiracies all twisted together in a single mass. Some strands are connected and some are fractured, but it is very difficult to tell where one ends and another begins. In fact, it is more like a nest of copulating but cannibalistic snakes writhing, slithering, humping and devouring each other in constant upheaval. Certain serpents may appear dominant at times, rising to the top of the nest, but this is but a temporary illusion. All remain subject to the diversity and complexity of nature.

Nucleus

In his classic 1956 study on the US ruling class, The Power Elite, sociologist C. Wright Mills earlier reached the same conclusions as Wilson. While the elites of the US military, corporations and major political parties are entirely interwoven and incestuous it would be an analytical error to assert that they constitute a unified conspiracy. 

The conception of the power elite and of its unity rests upon the corresponding developments and the coincidence of interests among economic, political, and military organizations. It also rests upon the similarity of origin and outlook, and the social and personal intermingling of the top circles from each of these dominant hierarchies. 

This conjunction of institutional and psychological forces, in turn, is revealed by the heavy personnel traffic within and between the big three institutional orders, as well as by the rise of go-betweens as in the high-level lobbying. The conception of the power elite, accordingly, does not rest upon the assumption that American history since the origins of World War II must be understood as a secret plot, or as a great and co-ordinated conspiracy of the members of this elite. The conception rests upon quite impersonal grounds.

With this, however, Mills does not fall into the nihilist camp. Of course, elite conspiracies happen. They happen all of the time. But this does mean that one shadowy group effectively manipulates and directs all of history. Mills is firmly in the middle way, spaghetti faction of conspiracy analysis.

There is, however, little doubt that the American power elite — which contains, we are told, some of ‘the greatest organizers in the world’ — has also planned and has plotted. The rise of the elite, as we have already made clear, was not and could not have been caused by a plot; and the tenability of the conception does not rest upon the existence of any secret or any publicly known organization. But, once the conjunction of structural trend and of the personal will to utilize it gave rise to the power elite, then plans and programs did occur to its members and indeed it is not possible to interpret many events and official policies of the fifth epoch without reference to the power elite. ‘There is a great difference,’ Richard Hofstadter has remarked, ‘between locating conspiracies in history and saying that history is, in effect, a conspiracy ...’ 

In Superclass -- The Global Power Elite And The World They Are Making, published in 2008, author David Rothkopf takes Mills's analysis to an international level. There is a power elite but now they are global. Rothkopf argues that there are about six to seven thousand cosmopolitan, elite individuals, intermingled and incestuous in the same way that Mills describes, who effectively call the shots in the world today. As in Mills's study these elites are star players in government, high finance, military, the entertainment industry, etc., but with the financial players at the head of the pack. They are the type of people who private jet into summits like the World Economic Forum in Davos and the yearly Bilderberg meetings.

This superclass is also called "the transnational capitalist class" in post-Marxist analysis, and "the 1%" by the Occupy movement. In truth, they consist of far, far fewer than one percent of the human population. They represent a fraction of fraction of a fraction of a percent.



Nowadays, it a common for even middle-class individuals, because of the Internet, easy mobility, intercultural sophistication, etc., to consider themselves "citizens of the world." How inconceivably more do these elites transcend national boundaries. How does lunch in Hawaii, dinner in Rome and an all-night trance party in Gokarna sound? The whole world is their playground and ashtray. Governments are their wind-up toys.

A 2011 Swiss study conclusively maps out the organizational structure that most of these elites operate within. Suitably titled, "The Network of Global Corporate Control," the paper explains that current corporate capitalism is a hydra-headed behemoth with a dense nucleus controlled by only 147 corporations, mutually owned and invested in by each other. This "super-entity" is in turn mostly made up of banks and other financial institutions.



The most high-performing and/or influential members of the super-entity is the superclass. Skimming through the "company overview" pages of Businessweek's website brings this all to light. Here we can look up US cabinet ministers who sit on the boards of Fortune 500 companies, are rectors of ivy league universities, are the chair persons of NGOs, etc. The whole rotten bowl of spaghetti is laid out right in front of us. These are the Masters of the Universe. Our freedom comes when their rule ends.

As Mills emphasized over and over, though, these people very rarely engage in what could be called specific conspiracies. Of course sinister plots happen quite often, but what is more significant, more valuable in terms of analysis, is the simple fact that these relatively few individuals are in constant communication.

They are peers in the broadest sense of the word. This has not changed from Mills's time to our own. These elites may not be in agreement about most things, but they are in lockstep consensus when it comes to protecting their own class interests. If this is conspiracy then it is fluid and continuous.

Metaparanoid

The global power elite, centred around financial interests, is indeed a network. As a network its flexibility is its strength. A network, though, also has a great weakness. It depends on trust. It is dependent on more or less reliable information between its nodes. If it doesn't have this, as in the "credit crunch" of 2008, it seizes up. It ceases to function effectively. This is precisely where the meta-monkeywrenchers sneak in to pour sand into the gas tank of the global corporate machine. Enter WikiLeaks.



Everyone is aware of WikiLeaks. We think of it as a pesky but plucky little organization that publishes documents, provided by whistle blowers like Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, containing embarrassing details that governments and corporations would very much not like the general public to know about.

If WikiLeaks was only this, assuming its sincerity, this would itself be a necessary and heroic service for the 99+%, but essays surfacing in 2010 and written by WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, show the organization to have vastly more profound and radical objectives in mind.

Assange's key essay, "State and Terrorist Conspiracies," is broken down very nicely on the Zunguzungu blog.  In this essay Assange explains that elite rule is protected and sustained through the authoritarian instruments of the state. The most successful authoritarian states keep these repressive instruments hidden as much as possible.

Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.

Effective resistance must be prevented at all costs and the best way to ensure this is to keep the public in the dark. The societies with the least resistance are those who do not have any idea that they are being oppressed. This is the optimal condition for the ruling class, both nationally and globally.



As Assange and Zunguzungu go on to explain, though, the more that an authoritarian organization keeps its operations secret, the more its communications are closed. As Zunguzungu interprets Assange:

And his underlying insight is simple and, I think, compelling: while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy. The more closed the network is to outside intrusion, the less able it is to engage with that which is outside itself (true hacker theorizing).

An inescapable paradox is identified and pounced upon. As an institution increasingly tries to keep secrets it increasingly becomes less able to trust its own internal communications. It no longer knows if it is getting the full picture. It gets a classic case of paranoia. "Leaking" only accelerates this process. The more leaks that are discovered, the more communication has to be clamped down upon, and the less that can be definitively known.

He [Assange] decides, instead, that the most effective way to attack this kind of organization would be to make “leaks” a fundamental part of the conspiracy’s information environment. Which is why the point is not that particular leaks are specifically effective. Wikileaks does not leak something like the “Collateral Murder” video as a way of putting an end to that particular military tactic; that would be to target a specific leg of the hydra even as it grows two more. Instead, the idea is that increasing the porousness of the conspiracy’s information system will impede its functioning, that the conspiracy will turn against itself in self-defense, clamping down on its own information flows in ways that will then impede its own cognitive function. You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire.

This is the real point of all of the major leaks we've witnessed in recent years. The "Iraq War Logs," the U.S. State Department Diplomatic "cables," etc. all assist in creating an atmosphere of mistrust within the affected institutions. Edward Snowden's leaks on the vast NSA spy apparatus have the same effect. More than just making people aware of how their privacy is being constantly and minutely invaded it causes massive systemic mistrust.

All in all, diplomats are afraid to talk to other diplomats, spies are afraid to talk to other spies, governments are afraid to talk to other governments. No one knows what is going to get leaked, who is listening to whom, who is being set up for what. And so things begin to get even more cryptic to the point of total opacity, confusion, breakdown and silence. Or at least that's Assange's theory.

Platinum Blonde

But who is Assange anyway? Could it be, as many suggest, that both he and his organization are themselves conduits of disinformation and subversive tools of Empire? Why hasn't WikiLeaks, the argument goes, published any information about the 9/11 conspiracy? Why is Assange so dismissive of inquiries into 9/11? Is Julian Assange himself an intelligence agent?

Conspiracy theorists point to several things to support this claim. They are suspicious of the fact that Assange has been publicly dismissive of conspiracy research. They claim that the leaks that Assange and Co. have released have never really harmed Israel in particular. And they have special doubts about Assange's background.



Assange formed a hacking group called the International Subversives and was arrested in 1991 for a hack on the Nortel corporation. Assange's sentence was reduced and it was later revealed that Assange subsequently cooperated with Australian authorities in the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit. Conspiracy theorists suspect that Assange has never stopped being a police asset.

There is possible evidence, though, that Assange has been used and abused by the powers that be long before 1991. Theorists highlight the involvement of Assange's mother and her former boyfriend with the San­ti­nike­tan Park Asso­ci­a­tion, an Australian New Age cult also called the Family or the Great White Brotherhood. This group, led by Anne Hamilton-Byrne, reportedly

con­di­tioned chil­dren with drugs, sen­sory depri­va­tion, sleep depri­va­tion, torture and rit­ual sexual abuse in order to pro­duce sub­jects who bent to the will of the group’s leader.

According to this theory, Assange at an early age was subjected to a wide array of MK Ultra-style mind control techniques and is even now an active Manchurian Candidate, however conscious he may be of this fact. Conspiracy theorists point to Assange's monotone voice and even his platinum colored hair, syncing with Hamilton-Byrne's preference for "Aryan" looking children, to support these claims.



Assange himself, in an interview with the New Yorker, has only spoken of being "on the run" from his mother's ex-boyfriend whom he suspected was a member of the cult:

Assange recalled her [his mother] saying, “Now we need to disappear,” and he lived on the run with her from the age of eleven to sixteen. When I asked him about the experience, he told me that there was evidence that the man belonged to a powerful cult called the Family—its motto was “Unseen, Unknown, and Unheard.” Some members were doctors who persuaded mothers to give up their newborn children to the cult’s leader, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. The cult had moles in government, Assange suspected, who provided the musician with leads on Claire’s whereabouts.

Whatever the real extent of Assange's connection to this cult it is sufficient, in the minds of many conspiracy theorists, to cast a dark shadow of suspicion on the entire WikiLeaks project. Surely, they argue, it is nothing but an advanced disinformation campaign.

Bumstead's Word

And disinformation, for the elite conspirators, is the name of the game. Provide just enough truth to make a story plausible and then tweak the facts so that anybody who looks into it is led astray. On this subject Ex-CIA director William Casey, in a quote that widely circulates the net, stated the objective of the Agency very explicitly back in 1981:

We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false.

This is a pretty terrifying statement and one wonders, observing both mainstream and "alternative" media, if the program has been completed. The only problem is that there is no real evidence that Casey ever said these words. Is the statement itself disinformation? Is it designed and disseminated in order to project a false image of CIA omniscience? How would it be possible to know one way or the other?

It is easy to imagine, though, that something like this program is in effect. Certainly it would be in the interest of an intelligence organization to keep the public disinformed. If so, however, how could the CIA protect its own agents from being disinformed? Presumably they would be provided with the real information. But how would they be sure that this information was real?

If, as we are led to believe, there are competing national intelligence organizations then wouldn't they all be trying to disinform each other? Wouldn't similar agencies in Russia, China, Israel, etc. be likewise attempting to totally disinform? And isn't this really just another facet of Assange's own theory?



Even if Assange, unwittingly or not, is an agent of disinformation his theory still stands to reason. The more closed and paranoid an organization is, and the more unsure it is of receiving real information and protecting its secrets, the less effective it will be in dealing with real world problems. This seems axiomatic and it reveals and even greater meta-level to the spaghetti theory of conspiracy. No one can be entirely certain of anything that is presented as being real.

Robert Anton Wilson wrote of another aspect of this conundrum which he called the SNAFU Principle:

It’s what I call the “snafu principle.” Communication only occurs
between equals–real communication, that is–because when you are
dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell
them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything
they don’t want to hear, the response is, “One more word Bumstead
and I’ll fire you!” Or in the military, “One more word and you’re
court-martialed.” It’s throughout the whole system.

So the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more lies are being
told to flatter those above them. So those at the top have no idea
what is going on at all. Those at the bottom have to adjust to the
rules made by those at the top who don’t know what’s going on.
Those at the top can write rules about this, that and the other,
while those at the bottom have got to adjust reality to fit the rules
as much as they can.

The SNAFU Principle is a problem primarily of misinformation, individuals at the lower rungs of the hierarchy telling their superiors what they think their bosses want to hear, instead of disinformation but even this is not certain. How many workers willfully and maliciously tell lies to their employers?

If we combine Wilson's SNAFU Principle with Assange's theories and with the competing total disinformation campaigns, which may not exist but very plausibly do, of various intelligence agencies then the probability is very great that less and less people have any idea of what is really going on.

These kinds of conclusions are anathema to the believers in One Big Conspiracy. An assertion that the elite controllers of the System are basically as confused and mis/disinformed as the rest of us itself smacks of the worst type of disinformation. It causes us, they argue, to underestimate our rulers and it "muddies the water." It makes clear analysis impossible and therefore, as designed, it preempts effective resistance.

The Intentional Structure Of Turd

One Big Conspiracy theorists do not like contradictions. Only one consistent theory should be able to encompass all available facts. Details that do not conform to the emerging picture of absolute domination are rejected as being a part of the conspiracy, as being disinformation.

This is in direct opposition to the structuralist analysis of people like Noam Chomsky. Chomsky bases his criticism of the System on the available records -- media reports, publicly accessible government and corporate documents, eye witness accounts, historical texts, etc. These documents tend to shed light on the structure of institutions instead of the elite individuals who are manipulating and benefiting from these structures from behind the scenes and off the record.



Other serious thinkers like Peter Dale Scott take a different approach. Scott, by no means a One Big Conspiracy believer, asserts that analysts and critics must look into the deep politics that are always present behind and beyond what we find in the public record.

Chomsky, and as an MIT professor dismissed as a "gatekeeper" by conspiracy theorists, will not speculate on what really happened on 9/11, during the Kennedy assassination, in the alleged CIA involvement in the drug trade, etc. because there is not enough textual evidence, he asserts, to support such speculation. Scott, in contrast, argues that of course such a record is lacking or hidden but by inference and with deep and informed research it is possible to discover the outlines of real conspiracy.

The problem with Scott's method is that speculation, if not rigorous and confined to strict limitations, is potentially endless. This is what is happening in the conspiracy theory milieu.

There seemed to be a time shortly after 9/11 when there were only two theories on what took place that day -- there was the official story and there was the conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory, in brief, claimed that elements within the US government or ruling class, using Al Qaeda as either their dupe or scapegoat, purposely brought down the towers in New York and struck the Pentagon in order expand military operations and production and to implement a strict system of domestic surveillance.



9/11 Truthers are still pretty much in agreement with this broad theory, but splits in the ranks revealed themselves very early in speculation about just how these attacks were carried out, and exactly by who. Were the planes remote controlled? Were there any planes at all? Were the towers brought down in a controlled demolition using thermite-type explosives? Were the towers vaporized by advanced, top secret scalar technology? Was it the CIA that really carried out the attacks? Was it the Mossad? Was it the Jesuits? The Freemasons? An even more sinister group?

As time progressed and positions hardened, factions formed along these lines. The "9/11 Truth Movement" became less like a movement and more like a loose collection of warring sects and tendencies. Each now accuses the other groupuscule as being an active promoter of divisive disinformation. Once again the spaghetti theory entwines it all.

Post-9/11, conspiracy theories have proliferated about every possible issue but always within this same pattern. It is not uncommon now to have conspiracy theories presented on both sides. There are no more official stories. There is no single alternative story. To expand on Oglesby: a multitude of conspiracy theories contend in the night.

Some "Truthers" accuse the CIA as being behind the recent coup against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, others claim that it was a CIA-orchestrated pseudo-revolution that put the Brotherhood into power in the first place. Still others, perhaps paradoxically, argue that both of these positions are correct. Many researchers are now convinced of the use of "crisis actors" in heavily mediated events like the Sandy Hook shooting and the Boston Bombing. Others ardently argue that the whole theory of "crisis actors" is absurd and it is only promoted to make genuine researchers look ridiculous by association.

From the perspective of the conspiracy absolutists, however, this all makes sense. Of course those in power would do everything possible to confuse, waylay and disillusion sincere and spirited researchers. Disinformation plops the proverbial "turd in the punchbowl" and makes the entire scene seem pretty creepy. Instead of being presented with a clear case of elite corruption and foul play, an individual who has "woken up" will be sucked into a bewildering vortex of competing theories and personalities. There is a big temptation to roll over and go back to sleep.

There is really no doubt that such a strategy is taking place. Even if the disinformation campaign of intelligence organizations is not as total as the above quote by Casey suggests, it is in the best interest of those in power to keep a potentially informed opposition splintered and muddled. Is the absolutist position, therefore, correct? Are we being lied to literally about everything? Do only those at the very apex of the hierarchy have any idea what is truth?

Robert Anton Wilson certainly argues otherwise. There is a glaring contradiction at the heart of absolutist conspiracism. This can be illustrated in reference to the work of Alan Watt, found mostly at the website Cutting Through The Matrix.

Animal Farm

Alan Watt is arguably the most articulate and convincing proponent of the One Big Conspiracy theory on the net. Unlike David Icke, for instance, Watt does not insist that we are being ruled by shape-shifting reptilian overlords. Instead he tracks the objectives of the conspiracy, which consists of a bloodline of interbreeding elite families who have been the true power brokers of all the empires of history, through the writings of their own public intellectual representatives. These men include Carroll Quigley, H.G. Wells, Charles Galton Darwin, Bertrand Russell, etc. 

Watt, like all absolutists, believes that the elite conspiracy is behind every aspect of culture, every detail in history. The aim is total political, economic, biological, psychological and spiritual control of humanity.



Already, though, these elites reign in near omnipotence. Every item, every story, that appears in the media, including most of the internet, is only there because it has been carefully crafted to further their Agenda. While average individuals plan for the month or, at best, the year ahead, our "betters" plan in the span of decades and centuries. The secret technology that they employ against us is decades ahead of even the most state of the art devices available for public consumption. They truly are as gods. 

Week after week, in radio broadcasts and on his site, Watt is relentless and unwavering in his message -- we most resemble domesticated animals on a factory farm. We are bred ultimately for the slaughter. Any freedom that we imagine we have is deeply illusory. The best that we can hope for at this dismal moment is to keep ourselves informed of the extent and depth of the dark force that is sworn to extinguish the last sparks of our liberty and humanity. Through these recordings a future resistance may become possible, but there is no sign of this at present.



I first came across Alan Watt on the Sweet Liberty radio show back in 2005 or 2006. I became mesmerized. On Sweet Liberty, Watt would occasionally mention how the big "alternative" radio networks, most especially GCN and RBN, were essentially CIA operations. It was weird for me, then, when Watt began to host a show on RBN (which he has just recently given up) and became a frequent guest on Alex Jones' (someone who Watt earlier decried as being a disinformation agent) flagship show on GCN.

Why would Alan Watt join RBN? And more significantly why would a CIA-controlled radio network allow such a radical voice on their airwaves?

There are a few possibilities here but each of these deeply challenges the absolutist conspiracy narrative:

1) Watt sold out. For the sake of fame and a bit of cash he went over to the dark side. This appears very unlikely. Watt's message has not changed since he got his show on RBN and he has maintained his independent voice. His fame and influence has certainly grown but I seriously doubt he is getting rich off of this. He seems sincerely convinced of the utter importance of his message and took any opportunity to reach a wider audience.

2) Watt has always been an agent. Watt began as a caller to obscure radio shows like Sweet Liberty, slowly building up his street cred and expanding his sphere of influence, and is now one the most respected voices in the field. This to me is also highly doubtful. Once again, it is Watt's sincerity which is most convincing. Unlike many others he does not sensationalize and he is not pushing his own agenda. If he is an agent he's one of the best.



3) Watt is an unwitting tool to spread the myth of elite omnipotence. This is more probable. It could also be that Watt is fully aware that he is being used in this way but has concluded that it is the only way to reach a wider audience. In other words, he is using the system as it is using him.

4) Watt is wrong in his analysis -- we are not as controlled as he insists. Perhaps RBN and/or GCN are not controlled by the CIA or other nefarious organizations. Perhaps they are just what they claim to be.

The big problem with number 4 is if such large radio networks are essentially free of control, if Watt is wrong in this regard, then what else is outside of control? Certainly the conspiracy could not be total if this the case. If, on the other hand, numbers one, two or three are true, regardless of Watt's actual role, then the conspiracy may also not be as all-powerful as it lets on. Why would it need to promote a myth of omnipotence if it was truly god-like? Does it, like the Wizard of Oz, conclude that its power increases when the people believe it to be powerful?

Al Dente

The case of Alan Watt is really the whole of the absolutist position in a nutshell. The fact that conspiracy theorists exist either means that the control system is not as absolute as they insist or that their message is also being used as a device of control, which would indicate in turn that the system craves the omnipotence that it actually does not possess. In both cases the absolutist analysis falls short.

The nihilist position, that events are essentially random and coincidental, also fails. Conspiracies, in plural, are a fact. The only question is of their size and depth. What nihilists consider to be coincidences, conspiracy theorists take as being meaningful and intentional. The bigger the conspiracy is posited to be the more "coincidences" are resolved. When faced with coincidences the absolutist will simply absorb them into his theory. As coincidences are absorbed the conspiracy theory by necessity expands, often to seemingly absurd lengths.

To escape the endless complexity and groundlessness of the spaghetti theory of conspiracy, the absolutist needs to include more and more within his theory. The control system is viewed as being far beyond governments, intelligence agencies, elite families and even secret societies. The conspiracy moves beyond humanity, beyond this world, beyond this dimension. As RAW noted parenthetically in his essay:

(Thus, if there actually is one big jumbo-conspiracy governing this planet, it must be, as Donald Holmes wittily suggests in the following pages, of non-human origin.)

This is exactly where the spaghetti strand leads to next.