The conspiracy error

Not understanding signalling, networks, status games, the structuring state, bureaucratic pathologies …

Analysis of events abhors an analytical vacuum. That is, if your mental architecture lacks certain key analytical tools or framing, then you will be driven to mischaracterise—potentially seriously mischaracterise—events.

Given the human propensity for identifying patterns, and awareness of human intentionality, what can very easily fill in an analytical gap is some form of conspiracy theory. A conspiracy theory alleges that there are centrally organised people operating in secrecy—usually in a malign way—controlling events.

Source.

A conspiracy theorist is someone who advances such an idea. The term can also be used as a term of abuse for anyone who inconveniently notices patterns—such as folk advancing claims and beliefs that suit people like themselves—or simply advances claims that people find inconvenient or awkward.

There are actual conspiracies. We know there are actual conspiracies, because they have been exposed.

The question is whether the claimed level of coordination and control over events, and the required level of continuing secrecy, is what is happening. The more restricted one’s analytical tools, the more conspiracy is likely to seem the default explanation for any coordinated pattern of behaviour.

Something that people do openly is not a conspiracy. Nor is conspiracy the only way for people to coordinate. It is perfectly possible to coordinate via mutual signalling, for instance. This is particularly true if people are engaged in shared status games. It is even more true if networks share common interests, common information sources and are playing shared status games.

Among us Homo sapiens, much of the point of status is to generate currencies of cooperation. We are a very status-driven species because we are very social beings, so prestige (conspicuous competence) and propriety (conspicuous conformity to norms) have been currencies of cooperation for our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies that developed across hundreds of thousands of years.

In thinking about the dramatic changes brought about by the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, it became clear to me that there were always sexual outliers, there are always folk trying different life strategies. Due to the Pill and legally available abortion, which life strategies worked suddenly changed, so folk shifted to them and the norms that enabled them.

Thinking seriously about the mechanisms by which sexual mores changed leads to considering networks, signalling, life strategies. Once you grasp the power of these social mechanisms, you are in a much better situation to see how much conspiracy theories are a product of a lack of analytical breadth and depth. Conspiracy theories are a mechanism to “explain” events, one that occurs naturally to our pattern-seeking minds aware of human intentionality. They do so, however, in the absence of analytical alternatives, if we do not have better operational mechanisms to explain events—and especially observed social coordination—by.

The missing bureaucratic dynamic

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein tends to over-estimates how much evolutionary biology—his area of expertise—gives him insight into social dynamics. Yes, everything social is emergent from the biological and nothing biological makes sense, except in the light of evolution. But emergent means that the emergent thing acquires its own dynamics, its own causal patterns.

So, yes, evolutionary biology absolutely can give us rich insights into human behaviour. I am very grateful for the, in effect, free, online graduate level seminars Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have provided over the years. But we have to be careful to grasp how much social dynamics are a thing in their own right, they are not simply manifestations of biological patterns, even though the social patterns have to be enabled by biological capacities.

This over-estimation of biological enablement, and under-estimating of the emergent nature of social causes, can be aggravated if we have political or ideological reasons not to “see” things that matter. Thus, Bret Weinstein’s commentary at the time about the policy response to Covid displayed the weakness of his own progressivism. He tended to analyse government bureaucracy as an instrument of outside forces, rather than as having its own dynamics.

Progressives see the state apparatus as the means to achieve their policy goals. Thus, they see the state apparatus in instrumental terms, as an instrument of other social forces. If they see dysfunctional public policy, they look for what malign forces the state apparatus is instrumentally serving to generate such dysfunction. In the case of the public policy response to Covid, that was Big Pharma (and perhaps Big Food).

If the dysfunctions arise from the state apparatus itself, then that casts serious doubt on any progressive project. There were certainly bad incentives operating on Big Pharma and Big Food—that Big Tobacco brought an addiction model, via developing hyper-palatable foods, to food manufacture matters. They clearly did and do lobby the politicians and the regulatory agencies themselves to influence public policy. Nevertheless, the biggest source of bad public policy during the Covid Pandemic—including, completely ignoring previously devised plans of response to a pandemic—came from copying the allegedly oh-so-successful Chinese lockdowns.

Neither the Chinese policy responses, nor its appeal to Western decision-makers, were the result of Big Pharma or Big Food. It was the result of the incentives operating in the Chinese Party-State—so in an activist-directed state apparatus—then appealing to political and bureaucratic dynamics in the West.

Bureaucratic incentives and pathologies, on their own, explain much of the policy dysfunction both in China and in the West. Much of the rest of the dysfunctional response in the West came from the laptop class dominating public discourse and political decision-making for whom lockdowns imposed minimal inconvenience—and even enabled them to spend more time with their kids.

Vaccination and lockdowns—as one-size-fits-all responses that were to be applied to everyone—suited bureaucratic incentives and pathologies way better than a targeted response that would leave most people free to go about their lives. It particularly suited Public Health to not focus on how much risk was concentrated in the metabolically challenged. This avoided focusing on how appallingly bad Western Public Health has been in managing general metabolic health. Yes, Big Pharma did add in its own manipulations, but it was clearly pushing at an open door.

If the dysfunctions of bureaucracy-as-bureaucracy are not part of your analytical understanding—if you see state bureaucracies as instruments rather than social agents—then you are going to be driven to finding malign forces using the instrument badly to explain the observed dysfunctions. Conspiracist thinking flows in naturally to explain what one otherwise lacks the analytical tools to explain.

Conflict conspiracism

Any sort of Conflict Theory—which sees conflict between groups as central to social dynamics—if it does not think seriously about mechanisms of social dynamics, is going to tend towards conspiracism. The most famous Conflict Theory is Marxism. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848):

The history of all hitherto existing human society is the history of class struggles.

…

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

A lot of Marxist rhetoric sounds conspiratorial. This is also true of Critical Theory and its derivatives (Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, etc) that adapt the Marxist Oppressor/Oppressed analytical template.

According to this template, the Oppressor group turns society into a social prison for the Oppressed. The Oppressors are not “accidental” social gaolers. The oppressing intentionality of the Oppressor group is what makes them so morally reprehensible, so conspiracist rhetoric is not merely natural to Conflict Theory in general, but is well-nigh inevitable with the Oppressor/Oppressed analytical template in particular.

A huge problem with Conflict Theory is that human societies are mostly exercises in social cooperation.¹ Indeed, it is a challenge for evolutionary theory how strikingly cooperative Homo sapiens are. In foraging bands, for instance, young men will regularly provide food—especially fat and protein—from their hunts to children that they are not related to. Human societies habitually display levels of cooperation between unrelated lineages—i.e., non-kin cooperation—not achieved by any other species.²

As previously noted, even our evolved status mechanisms are currencies of cooperation. Prestige—conspicuous competence—encourages behaviour that helps others within a social order. Propriety—conspicuous conformity to norms—discourages behaviour that harms others within a social order.

We use dominance way less than other primates. Indeed, it is likely that our beta males systematically combined to kill off any alpha males: that our species murdered its way to niceness. It is very clear that human foraging societies systematically suppress dominance behaviour so as to protect broad-based cooperation within foraging bands.

In evolutionary Theory, lineages within the same species are presumed to be in conflict for breeding opportunities. While that is true of Homo sapien lineages—witness the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck that only 1-in-17 male lineages made it through—we also display habitual patterns of high levels of cross-lineage cooperation. Indeed, the European triumph and (temporary) global dominion was based on putting the Homo sapien advantage of non-kin cooperation on steroids. The Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck was a remarkable interlude, not the normal pattern.

As part of our remarkable cooperativeness, we are a highly normative species. Conspiracist rhetoric puts together our awareness of the intentionality of other humans, our advanced capacity for pattern recognition, and our normativity, in a single package that can be—by playing on those cognitive features of Homo sapiens—rhetorically powerful. Conspiracism also plays on our use of status as currencies of social cooperation to give believers a sense of being granted understanding greater than their poor deluded brethren who have not yet seen the light. The sense of order a Conspiracy Theory gives to the chaos and contingency of events can be very comforting.

Conflict Theories spread by using the cooperative mechanisms they generally systematically underestimate. This is particularly true of the Oppressed/Oppressor versions, especially in their more conspiracist modes.

Underestimating the State

There is an extra difficulty that arises from misconstruing the role of the state in social order, generating an analytical hole in one’s thinking and so an analytical vacuum into which conspiracism can slide.

Marxism, Marxian (i.e., Marxist-derived) and liberal Theories—plus a lot of mainstream social science—to varying degrees, implies that human societies have an inherent structure to them, treating the state as an extra layer “on top” of that inherent social structure. Once again, Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto (1848), provide the most redolent version of this:

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The trouble is, this implication of the state being an added feature on “top” of an inherent social structure is quite wrong. The state is a basic ordering feature of any state society, not least because the state dominates the creation and extraction of surplus—resources in excess of subsistence—in any state society.

In societies dominated by Malthusian constraints, state dominate the creation and extraction of surplus by extracting food and other resources before they can support more babies. Hence, state societies generate way more surplus than do stateless societies.

The other way states lead to the generation of way more surplus than would otherwise exist is that the social order states impose in order to reliably extract surplus—i.e., tax people—enables more generation of surplus via trade and commerce. It was chiefdoms, and especially states, keeping defeated males alive so they could pay taxes and tribute—and breed more payers of taxes and tribute—rather than just killing them and taking their women, that brought the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck to an end.

That states have dominated the creation, extraction and transmission of surplus means that they have also dominated the creation and maintenance of class structures. This is nowhere more obvious than in Marxist Party-States, where a Marxist group seizes power, pulverises society—including by varying levels of mass murder—and then restructures the society it now dominates according to the ideological and operational requirements of the Party-State itself.

Within the social order created by the Party-State, various social logics will work themselves out, but they will be deeply affected by what the Party-State does and does not do. For instance, the resurgence of commerce in CCP China since 1978 started with local peasants de-collectivising farming and local resurgences of market activity. The Party-State deciding not to block such was the crucial change in policy. This mattered, as have the Party-State’s public policy choices since.

Nevertheless, if you have a model in your head of the state as somehow derivatively “reflecting” its society, you can end up with a model of the “see-through” state. That is, of looking at state action and trying to pick the non-state actors who are driving it. That very easily leads to conspiracism, to Conspiracy Theories of state action.

Bret Weinstein, in his contemporary discussions of the Covid dysfunctions—because of his continuing progressive assumptions—has had a strong element of the “see-through” state in his thinking, so tended to over-attribute causal power to non-state actors (e.g. Big Pharma) and under-consider the agency and perverse incentives of Public Health agencies themselves. Cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra makes a similar error in over-attributing causal roles to Big Pharma and Big Food in explaining why Public Health throughout the West promulgates nutrition guidelines that are not well-grounded in science and are actively disadvantageous for human metabolic health.

I am not remotely claiming that Big Pharma and Big Food do not play perverse roles in our deteriorating metabolic health, nor in the dysfunctional public policy responses to Covid. They absolutely do and did.

Even so, to understand state dysfunction, to understand public policy dysfunction, even at the basic Seeing Like A State level, one has to rid oneself of the notion of the see-through state—of the state as an instrument of society—and see the state as the basic ordering structure in the society it is and the state apparatus (and the organisations and people within it) as having social agency. Indeed, forcing accountability and responsiveness on the state apparatus is a basic problem for all rulers—and all citizenries—precisely because the state is both a fundamental structuring feature of any state society and individuals, networks and organisations within the state apparatus have causal agency.

There is an useful analogy for the operation of contemporary Western Public Health with the the tendency of the postwar US military to win almost all the battles it fights, yet to lose wars. Losing a battle is potentially fatal to a military career (even literally). Lots of key decision-makers in the US national-security state are very motivated to ensure that the US military wins battles.

The US is so productive, populous and geographically blessed that it can lose wars overseas without generating any problems for decision-makers within the national-security state. So the US national-security state can lose in Afghanistan by following the same bureaucratic processes by which it lost in Vietnam and there is no negative consequences for any decision-maker or organisation.

We see the same dichotomy in Public Health across the West. Western health systems generate very effective acute care. There is a specific injury or episode of illness that specific people are responsible for treating. We all have an incentive for there to be effective acute care and the information to make relatively good judgements about whether it was fixed or not.

Western Public Health is awful at managing metabolic health. The information basis for making judgements is far worse than for acute care. The sicker the general population gets, the more money that Public Health gets. Lots of key decision-makers thus benefit from the metabolic health of the population getting worse.

You pay an organisation to do what makes its income, resources and authority go up. We Homo sapiens are easily capable of whatever level of self-deception, of moralising and rationalising our self-interest, needed to do that. So, Public Health succeeds in the acute health battles but (the population) loses the metabolic health war that it is in Public Health’s interest (for the population) to lose.

If you just ask what benefits the Public Health apparatus more, deteriorating or improving public metabolic health?, much is explained. For the worse our collective metabolic health gets, the more resources and authority the Public Health apparatus gets. Of course they have proved to be spectacularly bad managers of our collective metabolic health. That is what you would expect from their incentive structure. As ever, the Charlie Munger principle applies: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

No conspiracy is required, just mutual signalling, imitative behaviour—we are a highly imitative species—and the self-deception, plus the moralising and rationalising of self-interest, at levels we Homo sapiens are easily capable of. Thinking through social mechanisms is a great prophylactic against conspiracy theories.

The more one aspires to use the state as an instrument of social change, the more attractive an instrumental “see-through” conception of the state is. One of the fundamental problems of Communism in particular—and of progressivism in general—is throwing off all the painful learning about forcing accountability on the state. (Which, to be clear, Bret Weinstein is NOT in favour of.)

In the case of the sort of people who hounded Bret out of Evergreen College, the painful learning about accountability is replaced by the self-serving arrogance of their moralised understanding, with the golden aim of social transformation justifying them having trumping authority and control over resources. Any elevated ambitions for state action discourages taking seriously the inherent problems of state action, including limitations in its efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, problems with perverse incentives, and so on.

Malice activism

There is also the issue of targeted malice activism (aka complaints activism): letter-writing and other campaigns to get people sacked, ruin their businesses, their careers, their reputations. Modern malice activism was pioneered by the Jewish Lobby—activists who agitate on behalf of the Jewish community—but has since spread, especially since the development of social media. Transactivists have become particularly vicious practitioners of malice activism.

Social media allows near effortless mobbing. What previously took organisational skill, and a certain noxious paranoia, is a click of a button away.

If you observe—or worse are the target of—campaigns of clearly coordinated abuse, then lapsing into conspiracy theorising is very easy. As a friend notes:

Honestly what are you supposed to do with privately coordinated attacks on people? That’s the source of a lot of this conspiracism.

Shaming and shunning behaviour is very old among humans. Every single foraging society that anthropologists have ever studied does it.

The entire phenomenon of preference falsification comes from the power of mutual signalling combined with any lack of in-depth mutual information. Personality cults get much of their power from the difficulty of signalling loyalty when loyalty is compulsory. That we are such a status-ridden species also makes us very much a social-signalling species.

Whenever people are engaged in any sort of shared social game, there is a strong incentive to signal commitment to the shared game. This is particularly so with shared status games. Social media hugely upscales the capacity to engage in moral abuse and malice activism as a shared status game, creating pile-on cascades.

One does, however, have to be careful about the actual scale of such efforts, as a surprisingly small number of people can create the impression of a much larger mob. In such cases, it is always wise to simply count them. Repetitive online shrieking by a relatively small number of people can generate the impression of a much larger group than actually exists.

Open advocacy is not a conspiracy

James Lindsay is a mathematician who has a real gift for textual analysis and explanation. I have listened to everyone one of his podcasts, because he actually reads out the relevant texts and “connects the dots” with other texts.

Unfortunately, his understanding of social dynamics is not nearly as good as he thinks it is. He also has a weak understanding of political ideologies he has not read in depth.

In particular, he does not “get” conservatism. He cannot distinguish between Tucker Carlson, Candace Owen and Darryl Cooper, and folk of similar ilk, from conservatives such as Yoram Hazony, R.R. Reno and Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad).

James Lindsay has noticed something real with his concerns about what he (and others) call “the woke right”. This flows from having observed how Scepticism/New Atheism melted down and how readily many of these ostensibly anti-religious folk fell for the quasi-religion of “wokery”. Unfortunately, because he does not “get” conservatism, he over-eggs the category of the “woke right”.

He also over-eggs what is the operation of networks, thereby lapsing into conspiracism. He has fallen into a conspiracist hole about the Fabians: see here, here and here.

Fabian socialism is an openly acknowledged phenomenon in British political life dating back to the late C19th. Locations significant to it get the blue plaques used to identify historically significant sites around London. The author of a new history of the beginning of British party politics in the Whig and Tory contentions of the later C17th and early C18th puts things in perspective.

No one has any power because they are Fabians, they have power because they are Labour Ministers. Yes, ideas travel through such networks, but the Fabians do not make either British Labour politics in particular, nor UK politics in general, notably distinctive. British Labour is pushing the same progressivist ideas as one sees across the Anglosphere in centre-left politics.

As a friend comments:

Going after the Fabians is pattern-recognition gone wrong—classic high IQ trap.

If you’re very good at noticing you can start to think you’ve got superpowers.

There are things that I do not notice. This is one reason why I read, watch and listen fairly widely; to take advantage of other people’s noticings.

What is a much bigger issue in UK politics than the Fabians is Tony Blair, as PM (1997-2007), taking power away from anyone elected—apart from the PM—and handing it to “experts” in quangoes, to judges via human rights legislation, and to the EU. What compounded the problem is that the Tories, in Government, did nothing to reverse any of the first two patterns and, in some ways, doubled down on Blairism. None of the Tories were Fabians. Historian David Starkey discusses what Blair did, and Tory complicity, with his usual wit and perception.

As a friend commented on James Lindsay’s take on the Fabians:

As someone in the comments points out, you can judge the Fabian Society for its historical support for eugenicism and the naff logo, but not because it has power—it doesn’t.

One form of analytical hygiene is to never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity/incompetence. Similarly, never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by shared incentives, common beliefs and mutual signalling.

I have posted in the past about Social Alchemy Theory: the notion that increasing the dysfunctions within Western societies will lead to the oppression-free future society to arise: with the golden future emerging from a leaden present. This can, and does, generate plenty of motivation, coordination and differentiation along various networks. But it does not require secrecy and the advocates of such ideas are quite open about it, though they do not use my labelling.

I have also posted on using the above mechanisms to explain how Transactivism could bend so many institutions to its will. Sadly, in many ways, it was not despite all the toxic untruths Transactivism spreads, but because of them. It is precisely because toxic untruths can be such an excellent differentiating and rationalising-shows-loyalty mechanism that they can coordinate, motivate and differentiate so well. The entire history of Communism displays this—with no secret conspiracies being required, just advocacy and activism.³

In the case of both Bret Weinstein and James Lindsay, I tend to read down the conspiratorial stuff, operating on the basis of they are getting the social dynamics wrong, but the networks are real, as is the signalling, as are the shared status games, as are the perverse incentives, the bureaucratic pathologies. There is something real there, just not a conspiracy in the sense stated or implied.

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1. Conflict Theories posit that cooperation stops, or is greatly attenuated, at the borders between the designated conflicting groups. This is, or should be, an empirical question.

2. The neuter worker and soldiers of eusocial interests (ants, bees, termites …) serve the lineage of their queen and mother. They can be thought of as independently moving organ-bundles serving the reproductive needs of their queen and mother, coordinated by the external mechanism of pheromones rather than the internal coordination of hormones.

3. Operational secrecy within a centrally-directed Party engaged in armed struggle is not quite the same thing.