So, the Bilderberg group is meeting in Sitges. In case you haven’t heard of it, it is a kind of global steering committee which discusses and, depending on who you listen to, plans, the economic and political direction to be taken by national governments.
To which the “conspiricy theory” alarm bells start ringing.
I think there are two responses to this. The first relates to what we know about the world and how we receive, evaluate, assimilate and disseminate that information. The second relates to the regulatory role that the accusation of subscribing to a conspiracy theory plays in maintaining a homeostatic equilibrium when it comes to opinion forming.
On the first point, it is becoming increasingly evident, not just the extent to which the the media is biased or presents a distorted view of the world, but the way in which the media encloses us within a completely closed field. Take the North Korean sinking of a South Korean ship. I don’t doubt that that is what happened, the North Korean regime is clearly unstable and unpredictable, there was an international panel of experts which looked into the case and concluded that the sinking was almost certainly caused by the North Koreans.
Why don’t I doubt it? I know next to nothing about the case. What I do know has been gleaned from fragments of news reports on the radio, headlines and first paragraphs of stories in newspapers and on websites, a few images of the ship recovered from the seabed and the slightly comical image of Kim Jong-il, which has never quite recovered from its treatment in Team America. None of this, even if you add to it my slightly sketchy grasp of the history of the relations between the two countries, amounts to anything that could be considered evidence. But that’s the point. I have delegated the role of context setting to the media, accepting as true that which is not put into question across the range of different media. It’s as if I divine attitudes and opinions on the basis of their implicit assumption in the media. And this is not intended to be a confessional- I am convinced that even the most radical cyber-warrior or activist is subject to exactly the same regulatory influences, just not exactly where they look. It’s as if there is a point beyond which it is no longer socially expedient to call things into question. Not for obviously ideological reasons, but more because such questioning would remove the grounds upon which dialogue with other people is possible. Tucked into the margins of everyday conversation, we therefore find a powerful regulatory mechanism which acts to maintain something like social homeostasis. If we’re going to talk about the sinking of the South Korean ship, it must proceed on the assumption of North Korean culpability because to question this would undermine the smooth functioning of the social field (the conversation in this case) and so represent a threat to the homeostatic equilibrium of the social body. Being right is not really what comes first in our list of concerns, being coherent and keeping the conversation fluid are far more important. It is within the various media that the parameters are established, and potentially challenged, regarding which narratives (in the form of opinions, facts and assumptions) are ‘in play’.
We tend to veer away from conspiracy theorists. We start looking around in a contained panic for the exits. I met an alien fanatic one time. He waited a decent amount of time before he swung the conversation around to aliens, but once he got there, there was no letting up. The problem wasn’t the ideas- it was the sense that you had been trapped in a self-contained field, the functionality and fluidity of which had been bought at the expense of its integration into the broader social field. The guy made sense and spoke at break-neck speed, but also seemed anxious, paraniod and strangely lonely. This could be explained by the fact that, at least while he was rapping about aliens, he wasn’t embedded in the social field of regulated discourse. Of course, the field of aliens and ufology contain their own regulatory mechanisms, but importantly these fall beyond the parametres established by the various media, and are therefore inherently suspect. Consequently, there is no fluidity between the field of aliens and the broader social field. You are not being asked to traverse the contours of the social field, but to break with it.
Talking to a ufologist, talking to a jehovah’s witness and talking to a committed Marxist can often be very similar experiences. In part this is because what you are facing is a challenge to the integrity of the field of legitimated narratives which you know you are not going to accept. All that remains is to look for the exits.
This is all well understood and for this reason accusing someone of being a conspiracy theorist with respect to an opinion that they hold, plays a very powerful regulatory role in the maintainance of homeostatic equilibrium. No one wants to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist. In conversation, and also in contemplation, the formation and dissemination of our opinions is strongly influenced by this recognition that their are certain nexus of opinions that threaten to enclose us within a coherent, yet utterly limited field. We recognise that this field will compromise the smooth working of the broader field of opinions, attitudes etc… which we need to traverse in order to be social players and which is regulated, primarily, by the traditional media.
The role of social networking sites and blogs and fora etc is clearly very important and with time will be transformative (or better, will hold a strategically crucial place in the the more general transformation which is occurring) . The cracks that are appearing in the legitimacy of the traditional media are, in part, related to this static of unregulated opinion. However, I think that the traditional media, which obviously includes the on-line presence of newspapers, television and radio, are still instrumental in framing and legitimizing opinions, attitudes, perceptions and even reality.
So what are we to make of the Bilderberg conference and the various conspiracies that swirl around it? Should we laugh it off and allow the social field to continue functioning smoothly. Or should we be alerted to the fact that the various media have, for the last 50 years or so, obediently withheld from reporting on an event that, under any normal circumstances, would be a massive media magnet. And this is the same media which effectively frames our perception of reality at least as it is played out on the national and international level. I think that at this time, when we can see cracks opening up within that framework, we should take it very seriously. Britain and America have been embroiled in wars over the past eight years that were clearly embarked on for reasons that had nothing to do with the official line. Anyone with a pulse can see this. We have just witnessed an election in the UK which was conducted under conditions of national sedation. The vitally important questions about how we are going to transform consumption habits and turn the banking sector into something that is socially useful were not touched on. An awful lot of anesthetizing flattery was dished out. What’s more, and this is an on-going issue, the interpenetration of different estates (politics, business, banking and the media most notably) that we generally take to be separate was and is at no time highlighted. Neither was the way that they increasingly seem to operate in a coordinated way on a global level in the interests of a very small elite.
Bilderberg is an annual meeting of this elite. Stuff conspiracy theories. For all its smooth appearance, something is seriously wrong with the social field and our perception of how it operates. No one is in a privileged position with respect to this, no one ‘knows what’s really going on’. But don’t be cornered into passively shrugging your shoulders because you don’t want to be labelled a conspiracy theorist. The world is in an immensely unstable state and the policies being pursued by our leaders are clearly aggravating the situation. Whatever it is that they are discussing in Sitges, I think we should absolutely take it seriously.
thePuck 11:16 am on June 5, 2010 Permalink |
While I agree with your basic thesis, that we often allow ourselves to be socially regulated through our rhetoric and that this can basically control us, here is the problem I have with every conspiracy theory ever: Humans are really bad at cooperating and even worse at keeping it a secret. We’re just not good at it. Someone always screws it up or lets the proverbial cat out of the bag. Many things that people ascribe to conspiracy it is more rational to ascribe to human nature en masse. The rich get rich while the poor get poorer and enfranchised social groups exploit and gain their social power through the domination of disenfranchised groups. One doesn’t need a conspiracy to get an explanation of how this can be, one only needs looks at the playground, the high school, the home. It’s in our meat and bones, and the more scientist learn about primate behavior, the more our “sophisticated”, “civilized” behaviors are cashed out as (admittedly ornate) simian dominance and submission behaviors.
So while I don’t care about looking like a wingnut, mostly because anyone who knows me knows I am mad as a hatter, I also simply can’t give credence to any conspiracy theory. They require humans to consistently do things they are really bad at with no mistakes for long periods of time in complete secrecy. The Bilderberg group is just one of these cases. Rest assured if they are conspiring, one screws over another’s plans, while another leaks the information to the nearest tabloid for money and a fourth is having an affair with the first one’s wife. They all screw each other over and look for ways to get something over on each other, which inevitably leads to the collapse of whatever the conspiracy’s plans are.
I mean, we can’t even cooperate effectively when everyone ostensibly knows what is going on and it’s in everyone’s interest. What else is a nation, state, or town but a large conspiracy to act in concert to accomplish certain goals? And how effective are we at doing this?
oliver sutton 3:31 pm on June 5, 2010 Permalink |
I don’t disagree. I think conspiracy theories are a decoy. My point is that fear of sliding into the paranoid realm of the conspiracy theories acts as a disincentive to thinking in a way that is out of step with received opinion. JFK is the classic example. I’m sure a lot of people were reluctant to relinquish the transparently ridiculous official line, for fear of being a crank. In this way people maintain social cohesion, policing themselves and each other for non-functional opinions and attitudes.
I think Bilderberg does matter. It is a level of organization that we are discouraged from acknowledging. We kind of know that these networks exist informally, and that is perhaps more important- but the fact that there is, in all probability, a level of coordination between the media, the bankers, the politicians and the old aristocracy is important to recognize, because in its absence our default model is that of nation states and international organizations.
thePuck 4:27 pm on June 5, 2010 Permalink |
I agree that coordination is there, but I don’t think it results from real conspiracy. I think it simply results from people being people and rather predictable in their motivations. People want money and power, the higher up you go the fewer people who have that much money and power, thus they get connected because they are the players on that particular tier on the game of life.
Here’s an example from my own experience: I used to game competitively. All pro gamers have some basic things in common that motivate them: we want to win, we want to get better at our game, and we want the acclaim that comes from ranking highly in a group activity. In short, the goal is to pwn and it has much of the same feel as organized sports. One of the games I played competitively was Jedi Knight Outcast, and the clan I was in was one of the top ranked clans in the country. At that level of play you practice every day, your clan generally has private servers, and since there are only so many people at this level of play, most of the top clans and players end up knowing each other. You see the same names over and over.
Now, at a certain point a rival clan was hanging out on our servers a lot, and eventually a splinter clan formed called Red Whore Elite, consisting of all the people from both clans who used the red saber stance exclusively. Now, was there a deep conspiracy, really? Was anyone trying to undermine either clan? Was there a conspiracy between two of the top clans to create a “Dream Team” clan to do better in matches? No. It was just the natural result of people in a rarefied environment with common motivations doing what came naturally. From the outside it looked like a planned out thing (RWE did compete, and some people from both clans were pissy about it), but from the inside it was simply that a certain group of people were hanging out a lot and had the same motivations.
I think this is what happens with governments and business as well. No one sat around a table, twiddling mustaches and saying, “Muahaha!”, and planned out the military industrial complex, or the gradual erosion of the middle class through the de-industrialization of the US. The powerful and wealthy of the ’70s didn’t come together and say, “Okay, we’re going to move all the means of production to countries with no labor laws or unions, then abuse the hell out of our workers until they organize, then move to the next country and do the same thing. Rinse and repeat.” What happened was all these different businesses made choices that maximized profit and utilized resources efficiently, but since they all made pretty much the same choices for the same reasons and using the same reasoning, it certainly looks like a concerted, cooperative effort. While I am sure there are backroom deals galore, large-scale and concerted conspiracies that try to actively bring about things like the power and wealth disparities in the US sound far-fetched.
It’s like global warming…sure, it took a lot of people working in concert and making decisions, but those actions and decisions were not aimed at causing global warming, nor did all the people that brought it about conspire together. It’s simply the result of people doing what people do right now.