According to Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (8th edition) a conspiracy is “a secret plan by a group of people to do sth harmful or illegal”, eg.
a conspiracy of silence (= an agreement not to talk publicly about sth which should be made public)
According to the same source: a conspiracy theory is “the belief that a secret conspiracy is responsible for a particular event”.
I put to you that the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral Commission, the Mont Pelerin Society are all, and have long been, in a sense, conspiracies. In a sense, only, because we know they exist. But we don’t know exactly what they are up to. We suspect this, that and the other, and we are sure they are not just playing bridge.
That we are seeing a shift of power from elected to non-elected representatives, as in the EU, is not a conspiracy theory. It is a fact. What some people will want to call a conspiracy theory, however, is the hypothesis that power is increasingly being shifted to powerful corporations (mainly in the financial sector), the security state and the military industrial complex.
Branding a hypothesis, calling it “a conspiracy theory”, does not mean the hypothesis is wrong. It just means that there are those who dislike it.
The problem with hypotheses is that rather than meticulously testing them, some of us tend to believe them, to root for them. Belief, “faith”, is anathema to scientific method, it is true.
Nevertheless those of us who are not scientists in the empirical sense, have to make do with the tools we have: imagination, logic, observation and the facts that are available to us. Naturally, we will enthusiastically draw all sorts of erroneous conclusions, but some of our conclusions may well be spot on, in which case they risk being the sort of conclusions that will be disliked by the powers that be and that will be labelled conspiracy theories.
I would like to bring to your attention some interesting “notes” written by Nel Bonilla about what she calls the “Bunker State“. She defines the Bunker State as a regime that, facing systemic crisis, hunkers down defensively, militarising borders, suppressing dissent, controlling information, and — not least — warning about external threats in order to justify internal repression. Note, in particular, the section The Human Domain: “Security” applies not only to “enemy states” but also to unwelcome cognitive developments within the system.
You will no doubt be familiar with regulations pertaining to FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation & Interference), defined as
a multidimensional threat that lies at the intersection of national security, information integrity, democratic governance, and hybrid warfare.
War, in short, information war, not – I repeat NOT – against US disinformation or South Korean, Australian or German disinformation. Mind you, FIMI is not born of my imagination, or of that of Nel Bonilla, it is all there on your screen if you go and look.
Now if you happen to believe that FIMI aims to protect us from bad thoughts, ideas and “disinformation” for our own good, I put to you that much has been done “for our own good” in the course of the past decades that turned out to be anything but.
Take the statement “Water privatisation is a con.” Is that a conspiracy theory? Is it a hypothesis? Or is it a fact? And was water privatisation for our own good?
England (and Wales, but not Scotland) and Chile are the only countries in the world that have privatised water.
Now, finally, they know — the English people know — they’ve been had.
Better late than never? The damage has been done, it is true, but a lesson can be learnt.
FIMI regulations, however, or the equivalent are in place to prevent us from learning.