Utopia, you are standing in it!

Respondents were asked whether they agreed with four statements:

• “Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places,”
• “Even though we live in a democracy, a few people will always run things anyway,”
• “The people who really ‘run’ the country are not known to the voters.”
• “Big events like wars, the current recession, and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people who are working in secret against the rest of us.”

Source: monkey cage

American conservatives distrust science in part because they identify it with the regulatory state. When science means nuclear weapons, innovation and winning the space race, conservatives love it.  When they associate science with the EPA, regulation, and global institutions, they hate it.

Just as climate science is unpalatable for the Right, the Left is uncomfortable with, for example, genetic modification and nuclear power. Research into risks and benefits of these technologies are met with suspicion by the Left.

I find it bizarre the right wing politics is considered more conspiratorial than the left wing – a left-wing that is currently obsessed with the comings and goings of the top 1%.

A gentleman by the name of Karl Marx had a conspiracy theory of history, that the bosses were conspiring against the workers, there is a ruling class pulling the strings from behind the scenes, and there is an inherent inequality of bargaining power between workers and employers because the bosses plot to keep wages down.

It should be mentioned in this connection that Karl Marx himself was one of the first to emphasize the importance, for the social sciences, of these unintended consequences.

In his more mature utterances, he says that we are all caught in the net of the social system. The capitalist is not a demoniac conspirator, but a man who is forced by circumstances to act as he does; he is no more responsible for the state of affairs than is the proletarian.

This view of Marx’s has been abandoned – perhaps for propagandist reasons, perhaps because people did not understand it – and a Vulgar Marxist Conspiracy theory has very largely replaced it. It is a come-down – the come-down from Marx to Goebbels.

But it is clear that the adoption of the conspiracy theory can hardly be avoided by those who believe that they know how to make heaven on earth. The only explanation for their failure to produce this heaven is the malevolence of the devil who has a vested interest in hell.

Karl Popper

Don’t let me start on how the Left over Left goes on about neoliberal conspiracy with Hayek and Friedman ruling the roost through the truly obscure Mont Pelerin Society.

The IMF, World Trade Organisation and trade negotiations are riddled with conspiracies if I am to believe my friends in the  Left over Left.

Mention multinational corporations to a member of the Left of good standing and conspiracy theories pour fourth.

It would be unfair to bring up GMOs to remind the left of how anti-science it is. Don’t kick people when they’re down. The whole point of the precautionary principle is to allow the Left to reject good science.

At bottom, what call the barricades works if it’s not sexed-up with a conspiracy theory?