Cockup, or conspiracy?

What's the difference between a Covid conspiracy and reality? About 12 months.

Naïvety. Peer pressure. Virtue signalling. Vested Interest. Failure by those who knew better to defend science, freedom, and human decency. But not conspiracy. At least, not at State level.

conspiracy (n.) a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful

I’M NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORIST by instinct. Napoleon professed never to be terribly concerned about his Generals conspiring against him, believing them to be too stupid. In the absence of well documented evidence to the contrary, I’ve always inclined — for much the same reason — to assume cockup over conspiracy.

I clung to this instinct for long enough in my observations of a small number of people amassing colossal fortunes on the back of society’s inexplicable descent into hysteria, superstition, and self-harm over a 99.98% survivable virus.

I even had an insight that I thought explained it, acquired in the course of my work as an energy economist studying the complex relationship between our contracting energy supply and our rapidly unravelling civilisation: complex systems often produce phenomena that look like organised behaviour — “conspiracy”, if you like — but which aren’t. In complexity theory, such behaviour is called “emergent structure”.

We see emergent structures everywhere in nature. When starlings flock, each starling is following a couple of rules: “Fly in the same direction as my neighbour!”; “Don’t bump into my neighbour!”. From thousands of pea-sized brains following two simple rules, an incredibly rich structure emerges — murmuration. But there’s no über-starling. There’s no controlling, pea-sized mind.

Armed with this insight, I felt able to explain everything, from Australian paramilitary riot police firing rubber bullets indiscriminately into crowds from the steps of a memorial to those who died defending the freedom of the citizen from state tyranny, and tear gassing old ladies to protect their health, to previously sane people shouting at each other (and me) over the parsnips in Waitrose about perceived deviations from medieval plague costumery and superstitious ritual.

A few simple, long standing “starling rules” could explain it — greed; stupidity; power addiction; group think; political inertia; irrational fear; virtue signalling; bureaucratic risk asymmetry. Add a pinch of hysterical, furloughed laptop warriors preferring to lounge at home in their pyjamas while untutored poor people brought them crap from Amazon and emptied their bins; work-shy militant teacher unions;¹ doctors abandoning their non-Covid patients and their Hippocratic oaths for a union-negotiated £15 jab fee (£20 on a bank holiday!);² politically motivated tech bro billionaire social media company owners with hundreds of millions invested in novel pharmaceuticals; insolvent legacy media outlets financially dependent on government propaganda advertising; infantilised woke millennials with liberal arts degrees in lesbian interpretive dance, “fact checking” complex medical information for compliance with politically approved orthodoxy because “Trump, duh!", and you’ve got a pretty decent set of explanatory factors that don’t require a “controlling mind”. Starlings. Pea-sized brains. Complex structure. The appearance of coordinated malice, but not actual coordinated malice.

I’ve abandoned that instinct.

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One of the reliable ways you know something isn’t a conspiracy is if they tell you they’re doing it. The World Economic Forum’s enthusiastic exploitation of Covid hysteria to advance their agenda of accelerating the transfer of remaining power and wealth to the global elite (the so called “Great Reset”) is repulsive. But since they publish their aims and methods on a website, it’s difficult to frame their activities as “conspiracy”.³

But what of those who have a history of doing unlawful and harmful things at epic scale and not telling you?

Pfizer, for example, is the most sued and fined pharmaceutical company in the world. It has been sued and fined for fabricating efficacy and safety medical data, and bribing supervising doctors. It has fabricated efficacy and safety data and bribed supervising doctors while being sued and fined for fabricating efficacy and safety data and bribing supervising doctors. It’s in their DNA, so to speak. If the company was a human, we’d diagnose her as a sociopath.

They and others like them stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars from a medical treatment for an infection that, without treatment, the vast majority of us recover from without incident. And billions more for novel (read: “highly profitable”) treatments for any cancers, circulatory injuries, respiratory injuries, acquired immunodeficiency injuries, vaccine-induced virus enhancement, birth defects, or neurological injuries their still untested experimental medical products may be causing. They appear to be committing malfeasance on an epic scale to obtain it, right under our noses. The heads of the Regulators who’s job it is (or was) to protect us from their malfeasance either now sit on their Boards, or hope to soon. They spend colossal sums on lobbying to interfere with our laws and safety regulations, and are highly effective at it.

The pharmaceutical industry has the malice, the motive, the means, and the track record to qualify as a plausible candidate for a conspiracy’s “controlling mind”.

But while that is necessary, it’s not sufficient evidence for a claim that an actual conspiracy is taking place. An enabling factor has to be present.

Why? Well, one of the things that has protected us from conspiracies in the past is that they are awfully hard to pull off. There are simply too many people watching. To achieve their aims, Big Pharma needs an unprecedented and simultaneous failure of science, reason, governance, public policy, discourse, scepticism, and basic human decency. A failure which even they couldn’t engineer.

But which we’ve just witnessed.

How has this happened? I believe we are fatally underestimating the existential risk to our civilisation that postmodernism is inflicting on us — an infection our societies caught from cynical tactics developed in American universities by grievance mongering identity politics activists to deflect criticism from their ideology’s mostly absurd claims.

The unprecedented, synchronised failure required by the Pharmaceutical Industry has been conveniently provided by postmodernism’s destruction of the ideas of truth, evidence, fact, ethics, science, decent moral conduct, and even language — the basic tools we needed to defend ourselves against epic-scale malfeasance. I don’t claim woke activism is part of a conspiracy (or, at least, not this one). I do claim that they have made this one possible.

We can’t judge yet how long it will take to recover from what is showing signs of being the worst iatrogenic disaster in human history. Pharma peddled thalidomide to pregnant women for four years before the catastrophic birth defects it caused was acknowledged. By then, billions of humans will have been repeatedly exposed to a highly experimental, possibly dangerous⁴ gene transfer technology that has so far received only a few months of rudimentary, fiddled safety and efficacy testing. Whatever that outcome, our confidence in science, medicine, government, institutions, and each other may never recover. Those are more important than the permanent quest to prolong life at all costs, and they have been permanently damaged by Pharma’s cynical business strategy.

Meanwhile, is it too much to claim that there is an ongoing conspiracy — a “secret plan to do something unlawful and harmful” by Big Pharma to secure colossal profits — and that we are too weakened by postmodernism to defend ourselves from it? I don’t think so. And that’s much harder to deal with than a cockup.

1. There are some principled teachers who have objected to all of this.

2. There are some principled doctors who have objected to all of this.

3. I’m conscious of the lurch almost everywhere towards the authoritarian, bio-surveillance state. But I see this as straightforward political power addiction and rank opportunism rather than conspiracy.

4. See e.g. Seneff, S. and G. Nigh (2021), ‘Worse Than the Disease? Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of the mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19’, International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, 2 (1), 655-77.