The idea of the open conspiracy
The second chapter of the Open Conspiracy book
“It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behaviour, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute first a protest and then a creative resistance to the inertia that was stifling and threatening us.… What are we to do with our lives? …Let us get together .. and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time” (pp 11-12).
I felt it when I heard Greta Thunberg. Once you see it, it is obvious. The change required is so massive and fundamental that a conspiracy - a plan- is necessary. This plan involves building a vast, broad and inclusive movement and for that it needs to be open and visible. Wells describes the project as:
“A protest, first mental and then practical, … a sort of unpremeditated and unorganized conspiracy, against the fragmentary and insufficient governments and the wide-spread greed, appropriation, clumsiness, and waste that are now going on. But unlike conspiracies in general this widening protest and conspiracy against established things would, by its very nature, go on in the daylight, and it would be willing to accept participation and help from every quarter. It would, in fact, become an "Open Conspiracy," a necessary, naturally evolved conspiracy, to adjust our dislocated world” (p 12).
This is the idea. It is simple. It merely takes 3 pages in the book. Why spend more time here?
One reason is that the idea is not really new. It is found in many intellectual efforts over the centuries, some of its most famous articulations in unfinished novels, such as Bacon’s New Atlantis and Thomas More’s Utopia. It is a protest against the status quo and the search for an ideal human society. One reason why many such works remain unfinished is that fixing the world’s evils is an extremely challenging project. There is little agreement on exactly what those evils are and how to fix them. According to Anderson [1]
“the history of politics is littered with attempts to realize imagined utopias that turned out badly, not just because of unforeseen consequences, but because anticipated consequences that people imagined would be wonderful were experienced as horrible in real life” (p 379).
Amitav Ghosh [2] argues that the abstract, de-localized, thinking of universalist pursuits – from universalist scientific knowledge to Utopia - is one of the roots of Western colonialism, partly responsible for all the violence and evil it unleashed in the world. Place-based cultures and understandings, and participative approaches to futures-making are at the forefront of the movement towards decolonial futures, and the pursuit of harmony within society and with the other creatures and elements that constitute planet earth. From that perspective, the pursuit of a list of world’s evils needs to be constructed with great care and respect for variety and indigenous understandings.
Another reason is the experience of an unfolding, rising counter-conspiracy, which is about the return to good old colonialism that served “our economies” handsomely, and “why did we ever abandon it”? In this counter-conspiracy knowledge is replaced by fake facts and lies, moral clarity is about self-interest and the subjugation of others, and deliberation is about threats and intimidation. Jane Mayer [5] and Michael Mann [4] offer detailed descriptions of biased knowledge production industries serving political pursuits by distorting facts and producing “alternative facts”. In the meantime violence has escalated; not only wars between states but also non-state violence and one sided violence, and people continues to increase the production of weapons – aimed clearly at facilitating violence against people.
Sebastain Haffner [3], in an unfinished memoir project abandoned in 1939, described how the Nazi movement and its ideology had found Germans unprepared and was allowed to penetrate the depths of their individual existence, thereby making resistance impossible. The dream of every totalitarian to reach deep into the lives of people and control their thoughts, loyalties and allegiances, seems much more realizable in the era of social media than in the Germany of 1930s. One more reason why the open conspiracy is now more important than ever.
References
[1] Anderson, E (2014) Reply to critics of the imperative of integration. Political Studies Review, 12(3), pp 376-382 https://doi.org/10.1111/1478-9302.12065
[2] Ghosh, A (2021) The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, The University of Chicago Press
[3] Haffner, S (2000) Defying Hitler: A Memoir, Picador, London and New York
[4] Mann, M (2021) The New Climate War: the fight to take back our planet, Scribe Publications, Victoria Australia and London UK
[5] Mayer, J (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Doubleday, New York
