Horizontal vs. Top-down Control

When I was growing up I got really into the "grand" global conspiracy. I went to see David Icke speak with my brother in a relatively small room in Stoke on Trent around 2002. There were only maybe a couple hundred people in the audience.

Later on, around 2007, I got really into economics and libertarianism. I began to think a less about the "global" conspiracy. Suddenly most of what I saw going on in society could be explained by economic incentives. 

For one thing, people like free stuff, of course they are going to vote it for themselves whenever they can. They don't typically see this as looting the commonweal, living at the expense of their neighbour, but "fair" in light of the challenges they face in life. Society has never told public sector workers, for example, that this is shameful, all is fair under democracy. A vote is a vote and a policy is a policy.

As a corollary, those individuals that make up government want power - even if it is power to "do good" according to their own values. One way the government can get power, while garnering the support of the populace, is to bribe people with handouts. People who receive benefits are from the state are likely to be supporters of the state. All the public servants, school teachers, university professors, campaign contributors, not to mention the politicians themselves, are basically bought off with public funds to be tacit allies of government. In addition to this, they keep an underclass on welfare, who can always be relied upon to support the institution of government out of fear of starvation. 

When our societies were not very affluent, only a small percentage of people's income could be appropriated in taxes because, say, a "0% reduction in the average person's living standards would have  been huge. As we have grown richer, the total tax many people pay is far in excess of half of their income. This allows the government to have a far greater number of people than ever before on its payrolls to protest tax increases, however, it does not cause the tax-payer themselves to starve. In addition to this, they believe they are at least in receipt of some services that have come to be seen as impossible to provide without government by the great majority of people, including roads, hospitals and schools. By this final act, the support of even the net tax-contributors are won over to the idea of government, and all of this is explainable merely by the incentives of the system itself. This is what you could more or less expect to happen in an affluent democracy. 

It's power being solidified, it's not difficult for the corporations, who deal with huge sums of money, to buy the government. In fact they are incentivised to do so. As soon as a corporation gains a greater return on their investment by lobbying the government than they do from serving their customer, that is what they are going to do. This completes the circle. 

Organisations like WHO, IMF, World Bank and CDC work in the interests of the corporations, but people think they are "government" agencies; which they take to mean working in the public interest.  

Now, this doesn't mean I don't believe individual conspiracies take place. For example, murder of Jeffrey Epstein. Other conspiracies such as The Lavon Affair or Operation Gladio are even freely admitted to have occurred. It just means that I don't necessarily think these need to be centrally orchestrated in smoky rooms by the same cabal of powermongers. 

The term conspiracy theory, itself, is simply used to dismiss claims out of hand and relieve people of the need for further investigation. The term "conspiracy theorist" is synonymous with "nut," and it is popular to psychologize people who believe in conspiracies as having some strange motive to find patterns where there are none. However, someone can have psychological tendencies which drive them towards a position - and that position can still be true! One of the appeals of the "conspiracy theorists" in the pre-YouTube world was exactly that they would bring context to a media landscape devoid of it, where the media would portray complex events as a snapshot in time. For example, propagandizing the populace with the claim that, "Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds," without showing either of the videos of Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, meeting with Hussein in the 80s to sell him weapons.

Like many, recent events regarding the Global Pandemic (or "Globalist Plandemic" to conspiracy theorists), like many, have really made me think again of the global conspiracy again.

A global conspiracy, of course, could exist, and by its very nature of being secret and covert we would not even know about it.

My question though, remains, what is actually the scarier thought?

If there are just a handful of evil men who are orchestrating world event, up to no good, then it is relatively easy to depose them.

If it is not a centrally planned conspiracy then the world becomes far harder to fix. You have a nice neighbour, but he doesn't believe you should be able to operate a hair salon without a licence. Your drinking buddies want to take your guns. Your churchmates don't think gays should be allowed to get married. Another friend says Soviet Russia wasn't real communism and real communism has never been tried. All the people at your local theatre group support you being taxed to pay for allopathic medical treatments that you disagree with, taking money from you to pay big pharma. Atheists want Christians to pay for abortions. Meat eaters want vegans to pay for subsidies to dairy farmers. 

In other words - control is not exerted upon you vertically, from above, but horizontally, by the very people around you, whom you love.

 

Slavery did not advance Western Civilisation.

Every now and then someone will say something like "Despite the fact that slavery was immoral the modern world was build upon slavery and we owe the lifestyle we enjoy to the sacrifice of slaves..." Sounds compelling - except its not true. Slavery held back the advance of civilization because its pointless to innovate, invent or automate when you have (free) slave labour. Absent slavery the agricultural revolution may have begun decades earlier. Slavery was an abomination, and positive ends can never become of corrupt means.

Why is the Capitalist Workplace so Authoritarian?

You are told that capital tyrannizes over labor. I do not deny that each one endeavors to draw the greatest possible advantage from his situation; but, in this sense, he realizes only that which is possible. Now, it is never more possible for capitalists to tyrannize over labor, than when they are scarce; for then it is they who make the law -- it is they who regulate the rate of sale. Never is this tyranny more impossible to them, than when they are abundant; for, in that case, it is labor which has the command.

- Frederic Bastiat, from Capital and Interest

A persistent criticism of capitalism as an ideology is that it is authoritarian by nature, and can only lead to tyrannical bosses ruling over dependent staff who are forced - by fear of poverty and starvation - to remain under their command. Certainly, if we take our example from the workplaces of today, most of them are hierarchical, and many of them pretty authoritarian. In extreme cases staff even need to ask permission to go to the bathroom. So there appears to be some demonstration to the thesis.

In reality there is nothing inherent in the system of free enterprise that necessitates hierarchy, and many businesses have been successfully run with decentralised structures. Ricardo Semler is an example of an entrepreneur who had such massive success running his business on a non-hierarchical model that he turned to teaching other capitalists all over the world to do the same. Nonetheless, crappy bosses who like to throw their weight around the shop or office are ten a penny, and since no one likes working under a dictatorship we really have to question why more egalitarian models not more common.

A market will tend to use the skills and propensities of the labour force within that market, because it is costly and time consuming to inculcate staff with new habits. For example, if a workplace can afford to hire experienced staff rather than train newbies they will often do so (especially where there is a high minimum wage.) Companies will sooner offer a raise to hold on to an employee with a good work ethic than take a risk on someone new. The fact is, human qualities are less malleable than other factors of production, and so it's usually going to be preferable to try and court the kind of employees you want around rather than try to foster whoever walks in the door into a new sort of character you like; especially considering people have their own proclivities and desires for their own personal character development, unlike machines. This is why most of the companies that run in cooperative or non-hierarchical structures begin with this idea as a primary value, and will tend to attract a certain kind of person who shares in the company vision and is competent to contribute to making it a reality. (Tim Kelley, an expert who currently helps companies adapt to what he calls "The New Paradigm in Business" states that as they do usually some number of employees flee, unable to adapt to the rights they are afforded, and responsibilities they must shoulder, under the changed system.)

Now am I saying that people are naturally slavish and therefore will tend towards hierarchy on a free market?

Not at all!

The average person who enters the workplace has been through 11-13 years of a mandatory education system which is highly authoritarian and hierarchical, and at the time in their life where their character is most impressionable and inclined to adapt to their circumstances. Their personalities have already been adapted to what was necessary for them thrive (or at least survive) under that system. Interestingly, the empirical evidence on how people best learn seems to suggest that a cooperative learning environment is far more productive than the isolated one that is the dish of the day at school. A crappy boss is not that unfamiliar in aspect from a crappy teacher, and it's hard to imagine that a population exposed to a long period of cooperative and mutually edifying education along the lines of the empirical evidence would be so tolerant of poor treatment from authority. If schools were to teach reasoning, social skills, emotional handing, conflict resolution, and other soft skills, far more people would have the skills to run organisations. start business enterprises, or create egalitarian ones.

The Marxist ideal of workers owning the means of production is perfectly compatible with free market capitalism, and there is no reason why there should not be more worker run cooperatives, communally owned business, and organisations with polycentric structures - other than the fact that currently, workers have no idea how to own the means of production or run a business. Partly because this requires different skills from what is required to complete their jobs from day to day, and partly because they are pre-conditions by years of hierarchical and authoritarian state education. If Marx was right and bosses provide no value - only skimming profit off the top - then workplaces without bosses will surely be more efficient and out-compete workplaces that shell out unnecessarily on paying them... but we will never know until we reform our education system.