printBy now, my thinking on conspiracy theories should be known; they are the refuge of the weak-minded. Remember Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil? Reality is bad enough; there is no need to look beyond it. That is tantamount to conjecture and fantasy. As I said in the introduction to my book, the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy.
The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.
Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold. I see most of what the behemoth does nowadays as contrary to the good of the individual, and aimed reflexively at increasing its own power and size. Even if government embarked on a just war, it would find ways to prolong it, since this involves the consolidation of fiefdoms. Soldiers don’t benefit, but their superiors—those “generals” everyone reveres so—do. Our government, given its size, reach, and many usurpations, is a destructive and warring entity. It is natural for such an entity to pursue war for war’s sake. The constituent elements of the behemoth continuously work to increase their spheres of control. This is why we must curtail the state’s powers.
Propensity for conspiracy is yet another facet paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians share with the hard-left. I pointed out in “Deriding Dershowitz,” and elsewhere, that the far-out right has made common cause with the far left on quite a number of fronts. That’s a shame. You’ll find no such incongruities in my thinking. By way of example, my anti-war sentiments have never strayed into these murky precincts—don’t look for any war-for-oil-&-Israel kookiness here.