- Hunter S. Thompson
I don't believe in conspiracy theories. The good ones tend to involve enough people that there's just no way someone wouldn't slip and say something, thus blowing the conspiracy. For most they're a diversion, an exercise in entertainment. Others truly and honestly buy into them for reasons only they know. While I choose not to live in Conspiracyland, sometimes I feel like I can see it from here.
Like with the gun issue. I can envision a series of events, ending in court, whereby the average person's ability to buy and keep an assault rifle is revoked. It's far-fetched, but I can see it. Apart from the uproar this would cause among certain (but not all) gun owners, gun manufacturers will not be happy because eventually it would remove a revenue stream. What to do while that scenario played out? One might push the idea of arming teachers and other school staff as a way to "protect the children." It could be tied in with a broader good guys vs. bad guys notion that plays to our Old West nostalgia. To push that narrative even further, maybe cities could be flooded with guns to be used for conflict between groups that have more in common than they don't but that are conditioned through economics and social policy to see each other as competitors. The carnage could be highlighted to illustrate why guns are needed for protection. Just like that there'd be a whole new market for gun sales, and the financial effect of an assault weapons ban would be mitigated.
Sticking with schools, let's say one favors charter schools. Perhaps one even thinks public education itself is socialist and should be abolished in favor of straight-up private schools paid for with vouchers, or better yet, out-of-pocket. Reasonably, one might argue, schools should be run like businesses and their success or failure should depend entirely on the market. Good educational outcomes would lead to more business. Naturally, corporate entities would form to serve this educational market on a broader scale, creating investment opportunities for those with capital. One downside is that a lot of people still believe strongly, or at least have a notion that profit motive may not be the best driver of educational outcomes. And there is the issue James Howard Kunstler calls the psychology of previous investment, which is the reluctance to abandon things in which we've made large investments of time and money – i.e. the infrastructure of "the public school system". That's a lot to overcome.
A two-pronged approach to alter public opinion over time might consist of methodically demonizing public school unions – and by association, teachers – and slowly ratcheting down funding for public schools to the point where they can't fulfill their mission. A side strategy to rile up the teachers so as to paint them as extremist and out-of-touch with regular people would be to cut their promised benefits, including retirement and health coverage, so they angrily demand compensation that most people in the private sector don't receive. Those benefits, which include money teachers contributed, could be re-labeled "entitlements." From there it wouldn't be difficult to extend the same strategy to all public employees and even the military.
Once the entitlements beachhead is established, it's possible to open another front, this one against the social safety net – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs. One would start, of course, with Medicaid by painting it as an entitlement demanded by lazy people who prefer to loaf while everyone else works. Then, perhaps playing on the similarity between the two names, start calling Medicare an entitlement, too. Portray Social Security as a bloated bureaucracy that can't be sustained in its current form.
These programs are popular, though, and public resistance to change could be even stronger than with schools. Systematically cutting funding, thereby making the programs less effective, and suggesting the federal employees who administer them include the corrupt, the lazy or the leftist could chip away at public opinion over time. Then one might propose shifting management away from the federal government to the states, giving them more "flexibility." Finally, broach the idea of "fixing it" by privatizing the entire system, which will seem outrageous at first but gradually the shock will wear off and what will be left is a psychological association between these programs and the word "privatization," which through the same drip-drip marketing strategy becomes synonymous with "effectiveness."
It could all work because unions do tend to overreach when it comes to advocating for their members and because some percentage of people are corrupt and lazy and leftist and so it stands to reason that examples can be found among public sector workers and benefit recipients, too. Stories about these examples would need to be emphasized disproportionately in relation to their occurrence.
And lo, there is an app for that. Social media has given all of us a conduit to explore, reaffirm and exploit our natural fear of "others," our distrust of authority and our prurient interests. The weirder and more outrageous the story, no matter how isolated, the better for sharing. And those stories can now be amplified almost instantly, far faster than truth can be discerned, thanks to the use of devices we carry with us all the time. Anonymity has bred internet bravado when it comes to saying terrible things about one another, and our admirable embrace of the right to speak freely opens an unlimited access highway down which practically anyone with almost any view can travel nearly unimpeded. Naturally some people will take advantage of this vital freedom of speech to say vile and hateful things and degrade others to serve their own agendas, or even just for fun. Throw in some way to measure how people feel about all of it, through up or down votes, how often a message is spread or the use of funny faces, and make all that public, too, and the internet becomes a giant popularity contest competing for eyes and likes (or dislikes).
Exploiting our inherent vanity in this way would turn out to be useful in promoting some of these ideas. And the repetitive feedback loop is also the perfect tool for turning once-outrageous ideas into dogma over time.
Of course it wouldn't be long before larger entities like state actors or large private interests began seeking to influence people through these means for their own interests, most likely monetary. Once money gets involved as a motivation it's Katy bar the door in terms of distinguishing news from opinion and true sentiment from marketing.
Then truth dies and we begin searching for some way to retrieve it, or at least revive our faith that a truth exists in some form. Into that void might step various people or entities professing to speak The Truth either as they see it or as it has been imparted to them through means we may not access or understand. And the cycle starts again.
But I don't believe in conspiracy theories. So probably I don't believe any of this is happening.
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