I don’t see the need for any smart people pulling the strings to cause all the problems we have. I think psychological data strongly suggests people work in self-interest most of the time, and those self-interests and the perfunctory aspect of our minds work together to create all of our problems. Surely there are some coordinated groups that are clever and manipulate others, but I doubt they have a strong grip on society at large. So many times a revolution has broken out and beheaded the lords of the land. My problem with conspiracy theory thinking is that it generally moves the goalposts to make everything fit the narrative that these evil people are always on top, in control, behind everything wrong in the world. If we topple the current regime, conspiracy theorists will say that it was all part of the Cabal’s plan and it is still in control. This mentality would lead one to presume the American revolution was orchestrated and manipulated by the Rothschilds or some other shadowy power family, along with the French revolution, the Russian revolution, and every other revolution throughout history. For that to be true, every historian in the world throughout human history would have had to be controlled by the Cabal. Do you have any idea how many people that is and how many potential leaks in that conspiracy there would have been? History tells us how things work and how they don’t, and if there is adequate explanation in history for why certain evil behavior took place, then there’s little need to imagine a Cabal behind it. The academic community is a diverse, robust, interdependent system of thousands of people with different agendas and backgrounds who vet each other’s data. I’ve met enough of these people to be nearly certain they aren’t being controlled en masse by a manipulative Cabal. And just because John D. Rockefeller helped to set up many of these universities doesn’t mean they are all culturally twisted to an evil agenda. Truth is clearly important to most of the people in the academic community, and they have been typically quite good at questioning even the founding principles of their institutions. The fact that conspiracy theorists would doubt all of academia suggests insufficient exposure to good professors, and a strain of anti-intellectualism, which happens to be prevalent in American culture.
I’ve known too many people in journalism to believe they are all under mind control or that they are being silenced by their corrupt superiors and just aren’t complaining about it. I know too many doctors to believe that they are all in on it or just brainwashed by their education to have blinders on. Cultural blinders, yes. To some degree doctors prescribe medications rather than proper nutrition and exercise — why? Because that’s the culture we’ve evolved into — quick fix, silence the symptoms so I can get back to normal. “I don’t want to change my lifestyle! Can’t I just buy my way out?” Yes, doctors can get rewarded by drug companies for pushing their products, and those ethical concerns have been pointed out and regulations have been attempted, but the pharmaceutical lobby is very strong, so little has happened. That is real corruption, but it doesn’t require an evil Cabal or any evil doctors. It requires only our continued cultural passivity.
If I only investigated the disparate dots of connection between people in power and those we’ve labeled as evil, linking them by simple association, I would come up with a conspiracy theory for the source of all the evil in the world. But by the same association procedure, if I kept going, I would eventually be able to tag every human being on the planet as connected to someone connected to someone connected to someone in power who knew Jeffrey Epstein. I know that to convict somebody requires more than mere association. Epstein knew a lot of people in high places and many of them flew on his jet. That doesn’t mean they are all pedophiles too.
As I see it, our culture is the problem because we grow up with certain ideas being championed over others, like capitalism is good no matter what, greed is good, winning is all important, the ends justify the means, might makes right, more is better, technology can solve everything, etc. These foundational beliefs spread from parent to child without being questioned and shape the society. But it is in college that people are supposed to finally challenge those unconscious assumptions and think for themselves. The problem, as I see it, is that this religion of “More” has corrupted everything, including our approach to college. So instead of wanting to learn how to think critically, people show up at college to get a degree to earn them more money. Their resistance to learning makes the teachers’ job harder, and rather than failing the students for not learning, the people running the for-profit university pressure the teachers to lower their standards to keep making profit and preserve their business. Generations of people come out of college with less ability to think things through and question the cultural ideas that are strangling us. This greed-driven culture has led to devastating environmental pollution that makes people sick, for-profit pharmaceutical industry that pushes for profit over the health of its customers, a food industry that consistently reduces the health of its products to sell more at a cheaper cost, a manufacturing industry that sells us technologies and toys and junk we don’t need and don’t really want but subliminally convinces us that we do, a health industry that nurses our symptoms instead of addressing the causes years before they are serious. This religious version of capitalism run-amok isn’t a special recipe from an evil Cabal that foresaw these results centuries ago; it is the history of the American settlers who came here and killed native people in order to hustle and make money to become as wealthy as their older first-born brothers back in Europe. That is all easily explained by history and psychology. An evil Cabal, while possible, isn’t necessary to explain all the evils we are experiencing in the world today.
Pedophilia is sadly a human desire by a ghastly number of people. Preventing them from committing those acts by encouraging them to seek help rather than risk jail time would be far more productive than labeling them as evil people and tying them to all the evil in the world. After they’re all locked up, will the evil in the world actually stop? Now, are there some organized pedophile rings like Epstein’s, and some groups that sexually coerce the young and maintain a small sub-culture of sexual abuse and control? History confirms that has happened many times, so no doubt it is still happening today. Let us agree to root that out together. But that is not the root of all evil in the world.
Now, it is a religious age-old question, “Why is there evil in the world?” And every religion tries to explain it. Some say God is testing us. Some say it isn’t really evil, it’s just how we are perceiving it. Others say that we invented the concept of evil in order to create moral codes for society and that we are the originators of morality in a world that has none. But the simplest explanation for why we see evil in the world is our amygdala. Identity-protective cognition drives us to always be seeking higher status in our community. Being labeled “Good” correlates with higher status and so we naturally seek out that label. When we notice something not good inside of us, it scares us and we immediately want to distance ourselves from it. We project evil upon others which by distinction makes us good again, and our brain can imagine we are “pure good.” The more evil the other is, and the more we condemn that evil, the more good we are in comparison. This simple brain mechanism is behind the witch trials that murdered innocent women by the thousands for centuries. It is behind the Nazis murdering 6 million Jews during WWII. It is what we use to go to war, to feel justified in killing other human beings we’ve never met. It is sadly a hard-wired mechanism that has caused evil in the name of good throughout human history. We Americans have used it to go to war with other countries, to kill thousands of other human beings whose lives were meaningless to us because they weren’t people but “evil” enemies.
America is not all good, and I think that we are going through an identity crisis, and that slipping sense of good is enough for us to want to invoke this old hard-wired mechanism to demonize others, make them evil, hate them, and believe, naively, that destroying them would cleanse us of all the evil in the world, and most importantly, our own inner darkness. That is why we are falling apart as a country right now — we aren’t distracted enough by television and boring jobs to ignore our shadow anymore. The shadow is real and no scapegoats can truly make it go away.
This is a time for honesty, for tears of grief and loss of identity, for finally owning our bullshit and attempting to take responsibility for it. This is a time for spring cleaning, for questioning our culture, our beliefs, our behaviors, and our normal operating patterns. This is a time for renewal and improving ourselves and in so doing, our community, our country, and the world. This is a time to choose the values that will represent us and our children going into the future. Let’s be mindful what we are choosing.