Popperian thesis on ‘conspiracies’ and the Deep State

Popper and perhaps others posited in the early to mid-20^th century that conspiracy theories were implausible simply on the face of it.[¹] Any claim of a ‘conspiracy theory’ as deemed by ‘experts’ should require such a massive burden of proof that it should be absurd and likely beyond the ability of amateur researchers to prove. His specific statement was something along the lines of ‘any large group engaged in [nefarious] secret activity is unlikely to keep its secrets long.’ For now, we’ll let this stand. Suffice it to say, I think that there are enough case studies if you like or Bayesian priors which lead one to conclude that his thesis was wrongheaded. That is, if you attribute no ill motives to him or the others who helped create the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and then pathologize it.

The first and obvious counter is that states do things in secret which they are tasked in the name of known objectives, the foremost being national security, national interest, protection of individual citizens or representatives of state, or some more amorphous greater good. Some of these secret measures are necessary simply to conduct diplomacy from a realpolitik standpoint; some are necessary for militaries and security forces to operate effectively. But the simple fact that hundreds or thousands of people can coordinate all the time and those who aren’t read in only have the vaguest idea what these folks are up to goes a great way to falsifying the Popperian thesis on so-called conspiracies. Plans which are elaborate and concealed from the public are not only possible, they occur with alarming frequency.

Non-state actors also conceal plans from everyone else. Be they corporations, small groups, or what have you, their acts need not be criminal or evil in nature. Sometimes information leaks out but that isn’t always the case. Further, criminal conspiracies under the law are considered relatively common, occurring whenever evidence suggests two or more people plot a crime. Incentives to keep deeds secret, be they nefarious or not, can be powerful motivators indeed like anything else. It takes an equally powerful motivator to convince someone to break that vow of silence.

It’s important to remember that Popper’s thesis is a supposition based on a hunch and prior probabilities which are inferred rather than demonstrated, not on specific evidence. It’s a broad dismissal of ‘conspiracies’ on whole as though secretive plans are nigh impossible to hold together. While specific claims of ‘conspiracies’ may be more or less probable, there are some interesting things we are aware of. For instance, even if you buy the official line on COINTELPRO and MKULTRA [²], neither make the deep state in this country look good. In either case, we aren’t aware of the broader part of these programs, and there is some evidence that they continued past the official termination. Both of them show that the state is willing to act in secret through intelligence agencies to alter the minds of their citizens (especially in the US), by first heavily monitoring and actively entrapping dissenters from the very worst elements among the former Communist Party of America to conspiracy theory groups, the KKK, and militias; and then second, by covertly inducing stress and chemical changes (i.e. strong psychoactive drugs) in citizens for the purpose of temporary psychosis and suggestibility. MKULTRA is also notable for a large cover-up where most of the documents involved were burned prior to hearings with the exception of a few thousand papers.

One could cite the Business Plot, where business leaders allegedly planned to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 [³]. The Bolshevik October Revolution itself was a conspiracy which spread from a small group to the rest of society, overthrowing the interim Russian social-democratic government. Most political revolutions work in this way, starting from smaller groups who lead them – which one might reasonably call a conspiracy – around which a mass movement follows later. The mass movements and success of revolutions later legitimizes them; failure means they are simply rebellions, protests, uprisings or factions in civil war. One could raise the Glorious Revolution, or the traitors who opened the gates to the walls in 1453 in Constantinople, or the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist group which called itself ‘The Black Hand.’

So the problem then is not the existence of conspiracies as such, or of secretive plans, or even of untoward or nefarious and secretive plans. The problem is of being overly credulous and believing everything people say; in a phrase, the ‘born yesterday’ attitude. A large part of the draw of conspiracies is the spread of disinformation tactics starting with largely communist regimes in the early 20^th century and its later adoption by Western intelligence agencies as well as the media-entertainment-unkultur complex. [⁴] I refer to it as unkultur because I don’t see any way that the film or music industry, broadly speaking, could be looked toward as any sort of cultural paragons, and certainly not in a forward or good fashion. Another part of the draw of these conspiracies is the sublimation of religious drives toward other ends. Religious narratives now crop up rather than in worship of the divine in things like political struggles and alien conspiracy theories. Communist propaganda [⁵] projects a sort of transcendence through collective struggle which allows man to thwart their religious instinct and turn it to purpose for secular ideology. Rather than the glory of God and some canonic vision of man, there is the ideological vision of man and the glory of the Socialist Revolution. Some Christian sects in the USSR actually bent the knee and had this sort of weird activist-church communism thing going on which was encouraged by the Communist party, while the actual Orthodox church of Russia was opposed and infiltrated.

The totally secular man and the atomistic individualistic man are not long for this world. Put together, you have a recipe for a tailspin of nihilism and waste. Any ideology which embraces both secularism and atomized individualism entrenches some of the worst problems of hypermodernity and will be run roughshod by stronger and more vital worldviews willing to grapple hypermodernity. Libertarian hyper-individualism and civic nationalism is an unstable equilibrium because it rests on cultural and genetic capital they’re unwilling to defend. Ultimately, it is likely that Western civilization will be a battlefield for authoritarians in the near term, and the question is whether they’re Western chauvinists or the legions of the third world intent on devouring its body whole. The sort of post-modernist third world ideology which seems intractable across the West at the moment, and seems wont to export itself everywhere possible, is only so resilient because of its hold on the aforementioned institutions – namely the media-entertainment-unkultur complex, as well as finance – without which it would find its hold quickly untenable.

If you’ll allow me a quick aside: anarcho-capitalists, despite their pretensions, tend not to be proper anarchists. Many of them are, in fact, advocates of a nested system of legalism and appeals based somewhat on the historical English model of law and on the Holy Roman Empire with added appeals to individual rights and usually what they’ve dubbed the ‘non-aggression principle.’ The examples they give of good [quasi] stateless societies, for instance ancient Iceland and Ireland, colonial Pennsylvania or the American West were not stateless societies. All of these places had central authorities of some shade, militias which were more or less voluntary, as well as at least nominal church or denominational authority. These places were more or less orderly as well, but to the extent that they were largely decentralized orders, those arrangements did not last long.

Proper anarchists, on the other hand, stand in contrast as opposing religion, hierarchy, and organized capital. They look to places like the Paris Commune and Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. The thrust of this is, to my mind, anarcho-capitalists with a right to ‘centrist’ bent are largely decent people who see the corruption of hypermodernity and want to opt out. The fallacy is of trying to avoid playing the game of empire when that appears to be the only game left on the table. How do you leave when the easiest exits are barred shut? The left an-caps and left anarchists are more likely to be libertines and degenerates whose ideology exists to excuse their lifestyle, and to permit them an ideology of getting comeuppance with whomever the proper enemies are come the revolution. Such fantasies are common among all types of anarchists and anarcho-capitalists.

Turning again to the main topic, we see that since 2015, the topic of the ‘deep state’ has been broached in public. I hesitate to say ‘polite society’ since I’m not sure such a thing exists anymore. But nonetheless, it is a mainstream sentiment that there exists something known as a Deep State, with a trademark somewhere affixed. Where does this come from? The deep state was frequently discussed when referring to foreign regimes outside of the English-speaking and Northern European world more broadly among strategy and intelligence types, places like Turkey, China, and elsewhere for quite a while. It merely refers to what one might call real as opposed to nominal power.

Real power in governments is usually centered on a few tens of highly important positions and their attendant staff. To give an example, in Turkey, China, and similar places it is common for senior military officers to try to cultivate personal loyalty to them. The central authorities have major problems whenever dealing with military matters, whether quelling rebellion, trying to project force, or whatever else. They can’t be certain that the senior officer staff won’t disobey orders to demand greater compensation or try to jockey for power. Those senior officers are one instance where this dynamic is apparent. The heads of important departments and their staff similarly stand closer to real power. One could have characterized the deep state in Turkey as a creation of Mustafa Kemal and his followers (especially his followers) to secure their power against rivals, and it involved gaining control over strategic nodes in the military, police, and intelligence services. The Kemalists have since fallen out of influence somewhat, and while they hold some sway, they’re not the predominant bloc in that country.

Nominal power are heads of state, legislative positions, and so forth. For illustrating the deep state from here on out I’ll stick to the United States, but similar themes work with local variations for the rest of the West. The deep state model in the US is ultimately based largely off of the British one and was cemented with the post-war transfer of power. [⁷] The deep state was truly set in stone in the US with the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and the creation of the OSS, a war-time military intelligence service. The CIA was essentially a ‘civilian’ permanent charter for the OSS with expanded mission statement. One might list figures associated with nominal power to be presidents, vice presidents, senators, congressmen, governors, and so forth. This isn’t to say there is no intersection between nominal and real power (there often is), but there can be a large disconnect if there is deliberate sabotage or merely a weak figurehead. The elected figures are often holders of nominal power.

On the other hand, real power in the United States largely falls in the hands of unelected functionaries, staff, aids, and officials. There is a fair bit of overlap between the administrative state and the deep state. Think key nodes in the DoD, CIA, FBI, NSA, State Department, Treasury, Federal Reserve, federal judiciary (both Supreme Court and circuit courts), and other important offices as well as influential billionaires. This as a model makes a nice break with the civics class model where power is ordered in a neat fashion according to a flow chart. To the extent that nominal power does intersect with real power it is because they are capable of getting those people and institutions to do what they want, when they want, and to have their whims and visions more or less carried out whether instructed directly or not. It is because of the resources they can bring to bear, sure, but also because of the legitimacy their office clothes them. Resources not only include the coffers and employees of the state, aides, and the like, but also friends, connections, and assets (monetary and otherwise) from prior life. These ‘resources’ can be both instruments toward power and impediments, and often what makes a nominal power node truly powerless is the fact that they are beholden to a patron or a great many creditors. The use of blackmail to systematically compromise politicians and functionaries and saddle them with so many liabilities that they are in effect no longer independent actors is also a common tactic by what one might call the establishment or the deep state.

Another way to think of it is the more a given node exerts abstract, disconnected, and visible influence, it is probably nominal power. The more a node gets to exerting direct commands, the less it is considered newsworthy, and the closer it is to what we might deem the ‘patrons’ of the system, the more it is real power. The United States looks in effect more like China year by year in that China has a mixed market economy in which patronage from the central party is vital to success, and while living outside the party’s purview is possible you’re likely to live a meagre or marginal existence. The same has been increasingly true in the US since the beginning of the Post-War order (1945). Total government spending in the US is about 40% of GDP on average since 2000, with the federal government representing roughly half and state and local governments also representing about half. This is by no means an abnormality; it’s essentially a common feature across the world now, barring parts of the third-world where governments are still too ineffective to form a patronage system and so simply steal widely. Since 1945, any claims about ‘private enterprise’ or ‘the free market’ become increasingly dubious when the whole economy is so intertwined in this.

If we were to fall back on Popper’s thesis, we couldn’t explain any of this. One comes up short on the deep state model; on various programs antithetical to American interests, safety, and security; and on real historical examples of conspiracies. The conspiratorial model of history is not a total model and does not explain all of history, and nor would any sane man claim it did; the claims, then, are that it explains some of history, and for that which it does explain, it seems to explain things which for a Popperian take would simply be a shrug and a hand wave. It is true that not all of history is written and some things must be inferred, since we are dealing always with interpretations or partial evidence, since even if we have deluges of information such as in the past one or two hundred years, we still have the problem of having actors who did things they would rather they not have us know about. Government agencies are not supposed to burn or otherwise destroy archives, and yet that is exactly what the CIA did in lead up to the Church hearings and in other instances. That is only the boldest incident one can list immediately. The skeptical mind must ironically reject both scientism and ‘born yesterday’ credulity.

¹ http://plotsagainstrussia.org/eb7nyuedu/2016/3/16/n6wsrlmkxc9td3on39ezlgo8mq1tet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies

² https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-we-know-about-cias-midcentury-mind-control-project-180962836/

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5161811

https://www.gnosticmedia.com/SpiesinAcademicClothing_MKULTRA (a more conspiracy-oriented site, but some portion of what they say on MKULTRA is probably true)

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation

⁵ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/26/communist-propaganda-post_n_6377336.html

⁶ https://www.socialmatter.net/2018/03/09/myth-20th-century-episode-60-syndicate-american-underworld-part-1/

⁷ https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol37no1/html/v37i1a05p_0001.htm

https://www.socialmatter.net/2017/02/17/myth-20th-century-episode-7-cia-wilderness-mirrors/