Letters

From the March 1998 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

As such, it dismisses the rule of law, overthrows the enforcement of contracts and property rights, eliminates the common defense, and permits mob rule (libertarians for lynching?). It quite rightly scares the hell out of the general public. If technocrats of the right and the left want to cling to power by claiming that we must choose between the huge, intrusive, Crolyist state and anarchy, that is their prerogative. But libertarians should not go out of their way to help make that ridiculous case. Critiquing failed programs is essential. Equating those programs with "government" is anachronistic, unimaginative, foolish, and just plain wrong.

As the societies of postcommunist Europe and the developing world struggle to establish a rule of law in which freedom can flourish, 21st-century classical liberalism must think hard about how institutions--including government institutions--can evolve to support free minds and free markets. That requires creativity and serious intellectual and practical engagement.

As for the Santa Claus line, believe it or not, I've heard it.

Conspiracy Theories

Charles Paul Freund would do well to leave alone the muddled analogies of Daniel Pipes ("The Truth is Out There," December). Yes, both pornography and conspiracism titillate--but so do libertarian exposés of the drug war and command economy. Viewpoints held in disfavor by the politically powerful tend to take on a forbidding glamour; even the politically naive appreciate that phenomenon.

Indeed, conspiracism and libertarianism share a philosophical kinship to complement the aura. Adherents of the two camps understand the essence of the state: that it consists of mere mortals who don't stop acting out of self-interest despite the presumption that they act in the public interest, and that this intersection of self-interest and monopoly force poses a potent and far-reaching danger. Conspiracists go farther with this premise, of course, positing an intersection that spurs webs of elites to criminal--even diabolical--cooperation. While Freund is entitled to take issue with this extension, he might still present a fair picture of those who make it.

He does nothing of the sort. Even when defining his terms he demonstrates dogmatic contempt for his subject: "Conspiracism is a belief in nonexistent grand conspiracies as the motive force in history." He chides conspiracists for tagging as gullible all who don't subscribe to the paranoid view, yet much of his piece consists of sweeping generalizations regarding the conspiracists' own gullibility (for subscribing to theories relating to the October Surprise, for example, or U.N. weather control measures, or the whacking of Princess Diana by the House of Windsor). Irony is lost on him. "Conspiracy," Freund writes, "offers a world with neither accidents nor unintended consequences"--even as he offers a world with neither planning nor intended consequences.

Punditry is characterized by such bristling at conspiracy. In a 1979 editorial, The New York Times grudgingly accepted the findings of a congressional committee investigating the assassination of President Kennedy but objected to the word used to describe those findings. "Conspiracy," the editors intoned, "is freighted with dark connotations of malevolence."

Sometimes, though, the truth is dark and malevolent, and punditry's rigid adherence to randomism (wildly ironic given canards about conspiracists' simplistic and monolithic mindset) does nothing to advance the cause of truth.
In the final analysis, the conspiracists' premise is remarkable only in its plausibility; the world would be an astonishing place if power were not inclined to hidden agendas and clandestine cooperation.

Tony Pivetta
Royal Oak, MI

Charles Paul Freund replies: Power may well be inclined to hidden agendas and clandestine cooperation, as Tony Pivetta writes. But what is at issue here is power's ability to plan with such complete foresight, and to manipulate with such total success, as to attain its goals while keeping its hand hidden over generations, if not centuries.

It is a founding concept of modern libertarianism that the world is a place of sufficient complexity that power's plans are necessarily incomplete, and that the consequences of its interventions, even when its actions are meant as benign, are both different from what was intended and beyond its control. Those who contend that the more sinister power is, the more prescient it is, have yet to demonstrate how this could be true.

Mr. Pivetta also objects that my use of the term conspiracism reflects dogmatic contempt. But this neologism has been coined (independently, several times) as a critical term, not a descriptive one. He can embrace the term if he chooses, of course, but that's its history. I don't deny my contempt for conspiracism; I do deny that there's anything dogmatic about it.